1907-8-9

OUR friends cannot understand why we make this voyage," Jack elucidates his and my "I like," which, he always contended, is the ultimate, obvious reason for all human decision. "They shudder, and moan, and raise their hands," somewhat, he might have added, as did the Lily Maid's mother upon his departure for Alaska. "No amount of explanation can make them comprehend that we are moving along the line of least resistance; that it is easier for us to go down to the sea in a small ship than to remain on dry land, just as it is easier for them to remain on dry land than to go down to the sea in the small ship. . . . They cannot come out of themselves long enough to see that their line of least resistance is not necessarily everybody else s line of least resistance.  . . . They think I am crazy. In return, I am sympathetic.  . . . The things I like constitute my set of values. The thing I like most of all is personal achievement—not achievement for the world's applause, but achievement for my own delight. It is the old 'I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!' But personal achievement, with me, must be concrete. I d rather win a water-fight in the swimming-pool, or remain astride a horse that is trying to get out from under me, than write the great American novel . . . Some other fellow would prefer writing the great American novel . . . That is why I am building the Snark . . . I am so made. I like it, that is all. The trip around the world means big moments of

living . . . Here is the sea, the wind, and the wave. Here are the seas, the winds, and the waves of all the world . . . Here is difficult adjustment, the achievement of which is delight to the small quivering vanity that is I . . . It is my own particular form of vanity, that it all."

"The ultimate word," he says elsewhere, "is I LIKE. It lies beneath philosophy and is twined about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says in an instant I LIKE—and does something else and philosophy goes glimmering. Philosophy is very often a man's way of explaining his own I LIKE."

To resume: "There is also another side to the voyage of the Snark. Being alive, I want to see, and all the world is a bigger thing to see than one small town or valley."

At the end of the voyage, he wrote:

"The voyage was our idea of a good time. I built the Snark and paid for it, and for all expenses. I contracted to write 35,000 words descriptive of the trip for a magazine which was to pay me the same rate I received for stories written at home. Promptly the magazine advertised that it was sending me especially around the world for itself. It was a wealthy magazine. And every man who had business dealings with the Snark charged three prices because forsooth the magazine could afford it. Down in the utter most South Sea isle this myth obtained, and I paid accordingly. To this day everybody believes that the magazine paid for everything and that I made a fortune out of the voyage. It is hard, after such advertising, to hammer it into the human understanding that the whole voyage was done for the fun of it."

The Snark exploit, so far as it lasted, was all and more to Jack London and to me than we had anticipated. Some feminine journalist, after reading my "Log," described the cruise as "a disappointment—nothing but a disappointment." It would have been to her, who did not care to go down to the sea in ships, or having gone down to the sea in ships, dwelt only upon the little annoyances that enter sea-

living as well as land-living. But I, with a firm philosophy that it is the Big Things which count, and with the memory of my Strong Traveler beside me, ask that no one shall entertain the opinion that it was not the most wonderful, victorious thing which ever happened to the right man and woman. What we set out to attain—the "purple passages," the glamor of Romance, the sheer emancipation from any possible boredom or commonplaceness of memory forever and forever, and, before everything, increased love and camaraderie between us two—became ours in unstinted measure.

One reporter, previously to our sailing, said: "When Jack London talks of his purposed voyage, he is all boy, all enthusiasm." So he appeared. But I, accustomed to look beneath the surface phenomena of him, realized throughout my life at his side that no matter how sincere his enthusiasms, the keen edge had been rubbed from adventure by pre-adventure, if I may coin a word—the super-adventure of a too-early manhood. So, in his successful maturity, when he came to undertake, with all the zest in him, the conquest of dreams he had failed to capture in youth like say exploring Typee Valley, or letting go anchor in uncharted bights of cannibal isles—it was with a difference which a less experienced, less thoughtful man would not have known.

Yet his ardors were many, once we were under way on the "Long Trail." Hawaii, that in later years he came to call his Love-Land, warmed his veins to the very deliciousness of our venture—the keenest zest of which was that we were seeing the world together. In the midst of his morning's thousand words, he would break off to remind me of the beauty and adventure we should find below the equator; and then, realizing that a half-hour had been lost from his busy time, he would pick up his charmed ink-pencil:

There—don't talk to me any more, woman! How am I going to get my thousand words done, to pay for those pearls

we're going to buy in the Paumotus and Torres Straits, and all that turtle shell from Melanesia, if you keep me from work now!"—Poor me, speechless, with clasped hands of transport in his own rapturous imaginings. But, since the youngling philosopher, who always dreamed with his two feet upon solid earth, seldom failed to bring his intentions to pass, safely enough I thought to count upon the gleaming sea-seeds and polished turtle-scales, the adventuring for which was to be seven-eighths of the prize. Again, looking up with visions in his deep eyes:

"Think, think where we are bound—the very names stir all the younger red corpuscles in one!—Bankok, Celebes, Madagascar, Java, Sumatra, Natal—oh, I'll take you to them all; and your lap shall be filled with pearls, my dear, and we shall have them set in fretted gold by the smiths of the Orient."

As a sailor, I could not but feel that he was a consummate artist. As that matchless sea-writer, Joseph Conrad, reminds us, "an artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation. And Jack London's was a facility of adjustment, a quickness of conception and execution, "upon the basis," again to quote Conrad, "of just appreciation of means and ends which is the highest quality of the man of action."

All a piece of wonder it was, on and round about the narrow precipitous deck of the Snark, herself a mere scudding fleck of matter advancing upon the vast undulating plane of the Pacific. How could a true sailor be bored, the longest day under the arching blue sky—the excellent trades hunting his ship to its purple havens? For Jack found me sailor, too, albeit a lamentably untechnical mariner—ever he stood aghast at the hopelessness of getting me to present, "so that the Man from Mars could understand," certain ordinary, primary principles of seamanship. But my love and true feel for the very shape of a boat, and for her perform-

ance, and for the whole world of water, easily he saw were not to be questioned; while always, in entering and leaving the most dangerous passages, he sent me to the wheel to coöperate with his piloting. "It's this way:" he had it. "There are many boats, but only one woman; boats will come and go, and captains will come and go, but Charmian will be with me always, at the helm."

Here I am tempted to digress, in order to word a still but not small worry that was mine during our married life. Jack's correlations between brain and body were exceptionally balanced. But there showed in him one inexactitude that led me to nurse a dread that my own hand, under his command, might some most inopportune time wreck a boat. I do not know when I first began to notice that at intervals he would say "right" for "left," but sometimes I would promptly call his attention to the mistake while his voice was still in the air. My principal fear was that, some irretrievable consequence having occurred, the responsibility might not be easy to place; and I prided myself upon unquestioning obedience aboard ship. Jack liked that, and only once did we personally come to grief. It was upon a midnight in the Solomon Islands, dark as a hat, and Jack, sick and apprehensive, was trying to make out a certain plantation anchorage on Guadalcanal. Suddenly, though the shore signal lights were identical, he discovered that we were almost on the rocks. It eventuated that another plantation than the one we sought had irresponsibly copied the other's lights. I started to put the wheel hard down at Jack's swift, tense command. "Hard down! Hard down! quick!" he repeated. Then I, like an idiot, "Oh, I am! I am!" It was too much for the disciplined sailorman. Not of babbling courtesies nor babies nor women was he thinking, but of saving the vessel that insured the safety of all the souls on board. And I let my own silly, mawkish, fever-warped nerves go up against this intellectually-cool, efficient manipulating of a real issue. Since

Jack never apologized for his sharp reproof, "Obey orders and don't talk back!" I truly believe that no realization of his harshness entered the mind so bent upon a life-and-death problem.

No, we did not know the meaning of boredom. And "Aren't you glad I'm your husband?" Jack would laugh over my enthusiasms. Or, tenderly, "You would marry a sailor!" when I floundered into the head-splitting fever attacks. But dearest of all was his assurance, reiterated in illness and discouragement: "You do not know what you mean to me. It is like being lost in the Dangerous Archipelago, and coming into safe harbor at last."

It is all a piece of wonder, the sea, to such as we: still magic of calms, where one s boat lies with motionless grace upon a shadow-flecked expanse of mirror; or when one laughs in the pelt of warm sea-rain from a ragged gray sky of clouds; or peers for blue-black squalls darkling upon the silver moonlit waves; or lifts prideful, fond eyes to the small ship's goodly spars standing fast in a white gale; or gazes in marvel at those same spars lighted to flame by the red-gilt morning sunrays from over some green and purple savage isle feared of God and man; or braces to the Pacific rollers bowling upon the surface of the eternal unagitated depths; or scans the configuration of coasts from inadequate charts; or steers, tense, breathless, through the gateways of but half-known reefs, into enchanted coral-rings below "the lap of the Line"; or looks with misleading candor into the eyes of man-eating human beings; or being received ashore on scented Polynesian fragments of Paradise" aplume with waving palms, with brown embraces, into the "high seat of abundance." It is all wonder and deep delight, this "smoke of life"; and often and often we sur prised ourselves thinking or voicing our pity for the "vain people of landsmen" who have no care for such joys as ours. Jack, embodiment of fearlessness, so vivid in

thought, and action, and body, was a ringing challenge to any who were not half-dead.

On November 24, 1907, in 126° 20' W.Lon., 60° 47 N.Lat., Jack wrote George Sterling:

In Jack's ten-weeks mail at Tahiti was a letter from his children's mother, announcing her approaching nuptials. His natural paternal interest in the prospective stepfather of his two daughters, combined with news of the current panic in Wall Street, determined a break in the Snark voyage. We took a thirty-days round-trip to San Francisco, on the old S.S. Mariposa, whose roomy portholes were model for the means of "Martin Eden's" suicide. Once more in Tahiti, Jack wrote Cloudesley Johns under date of February 17, 1908:

Somewhere along our gorgeous sea highway, the mail brought Jack word of the public's reception of "The Iron Heel," which cast him into temporary gloom.

"Just the same," he burst into his sunny chuckle, "I told the bourgeoisie a thing or two they didn't know about

the way their blessed laws are made!" He referred especially to the Dick Militia Bill, passed by the Senate in 1903. For some reason best known to the Solons, very few Americans knew of this bill. Practically none but the Socialist papers gave it notice. Chapter VIII of "The Iron Heel" started considerable publicity for both himself and Representative Dick of Ohio. I have in my hand a clipping as late as February 1917, headed: "State Guards in a Dilemma: Dick Bill and National Defense Act Conflict With Some of the Units."

Jack, pressed to relate our wildest experiences in cannibaldom, would sometimes tell the following:

During the space in time taken up by the Snark episode, namely between April 1907 and July 1909, Jack London, in addition to the administration of ship's affairs, recreation, wide reading, sightseeing, and weeks idle from illnesses, wrote the equivalent of more than eight full volumes, as follows:

"The Cruise of the Snark," published serially in The Cosmopolitan and Harper's Weekly.

"Martin Eden," begun in Honolulu in summer of 1907, finished at Papeete, Tahiti, February 1908, and serial pub-

lication commenced in The Pacific Monthly, of Portland, Oregon, in September of same year.

"Adventure," a novel depicting the manner of life we lived ashore in the Solomons. Begun while cruising among that Group, and often interrupted for the writing of timely short work.

"South Sea Tales." These splendid stories, unlike the later ones in "A Son of the Sun," were written during the voyage.

"The House of Pride" collection of Hawaii romances. "Burning Daylight." This novel was started in Quito, Ecuador.

And short stories, later dispersed throughout five different volumes:

"The Chinago" ("When God Laughs")
"A Piece of Steak" ("When God Laughs")
"Make Westing" ("When God Laughs")
"South of the Slot" ("The Night-Born")
"The Other Animals" (Article replying to Theodore Roosevelt's attack upon the "nature fakers," and collected in "Revolution.")
"Nothing that Ever Came to Anything" ("The Human Drift.")

In Australia, Jack, on condition that I should accompany him, reported the Burns-Johnson prizefight for The Star, Sydney, and the New York Herald. He also wrote a series of articles upon his general local impressions, as well as the labor situation in the Commonwealth from his socialist viewpoint. All of this work I shall collect at a future date for book publication.

Jack had much fun over the charge of "nature-faking," inasmuch as it arose over a misreading on the part of the President, of the incident, in "White Fang," of the wolfdog killing the lynx; whereas Mr. Roosevelt erroneously attacked the author for having the lynx do away with the dog.

It must not be forgotten that throughout the traverse of the Pacific, Jack failed not in sounding his trumpet for the brotherhood of man. Wherever opportunity presented, he either debated, as in Honolulu, or lectured, as in Tahiti and Samoa, or used his pen when too ill to speak, as in Australia.

I might mention, if I have not previously done so, that Jack was accustomed, in the course of his literary career, to seek perspective upon his plots and motifs before developing them on paper; but during the Snark voyage he often went at the actual weaving of a story rather than merely filing notes upon it.

For the benefit of editors and readers who have scoffed at Jack London's novel "Adventure" as an inaccurate, over-drawn picture of savagery in the Twentieth Century, I select passages from his letter to George Sterling, from the Solomon Islands, October 31, 1908:

The one and only reason that our splendid adventure terminated in two years instead of seven, or ten, or unnumbered years, was that Jack London's supersensitive organism prevented. I remember him arguing, in Hawaii, with Dr. E. S. Goodhue, the point of his working-pace in the tropics. Neither Jack nor I was willing to forego any jot of our activity, mental or physical. In the end, the ultra-violet rays exacted their toll of his nervous system, as the Doctor had forewarned. In his own words:

Finally, as a tribute to my own whole-hearted devotion to the voyage and all that it meant, Jack offers:

The venture definitely thrown over, Jack dispersed his crew, laid up the Snark in one of beautiful Sydney Harbor's green crannies, and shipped home our effects. The yacht eventually netted less than one-tenth of her original inflated price, and went to trade and recruit in the New Hebrides. Jack and I, loath to retrace our way across the ocean in conventional mode, watched for chance to ship on anything but a passenger liner. Our luck it was to catch, upon extremely short notice, a rusty leviathan of a Scotch collier, the Tymeric, Captain Robert Mcllwaine, from Newcastle, N.S.W., to Guayaquil, Ecuador. With us sailed Yoshimatsu Nakata, the eighteen-year-old, fatherly Japanese soul who had joined the Snark as cabin boy when we left Hawaii. Nakata remained our loving and beloved shadow for nine responsible years; and I feel free to assert, for Jack London as well as myself, that

when the faithful brown boy came to marry and resign from our service at the end of 1915, life never seemed quite the same again. Nakata is since a graduate of the San Francisco College of Physicians and Surgeons, and success fully wields his fashionable forceps in his own offices in Honolulu, with two assistants.

"No man is a hero to his valet" was not applicable in Jack London's household. Servants worshiped him, for he never tired helping them with his knowledge of all kinds.

For nearly three weeks after she stood out at sea, the Tymeric, resembling a log awash, fought a violent gale. I was time and again laid low with the terrible Solomon Island malaria. Jack and Nakata, suffering only occasional light attacks, nursed me like gentlest women. Jack was especially sympathetic in that I was missing the magnificent sight, from the bridge, of the plunging, submerging hull of the steamer, which he, "who lived with storms and spaces like a kinsman," as some one has aptly said, so reveled in. Here is his reference to the gale:

Yet Jack compared all this as monotonous alongside sailing a small boat on San Francisco Bay.

We were forty-three days on this passage, seeing land but twice, and upon two successive days first, fair Pitcairn Island of Bounty fame, on the southernmost edge of the farflung Paumotus whose northernmost edge we had skirted when westward-bound; and next, the low isle of Ducie, its tropic scents of blossom and cocoanut borne out across the water on the warm breeze.

Captain McIlwaine proved a mine of interest to Jack,

who wrote a brace of his most thoughtful stories, "Samuel" and "The Sea Farmer" (in "The Strength of the Strong") from notes made from the canny skipper's yarns. I worked up a County McGee, North of Ireland, vocabulary for Jack, often reporting the quaint speech under the table at meals. The Skipper caught me at it, I know; but he continued generously unabated in reminiscence.

Here is part of a letter Jack wrote off Pitcairn Island on May 2, to George Sterling:

One could draw a sheaf of sketches upon that month in Ecuador. We climbed great Chimborazo, twelve thousand feet of its twenty-two thousand, on the wonderful American railway; thence descended two thousand feet to Quito, where, at the Hotel Royal, over a fortnight was spent; and before sailing upon the Erica for Panama, friends took us alligator-hunting up the River Guayas, where Jack, who never did anything by halves, laid in a large supply of salted skins.

As to this marvelous country, he ever afterward raved of its possibilities of agricultural development, and advised more than one ambitious young man that Ecuador would give him "the chance of his life."

There are many incidents that throw added light upon Jack London's individuality. Such as his indignation toward the unfair methods of the bull-ring, as against the "white-man's game" of prizefighting—his passion leading

him to write "The Madness of John Harned" (in "The Night-Born"); and his interest, for once, in American horse-racing as practised in Quito; and the Latin-American character as displayed about him, in public, and in the clubs where he took a look-in at the gambling of Ecuadorian gentlemen and their psychology as regarded payment of losses. He was in the best of humor for most of the sojourn, little troubled with fever, and spilled some of his whimsical disgust at the undependableness of Quito's inhabitants in a humorous skit, "Nothing that Ever Came to Anything" (in "The Human Drift"), which is the narration of an actual occurrence.

One sweet manifestation of himself shone out one day when I was strolling alone. A spic-and-span victoria was sent all over the shopping district to find me, because, for sooth, a peddler with her basket of laces had come to our rooms, and Jack did not want me to miss her. He hovered about the pair of us seated on the floor in a sea of needlework, inciting me to satisfy my craving to the uttermost. A day he spent taking me to convents, in search for embroideries, and joined in a blanket-haggling revel in an old plaza—brilliant native dyes of hand-loom weaves from llama wool. He did balk, however, at adding a tiny, shivering green monkey to the menage.

In Panama, a rousing American military Fourth of July was followed by a ten days' stay at the Hotel Tivoli, whence we explored some of the surrounding country, saw the work of the great canal, and shopped in the Chinese stores. And I must take space for something that happened on the evening of the Fourth. The hotel was jammed, and we were obliged to share our small table with an American couple. The man appeared to be much the worse for the climate, and his wife evidently spent her life soothing him into a semblance of fitness for association with his kind. We extended the ordinary courtesies to them both, but it

was no use. After the man had sourly declined several things passed him, suddenly, to Jack, he burst:

"I don't want anything from you!"

Jack gulped. I went chill, as when Manyoungi had invited destruction, but again misjudged my man. Instead of blowing up as the terrified woman expected, Jack turned to her, and quietly, without interruption, at length and sans haste, told her exactly what he thought of her husband and how sorry he was for her. The poor lady, already blanched and wilted, never raised her eyes nor opened her lips. Nor did her companion. They presently rose and left the table.

"I couldn't help it," Jack apologized to me. "I was sorry for her, and I did her a service, I do believe—just in telling her, before him, what a skunk he is!"

I never saw Jack smite anybody except with a tongue-lashing; and, so far as I know, during our years together he never but once struck a man.

We sailed from Colon on the Turrialba for New Orleans. My temperature on the day of arrival, if memory serves, was 104, and I continued for a year to suffer intermittent attacks of malaria. But Jack, again in his home-land, soon had cast all trace of fever, as well as of psoriaris, forever into the discard.

From New Orleans to Oakland his return was hailed by the newspapers, and reporters boarded the train at a number of towns. We stopped over but once, at the Grand Canon of the Colorado, where we found ourselves hospitably entertained by the Manager of the Hotel El Tovar and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Brandt, as guests of the proprietor, Mr. Fred Harvey. On July 24, 1909, we were once more at home in Wake Robin Lodge.

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