I NEVER told you, did I, Mate Woman, the essential reason for my title 'Prince of the Oyster Pirates'?" This from Jack London to me twenty years thereafter. And here I warn that the story may seem unpretty to those who pharisaically shrink from the facts of life.

"Why, you see when I, the youngest of the pirates, commanded my own Razzle Dazzle, the Queen went along with me! I was the only skipper in the fleet sailing with a woman aboard, and it made a sensation. Spider had told me French Frank was 'crazy jealous' the night she asked me to row her ashore from his boat; but I could n't believe that a man of his age could be jealous of a boy like myself. So I dismissed the matter from mind until one night he tried to run me down in a black squall on the oyster-flats.

"Spider I paid to do the cooking and help me generally, and I did the deck-work and sailorizing—I had already learned pride in a boat. I guess the Queen had an easy time enough.—Why did I take her? It would be hard to say it all," he retrospected, an odd bashful expression flitting across his face. "I was making a career for myself, after a picture I had created out of the books I always kept on exchanging at the old library. I was in revolt from the beastly hopelessness of the labor I had been performing, and had not yet seen ahead to the other kinds of beastly consequences of the life I was entering inescapable—to any one who stayed in it. All I saw was glamor of conquest, of scarlet adventure and yellow gold which latter I

needed badly.—Men did these reckless things; only, I would do them better than I saw them done around me: I would preserve the romance and leave out the brutality if possible.

"The Queen again?—you'll never know her real name, my dear.  . . . It was largely a hard-headed manifestation of myself as a man among men. And she wanted to go with me. But in all my life, in its roughest, toughest aspects, surrounded by brutal men and brutal acts, I never laid my hand on a woman except in gentleness—I hardly need tell you this. But my personal feeling—why, I liked the girl. She was good-looking, and warm and kind, and best of all she made a real home in that little bit of a cabin. It stirred my imagination—I glimpsed, beyond adventure, dim visions of a future in which wife and children and home figured. Besides, she was a sort of waif herself and we had that unspoken sympathy between us. Then, too, I could not help admiring a certain pluck she had about her, good fellow all through, unafraid of God or man or devil. But along with a prestige that obtained from holding my own woman against all comers, I knew the handicap of being considered tied by apron-strings; and there were times when the Queen knew better than to show her head above deck.—And then you must take into account," he referred to the human passion of a body that ever remained incorruptibly normal, I was a husky man at sixteen, and already knew girls—my first wondering knowledge had been presented to me by one much older than myself; and the Queen met more than one need I had come to recognize."

The real comradeship that existed between them partially redeemed the precocity of the affair. There was nothing of the moral imbecile about the Queen. In her make-up was no weakness of "squealing" at danger, nor for hurt feelings nor even the desertions incident to her chosen adventurings. She took the world as it came, and this remarkable new friend's very unsentimentality appealed to

her along with his vital charm. That he did not spill over nor deceive her as to the shallowness of his ultimate regard, was to her in his favor. She asked no more than he gave, and she appreciated his humanity.

As one wise woman has remembered him: "Sincerity was the greatest trait of his character. He never made pretensions and he built neither his work nor his life on sophisms and evasions."

"I'm a funny sort of fellow, I guess," he pursued the self-revelation. "Because I have sung the paean of the strong, and despite the whole heart I threw into showing the weak how to become strong, as I saw it, the world has given me the personal reputation of a cave-man! How much of a cave-man have you, or has any one, found me?  . . . Sometimes I almost wonder if even you would not have more respect for me, love me more if I'd beat you up soundly once in a while"—laughingly whirling me into an embrace. "You know my opinion of woman in general, and that it s not all flattering by any means; but even in my violent youth a woman was always to me something to handle tenderly. Oh, I'll rough-house with a bunch of romping boy-girls and give as good as I take, and then some. But that's different." And once he mused: "I cannot understand the type of man who, having held a woman in his arms, thinks less of her. Girls have told me of such lovers, and I was aghast. To you I say solemnly that no woman, howsoever little dear to me, whom I have ever held in my arms, but has been dearer to me for it."

And so, the Queen of the Oyster Pirates, now herself long dead, clasped the shadow of the lover he was in ripeness of time to discover himself. Indeed, she clasped but the shadow of what he then was, for he gave her no more of himself than was expedient, not even yet having been touched with the shy madness of first love.

The maturing philosopher would perform no uncon-

genial work, so long as there were others willing to receive his pay for the same; yet he would rupture a blood-vessel or rip off his sensitive nail-quick, jumping into a breach or doing what appealed to a whim, or to accomplish an end. And he asked no man to do what he could not himself do. That he did not break his neck or cripple himself for life, was due to his exquisite balance. Waste motion was a crime against common sense. Master of life that he intended to become, he would eliminate every effort that did not bear directly upon his success. And success in what? Merely living to the full while he earned something over and above his bread and butter. The cannery masters worked with their heads—why not he? Seven years later, and a year before his precipitate first marriage, he wrote to Cloudesley Johns:

"I, too, have worked like a horse, and eaten like an ox; but as to work while no comrade can ever say Jack London shirked in the slightest, I hate the very thought of thus wasting my time. It s so deadening I mean hard labor. . . . While I have a strong will, I deliberately withhold it when it happens to clash with desire. I simply refuse to draw the curb. When I was just sixteen I broke loose and went off on my own hook. Took unto myself a mistress of the same age, lived a year of wildest risk in which I made more money in one week than I do in a year now, and then, to escape the inevitable downward drift, broke away from every thing and went to sea."

During school days and afterward, he had been an in defatigable trader and collector of everything under the sun. There were his painstakingly hunted and labeled birdeggs; a treasure of marbles—finest collection of agates he had even seen, won by skill in schoolyard or street games; and his cigarette-pictures and posters and albums had been the envy of associates. Not having had the spending of his own money, he had made use of duplicate papers in trading with the newsboys. Foreshadowing what was to become a perfect system in larger matters, he
amassed a

series of pictures complete from every cigarette manufacturer, "such as the Great Eacehorses, Parisian Beauties, Women of All Nations, Flags of All Nations, Noted Actors, Champion Prizefighters. And each series he had in three different ways: "in the card from the cigarette package, in the poster, and in the album." After which, he set out to gather sets for trading purposes. In addition, through barter he had accumulated an excellent album of postage stamps, a fair shelf of minerals, and some good curios that whetted his instinct to rove in far countries.

Because this hoarding depended, not upon money, but upon his wits, he achieved a name as a sharp trader, and trading became to him a game. "I could make even a junkman weep when I had dealings with him, he refers to one branch of operations that lasted into his pirate days. "Other boys called me in to sell for them their collections of bottles, rags, old iron, grain and gunny sacks, and five-gallon oil-cans—aye, and gave me a commission for doing it."

And now, determined fledgling in a cutthroat crowd who sneered at boyish sports which to some of them were in deed unknown, he steadily strengthened his pinions among "birds" vain of titles like "Whiskey" Bob, Joe Goose, Nicky the Greek, "Scratch" Nelson, "Soup" and "Stew" Kennedy, "Clam" Bart, "Irish" and "Oyster" Kelly, Patsy Haggerty, "Harmonica" Joe, "Hell and Blazes." He wrote to his dumbfounded mother to distribute his wealth according to the choices of his erstwhile cronies. Here it must have been that he commenced to foster that distaste for looking behind him with which I came to reckon early in our friendship. "We are now concerned with to day," was his familiar adjuration. "Forget the mistakes of yesterday, except as warning against making the same mistake twice." He would have no commerce with what he termed "the rule of the dead." The living present was the thing.

Inimical he knew this new world to be: therefore he would concentrate upon becoming one with it only insofar as it gave him pleasure and profit. Oh, he did not reason it in so many words; but his cerebration was to that effect. The old shackling sense of poverty he resolutely disowned, and with free fist spent all of eighty cents upon detested liquor when it served the purpose of educating himself in mastership of the human elements that surrounded him. Abandoning a measure of caution, drink for drink he tossed them down. And he marveled and gloated upon the patent fact that he could as before win laurels from the well pickled villains with whom he had cast lot. If the whiskey route was the only one by which he, the rank tyro, could overtake his book-heroes, the whiskey route for him—on the surface at any rate. But there were stolen occasions when the Razzle Dazzle's snug cabin, locked from the inside, was the scene of blissful secret orgies of reading and sucking "cannon-balls" and taffy. For "dollars and dollars, across the bar, couldn't buy the satisfaction that twenty-five cents did in a candy store."

"I was aware that I was making a grave decision," he declared. "I was deciding between money and men, between niggardliness and romance. Either I must throw overboard all my old values of money and look upon it as something to be flung about wastefully, or I must throw overboard ray comradeship with those men whose peculiar quirks made them care for strong drink."

The very embodiment of the thrilling baresark of the boy s Norse mythology was "Young Scratch" Nelson—one day to be the mightiest-shouldered cadaver that the Benicia undertaker ever laid out. That he could neither read nor write, far from diminishing, rather enhanced the figure he was to Jack. What had his Viking ancestral drift to do with type and ink? "Squarehead" did not suit the younger boy as a just or beautiful appellation for this blond beast of unconsidered rages that flared in

terrible, admiration-compelling deeds. The first of these which came under Jack's observation was a mad freak in a nasty blow one starless night, when the Scandinavian sailed his piratical sloop Reindeer, dredging a record burglary of oysters, around and around the other boats that fearfully clung at anchor in the pounding shallow waves.

As for "Old Scratch," young Nelson's sire, blue-eyed and yellow-maned, owner and master of the great scow schooner Annie Mine—what wonder Jack's most exalted pinnacle seemed reached on the day when Old Scratch accepted quite as a matter of course his shyly-dared invitation to have a drink! Treat by treat, mere "beer-bust" though it was, the session was protracted until the distended brace of salts succumbed. But what of that? Old Scratch was as helpless as he, the novice—more helpless than he, was the one thing of which the latter felt sure. And before the hops and the heat of the summer afternoon had reduced him to slumbrous defeat, out of his book-lore and the connivance of his and the bartender s combined tact in supplying beers large and small, he had led the old sea dog into unbelievable reminiscence of his youth in northern seas. The telling sobriquet of "Scratch," by the way, had been won by virtue of a tigerish mode of clawing off the faces of opponents in his Berserker brawls. And when the rumor came to Jack's ravished ears that he had been "soused all afternoon with Old Scratch," his cup of self-esteem brimmed.

Little had he dreamed, that day aboard the Idler, filled as he was with idolatry of the runaway sailor Scotty and the harpooner and the whole neighborhood, that he would so soon be his own fearless buccaneer. But here he was, causing the water-front of his home town, that once had been his awe, in turn to feel the shock of his dare-devil exploits, and beholding his one-time hero, Scotty, and the impish "Irish," and "Spider," successively taking orders aboard his own ship. For government was in his veins,

unguessed by the very ones who submitted to his vital charm and admirable ability to make good in the matter of their wages. The very air whispered deviltry, and the whimsy of his altered relation must have shaken thoughtful moments with silent mirth. Gone were parsimonious days, flung to the four winds. I can see the glint of eye and firm clutch of jaw, when he ranged the sloop alongside the wharf with the biggest load of stolen oysters of any two-man craft in the raffish fleet. I can see him with a cocked double-barreled shotgun in his small salt-grimed hands, crouched feet-on-wheel holding the plunging Razzle Dazzle on her course under a racing dark sky, that exciting night French Frank failed to ram him.

"And there was the time when we raided far down in Lower Bay," he recounts, "and mine was the only craft back at daylight to the anchorage off Asparagus Island.  . . . And the Thursday night we raced for market and I brought the Razzle Dazzle in without a rudder, first of the fleet, and skimmed the cream of the Friday morning trade.  . . . And the time I brought her in from Upper Bay under jib, when Scotty burned my mainsail." (In 1909, among those seeing us off on the steamer Loongana from Melbourne to Launceston, Tasmania, was Scotty of the Razzle Dazzle days. Jack, grinning at the recollection, could not forbear a reference to the burned mainsail. "But you burned the mainsail," Mr. Scott disputed stoutly, where upon argument waxed. But after we had waved our last to the receding quay, my ex-oyster-pirate smiled, "Well, after all, if it makes him happy to think I burned that mainsail, why shouldn't I let him have it that way!")

As for fear of the law and its enforcement, read this: " . . . lying at the wharf disposing of my oysters, there were dusky twilights when big policemen and plainclothes men stole on board. And because we lived in the shadow of the police, we opened oysters and fed them to them with squirts of pepper sauce, and rushed the growler or got

stronger stuff in bottles." Jack would ruffle with pride at remembrance of the "A. No. 1" oyster-cocktails he had mixed.

"Mayn't I meet Johnny Heinold some time?" I once asked Jack, learning that he had been into the "First and Last Chance" Saloon on Webster Street, to see his old friend. The stamping-ground of the water-front habitues, where the boy's intrepid foot had rested upon the brass rail, bore this two-faced pseudonym by reason of its accommodating relation to comers as well as goers across the drawbridge. "Why, I'd like you to see Johnny," he acknowledged pleasedly. "I'll ask him up to the Ranch some time. It would be pretty difficult to manage so you could meet him in the old place," he hesitated at my suggestion. "It's a rough crowd that congregates there—though I might slip you in at a slack hour. But the time never was decided upon in our busy lives, and Heinold never found his way up to Glen Ellen; so that I have yet to shake his hand.

Jack first crossed Johnny's threshold on that fateful Monday morning he turned up missing at the cannery. French Frank, dissembling his choler toward the lad for the unwitting theft of his inamorata, had met him here by appointment to receive the price of the Razzle Dazzle in exchange for a bill of sale. The transaction completed, the new-made skipper of the tidy sloop underwent initiation, unsuspected save by the proprietor of the bar, into public-house etiquette. French Frank, once with Jack's funds in pocket, proceeded to demonstrate the wastrel progress of camaraderie amongst men of his loose profession. Beadily could Jack grasp the logic of the seller, which caused him "to wet a piece of it [the money] in the establishment where the trade was consummated." But on top of this, Frank "treated the house." The boy speedily concluded that the saloonkeeper made a profit on the drink he accepted which reasoning was upset when Johnny treated

in return. He could also see why Spider and Whiskey Bob were included in the invitation, along with Pat, the Queen's brother. But why in the name of sense should every one else standing about the sawdusted floor be bidden to help squander the Frenchman's money—Mammy Jenny's hard-won savings?

Although it was early morning, the entire company ordered whiskey. So "whiskey for mine," the freshman out law registered indifference. But his soul sickened that he must make of himself a martyr to this silly custom of pouring a nauseous and expensive draught down his throat, when his desire was to be off to his new command.

With his thoughts upon the sloop, he failed to notice an awkwardness that crept into the manner of the others, though he did vaguely sense a growing antagonism in French Frank, which also seemed to tincture the Queen's brother. All waited for him, the boat-buyer, to treat as the seller had treated. And here Johnny Heinold rendered the first of many kind services to the youth, whom he alone of the foolish gang understood in his ignorance of drinking usages. "Watch out for French Frank," Heinold breathed, bending close as he reached for the soiled glasses. On many another occasion, closely following the amateur drinker's unwilling matriculation into the brotherhood of the saloon, Johnny took it upon his elastic conscience to save Jack from himself by warning when he had had enough small beers or other liquor, by which magic potions the student of raw human nature beguiled its traditions from this same human nature.

Whiskey Bob, and Spider, too, softly articulated, "Keep your eye peeled for Frenchy," or "Frank's ugly, take my tip and look out." To their friendly signals he nodded comprehension where comprehension was not, and perhaps this very bepuzzlement preserved him, what of his apparent cool poise in a tense and vibrant situation. How was he, hardly sixteen, who had worked sordidly for his

living and gleaned his romance from the books, "who had not dreamed of giving the Queen of the Oyster Pirates a second thought, and who did not know that French Frank was madly and Latinly in love with her—" how was he to know? "And how was I to guess that the story of how the Queen had thrown him down on his own boat, the moment I hove in sight, was already the gleeful gossip of the water-front? " When he presently learned the inwardness of his celebrity as a bold gallant, he could not help feeling elation "that French Frank, the adventurer of fifty, the sailor of all the seas of all the world, was jealous . . . and jealous over a girl most romantically named the Queen of the Oyster Pirates. I had read of such things in books, and regarded them as personal probabilities of a distant maturity. Oh, I felt a rare young devil, as we hoisted the big mainsail that morning, broke out anchor, and filled away close-hauled on the three-mile beat to windward out into the bay.  . . . Such was my escape from the killing machine-toil, and my introduction to the oyster-pirates. True, the introduction had begun with drink. But was I to stay away from it for such reason? Wherever life ran free and great, there men drank. Romance and adventure seemed always to go down the street locked arm in arm with John Barleycorn. To know the two, I must know the third. Or else I must go back to my free-library books and read of the deeds of other men and do no deeds of my own save to slave for ten cents an hour at a machine in a cannery."

Even after losing one hundred and eighty dollars in one glorious night of inchoate induction, ashore with Nelson, his sobered aching head still deduced: "Better to reign among booze-fighters, a prince, than to toil twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an hour. There are no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending of one hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage, then I'd like to know what is." But

he would avoid over-drinking when drink was thrust upon him, he forewarned himself, and there should be no alcoholic beverage of whatsoever description aboard his own sloop except in port at anchor when it devolved upon him to entertain. Alcohol and his austere ideal of seamanship had nothing in common.

Ashore, however, one of his proudest moments after he had adjusted to the necessity of "boozing" with those whose temper he must discern, was when Johnny Heinold, quite as a matter of course, reached down his book and opened a charge account for the young reveler's convenience, his name at the top of a clean page. A trusted customer he was established, as behooved one in this man-world wherein he had elected to distinguish himself.

The vicissitudes of several months' living, earning, spending, landed him metaphorically high and dry one comfortless foggy dawn after a wild orgy on the sand-flats, with empty pockets, a burned mainsail, and a breach with Scotty resulting from an overnight fistic engagement. Young Nelson in similar fashion had forfeited his crew, and bore one wounded hand in a sling to boot. Their mutual plight and a consultation terminated in a pact whereby Jack and Nelson cast together their fortunes as partners in rakish crime on the smart Reindeer, and forth with departed for the oyster-beds. But first Johnny Heinold was approached for a loan with which to buy stores, and he, knowing their ethics in such matters, trusted them without misgiving. Reviewing that night, Jack London makes an appeal for sympathy of understanding of the unsatisfied boy-soul that was his:

"And now, of all this that is squalid, and ridiculous, and bestial, try to think what it meant to me, a youth not yet sixteen, burning with the spirit of adventure, fancy-filled with tales of buccaneers and sea-rovers, sacks of cities and conflicts of armed men, and imagination-maddened by the stuff I had drunk. It was life raw and naked,

wild and free—the only life of that sort which my birth in time and space permitted me to attain. And more than that. It carried a promise. It was the beginning. From the sand-pit the way led out through the Golden Gate to the vastness of adventure of all the world, where battles would be fought, not for old shirts and over stolen salmon boats, but high purposes and romantic ends."

His own boat was raided by a rival gang of pirates, dismantled and set adrift. By the time Jack found the battered hulk, she was hardly worth the twenty dollars he got for her.

"Never have I regretted those months of mad deviltry I put in with Nelson," Jack always averred. The Norseman was a blind genius in affairs nautical, and luck played its part in that the pair escaped with their lives. "To steer to miss destruction was his joy.  . . . Never to reef down was his mania, and in all the time I spent with him, blow high or low, the Reindeer was never reefed. Nor was she ever dry. We strained her open and sailed her open continually. "

The odd thing is that far from the making of Jack a reckless sailor, he became an exceptionally cautious one. The only tangible harm that seemed wrought by association with Nelson was the ruination of his vocal cords and his ear, and by the same process that had been worked on him by the teacher in East Oakland. Nelson had no sense of pitch, and bawled endless rowdy songs and sea chanteys regardless of key. Jack, doing his valorous best toward augmenting the unmelodious din, bereft himself of what he has told me was a "golden voice." (His speaking tone remained pleasant, even musical; but the mellow timbre was gone, to return wholly, but once. When he was about twenty-five, on the lecture platform one evening he discovered himself listening to a voice that had been asleep for nearly a decade. "It was the 'golden voice,' Mate—I'd give anything if you could

have heard it," he said long afterward. "I don't believe it—but I heard it, I'm telling you. I reveled in it, turned it over on my tongue, sounded its clarion for all I was worth. When I stopped speaking—just to show you this is no fairytale—people came up the hall and told me what a beautiful voice I had! And that was the one and only time, since Nelson finished the spoiling of my ear. It's the only thing I've got against Nelson!")

To the mad-cap masters of the Reindeer the lower-bay haunts soon became inadequate. In the opposite direction they ranged over the vast and devious waters behind the Golden Gate, and eastward into the terrific narrowed tides of the tributary San Pablo and Suisun Bays. Well Jack fixed in mind the Forbidden Anchorages of the traffic routes of the main harbor, and the violent habits of Raccoon Straits, between Angel Island and Tiburon. And high and quiet his happiness, the time they first voyaged northwest across the big waters of the inland sea, Golden Gate and Angel Island sliding by on the left; on past that sunset cabochon jewel, Red Rock, so long coveted from afar; northerly skirting The Brothers, with Marin Islands to port; thence entering San Pablo Bay. Then the joy of running into anchorage in the purpling dusk on the flats; heaving over the sturdy hook; watching the vessel swing to the proper length of cable that slipped through his measuring hands; while the heavenly odor of frizzling bacon and strong, rich coffee floated up the companionway from the hot little galley stove, and the wild geese honked over head. Life was sweeter than honey on his tongue, and he dreamed dreams of seeing the whole wide world some day, in a boat of his very own. How well I know it all—ah, do I not? who have done it with him in that very boat of his own!

Steadily, through the muck and ruck that mixed with the healthier material of his experience at this time, there burned the pure flame of adventure's passionate en-

chantment: the falling asleep peacefully to the rocking of the sloop to the rippled ebb and flow of tides along her sleek sides; the opening of happy eyes each morning upon a different spaciousness of sky and water; the adjusting and stabilizing of himself in relation to undependable mankind and the rolling planet, victory resting upon his acuity in gauging the capriciousness of all things.

Intermittently within this succession of months between the ages of a little under sixteen and up to say twenty-one, the incipient sage, adding to his knowledge of man kind and its singular way upon the earth, must have committed nearly every natural crime in the calendar, save disloyalty and murder. Nothing, in his view or temperament in any period, was meet to invite him to the taking of life, little as he came to respect life; and even when it was merely the question of honor among thieves, his instinctive ethic, if an ethic may be instinctive, was that disloyalty was the only real sin. And he died reverencing this self-made axiom. To me he has confessed:

"If I should serve sentences on end for pranks I did in sheer pursuit of the tang of living, from time to time during the scattered months I was busy finding myself on the Bay, or tramping, or ashore with the 'Boo Gang' and the 'Sporting Life Gang' that terrorized Oakland, I'd languish behind prison bars for a hundred years!"

As for unnatural crimes, these were not admissible in his magnificently balanced body and mind. No inbred fastidiousness was weak enough to unfit him for eating and sleeping, playing or working, with the unmoral and the unwashed, to their complete befoolment as to his intrinsic difference from them. He could love with them, and fight with them; for he had "kissed his woman and struck his man," although he did not know the lusty old phrase. But in all his days, let the unnatural, the abnormal, creep near, and his trigger-like recoil of sense and perception and swift reaction left no uncertain impact upon

the aggressor, be he brutal or subtle. Except in one or two defensive incidents, such as when French Frank was out hunting for him on the oyster-beds, either with the pirates or the subsequent fish-patrol contingent, Jack went unprotected by other arms than an ordinary table-fork. The sole provocation under which this ridiculous but effective weapon was drawn, was in the case of a degenerate Greek fisherman he had aboard in capacity of sailor. The happening does not lend itself to polite literature, and should be treated by some one compounded of a Balzac and a Havelock Ellis.

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