“There was nothing to do but rot and die,” he says. Charley and his fellow pearl-buyers stay drunk until the whiskey gives out. Then a hurricane hits. Eighty-foot waves roll over the ship. “The bananas and cocoanuts [sic], the pigs and trade-boxes, the sick and the dying, were swept along in a solid, screeching, groaning mass.” As the ship goes down, one man clings to a floating hatch-cover, kicking away another shipmate to keep the makeshift life raft to himself. And that’s just the start. Before the story is done, Charley battles angry headhunters and circling sharks.

You don’t stumble very often into this kind of adventure in the contemporary South Seas. I’ve spent most of the past two years traveling the Pacific, visiting many of the islands London wrote about. These days, you’re more likely to be maimed by a speedboat than a shark. Descendants of the cannibals of old now gorge themselves on American junk food, and American junk culture. Colonial plantations have become gated golf communities. The Hawaiian island of Molokai, a leper colony in London’s stories, has a website offering “Sunset Beach Weddings” and “Oceanfront Condos.” When ships go down in Pacific storms, they’re usually racing yachts, able to quickly alert rescue boats and helicopters.

Jack London’s Pacific wasn’t a better place, but it was certainly more exotic and elemental. We can’t go back, and wouldn’t if we could. But on a slow summer day, with the air conditioner thrumming, we can still open South Sea Tales and drift away, as the barometer plunges, sailors suck down quinine and “squareface” gin, and tattooed warriors step from the fringe of a mangrove swamp, their spears at the ready.

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TONY HORWITZ is the author of Baghdad Without a Map, Confederates in the Attic, and an upcoming book on the voyages of Captain Cook.

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Christopher Gair

It is often said of Jack London that although he failed to find gold on his expedition to the Klondike during the gold rush of 1897–98, the material he gathered there provided the backdrop to his massively successful Northland tales and novels, such as The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and “To Build a Fire.” With the publication of these works, London was swiftly transformed from penniless adventurer, fearful of slipping into the “abyss” of poverty and physical toil, into a celebrated bestselling author. Much of the same process can be seen with his experiences in the South Seas between 1907 and 1909. London’s voyage could hardly be called a success: the construction of his schooner, the Snark, cost vastly more than he had anticipated; he had troubles with unreliable crew; and what had been planned as a round-the-world adventure was aborted in Australia owing to London’s increasingly poor health and need to return to California to recuperate. Nevertheless, as with his Klondike experiences, the South Seas provided the author with new landscapes and cultures to write about. Thus, in addition to The Cruise of the “Snark” (the account of the trip), London produced novels (Adventure, Jerry of the Islands) and several collections of short stories based on what he had seen.

Typically, the quality of this work is highly variable. In part, this is a result of the cost of building the Snark and London’s confession that he would write potboilers as a means of making quick cash. There is no doubt that he was rather better at earning money than using it wisely or saving it. In consequence, some of these works—for example, Adventure and several of the David Grief stories collected in A Son of the Sun—neatly transplant ideas developed in earlier novels and stories from the Klondike to the South Seas. Tapping into contemporary middle-class fears about a degenerate and overcivilized white elite being overwhelmed by the masses or by immigrants, London presents a series of alcoholic, cowardly, or crooked Euro-Americans, all ultimately taught the worth of key frontier values such as honesty and bravery. Grief himself is the model of the idealized Westerner. Hugely successful as a capitalist, worth “many millions,” and with “holdings and ventures … everywhere in the great South Pacific,” Grief is also the supreme physical specimen, immune to the sun, to sickness, and to the alcoholism that is the fate of most white men in London’s Pacific writings. Indeed, in “A Son of the Sun,” London maps out Grief’s exceptional nature and constitution in great detail, making clear that: “Unlike other white men in the tropics, he was there because he liked it…. one he was in ten thousand in the matter of sun-resistance.” Grief epitomizes the Western individualist out to assert his “manhood”:

His was the golden touch, but he played the game, not for the gold, but for the game’s sake. It was a man’s game, the rough contacts and fierce give and take of the adventurers of his own blood and of half the bloods of Europe and the rest of the world, and it was a good game; but over and beyond was his love of all the other things that go to make up a South Seas rover’s life—the smell of the reef; the infinite exquisiteness of the shoals of living coral in the mirrorsurfaced lagoons;… and even the howling savages of Melanesia, head-hunters and man-eaters, half-devil and all beast.

Although Grief does show a concern with and respect for native customs (and even has a blood brother called Mauriri with whom he converses in Polynesian), the descriptions of the land and its inhabitants largely serve as backdrops to the reconstruction of white identity, a process repeatedly undertaken via the application of the moral code to degenerates, under Grief’s supervision. In contrast, many of London’s other tales reject such implicit racial and cultural superiority and examine local cultures and landscapes as potential alternatives to the problems of modern life. As he recounts in Cruise of the “Snark,” London had been impressed by what he saw as the contrast between the natives and white settlers in Hawaii (“clean men… with their unsmirched souls”) and the “panicky little merchants with rusty dollars for souls” that he had left behind him in San Francisco. Subsequently, the chapter on Tahiti is devoted to “The Nature Man,” an American ex-teacher named Ernest Darling, whose response to his own failing physical and mental health is to take the classic American step into the wilderness to seek a cure for overcivilization.