The Cruise of the Snark Read Online

cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN : 978-1-4406-5076-5

1. London, Jack, 1876-1916—Travel—Oceania. 2. Americans—Oceania—History—20th century.
3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Oceania—Description and travel. 5. Ocean travel.
I. Title. II. Series.

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Introduction:

The Romance of Yachting; or, The Private History of a Voyage That Failed

When a man announces that he is about to do something stupid—something profoundly stupid to the point of being dangerous—his friends naturally try to talk him out of it. Then, in response, comes the rationalization—usually a condescension that trivializes friendship and conventional wisdom, and ends in assertive and dismissive solipsism. At that point there is nothing to be done.

As well point out that neither the man Jack nor his wife Charmian nor her uncle Roscoe Eames nor all of the “Snarkites” combined could match the experience and technical seamanship that enabled Joshua Slocum, in three years at the end of the nineteenth century, to circumnavigate the globe alone in a boat he had rebuilt with his own hands. Jack said he “had followed the sea a bit”—a statement that ought to bear some qualification unless turning pages counts as much as turning a windlass. But all his life Jack had fantasized about being a sailor; perhaps submitting to the romantic lure of the sea was the line of least resistance for him.

By age seventeen, with no blue-water experience, Jack had seduced his way into a berth as an Able-Bodied Seaman on the Sophie Sutherland, a three-masted sealing schooner bound to the western Pacific. Usually a green-hand would ship for a first voyage as a “Landsman,” a name that itself indicates the level of seamanship expected. Jack’s experience as a youth on San Francisco Bay would have justified him in claiming the berth of an “Ordinary Seaman”—a sailor who could steer and handle sail. But to claim anything more—as Jack did—is surely the result of pride or illusion or—most likely—both. And it is certain that Jack looked back on this experience with both pride and illusion.

While Jack’s career as a writer was launched by his prize-winning “Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan” (1893), a decade later he had returned to his boyhood experiences on the Bay for nautical literary material, and the deep blue sea had been relegated to the Horatio-Algerish The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902)—in which Jack demonstrated, not for the last time, that when he wrote about the sea his writing could be unabashedly sentimental. But although a book for boys, The Cruise of the Dazzler helped Jack work out some of the problems of writing about the sea. The book is full of inchoate themes and characterizations that would mature two years later in The Sea-Wolf: Nelson is the prototype for Wolf Larsen; his vessel, the Reindeer, a model for the Ghost. Most of all, Jack portrays the sea as destroyer; the ship is a prison despite being a place of refuge from school ashore. And Jack expresses the friendship between the two boys, Frisco Kid and Joe (the son of a successful capitalist), in words that unmistakably show that he is already trying to reshape Rudyard Kipling’s “snorter” Captains Courageous (1897): “He’s a captain on sea, and I’m a captain on land.”

Kipling’s book celebrated bootstrap capitalism—(exemplified by the railroad) alongside hands-on industry (exemplified by the Gloucester fishing fleet). When Harvey Cheyne, the son of a wealthy railroad magnate, falls overboard from a liner on the Grand Banks and is rescued by the crew of the We’re Here, he begins an initiation into manhood that his father will appreciate but could not have provided himself. Harvey’s sea experience entails coping with the harshness of working-class life as well as the dangers of the sea. In fact, for much of the book the sea is a nurturing force—the most forceful images of the destructive power of water do not belong to Harvey’s growth to maturity but to Penn’s family lost to the Johnstown flood and to Mrs.