Troop’s peroration on the sea after the We’re Here has safely returned to land. Only with the raising of a flag as the vessel enters Gloucester harbor—to signal the loss of the man whom Harvey replaced—does the book develop in full the sea as reaper of lives.

Captains Courageous had not exhausted the genre. Only a year after Kipling’s success, another California writer, Frank Norris, explored the socialite-at-sea in Moran of the Lady Letty (1898). Norris provided a model for Jack’s Humphrey Van Weyden in his own Ross Wilbur, a Yale man who is shanghaied by shark hunters in San Francisco. Sailing south to Baja California, Ross encounters Moran, who as the daughter of a sailing skipper has been brought up to be as tough as the sailors she lived among. After a terrific battle in which Moran goes berserk and nearly kills Ross, who finally defeats her, the two fall in love—Moran acknowledging that she has met her match in Ross, whom she now refers to primally as “mate” (anticipating Jack and Charmian’s nickname for each other). But as Ross toughens through his encounter with brutality, Moran softens as she adopts a dependency on Ross more “appropriate” for a woman at sea. At the beginning Moran is worthy of no less a mate than a Wolf Larsen; by the end of the book she hasn’t the strength of a Maud Brewster.

Norris’s book is handled with all the awkwardness of an immature writer, but its examination of the theme of the survival of the fittest is nevertheless powerful. Jack perhaps mistook the immaturity of Moran of the Lady Letty for youthful genius; Jack’s best sea writing owes more to Norris’s early novel than to his masterpieces McTeague (1899) or The Octopus (1901). In any case, Norris died young in 1902, leaving the field of American literary naturalism pretty much to Jack.

At least as far as his lasting reputation is concerned, Jack’s greatest experience was not at sea but in the Klondike goldfields. At the end of 1902, Jack was working on a social novel, The People of the Abyss, and his greatest book, The Call of the Wild. It would be hard to overemphasize the achievement of the latter book. It was unique in American literature, and in it Jack synthesized many currents of literature more successfully than at any other time in his career. Jack was on a roll when he began his greatest sea story, The Sea-Wolf (1904).

Jack owned the North; but he was too late—after his contemporaries Kipling, Stevenson, and Conrad (themselves second-generation writers of the sea)—to do much with the sea-novel. And The Sea-Wolf would not be any reader’s candidate for the perfect novel. Its elements remain fragmentary, but in this work Jack created his most powerful human character in Wolf Larsen, skipper of the sealing-schooner Ghost. Although not without antecedents like Melville’s monomaniacal Captain Ahab or Dana’s cruelly arbitrary Captain Thompson, Larsen emerges sui generis from Jack’s amalgamation of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. And yet the vision that gave birth to Wolf Larsen fails to sustain the rest of the book. Although Jack tries to describe a sea more truthful than Harvey Cheyne’s and a love more fit for survival than Moran’s, the scenes with Hump and Maud never escape their artificiality. For better or worse, Maud’s arrival signals a triumph of civilization as clearly as the elder Cheyne’s railroad trip across America. London’s naturalism in The Sea-Wolf is romanticism on all fours. Yet Jack would not have admitted that his art in The Sea-Wolf was incoherent: to Jack realism probably meant getting the storm scenes right, while characterization was more about fidelity of character to type—to types as Jack saw them, not necessarily at all what the world would judge to be specimens of humanity. Nothing could be more firmly in the romantic tradition than Jack’s notion of type—it accounts for his best characters as well as his worst, his racism as well as his interpretation of the animal world. And Maud represented something in addition for Jack: she was an audience for Hump, the necessary adulatory witness of Hump’s passage into a manhood uncompromised by his civility. At a time when Jack was succumbing to the seductions of Charmian Kittredge and initiating a divorce from his first wife, the arrival of Maud in Jack’s imagination is perhaps more significant than her arrival on the Ghost.

Perhaps, after all, Jack knew more truths about dogs than about people. As a writer, Jack was best standing at the edge of a boreal forest he could fill with canine creatures of his imagination. Though he tried, he could not fill the sea with his own life, instead leaving in his pseudo-autobiographical sea fiction, in Melville’s words, only a “white and turbid wake.” Aside from the characterization of Larsen, Jack’s imagination seemed to work only re-constructively. He could dismantle the recent sea novels of Kipling and Norris and reassemble them into a work that seemed to diminish most of the themes and nearly every effort towards realistically complex characterization. Norris had handled naturalism with a more honestly scientific mind, however crude his first book may otherwise have been. But perhaps Jack’s greatest problem was that by the time he wrote The Sea-Wolf, science at sea had pretty much left fiction behind. And sea fiction, as it matured at the end of the nineteenth century, may well have left writers like Jack behind.

Born in 1857, Joseph Conrad was a generation older than Jack, a generation he had spent at sea. Once he had turned to fiction in the mid 1890s, Conrad would never forget that he was an artist, while Jack never forgot he was writing for money.