By 1903, Conrad had already written Nigger of the Narcissus, Lord Jim, and Youth—any one of which shows more artistic integrity than Jack’s whole maritime output. Jack admired Conrad, as he admired Melville, without a prayer or an intention of ever writing like either of them. To the craft of language, in the Conradian sense, Jack was entirely a stranger.

But Jack had done something Melville had only begun and Conrad had never attempted: he had built a persona for himself as a man who had done something. Jack’s readers may have been naïve in their appreciation of literature, but they were quick to appreciate the man. Here was a man who as a kid had gone to sea under the most brutal conditions and had survived to write about it. And here was a young man who had gone to the goldfields of the frozen north and had again survived to write about it. He had mingled among the slums of the world, and had not been degraded, had not been crushed by disease or poverty. And after the publication of The Sea-Wolf, Jack’s persona was further honed to the point where even his friends began to call him “Wolf.” Jack had been tested in the caldron of brute nature and had been found fit.

Whether, as Alfred Kazin maintained, the greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived, or whether the greatest story Jack ever wrote was the one he wanted us to believe he lived, Jack was personally and commercially wrapped up in this persona. By the time he began to consider the Snark voyage, Jack was neither simply writer nor adventurer but—like Hemingway a generation later—was both: a public adventurer who was expected to put himself in harm’s way and to report the result to the panting public.

Jack had two models before him as he envisioned the great voyage he would undertake. Of course, he had been inspired by Herman Melville’s Typee (1846). Melville’s alter-ego Tomo would evolve, as Hershel Parker has suggested, into America’s first literary sex star, until the phrase “the man who lived among cannibals” was only a slightly disguised euphemism. But although Melville may have drawn Jack to the Marquesas, Jack already had a Fayaway in Charmian. And besides, Melville had jumped ship to win his vacation in paradise, while Jack intended to sail his own vessel.

He got the idea from Joshua Slocum, whose Sailing Alone Around the World had appeared in book form in 1900, and which Jack and Charmian read aloud in 1905. Slocum had built his own yacht with his own hands from the crumbling remains of an oyster sloop. He had then carefully selected his crew of one (he had sailed on a small boat voyage with his family before, and did not choose to repeat the experiment), and sailed single-handedly around the world—the first solo circumnavigation of the globe.

Slocum’s writing style was unpretentious. As a failed ship captain, Slocum seemed also destined to be a failure as a writer. Two previous voyage narratives had netted him practically nothing. He was, as Conrad would have put it, at the end of his tether when he sailed out of Boston Harbor in 1895 on the rebuilt Spray. But Slocum’s voyage clarified both spirit and mind. When he came to write about his three-year voyage, an “easy literary concord” resulted, in the words of Haskell Springer, “from his remarkable competence with both tiller and pen.” Springer’s choice of the word “concord” is perhaps subliminal: at its best Slocum’s book reads like a saltwater Walden.

In Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum achieved a perfect balance of ship, sailor, and the sea. Everything in the book is seasoned with the salt of the Spray, her skipper, and the watery world in which she sailed. But when in July 1906 Jack described both the voyage he planned to take and the book he planned to write about it in a prospectus to Woman’s Home Companion, his model was no longer Slocum but Robert Louis Stevenson.

In the struggle for survival, Stevenson was losing fast. Born in 1850, he never outgrew childhood sickliness, but his search for a better environment for his failing lungs took him on journeys by canoe, donkey, train, and ship. He also found a soulmate, Fanny, under whose care he wrote his masterpiece Treasure Island (1883), the first of a number of successes. By 1888, Stevenson and Fanny were able to journey to the South Pacific, stopping (as would Jack) at the leper colony at Molokai and island-hopping their way to Samoa. There Stevenson would settle and, despite a brief and productive respite in health, die in 1894, honored throughout the world as “Tusitala”—the Teller of Tales. Stevenson did not live to complete a proposed collection of descriptive pieces: they were haggled together after his death as In the South Seas (1896). Stevenson had been catering to the demand of readers to see the sea through the eyes of the now-great writer, but Stevenson made the crippling mistake of leaving himself largely out of his observations—a mistake that, unfortunately, would be largely repeated in Jack’s own book, both in prospectus and in the writing. Despite enjoying great reputations as literary personae, neither Stevenson nor Jack really got the point that they had to be in the foreground of any view of the South Seas they chose to give. On the other hand, both books were by dying men who in some deeply psychological way may have been unable or unwilling to look squarely at their own lack of fitness in the great South Pacific archipelago.

So although he was inspired to take the voyage by Slocum, as a literary project the trip was handicapped by Jack’s infatuation with Stevenson. Nevertheless, the voyage-cum-book was an easy sell to the magazines, even if some of his friends thought he was crazy.