As Jack’s contemporary, arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, might have remarked, only the unprepared have adventures.

Still another influence began to bear on the Snark project. The greatest living American writer of London’s day was Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens (1835-1910). Jack may have looked up Twain’s Roughing It (1872) for its account of Hawaii. And as recently as 1897 Twain had published the account of his own circumnavigation, Following the Equator. Jack liked Twain’s laconic irony, and adopted it in most of the essays that would become The Cruise of the Snark, but in none so much as in the first two chapters, originally titled “The Voyage of the Snark” and “Building of the Boat.”

The Twain experiment was a healthy one for Jack, and probably would have worked if one didn’t suspect that behind all the supposed irony Jack wasn’t, after all, falling for his own dream. Twain, after all, had wrecked the Walter Scott, but Jack was actually going to do this thing. And he was, in true Jack form, going to do it by himself. There was no Adirondack Murray of the sea to trick the innocent into the jaws of romance—even Tomo had fled from Fayaway’s valley in fear for his life. Although he may have rankled under the celebration of capitalism while being attracted to Kipling’s captain of industry (a kind of superman), Jack wanted to believe in Typee and Captains Courageous. He had a dream and it shanghaied him.

The first of Jack’s preliminary articles appeared in Cosmopolitan for December 1906, prefaced by the following somewhat premature paragraph:

 

Jack London is off on his round-the-world voyage for the Cosmopolitan, in his little forty-five foot, ketch-rigged boat, the Snark, with Mrs. London, her uncle, a cook, and a Japanese cabin-boy. The author of “The Sea Wolf” expects to be gone several years and, for the time, to do all his writing on board his boat. He will write the story of the voyage exclusively for the Cosmopolitan, and expects to begin his narration in the January or February number.

 

The article was illustrated with photographs of Jack and the still a-building Snark, one of which bore the caption, “Jack London and the skeleton of his forty-five foot boat, in which he will sail around the world for the Cosmopolitan Magazine.” Jack was furious. Besides resenting the implication that he was undertaking the voyage as a convenience to the Cosmopolitan, Jack knew full well that he had already negotiated to place Snark material in other periodicals. There would be no more articles for the Cosmopolitan this trip

But the voyage wouldn’t begin anyway. Although he had chosen his crew by year’s end, the Snark refused to be finished. Jack was no Slocum, and even if he had wanted to build the boat with his own hands, he needed to keep those hands busy writing in order to pay for the adventure. Not one of the crew he had arranged, not even Charmian’s uncle Roscoe Eames who supposedly was to provide the maritime experience of the outfit, was competent to oversee the building of such a vessel. And in the wake of the earthquake of 1906, new building put a premium on materials, labor, and transportation that often brought construction of the Snark to a halt. Not until spring of 1907 did Jack desperately decide to sail the still-unfinished yacht to Hawaii.

When, on April 23, 1907, the Snark sailed out the Golden Gate, she carried three people on board who would chronicle the voyage, although it would be misleading to say they stuck to her to the end—since the intended circumnavigation would never come to pass. With as much discipline as any writer ever displayed, Jack continued his daily grind, writing for a set number of hours nearly every morning on a rainbow of subjects. Charmian was probably a lot smarter than Jack—and she was probably a better travel writer, if their respective Snark books are admitted as evidence. But she idolized Jack—both the man and the persona, if there was any difference to her—and she had the advantage of making Jack the persona of her book while developing her own narrative voice. Martin Johnson turned out to be a far better writer than cook. Martin was a perfect boy-companion for Jack, as Jack almost certainly realized when he chose him out of the myriads of applicants for a position on the Snark. Martin was still young enough to adulate Jack, but he was also probably, after all, more intelligent. Navigation was Jack’s greatest intellectual achievement; for Martin, repairing the engine was an exercise in logic and organization that was more likely characteristic. Jack would remain an enormously popular writer of fiction, but Martin would grow up to be the most celebrated adventurer of his day. Martin, of course, had the advantage of hero and heroine, both ready-made, for his book, and retained a distinct enough voice that he does not too frequently lose himself in his admiration (which was real and profound) of his shipmates. And it is Martin, after all, who provides the most direct evidence of the sincerity of the Jack London persona—evidence important when one weighs the artistic and personal successes or failures of the voyage.

John Seelye has called Martin Johnson the “shadow hero” of the Snark voyage. Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1884, Martin would make several successful voyages of his own to South Sea archipelagos, as well as Africa, with his wife, Osa. Together the two of them would practically invent the travel film and the recording of natural history through both still photography and the motion picture. Martin and Osa combined twentieth-century technology with a knack for popularization—in both of which areas Martin served his apprenticeship aboard the Snark.

In fact, Martin probably spent more time aboard the vessel—before, during, and after the cruise—than any of the other Snarkites.