Traveling to Oakland long before the Snark was ready to sail, Martin spent the time observing the construction of the vessel at Anderson’s Ways in San Francisco. He became part of the London household, and recorded his wonder at his good fortune:

 

Some hundreds of persons wrote to Jack, begging him to let them go with him on the cruise. Every mail contained such letters. They continued to pour in almost up to the day we sailed out of the Golden Gate. Most of the letters Jack showed to me. Here was a chef in a big hotel in Philadelphia, a man getting over two hundred dollars a month, who offered his services free. A college professor volunteered to do any kind of work, and give one thousand dollars for the privilege. Another man, the son of a millionaire, offered five hundred dollars to go along. Still another declared that he would put up any amount of money if Jack would allow his son to be one of the crew. And there were offers and solicitations from school-teachers, draftsmen, authors, photographers, secretaries, stenographers, physicians, surgeons, civil engineers, cooks, typists, dentists, compositors, reporters, adventurers, sailors, valets, “lady companions” for Mrs. London, stewards, machinists, engineers, high-school and university students, electricians—men and women of every imaginable trade, profession or inclination. I began to have misgivings when I thought of the fine chefs who had applied. I contrasted their skilled ability with the little that I had learned from the cook-book! It was just such things as these that made me feel how lucky I was to be a member of the crew of the Snark. (Chapter II)

 

Even at his young age, Martin had done some exploring of his own, and he and Jack were able to compare notes on the East End of London: Martin remarked that Jack’s “People of the Abyss” read “almost like a passage out of my own life.”

After March 1907, Martin largely lived aboard the still uncompleted but by now launched Snark in the Oakland Estuary. Rather naively, he described the conditions of a trial voyage on San Francisco Bay “as heavy a sea as will be encountered on an ocean voyage,” and, not surprisingly, he added, “And we were seasick—oh! We were seasick!” Shortly after the trial voyage, the Snark was nearly sunk at her moorings as two lumber scows drove into her in a gale: “wherever she is,” Martin wrote, “the Snark is lop-sided to this day.” In another gale while moored off Oakland, the Snark dragged her anchor and nearly stove herself in on a wharf to leeward. Martin miraculously set a kedge anchor, which gave him time to reassemble the engine, start it successfully, and keep the Snark from grounding—all this alone at night on an unfinished vessel.

Martin practiced his cooking on the shipwrights who worked on the Snark, and later entertained the Famous Fraternity, “a group of celebrated authors and artists, all hailing from California and most of them resident there”:

 

Among those who came were George Sterling, the man whom the Londons had pronounced one of the greatest of living poets, Martinez, the artist, Dick Partington, another artist, Johannes Reimers, writer, and Jimmie Hopper, famous first as a football hero and then as a writer of short stories, and others, whose names I have forgotten. I did my very best to prepare them a good dinner; and if their expressions of satisfaction were any indication, I succeeded. (Chapter II)

 

Martin described the final preparations for sailing with particular attention to the literary nature of the voyage:

 

We began provisioning and buying all kinds of photographic supplies, done up in tropical form—that is, with the film wrapped in tin-foil and sealed in tins, and the paper triple-wrapped and protected with foil. . . . We bought clothing, and we bought fishing tackle, and harpoons, and guns, and pistols, and we bought paper, paper for Jack’s writing, and paper for the typewriter, hundreds of reams of it. (Chapter II)

 

Above all, Martin wrote, they brought “books—five hundred of them, on every conceivable topic, selected from Jack’s library of ten thousand volumes. The Snark was fairly ballasted with books.” In the weeks leading up to the departure, Martin read many of Jack’s books—literally, that is—books that Jack had written himself. Interrupting one of Jack’s pre-departure reveries, Martin asked him, “What do you think you’ll write about?”

 

He smiled

“Well, if we’re boarded by pirates and fight it out until our deck becomes a shambles, I don’t think I’ll write about it. And if we’re wrecked at sea, and are driven by starvation into eating one another, I’ll keep it quiet for the sake of our relatives. And if we’re killed and eaten by cannibals, of course, I shan’t let the American public get an inkling of it.” (Chapter II)

Jack already knew what he was going to write. And it was Martin, also, who gave his name to the most important work Jack wrote on this trip, his semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909). Written during the first half of the trip, the novel has received a mixed critical response. It is another example of Jack’s ideas being bigger than his art. As a character, Martin Eden is slightly less credible than a Horatio Alger hero.