With a sudden twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off to the right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was the bed, the other the table. When the one chair in the room was at its usual place before the table, the canal was unnavigable. When the chair was not in use, it reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even becoming skillful enough to manage a paragraph or two while steak was frying. Also, so small was the little corner that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting down, to reach anything he needed. In fact, it was expedient to cook sitting down; standing up, he was too often in his own way. (Chapter 23)

 

This is Jack’s tongue-in-cheek description of the real Martin negotiating his well-over-six-foot form in the galley of the Snark.

The Snark, after a refit in Hawaii, visited the Marquesas and reached Tahiti around Christmas, 1907. The Snark remained at Tahiti for several months, while the steamer Mariposa carried Jack as well as his manuscripts back to the United States. With Martin Eden out of his system, Jack began more systematically to turn the materials of the voyage into literature. “The House of Mapuhi” proved popular, although this styleless story of the loss and recovery of a pearl by means of a hurricane might to modern readers seem to lack both goal and spirit; “The Whale Tooth” seems a pointless excursion; “Yah! Yah! Yah!” is much better and in fact reads as if it were by an entirely different author; “The Heathen” seems to have been a practice run at the materials of “Yah,” tentatively borrowing the names of its characters from Jack’s recent voyage-reading—“Charley” from Conrad and “Carruthers” from Erskine Childers.

During Jack’s brief return to California, he must have brought himself up to date on a literary controversy that had been raging in the United States, and which by implication involved him. The best known—and most widely loved—nature writer of Jack’s day was John Burroughs (1837-1921), a comrade of Walt Whitman and, later, Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1903 published the essay “Real and Sham Natural History” in the Atlantic Monthly, the flagship periodical of the eastern literary establishment. Normally mild-mannered, Burroughs sarcastically took two of his contemporaries—Ernest Thompson Seton and William J. Long—to the whipping post for trying to pass off wilderness fantasies as factual nature study. Burroughs almost immediately regretted publishing the essay (the Atlantic didn’t even cite it in its own index for that year, and Burroughs never included it in collected editions of his writing). But the gauntlet had been thrown, and when the “Nature Fakers,” as they came to be known, took it up, no less a champion than Roosevelt himself waded in on the side of Burroughs. The essay didn’t mention Jack’s animal stories directly, but perhaps Jack heard about this essay secondhand anyway, from someone who confused the name “Long” with “London” and Charles G. D. Roberts’s Kindred of the Wild with Call of the Wild. Burroughs had written,

 

True it is that all the animals whose lives are portrayed [in a story in Roberts’s book]—the bear, the panther, the lynx, the hare, the moose, and others—are simply human beings disguised as animals; they think, feel, plan, suffer, as we do; in fact, exhibit almost the entire human psychology. But in other respects they follow closely the facts of natural history, and the reader is not deceived; he knows where he stands. Of course it is mainly guesswork how far our psychology applies to the lower animals. That they experience many of our emotions there can be no doubt, but that they have intellectual and reasoning processes like our own, except in a very rudimentary form, admits of grave doubt.

 

Jack’s own contribution, dated March 1908 at Papeete, and called “The Other Animals,” reports that “. . . when the word nature-faker was coined, I, for one, climbed into my tree and stayed there.” But later comments by Roosevelt and Burroughs’s “Reasonable but Unreasoning Animals,” published in The Outlook in December 1907, got Jack out of his tree. He went at Burroughs tooth and claw, arguing somewhat humorously that if Burroughs could see nothing but instinct in his dog, Jack had certainly observed reason in his. An anecdote of Martin’s suitably closes the controversy, at least as it played out in the Pacific Ocean:

 

As we were cruising in a general westerly direction through the New Hebrides, a little incident occurred which throws a side-light on the man, Jack London. One day, when weather conditions were perfect and everyone was on deck enjoying himself, an animated ball of variegated colours dropped slowly down into the cockpit at the feet of Mrs. London, who was at the wheel. She eagerly picked it up, calling out, “Lookie, lookie, what I’ve got!” It proved to be the prettiest little bird we had ever seen. Jack got out his book on ornithology, and proceeded to study book and bird, but nowhere was such a bird described.

It was evidently a land-bird that had gotten too far from shore and had fallen exhausted on the deck of the Snark. We all stood around looking at it as it lay in Mrs. London’s hand, while she chirped and tried to talk bird-talk to it. At last Jack said: “If it’s a land-bird you are, to the land you go,” and changing the course, we sailed for the island of Mallicolo, just barely visible ten miles out of our way.