Jack London – The Call of the Sea

London was a writer and one of the biggest celebrities in America at the time. He had shot to fame with books such as The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf and his articles commanded huge fees from magazines. The idea of him dropping everything and simply disappearing into the unknown seemed utterly outlandish. Yet the following year his new yacht, Snark, made her departure from San Francisco headed for Hawaii and beyond into the unknown. The plan was to circumnavigate the globe.

The decision was a brave one, for in 1907 the concept of sailing a yacht around the world was still considered highly dangerous. Yet the plan was not wholly foolish or naïve. Jack London was a man of dash and dare and although he had made his name as an author with tales of the frozen wastelands of the Yukon, he was actually a highly experienced sailor.
Born in 1876, he had grown up in Oakland, California on the shores of San Francisco Bay and his early years were a story of grinding poverty. From an early age he was forced into dead-end jobs to support his family and he sought salvation through the sea. By hiding some of his earnings from his mother, London was able to secrete enough money away to buy a little 14ft sailing skiff and he then honed his sailing skills running errands and supplies to and from the ships that lay in Oakland harbour.

His next move was a lucrative one. He borrowed some money from a mentor which enabled him to buy a small sloop, Razzle Dazzle, and set himself up as an oyster pirate. Oyster pirates were essentially renegade fishermen who dredged the privately owned oyster beds of San Francisco Bay. This was something of a cause célèbre at the time, as the oyster beds had originally been fished communally but were then sold off without public consent, so there was much resentment and romanticising over the antics of the pirates. The risks of this pursuit were high, for the oyster fisheries had soon cottoned on to what was going on and guards were posted. The penalty for getting caught was often a bullet in the back or a lengthy stretch in San Quentin Prison. Yet the lure for young London was irresistible.
Oyster thieving using an unpowered boat in the dead of night in an area notorious for its strong tides and treacherous shallows turned London into an excellent sailor. His career was curtailed when one of his rivals set fire to Razzle Dazzle’s sails, yet he continued to hone his skills by signing on aboard a sealing schooner, the Sophia Sutherland which took him to Japan and back, supplying him with many details for the plot of his later book The Sea Wolf.

After these adventures, London turned his back on the sea and determined to make it as a writer. Yet he always felt the call of the sea, for it was in his blood. In 1906, he felt confident enough to answer that call once more. By now, he had established himself as a successful writer and it had brought him great wealth. He was 27, still a young man, still full of dash and dare. He had also married an equally adventurous young woman, Charmian Kittredge, and the two goaded each other into making the final leap, as London wrote later.
“It began in the swimming pool at Glen Ellen

[his home]. Between swims it was our wont to come out and lie in the sand and let our skins breathe the warm air and soak in the sunshine. We talked about small boats, and the seaworthiness of small boats. We instanced Captain Slocum and his three years’ voyage around the world in the Spray (from 1895).
“We asserted that we were not afraid to go around the world in a small boat, say forty feet long. We asserted furthermore that we would like to do it. We asserted finally that there was nothing in this world we’d like better than a chance to do it. Let us do it,” we said.

Thus the decision was made to build a brand-new vessel, Snark a 45 ft ketch to his own design, with the express intention of sailing around the world. From the start, however, the project seemed almost cursed (see next page). It didn’t help that London was trying to get the vessel built in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The city had been devastated and quality materials were in short supply. His foreman was also his wife’s uncle, Roscoe Eames, who proved useless and botched everything. The press started to nickname the boat ‘London’s folly’.

Endless delays and London’s own high profile turned his dream project into a laughing stock. San Francisco newspapers would run snide daily bulletins proclaiming: ‘The Snark will sail… Soon.’ Ultimately he took drastic and somewhat reckless measures: staunching the Snark’s leaky hull as best he could, London and his entourage departed San Francisco for Hawaii with the vessel in bits. It seemed the only way to escape.

From the first, the trip was horrific. It didn’t help that Snark leaked horribly and the crew, consisting of Jack and Charmian London, cook Martin Johnson, another deckhand and Roscoe Eames acting as captain, also made the disquieting discovery that her petrol tanks were not watertight, meaning that the vessel reeked of petrol and sloshed her lethal cargo around with every roll and scend. Snark soon encountered heavy weather and all of the crew was fearfully sick and became frightened for their lives. London remained cool, however. In his memoirs of the voyage, Johnson recalls that his own nerve gave out after several days of terrible battering by the seas.

He confided his fears to London, who replied: “Nonsense Martin, we’re only two miles from land at present.” When Martin asked where this land was, Jack replied with admirable sang-froid: “Straight down, Martin. Straight down.”
Once Snark found herself in calmer waters, a new problem emerged: navigation. The serially incompetent Eames – overseer of Snark’s disastrous construction – ostensibly commanded the vessel, but it was soon clear that he could not navigate in any meaningful sense. So Jack took it upon himself to learn. To everyone’s surprise, the island of Oahu was finally located and Snark was once again put in the hands of the repair men. At this point Eames was dismissed after again neglecting to maintain the vessel and a new captain was appointed – a convicted murderer as it happened – and the cruise resumed. The next destination was the Marquesas – an odd choice as it was a destination that relied on Snark defying both prevailing wind and current and it took the little vessel 60 days to get there. The trip was a fraught one; Captain Warren distinguished himself by trying to throttle the cook for allegedly stealing his favourite pot of honey and tensions cannot have helped when they ran out of water after one crewmember managed to empty most of their supply into the bilges. After several days of extreme thirst, the tanks were replenished by a torrential rainstorm and normality returned. Snark was finally anchored in Taiohae Bay on the island of Nuku Hiva.

From Nuku-Hiva, she headed for the Paumotus, or Dangerous Islands and got hopelessly lost, the low atolls of the Paumotus being notoriously hard to distinguish. Soon Captain Warren was befuzzled and it did not help that he was the sort of pig-headed old mariner who would not accept when he was wrong. After many hours of drifting about and arguing, Jack took the decision to head straight to Tahiti, where he had mail waiting. Shortly after this misadventure Captain Warren was dismissed and Jack took charge of the Snark himself.

The trip had already been full of adventure and incident, but the next destination promised to trump all that had gone before, as the Snark pointed her bows toward the ‘Cannibal Islands’ of the South Pacific. In 1906, islands such as the Solomons still had a justifiably fearsome reputation for cannibalism and many of the inhabitants of these beautiful places still knew the taste of human flesh. At times there was a tangible feeling that the crew of the Snark could end up as ‘long pig’. Jack and Charmian always packed a pistol in their belt when they went ashore. If the islanders frequently unnerved London, his trip also opened his mind and inspired some of his finest writing. His South Sea Tales is inspired by this period and is among his finest work. The book is innovative for its time as it depicts the local populace in a far less one-dimensional manner than contemporaries and captures more acutely than any other the uneasy beauty of these savage islands and how alive and visceral life was among them. Perhaps most astute are his observations about the uncomfortable relationship between the avaricious white colonisers, pious yet misguided missionaries and the local population.

The South Sea trip was meant to be just the beginning of the cruise. London dreamt of threading the Arabian Sea and traversing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic but ultimately it was the savage climate of the south Pacific that did for him. London became afflicted by a mysterious skin disease which meant his hands swelled up and huge chunks of skin fell off. Without his hands he could not write and earn the money to fund the voyage and, after seeking medical advice, he was urged to abandon the trip. It was a devastating decision for London, and he and Charmian were distraught, as Jack recalled:
“In hospital when I broke the news to Charmian that I must go back to California the tears welled into her eyes. For two days she was wrecked and broken by the knowledge that the happy, happy voyage was abandoned.”

Thus one of the most offbeat and pioneering cruises ended rather abruptly. In the process, London had ensured that he would not only be noted as one of the foremost American storytellers of the early 20th century, but also as a yacht cruising pioneer, who blazed a trail now sailed by bluewater yachtsmen. Yet the disappointment of not concluding the voyage was severe and marked a distinct turning point. His return to land seemed to stifle him and he fell far too easily into a life of heavy drinking and smoking, egged on by his many bohemian friends and hangers-on. His health suffered terribly as a consequence.

To London, the sea was life and land seemed to signify suffocating death. Sadly the land won out and he died, aged 40, from alcohol and prescription drug abuse at his ranch in California. Today, he’s seen as one of the few writers who can convey the raw thrill of crossing oceans and raising mysterious and savage lands over the horizon with exhilarating sharpness. For that alone, London’s sailing exploits as well his writing deserve to be remembered.

 

Building the Snark

“The Snark is a small boat. When I figured seven thousand dollars as her generous cost, I was both generous and correct. I have built barns and houses, and I know the peculiar trait such things have of running past their estimated cost. This knowledge was mine, was already mine, when I estimated the probable cost of the building of the Snark at seven thousand dollars. Well, she cost thirty thousand. Now don’t ask me, please. It is the truth. I signed the cheques and I raised the money.”
So wrote London in his Cruise of the Snark. In today’s money that is the rough equivalent of a whopping £2m. For that, London got a boat with an engine that did not work, a hull that leaked, a deck that leaked and petrol tanks that leaked. Commissioning problems are familiar to the modern mariner, but seem to have dogged London and Snark in spades. Part of the problem was that San Francisco had just been almost razed to the ground by the 1906 earthquake and as a consequence, skilled craftsmen and good quality materials were at a premium. London paid the price.
The Snark was named after one of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poems and much to do with her build made about as much sense. One of the first-ever custom-built bluewater cruisers, she should have been a fine vessel.
She was originally planned to be 40ft long but was extended to 45ft due to the need for an ‘extra bathroom’. This figure was later reduced to 43ft, this being ‘due to the fact that the builder was not on speaking terms with the tape-line or two-foot rule’ as London put it. She was ketch-rigged and shared much with Joshua Slocum’s Spray, sharing the clipper bow, heavy sheer and square stern. Right from the start she leaked. “Man had betrayed us and sent us to sea in a sieve, but the Lord must have loved us, for we had calm weather in which to learn that we must pump every day in order to keep afloat,” London wrote.
The reason for this was because shortly after her delayed launch, the Snark was left at anchor and became trapped between two large lumber scows which were also at anchor and dragged down on to the yacht. The Snark was crushed in the middle of this sandwich and her hull was seriously distorted and leaking heavily by the time she was pulled back out of the water. Further damage was inflicted as the yard workers were lowering the vessel back into the water following her repair; the slings they were using to lower her parted, and the yacht was dumped into the mud of Oakland Harbour. In the process, the mountings for her 70hp petrol engine sheared. London was exasperated, but opted to simply depart in a semi-wrecked condition with the useless engine lashed to the deck beams.
The Snark sailed reasonably well by all accounts and was well balanced when running, but proved deeply reluctant to heave-to, a major drawback greatly bemoaned by the author. He also listed a litany of other problems – for example much of her metalwork was defective and had a tendency to snap under strain.

Once the voyage was called off, Snark was sailed to Sydney by Martin Johnson and sold there. Under new ownership she returned to the South Seas as a trading vessel transporting copra, and there are rumours she even sank to the level of a ‘blackbirder’, essentially trafficking indentured plantation workers – some might say slaves – between islands. Her ultimate fate is not known but she was almost destroyed on a number of occasions by cyclones, and the photos of her last days suggest this was what eventually did for her.

Snark
LOA 55ft (16.7m)
LWL 43ft (13.1m)
Beam 15ft (4.6m)
Draught 7ft 8ins (2.3m)

From Classic Sailor February 2016