The Voyage of the Snark

In 1907, at the age of thirty-one, Jack London undertook a grand Pacific voyage with his second wife and a few crewmen in a small ketch of his own design and construction. The Cruise of the Snark is a non-fictional account of that voyage. London includes a great number of photographs from the voyage as illustrations to the book, with pictures of the landscapes and inhabitants of many of the strange islands in which they made port. The following post will offer what little I have gathered from a skimming of that account, and from secondary sources available online, and will hopefully give everyone a notion of London's adventuresome personality, which seeps through into the writing of his works of fiction, like The Call of the Wild.

London gives two main reasons for setting sail. For one, the voyage would serve as a personal fitness test for London himself. He writes that the "achievement of a difficult feat is successful adjustment to a sternly exacting environment," and that "the more difficult the feat, the greater the satisfaction at its accomplishment." He wanted to test himself. He had rather risk his life, like a man who "leaps forward from the springboard, out over the swimming pool," instead of "the fellows who sat on the bank and watched him. The second reason London wanted to make the journey was one of curiosity. "Being alive, I want to see, and all the world is a bigger thing to see than one small town or valley," London writes.

The Snark was a forty-five foot long sailing boat, which cost London "three hundred and ninety-five dollars" to build. Its named comes from Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark, so-named, says London, "because we could not think of any other name." It launched from San Francisco on April 23, 1907, eventually visiting Hawaii, where London learned to surf, the Marquesas islands, Fiji, Tahiti, Bora Bora, the Soloman islands, and finally, Australia, where London took ill for five weeks, suspending the journey. According to the foreword to The Cruise, the journey was to have been truly epic in scope had London's health kept up; they had intended to visit "New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra, and go on up through the Phillipines and Japan," to continue south and west along Asia's southern coast, visiting "Korea, China, India, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean." London intended it as a world voyage, planning to spend "from one to several months in every country in Europe," and to take the Snark inland onto the waters of every major river on the globe, "up the Nile," "up the Danube to Vienna," "up the Thames to London," "up the Seine to Paris," and so on. The itinerary would eventually even bring the little bark back to American waters, where they would "go up the Hudson, pass through the Erie canal, cross the Great Lakes, leave Lake Michigan at Chicago, gain access to the Mississippi by way of the Illinois River and the connecting canal, and go down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico."

"We'll know something about geography when we get back to California," wrote London.

The journey was not as successful as it was ambitious, but nonetheless London, his wife Charmian, and the crew visited numerous exotic locales, and almost certainly put London's survival instincts to the test, as he wanted. I suppose his journey-ending illness is a sign that ultimately, based on his own criteria, the self-described "fallible and frail" Jack London was unfit for such a voyage, something which surely must have bothered him.