Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  It is a scenario that almost anyone who has commissioned a new yacht will identify with and Snark was months overdue when she was finally launched. Even then things went far from smoothly: shortly after the launch, the Londons and their entourage took the Snark for a test sail and were well satisfied. The yacht was then left under the watchful eye of crewmember Martin Johnson. Unfortunately during the night the Snark drifted and became trapped between two large lumber scows that were also at anchor and which dragged down on to the yacht during the night. The Snark was severely 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 at the boatyard. At this point, further catastrophe occurred; as the yard workers were lowering the vessel back into the water following her repair job, the slings they were using to lower her into the water parted, and the yacht was unceremoniously dumped into the mud of Oakland Harbour. In the process, the mountings for the much-vaunted engine sheared and this was left totally disconnected and disabled. London was utterly exasperated. By now, the endless delays and London’s own high profile were turning his vessel and his dream into a laughing stock. San Francisco newspapers would run snide daily bulletins proclaiming: ‘The Snark will sail … Soon.’ Ultimately he took drastic and rather reckless measures: lashing down the useless engine and staunching 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.

  In addition to London and Chairman, now his wife, Snark carried Roscoe Eames as skipper. Quite how Jack mustered the patience to bear this incompetent has not been recorded, but it must have come as little surprise when it was discovered that Eames could not even navigate. The crew was completed by London’s personal assistant Nakata, a chef named Martin Johnson, and another deckhand. From the first the trip was fearful: the vessel leaked dreadfully and the supposedly watertight tanks containing all of the petrol for her useless engine also leaked, meaning that the boat reeked of petrol and sloshed her flammable liquid around with every roll and scend. The Snark soon encountered high winds and at this point it was discovered that the wretched craft could not be persuaded to heave to. This was a real blow, as in heavy weather it is very important for a boat to lie safely with her bows to the oncoming seas. All of the crew were fearfully sick and became frightened for their lives. London remained cool, however. In his memoirs of the voyage, Martin Johnson recalls that his own nerve gave out after several days of terrible battering by the seas. He confided his fears in London, who replied: ‘Nonsense Martin, we’re only two miles from land at present.’ When Martin asked where the land he spoke of was, London replied with admirable sang froid: ‘Straight down, Martin, Straight down.’

  Eventually, Snark emerged from the storm and the crew resumed their haphazard progress to Hawaii, teaching themselves navigation and succumbing to frequent bouts of seasickness as they went. 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 Roscoe Eames was finally dismissed after again neglecting to maintain the vessel. A new captain was appointed – a convicted murderer as it happened. From here, Snark made the lengthy and hazardous voyage to the Marquesas. It was typical of Jack’s devil-may-care approach to sailing that he chose to make such a trip, for it was popular knowledge that to run from Hawaii to the Marquesas was folly, as you were obliged to go against the prevailing winds and currents. The trip was therefore a trying one for the crew of the Snark; Captain Warren distinguished himself by trying to throttle the cook for allegedly stealing his favourite pot of honey, and tensions cannot have been soothed when they ran out of water after one crewmember managed to carelessly empty most of their supply into the bilges. After several days of extreme thirst, the tanks were replenished following a torrential rainstorm and normality returned. Snark was finally anchored Taiohae Bay on the island of Nuku Hiva after a truly epic passage of 60 days. This was a magical moment for Jack for this was the island where Melville’s legendary novel Ty-Pee was set (see from here to here). This autobiographical tale of two sailors who desert their whaling ship and take refuge in the savage valley of Ty-Pee was one of the books that had been pivotal in inspiring the young London to go to sea. The thrill of making the fabled island aboard his own yacht was great, and was only matched by the sadness and disappointment in discovering that the populace of Ty-Pee Valley had been all but wiped out since Melville’s time by western diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis. As Charmian noted, ‘It is as if a curse had fallen upon it spreading over it a choked jungle of burao, damp and unwholesome, on the edges of which, near the river, unkempt grass houses stand upon the lordly pae-paes of decayed affluence.’

  The Londons must have made quite an impression on what remained of the islanders and the colonials living there, for they took to swanning around in Japanese kimonos, which must have looked most curious to all, although doubtless they were very cool in the hot climate. From Nuku-Hiva, the Snark headed for the Paumotus, or Dangerous Islands, and just as Stevenson in the Casco had conspired to get hopelessly lost (see here), so too did the Snark, for the low atolls of the Paumotus are as alike as belaying pins and extremely hard to tell apart. In addition, cross currents make them exceedingly difficult to navigate with any great accuracy without a GPS. Soon Captain Warren, Snark’s navigator, was totally befuddled and it did not help that he was the sort of pig-headed old mariner who would not admit he was wrong. After many, many hours of drifting about and arguing, Jack took the decision to head straight to Tahiti, where he had mail waiting.

  The maddening nature of this exploit was later adapted to form the story of The Seed of McCoy, which featured in Jack’s South Sea Tales and is the true story of the large four-masted barque, Pyrenees, which turned up off Pitcairn Island with its cargo on fire. Her captain was searching for a beach to run his vessel ashore, with an eye to salvage once her cargo had burned, and enlisted the help of one McCoy, a distant relative of one of the Bounty’s mutinous crew, who settled on Pitcairn. The story essentially relates the extreme difficulty of making one of these awkward atolls and the Pyrenees, laden with a fiery cargo, endures all manner of close calls before finally coming to rest on the pristine sandy beach of an atoll.

  Leaving the Paumotus untouched in her wake, Snark blazed a trail through the islands of the South Pacific, which these days are familiar to many cruising yachtsmen: Tahiti, the Society Islands and Samoa are all relatively mainstream destinations, but back then the London entourage were deep in the heart of unknown territory. Tensions were now building between the crew and the irascible Captain Warren. One of the hands had jumped ship in Tahiti, having had enough of the skipper’s temper, and Jack was beginning to lose patience with him, as Charmian relates after a bungled attempt at anchoring in Pago-Pago, Samoa:

  And here we are, disgusted, and keenly disappointed with our messy arrival in Pago Pago, after our bright beginnings. Jack said gloomily: ‘I really think, when all’s said and done, I’ve got more sailor-pride than all the rest of them put together even if I don’t talk about it; and just look at the spectacle we’ve made of ourselves this morning!’ I feel so sorry for him; he spares nothing in order to have things as they should be, and seldom gets what he pays for. And the one and only thing in the world in which he fights for style, is his boat.

  This fractiousness culminated in Captain Warren’s discharge in Suva, Fiji, by which time the miserable and morose captain had earned the nickname of ‘the blight’ and was loathed by one and all. His culminating catastrophe was to get hopelessly lost amid a maze of corals and reefs off the coast of Fiji and for many hours it was touch and go as to whether the Snark would extricate herself from the trap. Once she did, it was no surprise that Warren was hastily dismissed and was later described by London as: ‘So crooked he could not hide behind a corkscrew.’ After this, Jack wisely took charge of the Snark himself.

  The turnover of crew was l
eading to all kinds of wild rumours back home, with tall tales spreading around that London was the embodiment of Wolf Larsen, captain of The Sea Wolf, the sort of brute who treated his crew roughly. London did no such thing, and further refuted the claim in the Log of the Snark:

  When I discharged an incompetent captain, they said I had beaten him to a pulp. When one young man returned home to continue at college, it was reported that I was a regular Wolf Larsen, and that my whole crew had deserted because I had beaten it to a pulp. In fact the only blow struck on the Snark was when the cook was manhandled by a captain who had shipped with me under false pretences, and whom I discharged in Fiji. Also, Charmian and I boxed for exercise; but neither of us was seriously maimed.

  As they pressed on into the unknown, they remained haunted by the ghosts of some of Jack’s childhood literary heroes. First it was Melville in the Marquesas, then, in Samoa, the Londons made a point of visiting the home of Robert Louis Stevenson, marvelling at the great house that he had built. They were some years too late in paying their visit, for Stevenson had died in 1892 and his wife, Fanny, had sold the house a couple of years later to a German Governor. The group visited his grave, high on the hill above his last home, and Jack murmured, ‘I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to visit the grave of any other man in the world.’

  Still the Londons pressed on, deeper into the unknown. The next destination was to be the Cannibal Islands of the South Pacific. In 1906, many of the inhabitants of these beautiful yet savage islands still knew the taste of human flesh and as the Snark threaded her way through the New Hebrides to the Solomon Islands, things rapidly went from the exotic to the plain terrifying. Photos of Jack and Charmian ashore show them mingling with the locals in a friendly manner, but carrying pistols at their waists. This was a very prudent measure and Jack kicked himself for not installing a machine gun aboard the Snark as he had originally planned to do.

  If one incident illustrates how fraught with risk their lives had become, it is perhaps their adventures aboard the trader Minota. Snark fell in with this vessel while at anchor off the island of Penduffryn. The vessel was a ‘blackbirder’; little more than a glorified slave trader, transporting labour between islands. Her captain, Jansen, invited the Londons to accompany him on a cruise through the Malaitian Islands and the pair eagerly agreed. By now they were deep in the heart of darkness, for it soon came to light that the previous captain of the Minota had been murdered by a marauding group of islanders. ‘The hatchet-marks were still raw on the door of our tiny stateroom advertising an event of a few months before. The event was the taking of Captain Mackenzie’s head’, London noted with strange relish. Despite this, the Londons seem to have been not in the least dismayed, and Charmian described their first night aboard the vessel as follows:

  There was not a single moment of silence on the Minota that long sweltering night. And yet it was wonderful to lie there, pistols and extra cartridges under our pillows a rifle apiece alongside us on the couch, realizing the slashing riskiness of our situation. Nothing between us and danger except our wardfulness and our lucky stars.

  Matters took a turn for the worse off the island of Malu in the Solomons. The Minota was nosing her way back out into open water through a gap in the reef, when a windshift forced her off her course and, to the horror of everyone, the vessel was hard aground and pounding her hull to pieces in the Pacific swell. Within an instant, the vessel was surrounded by native canoes, as Jack relates:

  When the Minota first struck, there was not a canoe in sight; but like vultures circling down out of the blue, canoes began to arrive from every quarter. The boat’s crew, with rifles at the ready, kept them lined up a hundred feet away with a promise of death if they ventured nearer. And there they clung, a hundred feet away, black and ominous, crowded with men, holding their canoes with their paddles on the perilous edge of the breaking surf. In the meantime the bushmen were flocking down from the hills armed with spears, Sniders [rifles], arrows, and clubs, until the beach was massed with them. To complicate matters, at least ten of our recruits had been enlisted from the very bushmen ashore who were waiting hungrily for the loot of the tobacco and trade goods and all that we had on board.

  Squall after squall, driving wind and blinding rain, smote the Minota, while a heavier sea was making. The Eugenie [a fellow blackbirder] lay at anchor five miles to windward, but she was behind a point of land and could not know of our mishap. At Captain Jansen’s suggestion, I wrote a note to Captain Keller, asking him to bring extra anchors and gear to our aid. But not a canoe could be persuaded to carry the letter. I offered half a case of tobacco, but the blacks grinned and held their canoes bow-on to the breaking seas. A half a case of tobacco was worth three pounds. In two hours, even against the strong wind and sea, a man could have carried the letter and received in payment what he would have laboured half a year for on a plantation. I managed to get into a canoe and paddle out to where Mr. Caulfield [A missionary friend from Malu] was running an anchor with his whale-boat. My idea was that he would have more influence over the natives. He called the canoes up to him, and a score of them clustered around and heard the offer of half a case of tobacco. No one spoke.

  ‘I know what you think,’ the missionary called out to them. ‘You think plenty tobacco on the schooner and you’re going to get it. I tell you plenty rifles on schooner. You no get tobacco, you get bullets.’

  At last, one man, alone in a small canoe, took the letter.

  Three hours from the time our messenger started, a whale-boat, pressing along under a huge spread of canvas, broke through the thick of a shrieking squall to windward. It was Captain Keller, wet with rain and spray, a revolver in belt, his boat’s crew fully armed, anchors and hawsers heaped high amidships, coming as fast as wind could drive – the white man, the inevitable white man, coming to a white man’s rescue.’

  Ultimately, the Minota was saved and the Londons survived to sail onward. Yet the incident illustrates just how far they had come and how close to the bone their adventures were. Many of the encounters from this period are related in London’s South Sea Tales, a collection of short stories which capture more acutely than any other the uneasy beauty of these savage islands and how vital and visceral life was among them. Perhaps most astute are his observations about the unsavoury relationship between the relentlessly avaricious white colonisers, pious yet misguided missionaries, and the local population. This period was probably the high point of the Londons’ cruise, for as the Snark progressed through the South Sea islands toward Australia, London and his crew began to suffer the ill effects of months at sea in strange lands. Many were laid up with fever and, most disturbingly of all, London’s hands became horribly afflicted by a mysterious skin disease. At times they swelled up to twice their normal size, and huge chunks of peeling skin would fall from them. In addition, his toenails grew to such an extent that they were almost as thick as they were long. All of this was gruesome and baffling to the doctors and London, without the use of his hands, was utterly incapable of writing. Jack was further unnerved by a rumour that the crew of his former vessel, the Sophia Sutherland, had been completely obliterated in the South Seas around this time by a skin disease rather fittingly known as ‘scratch scratch’. Another theory was that he had contracted leprosy from a visit to a leper colony in Molokai, Hawaii in the early stages of the voyage. This proved to be unfounded and the doctors argued it was a stress-related ailment. Nevertheless, London could no longer earn a living at all and he made the difficult decision to take a steamer from the island of Guadalcanal to Sydney, Australia where he and his sickly crew could receive some proper medical attention. After a brief period of convalescing, London was presented with a devastating prognosis. The doctors concluded that life in a tropical climate combined with the basic rations aboard the Snark was responsible for his ill health and decreed that London should return to California in order to regain his vigour. It was an agonising decision for London to have to take, as he was finally forced to
make the gut-wrenching choice between his literary career and all the life-affirming challenges that the sea offered. Weakened by illness, he chose the former and turned his back on the cruise. Charmian was devastated, 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.’

  The Snark was sailed to Sydney by some of the remaining crew and laid up there. She was later sold and remained trading – ironically as a ‘blackbirder’ – in the South Seas for many years before finally being wrecked off the coast of Vanuatu.

  Thus ended one of the most offbeat and pioneering cruises ever. In the process, London had ensured that he would not only be noted as one of the foremost American storytellers of the early twentieth century, but that he would also go down as a yacht-cruising pioneer, who blazed a trail now so well trodden by blue water yachtsmen. Yet for London, the disappointment of not concluding the round the world voyage was severe. 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, acquaintances and hangers on. In his twilight years, he dabbled with yachting again, heading down to his beloved San Francisco Bay aboard a new yacht, Roamer and it was aboard her that Charmian and Jack seemed to enjoy some of the happiest and most intimate moments of these latter years of their relationship. It was during one of these trips that he penned the following paean to the joys of sailing:

  Once a sailor, always a sailor. The savour of the salt never stales. The sailor never grows so old that he does not care to go back for one more wrestling bout with wind and wave. I know it of myself. I have turned rancher, and live beyond sight of the sea. Yet I can stay away from it only so long. After several months have passed, I begin to grow restless. I find myself day-dreaming over incidents of the last cruise, or wondering if the striped bass are running on Wingo Slough, or eagerly reading the newspapers for reports of the first northern flights of ducks. And then, suddenly, there is a hurried pack of suit-cases and overhauling of gear, and we are off for Vallejo where the little Roamer lies, waiting, always waiting, for the skiff to come alongside, for the lighting of the fire in the galley-stove, for the pulling off of gaskets, the swinging up of the mainsail, and the rat-tat-tat of the reef-points, for the heaving short and the breaking out, and for the twirling of the wheel as she fills away and heads up Bay or down.