The Cruise of the Snark (National Geographic Adventure Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Stand in a shower tearing up 100 dollar bills instead
Review: I've recently arrived back in the USA from Suva and Nadi in Fiji, one of Jack's stopping points.

However, what he describes about the South Pacific is no more.

London's South Pacific was affected by European trade and commerce. For one thing, disease, in an era when its prevention was primitive, was rife and the inhabitants of the islands he visited were dropping like flies. Today, of course, the very same network has brought modern medicine and the major health threat to natives in the South Pacific is obesity: the only restaurant on Victoria Parade in Suva, allowed Sunday hours, was McDonald's, while Singh's Curry Shop had to close (I recommend the latter, around the corner from McDonald's on Gordon Street: try the goat curry).

London's natives were partly pagan. Today, ordinary people in Oceania are mostly fundamentalist Christian, and, in Suva, there is also a streak of Islam, petering out far to the west of Indonesia but echoing in the afternoon call of the Muezzin in Suva.

The fundamentalism means that the yachtsman is well-advised on shore to dress modestly. Of course, London and his wife did this naturally, long ago. I actually saw an Australian man warn a woman in shorts in Suva to put knickers on lest one of the local Methodists or Moslems be offended.

But any myth of escape has been so commodified in the South Pacific by tavern owners and tourist companies as to be sour and bitter to the taste.

London, while asserting his property rights thoughtlessly at Oakland's wharf, and while assuming he had the right to hire men to work on his boat and judge their hard work in print, also assumed, in the South Pacific, his right to wander at will.

Today, as the Rough Guide to Fiji advises the tourist, 85% of the land in Fiji is owned fee simple by chiefs. Sir Arthur Gordon decided not to repeat America's dispossession of the Indians and covenanted with the lads in Fiji in such a way that today, the natives form a land-owning aristocracy.

Their fair-mindedness (as on display from Steve Rabuka who backed down from being a military dictator) means that other lads from other mobs have rough civic equality.

London was the prototype, however, of the colonialist as rugged individual whose humanity is based on the unconscious deprivation of others' humanity.

London was the prototype of the soured Yank who when a lad thought the best of people, without a dime to his name, who now has everything, and thinks the worst of people.

London with a grin repeats texts from the hundreds of letters he received from individuals who wanted to sign on to the Snark and so escape their own lives of quiet desparation in an America already unbearable for the average city-dweller. Like him they yearned for a clean-limbed life but unlike London they lacked cash.

London essentially uses their texts to pad out a book that was obviously written not from the heart but to raise cash for a silly boat.

Any yachtsman knows in his heart of hearts that if the landlubber wants his experience, he has only to stand in a cold shower tearing up 100 dollar bills. The Snark was an expensive lark and, like modern yachts, unconsciously offensive at both its sharp end (where were the natives, giving London gifts and dying like flies) and its blunt end (where were the American laborers whose work London disrespects because it was not finished on his schedule).

The South Seas are overrun, today, by people who really ought to be paying more taxes back home. I traveled out there to work at global rates and learned much more about the REAL South Seas than any tourist might, and I'm afraid that Joe Conrad, who also worked for a living, in The Heart of Darkness is more reliable on the tropics than old Jack London.

I'm afraid that London saw, what he wanted to see: the Gilded Age struggle of man against man. However, as Hannah Arendt points out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, this defines rather a culture of hatred out of which were form racialist identities. London was for the most part free of any special form of racism but he did believe that Socialism was impossible because Alpha males (like Wolf Larsen) would take what they need.

Well, they might, and they do. Nonetheless, in the South Seas and elsewhere, Beta males and women continue some how to achieve more, and of more lasting value, by working in groups. Sir Arthur Gordon is forgotten save in Suva, because unlike Cecil Rhodes he failed to mind his own press-agentry but it appears he did lasting good with his land-tenure scheme.

London never learned the limits of his world view and his darkest book, Alcoholic Memories, is a testament to London's limitations.

My favorite yachtsman remains good old Tristan Jones, a British sailor who was trained in the Royal Navy and who paid his dues. Tristan would like me arrive back, from the back of beyond, without a dime and go willingly to work while living willingly in a doss-house. Tristan dragged his own boat across the Mato Grosso and talked back to tinpot Fascists in Stroessner's Paraguay.

In my experience it is relatively easy to learn the mechanics of a sailing boat but what is hard is endurance, not only of Nature but the Other. London endured Nature but has a tendency to be impatient in print with others, as shown by his insenstive near-mockery of applicants for service on his boat. Jones, on the other hand, mocks only people who deserve it, like customs agents in Paraguay.

We lack Tristan Jones' spirit in America with the result that the Third World is overrun with the worst of us, whining yachtsmen and CIA agents and their trophy wives. London I fear was despite his genuine greatness of soul a prototype for the worse that came later.

Rating:
Summary: Read it in Hawaii!
Review: If you are travelling to Hawaii or any Polynesian destination, then make this book one of your companions. London makes you feel like you are on the boat with him as he takes you from the docks of San Fransisco, to the Hawaiin Isles, to Tahiti and beyond. With tremendous humility and wit London portrays his journey through the South Seas brilliantly, ultimately concluding that attempting to live out a dream can become a nightmarish reality.

Rating:
Summary: a ninety year-old book that could be written yesterday
Review: The Cruise of the Snark relays the saga of Jack London's construction, and two-year voyage in a 45-foot sailing ketch from San Francisco to Hawaii, the Marquesas, Tahiti, and the head-hunting Solomon islands.

His difficulties in getting the boat built after the 1906 San Fran earthquake are hilarious as he describes the assaults of his contractors and creditors during the construction.

After they finally launch the voyage six months late, they manage to find Hawaii through sheer luck, where Jack and his plucky wife, Charmain, learn to surf (remember this is 1907!), visit the leper colony at Molokai and the "House of the Sun" volcanic crater on Maui.

Then comes the "impossible traverse" to the Marquesas, which they didn't realize couldn't be done until a week after they'd begun. Continuing on to Tahiti and the savage Solomon islands, Jack and his determined "Snarkites" encounter natives, tribal chieftains, missionaries, and overcome their problems with incredible persistence and naivete as only some of the first white people to enter these areas could possess.

Incidentally, the "cook" on this voyage was the famous photographer and world explorer Martin Johnson who was picked to go on his very first adventure by a letter to Jack advertising his thirst for travel. With his wife Osa, he would years later revisit the Solomons for the purpose of photographing cannibalism before embarking on their epic photographic safaris in Africa and Borneo. Jack only mentions Martin in passing during "the Cruise", perhaps sensing some literary and photographic competition that he would encounter later.

This book is a great shelf companion to Martin's "Through the South Seas with Jack London", upon which he began his great series of travel books. "The Cruise" gives Jack's viewpoint as the sponsor of the trip, and an established literary giant. Whereas Martin's opinions on the racial makeup of the islanders are quite bigoted and reflect the prevailing views of the turn of the century, Jack is more open-minded, and willing to point out the failings of the white race in adapting to these island paradises.

"The Cruise" is a great non-fiction book, among few others by London such as "the Abyss" that tell of his adventures and opinions first-hand as they happen. It truly captures his sarcastic yet hopeful perspective of himself and the whole concept of adventure.