Dutch Courage and Other Stories
By Jack London
()
About this ebook
Jack London
Jack London was born in San Francisco on January 12th 1876, the unwanted child of a spiritualist mother and astrologer father. He was raised by Virginia Prentiss, a former slave, before rejoining his mother and her new husband, John London. Largely self-educated, the teenage Jack made money stealing oysters and working on a schooner before briefly studying at the University of Berkeley in 1896. He left to join the Klondike Gold Rush a year later, a phenomenon that would go on to form the background of his literary masterpieces, The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). Alongside his novel writing London dabbled in war reportage, agriculture and politics. He was married twice and had two daughters from his first marriage. London died in 1916 from complications of numerous chronic illnesses.
Read more from Jack London
50 Great Love Letters You Have To Read (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jack London: The Greatest Short Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Classic American Short Story MEGAPACK ® (Volume 1): 34 of the Greatest Stories Ever Written Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Deadline Artists—Scandals, Tragedies & Triumphs: More of America's Greatest Newspaper Columns Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To Build a Fire Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Classic Tales of Science Fiction & Fantasy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Greatest American Short Stories: 50+ Classics of American Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Victorian Mystery Megapack: 27 Classic Mystery Tales Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Plague, Pestilence & Apocalypse MEGAPACK ®: 18 Tales of Doom Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5American Classics (Omnibus Edition) (Diversion Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhite Fang: Level 2 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Post-Apocalyptic Collection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Greatest American Short Stories (Vol. 1) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMoloch Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to Dutch Courage and Other Stories
Related ebooks
In Search of the Castaways; or Captain Grant's Children Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFive Weeks in a Balloon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCivil War Memories: Nineteen Stories of Battle, Bravery, Love, and Tragedy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Unbridled Cowboy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Magnificent Ambersons Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer's Comrade) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Harry Gold: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Billy Budd Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Tale of Two Cities: A Story of The French Revolution Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiterature Companion: Ordinary People Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Count Of Monte Cristo (Unabridged) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTom Sawyer Abroad Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Far From The Madding Crowd Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Classic Westerns: Zane Grey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBougainville: A Marine's Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe History of Tasmania, Volume I Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlackbeard: Or, The Pirate of Roanoke Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMiddlemarch Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Top 10 Short Stories - Anton Chekov Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCaptain Rum: A Wondrous Adventure Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. Illustrated Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Three Mulla-Mulgars Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTwice Told Tales: Stories Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Medical Services in the First World War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The true story of Christopher Columbus, called the Great Admiral Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChildren of the Bush Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCount Robert of Paris by Sir Walter Scott (Illustrated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Good Soldier Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThis Heavy Silence: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Short Stories For You
Sex and Erotic: Hard, hot and sexy Short-Stories for Adults Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Explicit Content: Red Hot Stories of Hardcore Erotica Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Short Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Before You Sleep: Three Horrors Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hills Like White Elephants Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Warrior of the Light: A Manual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Don Quixote Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Finn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lovecraft Country: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Four Past Midnight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Five Tuesdays in Winter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The ABC Murders: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Skeleton Crew Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: A Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sour Candy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ficciones Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Scorched Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Dutch Courage and Other Stories
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Dutch Courage and Other Stories - Jack London
DUTCH COURAGE
AND OTHER STORIES
By
JACK LONDON
First published in 1924
This edition published by Read Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2019 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Contents
Jack London
PREFACE
DUTCH COURAGE
TYPHOON OFF THE COAST OF JAPAN
THE LOST POACHER
THE BANKS OF THE SACRAMENTO
CHRIS FARRINGTON: ABLE SEAMAN
TO REPEL BOARDERS
AN ADVENTURE IN THE UPPER SEA
BALD-FACE
IN YEDDO BAY
WHOSE BUSINESS IS TO LIVE
Jack London
Jack London was born in San Francisco, USA in 1876. In order to support his working class family, he left school at the age of fourteen and worked in a string of unskilled jobs, before returning briefly to graduate. Around this time, London discovered the public library in Oakland, and immersed himself in the literature of the day. In 1894, after a spell working on merchant ships, he set out to experience the life of the tramp, with a view to gaining an insight into the national class system and the raw essence of the human condition. At the age of nineteen, upon returning, London was admitted to the University of California in Berkeley, but left before graduating after just six months due to financial pressures.
London published his first short story, ‘Typhoon off the Coast of Japan’, in 1893. At this point, he turned seriously to writing, producing work at a prolific rate. Over the next decade, he began to be published in major magazines of the day, producing some of his best-remembered stories, such as ‘To Build a Fire’. Starting in 1902, London turned to novels, producing almost twenty in fifteen years. Of these, his best-known are Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set during the Klondike Gold Rush. He also produced a number of popular and still widely-anthologized stories, such as ‘An Odyssey of the North’ and ‘Love of Life’. London even proved himself as an excellent journalist, reporting on the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco and the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
London was an impassioned advocate of socialism and workers’ rights, and these themes inform a number of his works – most notably his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, published in 1907. He even ran unsuccessfully as the Socialist nominee for mayor of Oakland on two occasions. London died in 1916, aged 40.
PREFACE
I've never written a line that I'd be ashamed for my young daughters to read, and I never shall write such a line!
Thus Jack London, well along in his career. And thus almost any collection of his adventure stories is acceptable to young readers as well as to their elders. So, in sorting over the few manuscripts still unpublished in book form, while most of them were written primarily for boys and girls, I do not hesitate to include as appropriate a tale such as Whose Business Is to Live.
Number two of the present group, Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan,
is the first story ever written by Jack London for publication. At the age of seventeen he had returned from his deep-water voyage in the sealing schooner Sophie Sutherland, and was working thirteen hours a day for forty dollars a month in an Oakland, California, jute mill. The San Francisco Call offered a prize of twenty-five dollars for the best written descriptive article. Jack's mother, Flora London, remembering that I had excelled in his school compositions,
urged him to enter the contest by recalling some happening of his travels. Grammar school, years earlier, had been his sole disciplined education. But his wide reading, worldly experience, and extraordinary powers of observation and correlation, enabled him to command first prize. It is notable that the second and third awards went to students at California and Stanford universities.
Jack never took the trouble to hunt up that old San Francisco Call of November 12, 1893; but when I came to write his biography, The Book of Jack London,
I unearthed the issue, and the tale appears intact in my English edition, published in 1921. And now, gathering material for what will be the final Jack London collections, I cannot but think that his first printed story will have unusual interest for his readers of all ages.
The boy Jack's unexpected success in that virgin venture naturally spurred him to further effort. It was, for one thing, the pleasantest way he had ever earned so much money, even if it lacked the element of physical prowess and danger that had marked those purple days with the oyster pirates, and, later, equally exciting passages with the Fish Patrol. He only waited to catch up on sleep lost while hammering out Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan,
before applying himself to new fiction. That was what was the matter with it: it was sheer fiction in place of the white-hot realism of the true story
that had brought him distinction. This second venture he afterward termed gush.
It was promptly rejected by the editor of the Call. Lacking experience in such matters, Jack could not know why. And it did not occur to him to submit his manuscript elsewhere. His fire was dampened; he gave over writing and continued with the jute mill and innocent social diversion in company with Louis Shattuck and his friends, who had superseded Jack's wilder comrades and hazards of bay- and sea-faring. This period, following the publication of Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan,
is touched upon in his book John Barleycorn.
The next that one hears of attempts at writing is when, during his tramping episode, he showed some stories to his aunt, Mrs. Everhard, in St. Joseph, Michigan. And in the ensuing months of that year, 1894, she received other romances mailed at his stopping places along the eastward route, alone or with Kelly's Industrial Army. As yet it had not sunk into his consciousness that his unyouthful knowledge of life in the raw would be the means of success in literature; therefore he discoursed of imaginary things and persons, lords and ladies, days of chivalry and what not—anything but out of his priceless first-hand lore. At the same time, however, he kept a small diary which, in the days when he had found himself, helped in visualizing his tramp life, in The Road.
The only out and out juvenile
in the Jack London list prior to his death is The Cruise of the Dazzler,
published in 1902. At that it is a good and authentic maritime study of its kind, and not lacking in honest thrills. Tales of the Fish Patrol
comes next as a book for boys; but the happenings told therein are perilous enough to interest many an older reader.
I am often asked which of his books have made the strongest appeal to youth. The impulse is to answer that it depends upon the particular type of youth. As example, there lies before me a letter from a friend: Ruth (she is eleven) has been reading every book of your husband's that she can get hold of. She is crazy over the stories. I have bought nearly all of them, but cannot find 'The Son of the Wolf,' 'Moon Face,' and 'Michael Brother of Jerry.' Will you tell me where I can order these?
I have not yet learned Ruth's favorites; but I smile to myself at thought of the re-reading she may have to do when her mind has more fully developed.
The youth of every country who read Jack London naturally turn to his adventure stories—particularly The Call of the Wild
and its companion White Fang,
The Sea Wolf,
The Cruise of the Snark,
and my own journal, The Log of the Snark,
and Our Hawaii,
Smoke Bellew Tales,
Adventure,
The Mutiny of the Elsinore,
as well as Before Adam,
The Game,
The Abysmal Brute,
The Road,
Jerry of the Islands
and its sequel Michael Brother of Jerry.
And because of the last named, the youth of many lands are enrolling in the famous Jack London Club. This was inspired by Dr. Francis H. Bowley, President of the Massachusetts S.P.C.A. The Club expects no dues. Membership is automatic through the mere promise to leave any playhouse during an animal performance. The protest thereby registered is bound, in good time, to do away with the abuses that attend animal training for show purposes. Michael Brother of Jerry
was written out of Jack London's heart of love and head of understanding of animals, aided by a years'-long study of the conditions of which he treats. Incidentally this book contains one of the most charming bits of seafaring romance of the Southern Ocean that he ever wrote.
During the Great War, the English speaking soldiers called freely for the foregoing novels, dubbing them The Jacklondons
; and there was also lively demand for Burning Daylight,
The Scarlet Plague,
The Star Rover,
The Little Lady of the Big House,
The Valley of the Moon,
and, because of its prophetic spirit, The Iron Heel.
There was likewise a desire for the short-story collections, such as The God of His Fathers,
Children of the Frost,
The Faith of Men,
Love of Life,
Lost Face,
When God Laughs,
and later groups like South Sea Tales,
A Son of the Sun,
The Night Born,
and The House of Pride,
and a long list beside.
But for the serious minded youth of America, Great Britain, and all countries where Jack London's work has been translated—youth considering life with a purpose—Martin Eden
is the beacon. Passing years only augment the number of messages that find their way to me from near and far, attesting the worth to thoughtful boys and girls, young men and women, of the author's own formative struggle in life and letters as partially outlined in Martin Eden.
The present sheaf of young folk's stories were written during the latter part of that battle for