Adventure (Annotated)
By Jack London and Muhammad Humza
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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.
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Adventure (Annotated) - Jack London
Jack London Biography
JACK LONDON GREW UP in the slum area of Oakland, California, a place which he later called the cellar of society.
Born out of wedlock on January 12, 1876, he never knew his father, William Henry Chaney, who had left Jack's mother, Flora Wellman, before Jack's birth. On September 7, 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, from whom her son Jack took his name.
By the age of fifteen, London had turned delinquent. Barely seventeen, he signed aboard the schooner Sophie Sutherland, bound for Japan and the Bering Sea. Returning from the voyage in 1894, London began to be interested in the plight of the underprivileged and working classes, so he joined a group of militant workers who were going to Washington to protest the wretched working conditions in the country, caused by the Depression of 1894. He did not reach Washington, however; he deserted this Industrial Army
in Hannibal, Missouri, and for a time he traveled around the country as a hobo. At Niagara Falls, he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to the Erie County Penitentiary. He was released after thirty days, and he quickly caught the first train heading West, arriving eventually in Oakland.
It was probably soon after his release from the penitentiary that London became seriously interested in politics, and as a result, he joined an Oakland branch of the Socialist Labor Party in April 1896. Then soon afterward, he enrolled as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he attempted to further his studies in the most influential scientific and philosophic theories of the late nineteenth century — Darwinism, Social Darwinism, Nietzscheism, and Marxism. He soon became restless, though, and he left the university during his second semester as a student. From California, he went North, to the Klondike to search for gold, and his adventures there became the basis of many stories. In fact, two of his most famous novels, The Call of the Wild and White Fang, are set in the North, and while these two novels are perhaps his most famous in the United States, London is equally well known in places outside of the United States as the author of a number of socialistic works: The Iron Heel (1908), The War of the Classes (1905), Revolution and Other Essays (1910), and The People of the Abyss (1903). London has said that The People of the Abyss was his favorite book; it is a sociological study about the worst areas of poverty in London, England's East End and is based on London's first-hand experiences while he lived there.
Early in 1900, London married Bessie Maddern and began his career as a serious writer. He soon finished his first novel, A Daughter of the Snows, which was published in 1902, and in the summer of 1903, London met Charmian Kittredge, whom he promptly fell in love with and abruptly left his wife and two daughters for.
In ill health most of his life, by 1915, London was almost lame. His bowels gave him continual pain, and in order to reduce the pain, London began using opium and morphine, and it was not long before he became addicted to the drugs. As a consequence, his kidneys were also eventually wrecked by his misuse of all of the drugs, and London refused to even quit smoking, although he had cancer of the throat. By November 21,1916, London was in such poor health that he spent the entire day in bed. Then shortly before dawn the next day, he injected himself with what would prove to be an overdose of drugs. That evening, he died; he was forty years old. There is, naturally, some question as to whether his death was an intentional suicide.
London's Fiction
It is interesting to note that his novel The Iron Heel (written in 1906 and published in 1908) belies London's avid interest in science fiction. Considered to be one of his best novels, the novel predicts a Fascist oligarchy in the United States under threat from a proletarian revolution, allegedly pictured in manuscripts discovered by scholars in the socialist twenty-seventh century. A Thousand Deaths
(1899), London's first science fiction tale, utilizes some key motifs of the science fiction genre: a solitary, embittered scientist subjects his son to some revivification experiments, but the scientist is soon dematerialized by a fantastical weapon invented by his son. London's story The Shadow and the Flash
(1903) has as its concern the quest for invisibility on the part of two scientists. The Enemy of All the World
(1908) features a mad scientist
who invents a formidable weapon and terrorizes the world with it. Much of London's science fiction indicates his belief in the superiority of the white race. In 1904, London visited Japan and other Far Eastern countries, and his correspondences from there disguise his deep racist attitudes toward the Oriental people. For example, at a Socialist rally in Oakland, after his return from the Far East, he publicly declared his hatred of the Oriental races, and in his science fiction story The Unparalleled Invasion
(1910), the West destroys the Chinese with a bacteriological bomb. In London's posthumous novella The Red One (1918), London pictured a stone-age society which has formed a death cult and worships a strange sphere from outer space.
Plagued with debts throughout his life, London accepted an offer from Macmillan in 1902 for $2,000.00 for The Call of the Wild, which is all of the money that London ever received from what is perhaps his most famous book. In 1904, London decided to compose a complete antithesis [and] companion piece
to The Call of the Wild. Instead of the devolution or the decivilization of a dog, he said, I'm going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog . . . .
The result was White Fang, which appeared two years later, in 1906. In 1913, London published John Barleycorn, a book about his alcoholism, and a book that should be considered as a sincere tract describing the plight of the alcoholic.
While writing for only sixteen years, London produced an amazing body of work: nineteen novels, eighteen volumes of essays and short stories, and numerous other books, both sociological and autobiographical, and London's popularity has hardly ebbed over the years. The Call of the Wild has been translated into more than thirty languages, and it exists in millions of copies; sales and printing of White Fang are only slightly less in number than The Call of the Wild. Other popular London novels are Martin Eden (1909), The Valley of the Moon (1913), and the book which many critics feel comes closest to being the Great American Novel, The Sea Wolf (1904).
Table of Contents
Title
About
Chapter 1 - Something To Be Done
Chapter 2 - Something Is Done
Chapter 3 - The Jessie
Chapter 4 - Joan Lackland
Chapter 5 - She Would A Planter Be
Chapter 6 - Tempest
Chapter 7 - A Hard-Bitten Gang
Chapter 8 - Local Colour
Chapter 9 - As Between A Man and A Woman
Chapter 10 - A Message From Boucher
Chapter 11 - The Port Adams Crowd
Chapter 12 - Mr. Morgan and Mr. Raff
Chapter 13 - The Logic of Youth
Chapter 14 - The Martha
Chapter 15 - A Discourse on Manners
Chapter 16 - The Girl Who Had Not Grown Up
Chapter 17 - Your
Miss Lackland
Chapter 18 - Making the Books Come True
Chapter 19 - The Lost Toy
Chapter 20 - A Man-Talk
Chapter 21 - Contraband
Chapter 22 - Gogoomy Finishes Along Kwaque Altogether
Chapter 23 - A Message From the Bush
Chapter 24 - In the Bush
Chapter 25 - The Head-Hunters
Chapter 26 - Burning Daylight
Chapter 27 - Modern Duelling
Chapter 28 - Capitulation
Footnotes
Chapter
1
Something To Be Done
HE WAS A VERY SICK white man. He rode pick-a-back on a woolly- headed, black-skinned savage, the lobes of whose ears had been pierced and stretched until one had torn out, while the other carried a circular block of carved wood three inches in diameter. The torn ear had been pierced again, but this time not so ambitiously, for the hole accommodated no more than a short clay pipe. The man-horse was greasy and dirty, and naked save for an exceedingly narrow and dirty loin-cloth; but the white man clung to him closely and desperately. At times, from weakness, his head drooped and rested on the woolly pate. At other times he lifted his head and stared with swimming eyes at the cocoanut palms that reeled and swung in the shimmering heat. He was clad in a thin undershirt and a strip of cotton cloth, that wrapped about his waist and descended to his knees. On his head was a battered Stetson, known to the trade as a Baden-Powell. About his middle was strapped a belt, which carried a large-calibred automatic pistol and several spare clips, loaded and ready for quick work.
The rear was brought up by a black boy of fourteen or fifteen, who carried medicine bottles, a pail of hot water, and various other hospital appurtenances. They passed out of the compound through a small wicker gate, and went on under the blazing sun, winding about among new-planted cocoanuts that threw no shade. There was not a breath of wind, and the superheated, stagnant air was heavy with pestilence. From the direction they were going arose a wild clamour, as of lost souls wailing and of men in torment. A long, low shed showed ahead, grass-walled and grass-thatched, and it was from here that the noise proceeded. There were shrieks and screams, some unmistakably of grief, others unmistakably of unendurable pain. As the white man drew closer he could hear a low and continuous moaning and groaning. He shuddered at the thought of entering, and for a moment was quite certain that he was going to faint. For that most dreaded of Solomon Island scourges, dysentery, had struck Berande plantation, and he was all alone to cope with it. Also, he was afflicted himself.
By stooping close, still on man-back, he managed to pass through the low doorway. He took a small bottle from his follower, and sniffed strong ammonia to clear his senses for the ordeal. Then he shouted, Shut up!
and the clamour stilled. A raised platform of forest slabs, six feet wide, with a slight pitch, extended the full length of the shed. Alongside of it was a yard-wide run-way. Stretched on the platform, side by side and crowded close, lay a score of blacks. That they were low in the order of human life was apparent at a glance. They were man-eaters. Their faces were asymmetrical, bestial; their bodies were ugly and ape-like. They wore nose-rings of clam-shell and turtle-shell, and from the ends of their noses which were also pierced, projected horns of beads strung on stiff wire. Their ears were pierced and distended to accommodate wooden plugs and sticks, pipes, and all manner of barbaric ornaments. Their faces and bodies were tattooed or scarred in hideous designs. In their sickness they wore no clothing, not even loin-cloths, though they retained their shell armlets, their bead necklaces, and their leather belts, between which and the skin were thrust naked knives. The bodies of many were covered with horrible sores. Swarms of flies rose and settled, or flew back and forth in clouds.
The white man went down the line, dosing each man with medicine. To some he gave chlorodyne. He was forced to concentrate with all his will in order to remember which of them could stand ipecacuanha, and which of them were constitutionally unable to retain that powerful drug. One who lay dead he ordered to be carried out. He spoke in the sharp, peremptory manner of a man who would take no nonsense, and the well men who obeyed his orders scowled malignantly. One muttered deep in his chest as he took the corpse by the feet. The white man exploded in speech and action. It cost him a painful effort, but his arm shot out, landing a back- hand blow on the black's mouth.
What name you, Angara?
he shouted. What for talk 'long you, eh? I knock seven bells out of you, too much, quick!
With the automatic swiftness of a wild animal the black gathered himself to spring. The anger of a wild animal was in his eyes; but he saw the white man's hand dropping to the pistol in his belt. The spring was never made. The tensed body relaxed, and the black, stooping over the corpse, helped carry it out. This time there was no muttering.
Swine!
the white man gritted out through his teeth at the whole breed of Solomon Islanders.
He was very sick, this white man, as sick as the black men who lay helpless about him, and whom he attended. He never knew, each time he entered the festering shambles, whether or not he would be able to complete the round. But he did know in large degree of certainty that, if he ever fainted there in the midst of the blacks, those who were able would be at his throat like ravening wolves.
Part way down the line a man was dying. He gave orders for his removal as soon as he had breathed his last. A black stuck his head inside the shed door, saying, -
Four fella sick too much.
Fresh cases, still able to walk, they clustered about the spokesman. The white man singled out the weakest, and put him in the place just vacated by the corpse. Also, he indicated the next weakest, telling him to wait for a place until the next man died. Then, ordering one of the well men to take a squad from the field- force and build a lean-to addition to the hospital, he continued along the run-way, administering medicine and cracking jokes in beche-de-mer English to cheer the sufferers. Now and again, from the far end, a weird wail was raised. When he arrived there he found the noise was emitted by a boy who was not sick. The white man's wrath was immediate.
What name you sing out alla time?
he demanded.
Him fella my brother belong me,
was the answer. Him fella die too much.
You sing out, him fella brother belong you die too much,
the white man went on in threatening tones. I cross too much along you. What name you sing out, eh? You fat-head make um brother belong you die dose up too much. You fella finish sing out, savvee? You fella no finish sing out I make finish damn quick.
He threatened the wailer with his fist, and the black cowered down, glaring at him with sullen eyes.
Sing out no good little bit,
the white man went on, more gently. You no sing out. You chase um fella fly. Too much strong fella fly. You catch water, washee brother belong you; washee plenty too much, bime bye brother belong you all right. Jump!
he shouted fiercely at the end, his will penetrating the low intelligence of the black with dynamic force that made him jump to the task of brushing the loathsome swarms of flies away.
Again he rode out into the reeking heat. He clutched the black's neck tightly, and drew a long breath; but the dead air seemed to shrivel his lungs, and he dropped his head and dozed till the house was reached. Every effort of will was torture, yet he was called upon continually to make efforts of will. He gave the black he had ridden a nip of trade-gin. Viaburi, the house-boy, brought him corrosive sublimate and water, and he took a thorough antiseptic wash. He dosed himself with chlorodyne, took his own pulse, smoked a thermometer, and lay back on the couch with a suppressed groan. It was mid-afternoon, and he had completed his third round that day. He called the house-boy.
Take um big fella look along Jessie,
he commanded.
The boy carried the long telescope out on the veranda, and searched the sea.
One fella schooner long way little bit,
he announced. One fella Jessie.
The white man gave a little gasp of delight.
You make um Jessie, five sticks tobacco along you,
he said.
There was silence for a time, during which he waited with eager impatience.
Maybe Jessie, maybe other fella schooner,
came the faltering admission.
The man wormed to the edge of the couch, and slipped off to the floor on his knees. By means of a chair he drew himself to his feet. Still clinging to the chair, supporting most of his weight on it, he shoved it to the door and out upon the veranda. The sweat from the exertion streamed down his face and showed through the undershirt across his shoulders. He managed to get into the chair, where he panted in a state of collapse. In a few minutes he roused himself. The boy held the end of the telescope against one of the veranda scantlings, while the man gazed through it at the sea. At last he picked up the white sails of the schooner and studied them.
No Jessie,
he said very quietly. That's the Malakula.
He changed his seat for a steamer reclining-chair. Three hundred feet away the sea broke in a small surf upon the beach. To the left he could see the white line of breakers that marked the bar of the Balesuna River, and, beyond, the rugged outline of Savo Island. Directly before him, across the twelve-mile channel, lay Florida Island; and, farther to the right, dim in the distance, he could make out portions of Malaita—the savage island, the abode of murder, and robbery, and man-eating—the place from which his own two hundred plantation hands had been recruited. Between him and the beach was the cane-grass fence of the compound. The gate was ajar, and he sent the house-boy to close it. Within the fence grew a number of lofty cocoanut palms. On either side the path that led to the gate stood two tall flagstaffs. They were reared on artificial mounds of earth that were ten feet high. The base of each staff was surrounded by short posts, painted white and connected by heavy chains. The staffs themselves were like ships' masts, with topmasts spliced on in true nautical fashion, with shrouds, ratlines, gaffs, and flag-halyards. From the gaff of one, two gay flags hung limply, one a checkerboard of blue and white squares, the other a white pennant centred with a red disc. It was the international code signal of distress.
On the far corner of the compound fence a hawk brooded. The man watched it, and knew that it was sick. He wondered idly if it felt as bad as he felt, and was feebly amused at the thought of kinship that somehow penetrated his fancy. He roused himself to order the great bell to be rung as a signal for the plantation hands to cease work and go to their barracks. Then he mounted his man-horse and made the last round of the day.
In the hospital were two new cases. To these he gave castor-oil. He congratulated himself. It had been an easy day. Only three had died. He inspected the copra-drying that had been going on, and went through the barracks to see if there were any sick lying hidden and defying his rule of segregation. Returned to the house, he received the reports of the boss-boys and gave instructions for next day's work. The boat's crew boss also he had in, to give assurance, as was the custom nightly, that the whale-boats were hauled up and padlocked. This was a most necessary precaution, for the blacks were in a funk, and a whale-boat left lying on the beach in the evening meant a loss of twenty blacks by morning. Since the blacks were worth thirty dollars apiece, or less, according to how much of their time had been worked out, Berande plantation could ill afford the loss. Besides, whale-boats were not cheap in the Solomons; and, also, the deaths were daily reducing the working capital. Seven blacks had fled into the bush the week before, and four had dragged themselves back, helpless from fever, with the report that two more had been killed and kai-kai'd[1] by the hospitable bushmen. The seventh man was still at large, and was said to be working along the coast on the lookout to steal a canoe and get away to his own island.
Viaburi brought two lighted lanterns to the white man for inspection. He glanced at them and saw that they were burning brightly with clear, broad flames, and nodded his head. One was hoisted up to the gaff of the flagstaff, and the other was placed on the wide veranda. They were the leading lights to the Berande anchorage, and every night in the year they were so inspected and hung out.
He rolled back on his couch with a sigh of relief. The day's work was done. A rifle lay on the couch beside him. His revolver was within reach of his hand. An hour passed, during which he did not move. He lay in a state of half-slumber, half-coma. He became suddenly alert. A creak on the back veranda was the cause. The room was L-shaped; the corner in which stood his couch was dim, but the hanging lamp in the main part of the room,