Jack London and the Sea

By Anita Duneer

The first book-length study of London as a maritime writer

Jack London’s fiction has been studied previously for its thematic connections to the ocean, but Jack London and the Sea marks the first time that his life as a writer has been considered extensively in relationship to his own sailing history and interests. In this new study, Anita Duneer claims a central place for London in the maritime literary tradition, arguing that for him romance and nostalgia for the Age of Sail work with and against the portrayal of a gritty social realism associated with American naturalism in urban or rural settings. The sea provides a dynamic setting for London’s navigation of romance, naturalism, and realism to interrogate key social and philosophical dilemmas of modernity: race, class, and gender. Furthermore, the maritime tradition spills over into texts that are not set at sea.
 
Jack London and the Sea does not address all of London’s sea stories, but rather identifies key maritime motifs that influenced his creative process. Duneer’s critical methodology employs techniques of literary and cultural analysis, drawing on extensive archival research from a wealth of previously unpublished biographical materials and other sources. Duneer explores London’s immersion in the lore and literature of the sea, revealing the extent to which his writing is informed by travel narratives, sensational sea yarns, and the history of exploration, as well as firsthand experiences as a sailor in the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean.
 
Organized thematically, chapters address topics that interested London: labor abuses on “Hell-ships” and copra plantations, predatory and survival cannibalism, strong seafaring women, and environmental issues and property rights from San Francisco oyster beds to pearl diving in the Paumotos. Through its examination of the intersections of race, class, and gender in London’s writing, Jack London and the Sea plumbs the often-troubled waters of his representations of the racial Other and positions of capitalist and colonial privilege. We can see the manifestation of these socioeconomic hierarchies in London’s depiction of imperialist exploitation of labor and the environment, inequities that continue to reverberate in our current age of global capitalism.



 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817394028

Book preview

JACK LONDON and the SEA

STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM AND NATURALISM

SERIES EDITOR

Gary Scharnhorst

EDITORIAL BOARD

Donna M. Campbell

John Crowley

Robert E. Fleming

Alan Gribben

Eric Haralson

Denise D. Knight

Joseph McElrath

George Monteiro

Brenda Murphy

James Nagel

Alice Hall Petry

Donald Pizer

Tom Quirk

Jeanne Campbell Reesman

Ken Roemer

JACK LONDON and the SEA

ANITA DUNEER

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Plantin

Cover image: Charmian and Jack London on the Snark in Oakland, April 1907, as they prepare to set sail for the South Seas; from the photo album compiled by Charmian London, Concerning the Snark, Jack London Collection, Huntington Library. JLP 486 Alb. 48, p. 44

Cover design: Lori Lynch

A version of chapter four appeared as "Crafting the Sea: Romance and Realism in Jack London’s Martin Eden," American Literary Realism 47, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 250–71.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2125-3

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9402-8

To my father

Dr. Arthur Gustav Duneer, Jr.

whose sense of humor

and adventurous spirit

is with me always

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

1. The Call of the Sea

2. The Maritime Romantic Ideal on the San Francisco Bay

3. Hell-Ships and Seafaring Women

4. Crafting the Sea in Martin Eden

5. The Specter of Survival Cannibalism

6. Trading on Imperialism

7. Local History and Colonial Complexities

Afterword

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

FIGURES

1. Outward Bound

2. ‘Hell-Ships’ of the Past

3. Painting of the Snark

4. South Sea Stories

5. ‘King’ O’Keefe Once A Poor Sailor Lad

6. Dirigo

7. Her trick at the wheel!

8. Navigation Notes

9. A Journal of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Daniel Foss

10. Hurricane described by Drollet

11. Map of Nauri’s journey home

12. The Maui and Matsonia

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I first read Jack London’s sea stories, I was living on the water, immersed in literary voyaging—from nineteenth-century captains’ wives’ diaries to maritime novels from across the centuries. My own nautical adventures on the eastern seaboard—exciting, mundane, and with all manner of miscalculations, mishaps, and near disasters—gave me an intimate appreciation of London’s faithful attention to both the craft and romance of sailing.

My discovery of the rich critical potential under the surface of London’s writing was developed with the support of a community of scholars. This project is indebted to the scholarship, mentorship, and plain good camaraderie of my many colleagues at the Jack London Society, especially Kenneth K. Brandt, Donna M. Campbell, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Sara Sue Hodson, Cara Erdheim Kilgallen, Eric Carl Link, Keith Newlin, Susan Nuernberg, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, and Jay Williams. Colleagues in the field of American literary naturalism whose work has informed mine include all those above, along with Jude Davies, John Dudley, Steven Frye, Patricia Luedecke, Lauren Navarro, Adam Wood, and many others. I couldn’t ask for a more fun and intellectually inspiring group of colleagues!

I thank Rhode Island College and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for the faculty development and research grants that have supported many stages of the writing process: funding for research in the Jack London Collections at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and at Utah State University in Logan; and for the opportunity to share, learn, and collaborate with scholars of Jack London and literary naturalism at biennial Jack London Society Symposia and annual American Literature Association conferences, as well as the 32nd European Association for American Studies / 63rd British Association for American Studies Conference at King’s College, London, where we naturalists prowled the East End of London seeking signs of the places Jack London haunted as he gleaned material for his social exposé, The People of the Abyss.

I am grateful for the help of archivists in the Jack London Collections, especially Clint Pumphrey, manuscript curator at Utah State University, and Sara (Sue) Hodson, for her guidance in navigating the seemingly unfathomable files at the Huntington Library.

I wish to extend my deep gratitude to Keith Newlin, editor of Studies in American Naturalism, for his mentorship, professional advice, and generosity; for the many scholarly opportunities he has opened for me; for his keen critical and editorial eye; and for his valuable suggestions on chapter drafts.

Very special thanks go to Donna M. Campbell and Jeanne Campbell Reesman for their detailed comments and insightful suggestions on the full manuscript. Many thanks to other readers who have helped shape my development of the project: Pamela Bedore, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Susan Lyons, Karen Li Miller, Brenda Murphy, Jerry Phillips, Helen Rozwadowski, and Robert Tilton. I also want to acknowledge the critical influence of rousing conversations with my students on Jack London’s treatment of race and gender, in senior seminars and courses on American literature, literary theory, and literary naturalism at Rhode Island College.

This project surely would not have been completed without the encouragement and support of the Firehouse writing group: Pamela Bedore, Susan Lyons, Helen Rozwadowski, and Rebecca Troeger. In those halcyon pre-COVID days, we would meet nearly every Friday in a conference room at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point (with a lovely seascape view for inspiration), for a full-day retreat of undisturbed writing with intermittent pauses to share paragraphs and ideas we were developing, and to read each other’s drafts. Every month or so, we would gather at a historic firehouse in New London owned by Helen Rozwadowski and Daniel Hornstein, where our usual writing routine was supplemented with Daniel’s home-baked bread, cappuccino, and gourmet lunch. The meal and the occasion to write together are pleasures I sorely miss, but these firehouse days were an invaluable ritual that fueled the writing process for this book.

Hearty thanks go to my dear friend and writing buddy, Pamela Bedore, who has peer-reviewed every word of every draft, often one paragraph at a time. She has been a daily taskmaster, in the best sense, and an endless source of inspiration and motivation.

I want to express my love and appreciation to my mother, Lillian Duneer, for her unwavering encouragement. My most heartfelt gratitude goes to Paul Tiskus for keeping us afloat and on course, from early days of maritime adventures on our cutter-rigged Arts & Sciences to hours upon hours of conversations about the myriad meanings the sea held for Jack London. Finally, the writing process was all the more joyous with the help of my intrepid companions, sailing dogs Sandy and Zoe, and forest dogs Sylvie and Ceilidh.

INTRODUCTION

Today, excellent writing is swamped in a sea of excellent writing.

—JACK LONDON, Eight Factors of Literary Success, in Jack London: No Mentor But Myself, edited by Dale L. Walker (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979), 164

And if a man is a born sailor, and has gone to the school of the sea, never in all his life can he get away from the sea again. The salt of it is in his bones as well as his nostrils, and the sea will call to him until he dies. Of late years, I have found easier ways of earning a living. I have quit the forecastle for keeps, but always I come back to the sea.

—JACK LONDON, Small-Boat Sailing, in The Human Drift (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 55–56

Jack London’s writing career began with a sea story. Upon returning from a seven-month sealing voyage in the Pacific Ocean, he won an essay contest in the San Francisco Morning Call for his Story of A Typhoon off the Coast of Japan (1893). This momentary success, however, proved to be a premature start. During the next few years he would labor in a series of settings—from jute mill to power plant and steam laundry—while battling the publishing machine, a period of his life that he would later fictionalize in his semi-autobiographical Künstlerroman, Martin Eden (1909), the story of a seaman who, through diligent study and perseverance, transforms himself into a successful writer. London’s own literary success would not take off until he returned from a year in the Klondike (July 1897–June 1898), with little gold to speak of but a wealth of material for his writing. His first published stories were tales set in the frozen North; his early popularity emerged from his Klondike stories and The Call of the Wild (1903). Even in these early Northland tales, London found outlets to the sea, most obvious in the title of his first story published in the Atlantic, An Odyssey of the North (1901). His best-selling novel The Sea-Wolf (1904) firmly established him as a maritime writer, and the sea would remain a powerful presence in his life and writing. London’s characters’ struggles against the forces of nature and human nature—tests of will against an undefinable foe, one’s comrades, or oneself—and his exploration and development of big philosophical ideas about race and heredity, gender roles and sexuality, individuality and community, human difference and common humanity would play out at sea as well as on land. London’s love of the sea and sea lore features prominently in his writing, and the maritime tradition spills over onto texts that are not primarily set at sea.

Like other key writers in the maritime literary tradition, London was an avid reader of sea literature and a seasoned sailor. At the age of twelve, he taught himself to sail on a 14-foot skiff, and at fifteen he sailed in San Francisco Bay on his oyster-pirate sloop, the Razzle Dazzle. These early experiences on the bay informed his novel for young readers, The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902), and the short story collection, Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905). In 1893, at seventeen, he signed on as an able seaman for a sealing expedition aboard the Sophia Sutherland, an adventure that provided raw material for The Sea-Wolf. In 1903, the year he began writing The Sea-Wolf, and while his marriage was falling apart and he was romancing his future second wife, Charmian Kittredge, he bought a 38-foot sloop, the Spray, named after Joshua Slocum’s 37-foot sloop (which had also been an oyster-fishing boat). Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World (1900), a memoir of the first single-handed voyage of its kind, had been published just three years earlier. Also inspired by Slocum’s adventure, in 1906 London commissioned the construction of the 57-foot ketch Snark, on which he and Charmian were planning to sail around the world.¹ Their voyage in 1907–8 lasted less than two years before London’s health problems caused them to abandon their dream. The Snark voyage would be the richest source of material for London’s sea stories. In 1910, London bought the Roamer, a 30-foot yawl that he sailed with his wife and friends around the San Francisco Bay and estuaries. In 1912, the Londons embarked on the four-masted bark Dirigo from Baltimore for a five-month voyage around Cape Horn, on which he gathered material for his novel, The Mutiny of the Elsinore. Indeed, the sea did call to London throughout his life, and the salt of it is in his writing as well as in his bones.²

Certainly, London was drawn to the sea to fulfill his personal desire for adventure, yet the sea also provided much more for London’s writing. Characterizing its most elemental significance in literature, Jonathan Raban explains, The sea is one of the most ‘universal’ symbols in literature; it is certainly the most protean. It changes in response to shifts of sensibility as dramatically as it does to shifts of wind and the phases of the moon.³ London’s use of maritime motifs and tropes also shifts and takes on new meanings appropriate for his time and purposes. He makes use of well-established conventions of maritime literature. He takes his characters to sea to work out social problems of race, class, and gender, which in London’s day were debates of special interest to a new conception of modern America on the cusp of and just after the turn of the twentieth century. London’s sea, sailors, islanders, and ships are not carbon copies reinscribed from the picaresque and satirical British traditions of Tobias Smollett or Frederick Marryat, nor from the romantic adventures of James Fenimore Cooper, America’s most prolific and popular sea writer before Herman Melville. Like his American predecessors, London envisioned new American characters, whose ideologies of self and the world are challenged by the brutal forces of nature and exposure to social or cultural differences. During this pivotal emergence of modernity, London juxtaposes romance and realism as he navigates the relationship between past and present with attitudes of idealized nostalgia and subversive, ironic, skeptical questioning, features associated with literary naturalism.⁴

For London, romance and nostalgia for the Age of Sail work with and against a gritty social realism associated with American naturalism in urban or rural settings. Both the microcosmic world of the ship and the hierarchical thinking of social Darwinism construct social rules of order and convention—rules that London’s characters encounter and negotiate through risk-taking adventures at sea. The sea provides a dynamic setting for London’s navigation of romance, naturalism, and realism to interrogate key social and philosophical dilemmas of modernity.

This central motif of maritime nostalgia, the romance of the Age of Sail, looms large in London’s writing. Parallel to the image of the American frontier, the Age of Sail is a romantic ideal associated with maritime nineteenth-century America, which even today evokes a nostalgia recognized by the most landlocked of Americans. The Age of Sail was over by the time London put his characters to sea, but nostalgia for a romanticized past provided a thematic counterpoint to the social problems of America entering the twentieth century. This contradiction between the maritime romantic ideal of the Age of Sail and the real conditions of the ordinary seaman offered London a tension through which to explore inequities of race and class. In literature since antiquity, the sea has been depicted as a realm of romantic possibility. In the 1820s, Cooper’s sea novels cast heroes onto a fluid frontier, which, like the edges of civilization in his land-bound historical romances, paralleled the concerns of the developing nation. In mid-century, Melville would push the boundaries of the sea romance in an exploration of philosophical and political themes in Moby-Dick (1851), through a merging of practical nautical craft and the realistic depiction of the ship as a floating factory, immersed in a mythic aura of sea lore of epic proportions. Like Melville, London drew on real experiences at sea and a romantic literary tradition. London’s conception of "idealized realism"⁵ reflects his fluctuation between philosophical positions of his characters, in what might be seen as an extension of Melville’s metaphor of the Pequod balanced between whale heads suspended on either side, which Ishmael humorously imagines as the heads of the idealist Kant and the materialist Locke.⁶ It is a similar balance between romantic idealism and social realism that London admired so deeply about Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), a classic of the sea, which he predicted would be a document for the future centuries.⁷ In crossing class boundaries from Harvard student to ordinary seaman, Dana’s adventure on the brig Pilgrim sailing around Cape Horn brings the reader into the world of hardship and peril and becomes the prototype for rich boys or men thrown into a brutal world at sea, as in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous (1896), Frank Norris’s Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), and London’s two full-blown sea novels, The Sea-Wolf (1904) and The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914).⁸ In addition, Dana’s descent into the forecastle to see how the working seamen live makes an apt comparison with London’s descent into the underworld of [the city of] London, which would provide material for his social exposé, The People of the Abyss (1903), with an attitude of mind, as he puts it, which I may best liken to that of the explorer.⁹

London reverses the plot of initiation in Martin Eden. Martin, a working-class seaman, finds himself at sea in the upper-middle-class society of his love interest, Ruth Morse. The novel’s language is flooded with nautical imagery. As Martin strives to find his bearings in the world of the Morses and to master the craft of writing, he feels like a navigator adrift on a strange sea without chart or compass.¹⁰ In this novel, rather than transporting social problems to sea to dramatize them in the microcosmic world afloat, London brings the romance and realism of the sea to land in order to emphasize contradictions between social ideals and realities.

London also shares a profound nostalgia for the Age of Sail with his British contemporary, Joseph Conrad. Like Conrad, London makes use of the steamship as a symbolic counterpoint to the romance of the sea (most explicitly in the competition between sealing vessels in The Sea-Wolf: Wolf Larsen’s sailing schooner, the Ghost, and his brother Death Larsen’s steamship, the Macedonia). But London’s literary treatment of a bygone era and the promise of modernity are characteristically ambiguous. London tempers nostalgia with sympathy for the exploited and downtrodden, and a recognition that a return to a romanticized past, however alluring, is not possible or even desirable. London’s narration in the sea novels is particularly slippery because he tells the story through a position of privilege, and despite his complaints that readers have misread his critique of the Nietzschean blond beast in The Sea-Wolf or his underlying social intent in The Mutiny of the Elsinore, the ideological narrative stance remains troublesome. Like the problem of levels of narration in Heart of Darkness that continues to drive the critical debates spurred by Chinua Achebe’s charge that Conrad was a bloody racist, the problem of authorial intent and narration continue to fuel discussions around London’s attitudes toward race.¹¹ When read in tandem with London’s social writings, such as The People of the Abyss and his protest novel The Iron Heel (1908), the sea novels’ maritime tropes of mutiny and hard-driving mates can be seen as dramatic challenges to the hierarchical power structures of the ship, and the undergirding notions of race, class, and gender. But these tropes also evoke an idealized vision of the adventure and romance of the sea that sometimes overshadows London’s social consciousness. This is a recurring paradox of the idealized realism throughout London’s writing: the yearning for the ideal, as imagined in a romanticized past or a socially progressive future, along with a deep concern for human suffering, the product of real social conditions.

The maritime romantic ideal has traditionally mythologized the brotherhood of the sea, an exclusively masculine space far removed from the domestic world of women. While in his sea novels London’s treatment of race is often inconsistent, I argue that his treatment of gender is generally more progressive. London extends and challenges maritime conventions of gender: for example, in his depiction of the brutal environment of the ship and his introduction of strong female characters into what was traditionally an all-male setting. London’s seafaring women, like Maud Brewster in The Sea-Wolf, Joan Lackland in Adventure, and Margaret West in The Mutiny of the Elsinore, were inspired by his wife, Charmian, an active crew member on the Snark. These female characters at sea draw attention to underlying social assumptions complicated by gender. London’s incorporation of female characters highlights the already gendered world of the ship and the gendered implications of the shipboard hierarchy. His seafaring women also function alternately to challenge or reify dynamics of race and class. The strongest female characters can be seen as counterparts to the maritime romantic ideal, so that in novels like The Mutiny of the Elsinore and Adventure, the pull of romance distracts from London’s treatment of the overworked crew abused by hard-driving mates around the Horn or exploited plantation laborers in the Solomon Islands.

In his South Seas writings London’s inconsistent treatment of race reflects the various influences of maritime literature, popular yarns, and the settings and people he encountered during the Snark voyage. Romantic and terrifying depictions of the islands, like the contradictions embodied in Melville’s portrait of lovely Fayaway of the cannibal Typee valley and sensational reports by travel and fiction writers from Captain Cook to Robert Louis Stevenson, enticed Jack and Charmian London as they pursued their own dreams of adventure in Hawai‘i, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands. I suggest that London’s more conventionally sensational and insensitive racial characterizations of islanders were derived more from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing and the popular literature of London’s day than from his own experience. Even when mocking the greed and/or folly of the inevitable white man, as in Mauki, The Jokers of New Gibbon, The Whale Tooth, and The Red One, the implicit imperialist critique in these stories is undercut by stereotypical depictions of the Fijian and Solomon islanders as headhunting cannibals. While immersed in the sensational lore of man-eating natives, London had also been consuming sensational narratives of survival cannibalism. Indeed, the first story he wrote after arriving in the Solomons, which he referred to as the cannibal isles, was The ‘Francis Spaight’ (A True Tale Retold), a horrific tale of a shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean and the rigged drawing of lots by the survivors in an open boat to decide which men would be sacrificed for the sustenance of the others. With two types of cannibals in mind—the savage and the survivalist—London explored slippages in the dichotomies of savagery/civilization and human/beast, typically adding ironic twists to stories that both reinforce and ridicule popular literary and cultural conventions.

Stories generated from London’s sojourn in Tahiti, such as The Chinago and The House of Mapuhi, convey a more sophisticated understanding of the political and economic complexities shaped by colonial history. London’s use of specific historical events—the 1869 guillotine execution of a Chinese laborer on the Tahiti Cotton and Coffee Plantation at Atimaono and the 1903 hurricane that devastated islands in the Paumotu Archipelago during the pearling season—reflects a nuanced understanding of the resistance and complicity of several ethno-cultural groups to the overarching colonial power structure. During his travels across the Pacific, London was interested in the lives of plantation workers, and his writing suggests an awareness of the larger scope of global migrations as well as the more local conflicts between indigenous and migrant islanders.

My analysis of these stories sheds light on London’s creative process by looking at his likely sources for historical details and local lore. London left concrete clues about the composition of The House of Mapuhi, for example, in his personal files. He jotted down a note about the Hurricane described by Drollet, his friend in Tahiti from whom the Londons rented a house, and he sketched out a rough map of the island of Hikueru in the Paumotus. He followed up on his note to Maybe make up a plot for the story by creating a detailed storyline about the negotiation of local people with a series of competing pearl traders, which added cultural and economic context for the plot of a mythical journey by an elderly Paumotan woman, who, after being swept off the island by the hurricane, undertakes an epic sea adventure after recovering a marvelous pearl that had been swindled from her son, Mapuhi.¹²

London collected a variety of materials about the sea now preserved in the Jack London Collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. They remain as London had organized them: as personal files by subject, in which he saved newspaper clippings, magazine articles and stories, poems that had been published in magazines or well-loved poems that he typed for himself, and ideas for stories handwritten on small pieces of paper. In these materials, familiar maritime tropes and topics abound: romance and the Age of Sail; practical seamanship and modern technology; and sensational accounts of shipwreck, dramatic rescues, survival, and cannibalism. These files reveal London’s wide-ranging interest in all things related to the sea, which undergirds the ways he explores the maritime romantic ideal in his fiction, whether of land or sea. The irresistible appeal of the sea—the call of adventure and its demand for a sailor’s preparation and skill—is also evident in nonfiction pieces, such as the short essay Small-Boat Sailing and The Cruise of the Snark, London’s anecdotal account of selected topics and scenes from the conception of the voyage to its heartbreaking conclusion.

The present study does not attempt to cover all of London’s sea stories. Rather, it identifies key maritime motifs that influenced London’s creative process. Furthermore, through its exploration of the intersections of race, class, and gender in London’s writing, the book plumbs the often troubled waters of his representations of the racial Other and positions of capitalist and colonial privilege. My analysis of selected texts addresses the dynamic range of maritime influences that shaped London’s writing set on sea and land, giving him his rightful place within the maritime world. I hope readers will see why the sea was so compelling for London—as a sailor and a writer.

1

THE CALL OF THE SEA

Tired of the stifling city,

        Of selling our peace for gold,

We go to the mother that reared us,

        And the things we know of old—

  —From Outward Bound by Shellback

Jack London was an avid collector of poems, stories, and newspapers articles, which he used to generate ideas for storylines and motifs in his fiction. Thousands of these artifacts, along with handwritten and typed notes, can be found in the Jack London Collection at the Huntington Library, grouped according to his personal filing system. The materials that London filed away under headings such as The Sea and Sea Fiction reflect his investment in seafaring as a subject for his fiction as well as thematic inspiration for stories not obviously related to the sea. The epigraph to this chapter is a stanza that London marked on a poem he saved from a magazine. This stanza captures the essence of the maritime romantic ideal—the impulse to escape from the restrictions and obligations of civilization by returning to a simpler, more primal environment—which is developed more fully in the poem as a whole. The broad appeal of the maritime romantic ideal and its varied meanings can be mapped across the artifacts in London’s subject files and followed through various permutations throughout London’s writing.

This chapter posits a definition of the maritime romantic ideal as reflected in the poems, sea chanteys, and articles in London’s files, and then examines materials representing a broad range of topics that interested him. The variety of items in the subject files provides a window into the potential of the maritime themes he would craft in his fiction. Some of the pieces seem to reinforce his areas of interest in the romance of the sea; others can be seen as what he called data—details that directly informed his construction of plots and characters. The chapter looks at materials that convey familiar maritime tropes—sensational accounts of hell-ships, shipwrecks, dramatic survivals, and cannibalism—as well as examples of specific sources that informed London’s understanding of the economic complexities of imperialism and his imagination of romantic heroes in the South Seas.

THE MARITIME ROMANTIC IDEAL

The maritime romantic ideal, as I define it, encompasses a range of positive associations of freedom and possibility at sea in contrast to restrictions and banality on land. The concept is predicated on the tension between land and sea, and the countervailing desires for adventure and for hearth and home. It is related to the pastoral ideal, as defined extensively in Leo Marx’s seminal mid-twentieth-century study of technology and the pastoral in American literature, The Machine in the Garden, in which withdrawal to a simpler world is seen as the antidote to the dehumanization of an increasingly industrialized society.¹ In American frontier literature, the limitations of civilization are also associated with the expectations and demands of women. Leslie Fiedler, for instance, describes the lure of the frontier as the impulse to escape the world of busy women.² And yet, the taming and cultivation of the wilderness can be seen as extending the instinct for domestication to the project of westward expansion. Even the most adventurous frontier heroes express longing for the comforts of home, whether directly or symbolically, such as through feminization of the landscape or the naming of maritime vessels after wives and sweethearts. The maritime romantic ideal replaces values on land with new possibilities at sea. Thus, the desire for home and hearth is reimagined as the brotherhood of the sea, which combines camaraderie and the manly pursuit of adventure.

The poem Outward Bound by Shellback, which London saved in his personal files, expresses many of these elements of the maritime romantic ideal that are conceptually drawn from the terrestrial romantic ideals associated with the pastoral and the frontier. Shellback is a nickname reserved for experienced sailors who have crossed the equator, and refers to seamen’s curved backs from hauling on the lines of running rigging and from hunching over when working under low ceilings below decks. The poet is anonymous, but the persona presents a recognizable image of the seasoned deep-water sailor embarking once again on a voyage. The poem was inspired by the sea chantey Outward Bound. This particular chantey was a favorite for setting the rhythm for weighing anchor, according to William Brown Meloney in The Chanty-Man Sings, an essay from Everybody’s Magazine (1914), which London also saved in his files, with the handwritten annotation, The Sea. Lyrics were often improvised by the chantey-man, but these are the verses that Meloney recorded:

(The Chanty Man:)

We’re outward bound from New York Town;

(All Hands:)

Heave, bullies, heave and pawl!

(The Chanty Man:)

Oh, bring that cable up and down.

(All Hands:)

Hurrah, we’re outward bound!

Hurrah, we’re outward bound!

To the Battery Park we’ll bid adieu,

Heave, bullies, heave and pawl!

To Suke and Moll and Sally, too,

Hurrah, we’re outward