The Cruise of the Snark Read Online Free PDF Page A

perfect and everyone was on deck enjoying himself, an animated ball of variegated colours dropped slowly down into the cockpit at the feet of Mrs. London, who was at the wheel. She eagerly picked it up, calling out, “Lookie, lookie, what I’ve got!” It proved to be the prettiest little bird we had ever seen. Jack got out his book on ornithology, and proceeded to study book and bird, but nowhere was such a bird described.
    It was evidently a land-bird that had gotten too far from shore and had fallen exhausted on the deck of the Snark. We all stood around looking at it as it lay in Mrs. London’s hand, while she chirped and tried to talk bird-talk to it. At last Jack said: “If it’s a land-bird you are, to the land you go,” and changing the course, we sailed for the island of Mallicolo, just barely visible ten miles out of our way. We sailed as close to the shore as possible, and the little multi-coloured, pigeon-like bird, having regained its strength, flew in among the cocoanut trees. Then we headed out and continued our cruise up through the score of small islands composing the Western New Hebrides.
    Critics of the man, Jack London, may call him an infidel. Colonel Roosevelt may call him a “nature faker.” Others have not agreed with his ideas of life, but I have little doubt that this is the only time a captain ever went twenty miles out of his way when his fuel was low (our gasolene tanks were fast emptying), just to put a poor little bird ashore to go back to its mate and its young. (Chapter XII)
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    One wonders what Wolf Larsen would have done.
    Meanwhile Jack kept the periodical market well stocked with Snark material, which as “work performed” continued to be published even after the end of the voyage. Woman’s Home Companion published “Riding the South Sea Surf” (October 1907), “The Lepers of Molokai” (January 1908), “The Nature Man” (September 1908), “The High Seat of Abundance” (November 1908), and “‘Too Much’ English” [“Bêche de Mer English”] (April 1909). Harpers Weekly published “Building of the Boat” (July 1908), “Adventures in Dream Harbor” (August 1908), and “Finding One’s Way on the Sea” (August 1910). Pacific Monthly published “The House of the Sun” (January 1910), “A Pacific Traverse” (February 1910), “Typee” (March 1910), “The Stone Fishing of Bora Bora” (April 1910), “The Amateur Navigator” (May 1910), “Cruising in the Solomons” (July 1910), and “Amateur M.D.” (August 1910). Near the end of 1908 Jack began his novel Adventure, a reworking of the Londons’ August 1908 “blackbirding” cruise and near shipwreck in the Solomon Islands on the Minota.
    But by then the cruise was over. At nearly every major island group the Snark had suffered a crew change—some leaving of their own accord, others being fired for a variety of incompetences. Only Martin, promoted from cook to engineer, survived aboard with Jack and Charmian. And if all of them had suffered seasickness (another form of romanticism on all fours) on the passages to Hawaii and the Marquesas, on the second half of the voyage intermittent bouts of nausea, exhaustion, and disorientation were complemented by a variety of tropical diseases. But for all the flaws of the Snark, the crew, and the dream, it was only when Jack lost the use of his hands—the indispensable tools through which only could he write—that the voyage was abandoned. “The cruise of the Snark,” in Martin’s words, “was a thing of the past.”
    In a postscript to Martin’s book, Ralph D. Harrison summarizes the disposition of the Snarkites:
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    Henry, the Polynesian sailor, left Sydney on March 30, 1909, for Pago-Pago, Samoa. A week before, Tehei, the Society Islander, had gone with a sailor’s bag