The Cruise of the Snark

A wreck of a boat, drunken, incompetent and geriatric ship captains, storms, flesh eating infections and head hunting savages, this real life story of how the famous author and adventurer, Jack London, and his wife, Charmian, set out to circumnavigate the world on The Snark, a forty foot ketch of Jack's own design.

To be accurate, the Cruise of the Snark is not a book in the conventional sense. Instead it is a collection of the short accounts Jack London wrote for various magazines and sponsors while on the voyage.

Because it is immediate in that it was written at the time of the events, during the actual adventure, the writing has an almost 'dear diary' feel about it that is both honest and surprisingly candid.

From San Francisco the Snark sailed to Hawaii and that included the island of Molokai where the famous leper colony was located. Jack, admittedly, approached the colony with dread, expecting to see all manner of horrible sights and ghastly visions of disfigured islanders. He was greatly surprised to find that it was one of the happiest, most delightful places places it had ever been is pleasure to visit.

Jack London
Was, at one time, America’s most popular author as well as a much loved and revered adventurer. The respect with which he was held by his readers was derived largely from his obvious talent as a writer but also because it was well known that many of his adventure tales were based, at least partly, on his own, real life experiences. His early life reads like an Indiana Jones movie with Jack’s father abandoning him and his mother six months before Jack was even born. As a young boy Jack slaved his youth away in a jute mill under harsh conditions, struggling to breath in the lung-clogging, lint filled air. By the time he had finished grade school he had been a bobbin boy in a jute mill, as well as a cannery worker, and a coal-heaver in a power plant.

In his teens, Jack learned to sail and became an oyster pirate in the San Francisco Bay area before serving a stint on a sealing schooner in the infamous Bering Sea. He hobo’d in the western detachment of “Coxey’s Army” and was arrested for vagrancy in Buffalo, which resulted in him spending an extremely degrading month in the Erie County Penitentiary. This experience was to effect Jack profoundly.

In his twenties he participated in the Klondike gold rush in Canada’s Yukon Territory and even lived in London’s East End ghettos for a while. But it was also in his twenties that he became a professional writer and had his first book published. In 1906 he witnessed the great San Francisco earthquake, which he wrote a first rate account of forCollier’s.

It was in 1907 that he, along with his second wife, Charmian and a small crew of fellow adventurers, that Jack set sail on a ketch of his own design to sail around the world. This two year voyage aboard The Snark was filled with hilarious personal interactions and terrifying tales of cannibals, head hunters and brutal murders by savage islanders. In the course of their journey as they traveled to such remote islands as Hawaii, the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, the Solomons, Samoa, Fiji, the New Hebrides, and finally Australia, Jack and the rest of the crew were beset by a seemingly endless procession of diseases including malaria and pellagra.

Jack’s relationship with his wife Charmian was clearly one of equals, with her being considerably more equal than he! Her playful nature is clearly demonstrated by the way in which she insists her blood is more pure than Jack’s own and that’s why she wasn’t getting laid low by the myriad of skin conditions and other sicknesses that befell the rest of the crew. Not to be outdone in the arena of playful, jibes and devilish banter is the way in which Jack relishes the way Charmian is finally laid low by those some illnesses she mocked. Their marriage was clearly one of a deep, respectful love between two people that admired each other greatly.

It’s worth noting that Charmian wrote her own account of their voyage upon the Snark called The Log on the Snark (see Right)

One of the most spectacular things Jack saw on the entire voyage was in Hawaii, the Haleakala Crater or House of the Sun as it was known. This volcano, which is still ‘active’ but hasn’t erupted since 1790 rises 10,023 feet above sea level. The crater is 3,000 feet deep, 7.5 miles long and 2.5 miles wide – a total of 22 miles in circumference.

Jack London's boat, The Snark, got it's name from Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark?