London Jack

Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark Annotated Manuscript and Signed Check


Lot consists of 3pp 1st revision typed manuscript of The Cruise of the Snark with 15+ handwritten edits/words in Jack London's hand; along with a signed check dating from the era of the Snark's construction.


In the spring of 1907, Jack London (1876-1916), along with his wife Charmian (1871-1955) and a small crew, set out for a modern maritime adventure aboard the Snark, their 45' long custom built sailboat. Over the next 2 years, the Londons would sail west and south across the Pacific Ocean, exploring Hawaii, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Tahiti, Australia, and other tropical locales. London later recounted his travel experiences in a non-fiction illustrated account called The Cruise of the Snark, published by The Macmillan Company in New York in 1911.


These typed manuscript galleys correspond to pages 191-197 of London's final 1st edition of The Cruise of the Snark. This excerpt, which is from the latter half of Chapter XI: "The Nature Man," describes London's friend and self-proclaimed wild man Ernest Darling (1872-1919).


Ernest Darling fascinated London's contemporaries. London had met Darling in California before encountering him again on his travels in the Snark, and the adventure author knew his story well. London published "The Nature Man" as a short story in Woman's Home Companion in 1908, and later incorporated it into a chapter of The Cruise of the Snark in 1911.


Darling, a Kansas-born bluestocking who had attended Stanford University and graduated from medical school, nearly died of consumption in his mid-20s. Darling treated himself by adopting a simpler, more primitive lifestyle. His diet consisted of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and raw meat and he eschewed most clothing. He was intensely physically active and lived mostly outdoors. Darling eventually settled in Tahiti, cultivated a self-sufficient food-producing plantation, and married a Tahitian woman. Darling died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918-1919.


The galley proofs are oversized, measuring 9.25" x 12" on average overall, and have generously sized margins to accommodate handwritten author's edits. They are in mostly very good condition, with expected folds, closed tears, and minor scattered loss. Isolated water stains do not affect the legibility of the text. The manuscript dates circa spring 1911.


London's edits throughout the manuscript are in pencil. On the first and last pages, London has drawn an arrow into the text block where he wished illustrations to appear. Included are two black and white photographs that would become Illustration 61, "In the sweat of his brow" and Illustration 62, "Breakfast from the breadfruit tree", both with handwritten captions in London's hand. (A few of the words in the first caption are faded, and the first photo is partly adhered to the page.) On the last page, London has replaced the word "added" with "went on," and removed two prepositions in the following paragraphs. Other possibly publisher's edits in red are found throughout.


The manuscript pages correspond to the following published text found in The Cruise of the Snark. Areas affected by London's edits are in bold.


"--shot the pigs and trapped the rats.  Of the latter, in two weeks he caught fifteen hundred.  Everything had to be carried up on his back.  He usually did his packhorse work at night.

 



Gradually he began to win out.  A grass-walled house was built.  On the fertile, volcanic soil he had wrested from the jungle and jungle beasts were growing five hundred cocoanut trees, five hundred papaia trees, three hundred mango trees, many breadfruit trees and alligator-pear trees, to say nothing of vines, bushes, and vegetables.  He developed the drip of the hills in the canyons and worked out an efficient irrigation scheme, ditching the water from canyon to canyon and paralleling the ditches at different altitudes.  His narrow canyons became botanical gardens.  The arid shoulders of the hills, where formerly the blazing sun had parched the jungle and beaten it close to earth, blossomed into trees and shrubs and flowers.  Not only had the Nature Man become self-supporting, but he was now a prosperous agriculturist with produce to sell to the city-dwellers of Papeete.

 



Then it was discovered that his land, which the government officials had informed him was without an owner, really had an owner, and that deeds, descriptions, etc., were on record.  All his work bade fare to be lost.  The land had been valueless when he took it up, and the owner, a large landholder, was unaware of the extent to which the Nature Man had developed it.  A just price was agreed upon, and Darling’s deed was officially filed.

 



Next came a more crushing blow.  Darling’s access to market was destroyed.  The road he had built was fenced across by triple barb-wire fences.  It was one of those jumbles in human affairs that is so common in this absurdest of social systems.  Behind it was the fine hand of the same conservative element that haled the Nature Man before the Insanity Commission in Los Angeles and that deported him from Hawaii.  It is so hard for self-satisfied men to understand any man whose satisfactions are fundamentally different.  It seems clear that the officials have connived with the conservative element, for to this day the road the Nature Man built is closed; nothing has been done about it, while an adamant unwillingness to do anything about it is evidenced on every hand.  But the Nature Man dances and sings along his way.  He does not sit up nights thinking about the wrong which has been done him; he leaves the worrying to the doers of the wrong.  He has no time for bitterness.  He believes he is in the world for the purpose of being happy, and he has not a moment to waste in any other pursuit.

 



The road to his plantation is blocked.  He cannot build a new road, for there is no ground on which he can build it.  The government has restricted him to a wild-pig trail which runs precipitously up the mountain.  I climbed the trail with him, and we had to climb with hands and feet in order to get up.  Nor can that wild-pig trail be made into a road by any amount of toil less than that of an engineer, a steam-engine, and a steel cable.  But what does the Nature Man care?  In his gentle ethics the evil men do him he requites with goodness.  And who shall say he is not happier than they?

 



“Never mind their pesky road,” he said to me as we dragged ourselves up a shelf of rock and sat down, panting, to rest.  “I’ll get an air machine soon and fool them.  I’m clearing a level space for a landing stage for the airships, and next time you come to Tahiti you will alight right at my door.”

 



Yes, the Nature Man has some strange ideas besides that of the gorilla pounding his chest in the African jungle.  The Nature Man has ideas about levitation.  “Yes, sir,” he said to me, “levitation is not impossible.  And think of the glory of it—lifting one’s self from the ground by an act of will.  Think of it!  The astronomers tell us that our whole solar system is dying; that, barring accidents, it will all be so cold that no life can live upon it.  Very well.  In that day all men will be accomplished levitationists, and they will leave this perishing planet and seek more hospitable worlds.  How can levitation be accomplished?  By progressive fasts.  Yes, I have tried them, and toward the end I could feel myself actually getting lighter.”

 



The man is a maniac, thought I.

 



“Of course,” he added, “these are only theories of mine.  I like to speculate upon the glorious future of man.  Levitation may not be possible, but I like to think of it as possible.”

 



One evening, when he yawned, I asked him how much sleep he allowed himself.

 



“Seven hours,” was the answer.  “But in ten years I’ll be sleeping only six hours, and in twenty years only five hours.  You see, I shall cut off an hour’s sleep every ten years.”

 



“Then when you are a hundred you won’t be sleeping at all,” I interjected.

 



“Just that.  Exactly that.  When I am a hundred I shall not require sleep.  Also, I shall be living on air.  There are plants that live on air, you know.”

 



“But has any man ever succeeded in doing it?”

 



He shook his head.

 



“I never heard of him if he did.  But it is only a theory of mine, this living on air.  It would be fine, wouldn’t it?  Of course it may be impossible—most likely it is.  You see, I am not unpractical.  I never forget the present.  When I soar ahead into the future, I always leave a string by which to find my way back again.”

 



I fear me the Nature Man is a joker.  At any rate he lives the simple life.  His laundry bill cannot be large.  Up on his plantation he lives on fruit the labor cost of which, in cash, he estimates at five cents a day.  At present, because of his obstructed road and because he is head over heels in the propaganda of socialism, he is living in town, where his expenses, including rent, are twenty-five cents a day.  In order to pay those expenses he is running a night school for Chinese.

 



The Nature Man is not bigoted.  When there is nothing better to eat than meat, he eats meat, as, for instance, when in jail or on shipboard and the nuts and fruits give out.  Nor does he seem to crystallize into anything except sunburn.

 



“Drop anchor anywhere and the anchor will drag—that is, if your soul is a limitless, fathomless sea, and not dog-pound,” he quoted to me, then added: “You see, my anchor is always dragging.  I live for human health and progress, and I strive to drag my anchor always in that direction.  To me, the two are identical.  Dragging anchor is what has saved me.  My anchor did not hold me to my death-bed.  I dragged anchor into the brush and fooled the doctors.  When I recovered health and strength, I started, by preaching and by example, to teach the people to become nature men and nature women.  But they had deaf ears.  Then, on the steamer coming to Tahiti, a quarter-master expounded socialism to me.  He showed me that an economic square deal was necessary before men and women could live naturally.  So I dragged anchor once more, and now I am working for the co-operative commonwealth.  When that arrives, it will be easy to bring about nature living.

 



“I had a dream last night,” he went on thoughtfully, his face slowly breaking into a glow.  “It seemed that twenty-five nature men and nature women had just arrived on the steamer from California, and that I was starting to go with them up the wild-pig trail to the plantation.”

 



Ah, me, Ernest Darling, sun-worshipper and nature man, there are times when I am compelled to envy you and your carefree existence.  I see you now, dancing up the steps and cutting antics on the veranda; your hair dripping from a plunge in the salt sea, your eyes sparkling, your sun-gilded body flashing, your chest resounding to the devil’s own tattoo as you chant: “The gorilla in the African jungle pounds his chest until the noise of it can be heard half a mile away.”  And I shall see you always as I saw you that last day--".


In addition to the hand-corrected manuscript is an unnumbered check inscribed overall and signed “Jack London” on the payee line. Issued from the Central Bank of Oakland, California on May 30, 1905 in the amount of $4.00 payable to “M.L. Keith.” The  plain cream check is stamped in purple, red, and blue recto and verso, and bears a y-shaped cancellation mark at center. In very good to near fine condition, with minor loss to the lower left corner where check was torn out of check book. Check measures 6.5" x 2.875".


M.L. Keith was the publisher of Minneapolis-based Keith's Magazine on Home-Building; Devoted to the Home, its Building, Decorating, & Furnishing, established in 1899. At once a home design journal and trade catalog, subscription rates for the magazine's approximately 7,400 readers around 1907 were $1.50. It is therefore likely that this check was for something London ordered in Keith's catalog.


In 1905, London purchased his first ranch on Mount Sonoma in Glen Ellen, California called Beauty Ranch, or the Ranch of Good Intentions. (Today, the ranch, along with London's 1911 Wolf House ruins, are part of Jack London State Historic Park.) Could this check have been for ranch related or other building expenses?


Jack London grew up in Oakland, California. He attended elementary school through high school there, and studied at a local waterfront bar named Heinold's First and Last Saloon; the proprietor later lent him tuition money to Berkeley.


Jack London wrote dozens of poems, short stories, essays, and novels over a prolific career curtailed by chronic ill-health. With income generated from adventure classics like Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), London was able to purchase a ranch and outfit the Snark.

 


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