Читать книгу Through the South Seas with Jack London - Martin Johnson H. - Страница 4

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Through all my twenty years of life I had been in pursuit of Adventure. But Adventure eluded me. Many and many a time, when I thought that at last the prize was mine, she turned, and by some trickery slipped from my grasp. The twenty years were passed, and still there she was—Adventure!—in the road ahead of me, and I, unwearied by our many skirmishes, still following. The lure was always golden. I could not give it up. Somewhere, sometime, I knew that the advantage would incline my way, and that I should close down my two hands firmly upon her, and hold her fast. Adventure would be mine!

I thought, when I made it across the Atlantic on a cattle-boat, and trod the soil of several alien countries of the Old World, that I had won. But it was not so. It was but the golden reflection of Adventure that I had caught up with, and not the glorious thing itself. She was still there, ahead of me, and I still must needs pursue.

In my native Independence, Kansas, I sat long hours in my father's jewellry store, and dreamed as I worked. I ranged in vision over all the broad spaces of a world-chart. In this dream-realm, there were no impediments to my journeying. Through long ice-reaches, p002 across frozen rivers, over snow-piled mountains, I forced my way to the Poles. I skimmed over boundless tracts of ocean. Giant continents beckoned me from coast to coast. Here was an island, rearing its grassy back out of the great Pacific. My fancy invaded it. Or here was a lofty mountain-chain, over whose snow-capped summits I roamed at pleasure, communing with the sky. Then there were the valley-deeps; dropping down the steep descents on my mount, I explored their sheltered wonders with unceasing delight. Nothing was inaccessible. I walked in lands where queer people, in costumes unfamiliar, lived out their lives in ways which puzzled me, yet fascinated; my way led often amid strange trees and grasses and shrubs—their names unguessable. To the farthest limits of East and West I sallied, and North and South, knew no barriers but the Poles. I breathed strange airs; I engaged in remarkable pursuits; by night, unfamiliar stars and constellations glittered in the sky. It is so easy, travelling—on the map. There are no rigid limitations. Probabilities do not bother. Latitude and longitude are things unnoticed.

But all these dreams were presaging a reality. How it came about I hardly know. I must have tired out that glorious thing, Adventure, with my long pursuit; or else she grew kind to me, and fluttered into my clasp. One evening, during the fall of 1906, while passing away an hour with my favourite magazine, my attention was attracted to an article describing a proposed p003 trip round the world on a little forty-five-foot boat, by Jack London and a party of five. Instantly, I was all aglow with enthusiasm, and before I had finished the article I had mapped out a plan of action. If that boat made a trip such as described, I was going to be on the boat. It is needless to say that the letter I immediately wrote to Mr. Jack London was as strong as I could make it.

I did my best to convince Mr. London that I was the man he needed. I told him all I could do, and some things I couldn't do, laying special stress on the fact that I had at one time made a trip from Chicago to Liverpool, London, and Brussels, returning by way of New York with twenty-five cents of the original five dollars and a half with which I had started. There were other things in that letter, though just what they were I cannot now remember, nor does it matter. My impatience was great as I awaited Mr. London's reply. Yet I dared not believe anything would come of it. That would be impossible. Why, I knew that my letter was one of a host of letters; I knew that among those who had applied must be many who could push far stronger claims than mine; and so, hoping against odds, I looked to the outcome with no particular optimism.

Then, four days later, when hope had about dwindled away, the impossible happened. I was standing in my father's jewellry store after supper on the evening of Monday, November 12, 1906, when a messenger boy p004 came in and handed me a telegram. The instant I saw the little yellow envelope, something told me that this was the turning-point in my life. With trembling hands I tore it open, my heart beating wildly with excitement. It was Jack London's reply, the fateful slip of paper that was to dictate my acts for several years to come.

The telegram was dated from Oakland, California, a few hours earlier in the day. "Can you cook?" it asked. And I had no sooner read it than I had framed the reply. A little later it was burning over the wires in the direction of California. Could I cook? "Sure. Try me," I replied, with the bold audacity of youth—and then settled myself down to another wait.

The interval was brief. I spent it in learning how to cook. One of my local friends gave me temporary employment in his restaurant; and when, on Friday, the 23rd, the first letter came from Jack London, I had already been through the cook-book from cover to cover, learning the secrets of the cuisine: bread-baking and cake-making, the preparing of sauces and puddings and omelets, fruit, game, and fowl—in short, the "chemistry of the kitchen"; and what of my practical experience in the restaurant, I had even served up two or three experimental messes that seemed to me fairly creditable for a beginner.

The letter was long and detailed. It spoke of the p005 ship, of the crew, of the plans—to use Mr. London's own words, it let me know just what I was in for.

There were to be six aboard, all-told. There were Jack and Mrs. London; Captain Roscoe Eames, who is Mrs. London's uncle; Paul H. Tochigi, a Jap cabin-boy; Herbert Stolz, an all-around athlete, fresh from Stanford University; and lastly, there was to be myself, the cook. We were to sail southern seas and northern seas, bays and inland rivers, lakes and creeks—anything navigable. And we were not to stop until we had circled the planet. We were to visit the principal countries of the world, spending from three to six months in every port. It was planned that we should not be home for at least seven years.

"It is the strongest boat ever built in San Francisco," ran the letter. "We could go through a typhoon that would wreck a 15,000-ton steamer. . . . Practically, for every week that we are on the ocean, we will be a month in port. For instance, we expect that it will take us three weeks to sail from here to Hawaii, where we expect to remain three months—of course, in various portions of the Islands.

"Now as to the crew: All of us will be the crew. There is my wife, and myself. We will stand our watches and do our trick at the wheel. . . . When it comes to doing the trick at the wheel, I want to explain that this will not be arduous as it may appear at first. It is our intention, by sail-trimming, to make p006 the boat largely sail herself, without steering. Next, in bad weather, there will be no steering, for then we will be hove-to. But watches, or rather lookouts, must be kept at night, when we are sailing. Suppose we divide day and night into twelve hours each. There are six of us all-told on the boat. Each will take a two-hour turn on deck.

"Of course, when it comes to moments of danger, or to doing something ticklish, or to making port, etc., the whole six of us will then become the crew. I will not be a writer, but a sailor. The same with my wife. The cabin-boy will be a sailor, and so also, the cook. In fact, when it's a case for all hands, all hands it will be.

"From the present outlook, we shall sail out of San Francisco Bay on December 15. So you see, if you accompany us, you will miss your Christmas at home. . . . Incidentally, if you like boxing, I may tell you that all of us box, and we'll have the gloves along. You'll have the advantage of us on reach. Also, I may say that we should all of us have lots of good times together, swimming, fishing, adventuring, doing a thousand-and-one things.

"Now, about clothes. Remember that the boat is small, also that we are going into hot weather and shall be in hot weather all the time. So bring a small outfit, and one for use in warm weather."

Thereafter, my days and nights were more golden than ever with dreams. The days flew by swiftly, but p007 their heels seemed heavy to the anxious wight who spent his hours grubbing in a restaurant. It appeared to me that the time for my departure would never come. I shudder as I think of what weird messes I may have served up to my friend's customers in the moments of my abstraction. Meanwhile, a letter from Mrs. London dropped in, telling me how to get my passport. At last the day came for my going. A letter was pressed into my hands by one of my local friends, who was an Elk, even as I. When I opened it, I found it to be an introduction for me wherever I might find myself. Surely here was good-will and loyalty of which to be proud; and doubly proud was I when I found that the letter was endorsed by the Grand Exalted Ruler of the Elks. As I was later to find, this little slip of paper would open many a door which otherwise had remained shut to me.

With only a small satchel of clothing and a camera, I boarded a Santa Fé train, said the last good-byes, and sped westward toward California. The dreams did not cease as I passed through the several states that intervened. Whether by day or by night, they persisted. That glorious will-o'-the-wisp, Adventure, was still before me, though now much nearer and more tantalising. But the advantage was mine. Mounted on that monster of steam and iron, the modern train, I felt that Adventure would be hard put for speed in a race with me. And yet, that train seemed to me the slowest thing that ever ran on two rails. p008

My thoughts kept constantly turning upon the man whom I was journeying to meet. What sort of being was he, that had compelled the attention of the world by the magic of his pen, and by the daring of his exploits? One thing I knew. The places I had roamed in fancy, his foot had trod in reality. And he had sailed over the seas. In '97, he was a gold-seeker in the far North. He had been a sailor and a tramp, an oyster-pirate, a Socialist agitator, and a member of the San Francisco Bay fish-patrol. His voyages up to this time had carried him far over the earth, and his experiences would overlap the experiences of an ordinary man a score of times and more. Above all, he was a student, and a writer of world-wide celebrity. Wherever civilised men congregated, wherever books were read, the name of Jack London was familiar.

Why he was making this trip in so tiny a craft? That question he answered shortly afterward, when he wrote: "Life that lives is life successful, and success is the breath of its nostrils. The achievement of a difficult feat is successful adjustment to a sternly exacting environment. The more difficult the feat, the greater the satisfaction at its accomplishment. That is why I am building the Snark. I am so made. The trip around the world means big moments of living. Bear with me a moment and look at it. Here am I, a little animal called a man—a bit of vitalised matter, one hundred and sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, p009 nerve, sinew, bones and brain—all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible and frail. I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose of an obstreperous horse, and a bone in my hand is broken. I put my head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned. I fall twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed. I am a creature of temperature. A few degrees one way, and my fingers and ears and toes blacken and drop off. A few degrees the other way, and my skin blisters and shrivels away from the raw, quivering flesh. A few additional degrees either way, and the light and life in me go out. A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and I cease to move—forever I cease to move. A splinter of lead from a rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal blackness.

larger

Snark at Honolulu. Complement of the Snark in Solomon Islands: Mrs. Jack London, Mr. Jack London and Martin Johnson in the centre. Imglst

"Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life—it is all I am. About me are the great natural forces—colossal menaces, Titans of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have no concern for me at all. They do not know me. They are unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloudbursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts, and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing humans p010 to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death—and these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature, all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.

"In the maze and chaos of the conflict of these vast and draughty Titans, it is for me to thread my precarious way. The bit of life that is I will exult over them."

And again:

"Being alive, I want to see, and all the world is a bigger thing to see than one small town or valley. We have done little outlining of the voyage. Only one thing is definite, and that is that our first port of call will be Honolulu. Beyond a few general ideas, we have no thought of our next port after Hawaii. We shall make up our minds as we get nearer. In a general way, we know that we shall wander through the South Seas, take in Samoa, New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra, and go on up through the Philippines to Japan. Then will come Korea, China, India, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean. After that the voyage becomes too vague to describe, though we know a number of things we shall surely do, and we expect to spend from one to several months in every country in Europe."

The article in the magazine, which had first drawn my attention to the proposed trip, had given me little knowledge of the man with whom in all probability p011 I was to spend the next seven years of my life. The nearer I came to Oakland, the California city in which the Londons were then living, the more intense grew my curiosity. Worst of all, I was haunted by a fear that if I didn't hustle and get there, Jack London would have changed his mind, and I should be obliged to come back in humiliation to Independence.

It was about nine o'clock in the evening when I arrived in Oakland. As soon as I was off the train, I hunted a telephone and called up Jack London. It was London himself who came to the 'phone. When I told him who I was, I heard a pleasant voice say: "Hello, boy; come right along up," and then followed instructions as to how to find the house.

They lived in a splendid section of the town. I had no difficulty in finding them. When I rapped at the door, a neat little woman opened it, and grabbing my hand, almost wrung it off.

"Come right in," cried Mrs. London. "Jack's waiting for you."

At that moment a striking young man of thirty, with very broad shoulders, a mass of wavy auburn hair, and a general atmosphere of boyishness, appeared at the doorway, and shot a quick, inquisitive look at me from his wide grey eyes. Inside, I could see all manner of oars, odd assortments of clothing, books, papers, charts, guns, cameras, and folding canoes, piled in great stacks upon the floor.

"Hello, Martin," he said, stretching out his hand. p012

"Hello, Jack," I answered. We gripped.

And that is how I met Jack London, traveller, novelist, and social reformer; and that is how, for the first time, I really ran shoulder to shoulder with Adventure, which I had been pursuing all my days. p013