The Cruise Of The Snark

The Cruise of the Snark is a memoir of Jack and Charmian London’s 1907-1909 voyage across the Pacific. His descriptions of “surf-riding”, which he dubbed a “royal sport”, helped introduce it to and popularize it with the mainland. London writes:

Through the white crest of a breaker suddenly appears a dark figure, erect, a man-fish or a sea-god, on the very forward face of the crest where the top falls over and down, driving in toward shore, buried to his loins in smoking spray, caught up by the sea and flung landward, bodily, a quarter of a mile. It is a Kanaka on a surf-board. And I know that when I have finished these lines I shall be out in that riot of color and pounding surf, trying to bit those breakers even as he, and failing as he never failed, but living life as the best of us may live it.

there was the land, fading away before our eyes in the fires of sunset. The land was all right. There was no disputing it. Therefore our navigation was all wrong. But it wasn't. That land we saw was the summit of Haleakala, the House of the Sun, the greatest extinct volcano in the world. It towered ten thousand feet above the sea, and it was all of a hundred miles away. We sailed all night at a seven-knot clip, and in the morning the House of the Sun was still before us, and it took a few more hours of sailing to bring it abreast of us. "That island is Maui," we said, verifying by the chart. "That next island sticking out is Molokai, where the lepers are. And the island next to that is Oahu. There is Makapuu Head now. We'll be in Honolulu to-morrow. Our navigation is all right."

CHAPTER V—THE FIRST LANDFALL

"It will not be so monotonous at sea," I promised my fellow-voyagers on the Snark. "The sea is filled with life. It is so populous that every day something new is happening. Almost as soon as we pass through the Golden Gate and head south we'll pick up with the flying fish. We'll be having them fried for breakfast. We'll be catching bonita and dolphin, and spearing porpoises from the bowsprit. And then there are the sharks—sharks without end."

We passed through the Golden Gate and headed south. We dropped the mountains of California beneath the horizon, and daily the surf grew warmer. But there were no flying fish, no bonita and dolphin. The ocean was bereft of life. Never had I sailed on so forsaken a sea. Always, before, in the same latitudes, had I encountered flying fish.

"Never mind," I said. "Wait till we get off the coast of Southern
California. Then we'll pick up the flying fish."

We came abreast of Southern California, abreast of the Peninsula of Lower Cal

This is the third Jack London book and i'm loving him more and more each time. I'm also wondering why he isn't more widely read in modern times?
His stories always have a real vitality and sense of life bursting off the pages. Jack London really LIVED is the sense i get from reading him.
So this boo

Jack London's The Cruise of the Snark is not so much a book as a collection of magazine articles packaged as a book. And that is its main weakness. Toward the end, when the Snark is visiting the Solomon Islands and London becomes ill with a strange skin disease, London's writing becomes different an

THE CRUISE OF THE SNARK by Jack London

I loved Jack London's life when I was much younger, and well, I still do. I dreamed of sailing the seas as he had. I loved his stone house in Glen Ellen and wished to live there, and I loved and wanted all of his souvenirs from the different islands that he had

London's story of his attempt to sail around the world on a largely self-built yacht, the Snark. It was pretty much a failure of a trip, with problems starting even before they set sail from San Francisco. The yacht cost much more than London had figured, and the departure was delayed, in part, by l

The story of Jack London's ill-fated voyage halfway around the world over a hundred years ago gets one thumb up from me. While it was entertaining in several aspects and places, it bogged down in the minutia of who had what tropical disease for how long and how much they vomited, etc, etc, etc as we

Jack London

The Cruise of the Snark

Jack London

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CHAPTER V—THE FIRST LANDFALL

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