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The Cruise of the Snark
THE CRUISE OF THE "SNARK"
CHAPTER I--FOREWORD
It began in the swimming pool at Glen Ellen. Between swims it was our
wont to come out and lie in the sand and let our skins breathe the
warm air and soak in the sunshine. Roscoe was a yachtsman. I had
followed the sea a bit. It was inevitable that we should talk about
boats. We talked about small boats, and the seaworthiness of small
boats. We instanced Captain Slocum and his three years' voyage around
the world in the Spray.
We asserted that we were not afraid to go around the world in a small
boat, say forty feet long. We asserted furthermore that we would like
to do it. We asserted finally that there was nothing in this world
we'd like better than a chance to do it.
"Let us do it," we said . . . in fun.
Then I asked Charmian privily if she'd really care to do it, and she
said that it was too good to be true.
The next time we breathed our skins in the sand by the swimming pool I
said to Roscoe, "Let us do it."
I was in earnest, and so was he, for he said:
"When shall we start?"
I had a house to build on the ranch, also an orchard, a vineyard, and
several hedges to plant, and a number of other things to do. We
thought we would start in four or five years. Then the lure of the
adventure began to grip us. Why not start at once? We'd never be
younger, any of us. Let the orchard, vineyard, and hedges be growing
up while we were away. When we came back, they would be ready for us,
and we could live in the barn while we built the house.
So the trip was decided upon, and the building of the Snark began. We
named her the Snark because we could not think of any other name-
-this information is given for the benefit of those who otherwise
might think there is something occult in the name.
Our friends cannot understand why we make this voyage. They shudder,
and moan, and raise their hands. No amount of explanation can make
them comprehend that we are moving along the line of least resistance;
that it is easier for us to go down to the sea in a small ship than to
remain on dry land, just as it is easier for them to remain on dry
land than to go down to the sea in the small ship. This state of mind
comes of an undue prominence of the ego. They cannot get away from
themselves. They cannot come out of themselves long enough to see
that their line of least resistance is not necessarily everybody
else's line of least resistance. They make of their own bundle of
desires, likes, and dislikes a yardstick wherewith to measure the
desires, likes, and dislikes of all creatures. This is unfair. I
tell them so. But they cannot get away from their own miserable egos
long enough to hear me. They think I am crazy. In return, I am
sympathetic. It is a state of mind familiar to me. We are all prone
to think there is something wrong with the mental processes of the man
who disagrees with us.
The ultimate word is I LIKE. It lies beneath philosophy, and is
twined about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered
ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the
individual says, in an instant, "I LIKE," and does something else, and
philosophy goes glimmering. It is I LIKE that makes the drunkard
drink and the martyr wear a hair shirt; that makes one man a reveller
and another man an anchorite; that makes one man pursue fame, another
gold, another love, and another God. Philosophy is very often a man's
way of explaining his own I LIKE.
But to return to the Snark, and why I, for one, want to journey in her
around the world. The things I like constitute my set of values. The
thing I like most of all is personal achievement--not achievement for
the world's applause, but achievement for my own delight. It is the
old "I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!" But personal
achievement, with me, must be concrete. I'd rather win a water-fight
in the swimming pool, or remain astride a horse that is trying to get
out from under me, than write the great American novel. Each man to
his liking. Some other fellow would prefer writing the great American
novel to winning the water-fight or mastering the horse.
Possibly the proudest achievement of my life, my moment of highest
living, occurred when I was seventeen. I was in a three-masted
schooner off the coast of Japan. We were in a typhoon. All hands had
been on deck most of the night. I was called from my bunk at seven in
the morning to take the wheel. Not a stitch of canvas was set. We
were running before it under bare poles, yet the schooner fairly tore
along. The seas were all of an eighth of a mile apart, and the wind
snatched the whitecaps from their summits, filling. The air so thick
with driving spray that it was impossible to see more than two waves
at a time. The schooner was almost unmanageable, rolling her rail
under to starboard and to port, veering and yawing anywhere between
south-east and south-west, and threatening, when the huge seas lifted
under her quarter, to broach to. Had she broached to, she would
ultimately have been reported lost with all hands and no tidings.
I took the wheel. The sailing-master watched me for a space. He was
afraid of my youth, feared that I lacked the strength and the nerve.
But when he saw me successfully wrestle the schooner through several
bouts, he went below to breakfast. Fore and aft, all hands were below
at breakfast. Had she broached to, not one of them would ever have
reached the deck. For forty minutes I stood there alone at the wheel,
in my grasp the wildly careering schooner and the lives of twenty-two
men. Once we were pooped. I saw it coming, and, half-drowned, with
tons of water crushing me, I checked the schooner's rush to broach to.
At the end of the hour, sweating and played out, I was relieved. But
I had done it! With my own hands I had done my trick at the wheel and
guided a hundred tons of wood and iron through a few million tons of
wind and waves.
My delight was in that I had done it--not in the fact that twenty- two
men knew I had done it. Within the year over half of them were dead
and gone, yet my pride in the thing performed was not diminished by
half. I am willing to confess, however, that I do like a small
audience. But it must be a very small audience, composed of those who
love me and whom I love. When I then accomplish personal achievement,
I have a feeling that I am justifying their love for me. But this is
quite apart from the delight of the achievement itself. This delight
is peculiarly my own and does not depend upon witnesses. When I have
done some such thing, I am exalted. I glow all over. I am aware of a
pride in myself that is mine, and mine alone. It is organic. Every
fibre of me is thrilling with it. It is very natural. It is a mere
matter of satisfaction at adjustment to environment. It is success.
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. Thus it is
with the man who leaps forward from the springboard, out over the
swimming pool, and with a backward half-revolution of the body, enters
the water head first. Once he leaves the springboard his environment
becomes immediately savage, and savage the penalty it will exact
should he fail and strike the water flat. Of course, the man does not
have to run the risk of the penalty. He could remain on the bank in a
sweet and placid environment of summer air, sunshine, and stability.
Only he is not made that way. In that swift mid-air moment he lives
as he could never live on the bank.
As for myself, I'd rather be that man than the fellows who sit on the
bank and watch him. That is why I am building the Snark. I am so
made. I like, that is all. 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 vitalized matter, one hundred
and sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, 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 life and the light in me go
out. A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and I cease
to move--for ever I cease to move. A splinter of lead from a rifle
enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal blackness.
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 at all for me. They do not know me. They are unconscious,
unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes,
lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, 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 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. The bit of life that is I, in so far
as it succeeds in baffling them or in bitting them to its service,
will imagine that it is godlike. It is good to ride the tempest and
feel godlike. I dare to assert that for a finite speck of pulsating
jelly to feel godlike is a far more glorious feeling than for a god to
feel godlike.
Here is the sea, the wind, and the wave. Here are the seas, the
winds, and the waves of all the world. Here is ferocious environment.
And here is difficult adjustment, the achievement of which is delight
to the small quivering vanity that is I. I like. I am so made. It is
my own particular form of vanity, that is all.
There is also another side to the voyage of the Snark. 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 Snark is to be sailed. There will be a gasolene engine on board,
but it will be used only in case of emergency, such as in bad water
among reefs and shoals, where a sudden calm in a swift current leaves
a sailing-boat helpless. The rig of the Snark is to be what is called
the "ketch." The ketch rig is a compromise between the yawl and the
schooner. Of late years the yawl rig has proved the best for
cruising. The ketch retains the cruising virtues of the yawl, and in
addition manages to embrace a few of the sailing virtues of the
schooner. The foregoing must be taken with a pinch of salt. It is
all theory in my head. I've never sailed a ketch, nor even seen one.
The theory commends itself to me. Wait till I get out on the ocean,
then I'll be able to tell more about the cruising and sailing
qualities of the ketch.
As originally planned, the Snark was to be forty feet long on the
water-line. But we discovered there was no space for a bath-room, and
for that reason we have increased her length to forty-five feet. Her
greatest beam is fifteen feet. She has no house and no hold. There is
six feet of headroom, and the deck is unbroken save for two
companionways and a hatch for'ard. The fact that there is no house to
break the strength of the deck will make us feel safer in case great
seas thunder their tons of water down on board. A large and roomy
cockpit, sunk beneath the deck, with high rail and self- bailing, will
make our rough-weather days and nights more comfortable.
There will be no crew. Or, rather, Charmian, Roscoe, and I are the
crew. We are going to do the thing with our own hands. With our own
hands we're going to circumnavigate the globe. Sail her or sink her,
with our own hands we'll do it. Of course there will be a cook and a
cabin-boy. Why should we stew over a stove, wash dishes, and set the
table? We could stay on land if we wanted to do those things.
Besides, we've got to stand watch and work the ship. And also, I've
got to work at my trade of writing in order to feed us and to get new
sails and tackle and keep the Snark in efficient working order. And
then there's the ranch; I've got to keep the vineyard, orchard, and
hedges growing.
When we increased the length of the Snark in order to get space for a
bath-room, we found that all the space was not required by the
bath-room. Because of this, we increased the size of the engine.
Seventy horse-power our engine is, and since we expect it to drive us
along at a nine-knot clip, we do not know the name of a river with a
current swift enough to defy us.
We expect to do a lot of inland work. The smallness of the Snark
makes this possible. When we enter the land, out go the masts and on
goes the engine. There are the canals of China, and the Yang-tse
River. We shall spend months on them if we can get permission from
the government. That will be the one obstacle to our inland
voyaging--governmental permission. But if we can get that permission,
there is scarcely a limit to the inland voyaging we can do.
When we come to the Nile, why we can go up the Nile. We can go up the
Danube to Vienna, up the Thames to London, and we can go up the Seine
to Paris and moor opposite the Latin Quarter with a bow-line out to
Notre Dame and a stern-line fast to the Morgue. We can leave the
Mediterranean and go up the Rhone to Lyons, there enter the Saone,
cross from the Saone to the Maine through the Canal de Bourgogne, and
from the Marne enter the Seine and go out the Seine at Havre. When we
cross the Atlantic to the United States, we can go up the Hudson, pass
through the Erie Canal, cross the Great Lakes, leave Lake Michigan at
Chicago, gain the Mississippi by way of the Illinois River and the
connecting canal, and go down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
And then there are the great rivers of South America. We'll know
something about geography when we get back to California.
People that build houses are often sore perplexed; but if they enjoy
the strain of it, I'll advise them to build a boat like the Snark.
Just consider, for a moment, the strain of detail. Take the engine.
What is the best kind of engine--the two cycle? three cycle? four
cycle? My lips are mutilated with all kinds of strange jargon, my
mind is mutilated with still stranger ideas and is foot-sore and weary
from travelling in new and rocky realms of thought.--Ignition methods;
shall it be make-and-break or jump-spark? Shall dry cells or storage
batteries be used? A storage battery commends itself, but it requires
a dynamo. How powerful a dynamo? And when we have installed a dynamo
and a storage battery, it is simply ridiculous not to light the boat
with electricity. Then comes the discussion of how many lights and
how many candle-power. It is a splendid idea. But electric lights
will demand a more powerful storage battery, which, in turn, demands a
more powerful dynamo.
And now that we've gone in for it, why not have a searchlight? It
would be tremendously useful. But the searchlight needs so much
electricity that when it runs it will put all the other lights out of
commission. Again we travel the weary road in the quest after more
power for storage battery and dynamo. And then, when it is finally
solved, some one asks, "What if the engine breaks down?" And we
collapse. There are the sidelights, the binnacle light, and the
anchor light. Our very lives depend upon them. So we have to fit the
boat throughout with oil lamps as well.
But we are not done with that engine yet. The engine is powerful. We
are two small men and a small woman. It will break our hearts and our
backs to hoist anchor by hand. Let the engine do it. And then comes
the problem of how to convey power for'ard from the engine to the
winch. And by the time all this is settled, we redistribute the
allotments of space to the engine-room, galley, bath-room,
state-rooms, and cabin, and begin all over again. And when we have
shifted the engine, I send off a telegram of gibberish to its makers
at New York, something like this: Toggle-joint abandoned change
thrust-bearing accordingly distance from forward side of flywheel to
face of stern post sixteen feet six inches.
Just potter around in quest of the best steering gear, or try to
decide whether you will set up your rigging with old-fashioned
lanyards or with turnbuckles, if you want strain of detail. Shall the
binnacle be located in front of the wheel in the centre of the beam,
or shall it be located to one side in front of the wheel?-- there's
room right there for a library of sea-dog controversy. Then there's
the problem of gasolene, fifteen hundred gallons of it--what are the
safest ways to tank it and pipe it? and which is the best
fire-extinguisher for a gasolene fire? Then there is the pretty
problem of the life-boat and the stowage of the same. And when that
is finished, come the cook and cabin-boy to confront one with
nightmare possibilities. It is a small boat, and we'll be packed
close together. The servant-girl problem of landsmen pales to
insignificance. We did select one cabin-boy, and by that much were
our troubles eased. And then the cabin-boy fell in love and resigned.
And in the meanwhile how is a fellow to find time to study
navigation--when he is divided between these problems and the earning
of the money wherewith to settle the problems? Neither Roscoe nor I
know anything about navigation, and the summer is gone, and we are
about to start, and the problems are thicker than ever, and the
treasury is stuffed with emptiness. Well, anyway, it takes years to
learn seamanship, and both of us are seamen. If we don't find the
time, we'll lay in the books and instruments and teach ourselves
navigation on the ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii.
There is one unfortunate and perplexing phase of the voyage of the
Snark. Roscoe, who is to be my co-navigator, is a follower of one,
Cyrus R. Teed. Now Cyrus R. Teed has a different cosmology from the
one generally accepted, and Roscoe shares his views. Wherefore Roscoe
believes that the surface of the earth is concave and that we live on
the inside of a hollow sphere. Thus, though we shall sail on the one
boat, the Snark, Roscoe will journey around the world on the inside,
while I shall journey around on the outside. But of this, more anon.
We threaten to be of the one mind before the voyage is completed. I
am confident that I shall convert him into making the journey on the
outside, while he is equally confident that before we arrive back in
San Francisco I shall be on the inside of the earth. How he is going
to get me through the crust I don't know, but Roscoe is ay a masterful
man.
P.S.--That engine! While we've got it, and the dynamo, and the
storage battery, why not have an ice-machine? Ice in the tropics! It
is more necessary than bread. Here goes for the ice-machine! Now I am
plunged into chemistry, and my lips hurt, and my mind hurts, and how
am I ever to find the time to study navigation?