Jack London glanced toward the island and saw the headhunters gathering on the shore. He was stranded on the reef at Maluu, in Malaita, purportedly the most savage and dangerous of the South Seas cannibal isles. In the summer of 1908, the world-famous author of The Call of the Wild and his wife Charmian were engaged in a planned round-the-world voyage on their yacht, the Snark. Having temporarily left their boat at Ghavutu in the Florida Islands just north of Guadalcanal, London was gathering local color to enrich his fiction by taking a jaunt through the Solomon Islands on the vessel Minota. The rough-and-ready skipper, Captain Jansen, had won the job only a few months before, when Mackenzie, the previous captain, had been murdered and beheaded at Langa Langa by a party of Malaitan headhunters. Jack noticed with grim interest that hatchet marks on the ship’s cabin door were still fresh.

But suddenly real life was becoming as red and raw as any story he’d ever imagined. Jansen had just gathered two labor recruits for the local copra plantations. The process was often less like recruiting than it was like kidnapping, and the luckless victims were transported into virtual slavery on distant islands. The Malaitans, familiar with white treachery, particularly resented this traffic in human beings, a trade known locally as blackbirding. Important parts of the process involved threats with guns, sometimes demonstrations with dynamite, and always a quick getaway. But this time, Jansen’s plans for a rapid departure hit a snag. He had barely loaded the natives on board before he ran the ship aground on a hidden reef.

Stranded in the shallow water, Jansen, London, and the native crew desperately tried everything they could think of, but the ship wouldn’t budge from the reef. In a very short time, the tremendous waves pounding on the teak-and-cedar craft were bound to break her up. On the nearby beach, the naked warriors clearly began to take a keen interest in the plight of the strangers. Generations before, white traders had made tobacco addicts of the Solomon islanders, and the natives knew the Minota had cases of it in her hold. Charmian London, who had heard all the usual tales of local cannibal practices, also suspected from their expressions that they were after “rounder prizes” than tobacco.¹

Things began to look worse as the tide started to go out, stranding the Minota even more thoroughly, and Jack noticed several hundred headhunters gradually slipping into their canoes, slowly but deliberately paddling toward the ship. As he sized up the danger of their situation, London bribed a rather sullen islander with a fortune of tobacco—half a case—to help them. The native paddled off in a canoe to find the Eugenie, which Jansen had told them was nearby. A short time later, the messenger found the other ship and handed young Captain Keller a note hastily scribbled by Jack. The blond-haired and handsome youth acted at once. In the nick of time, Captain Keller appeared on the scene and rescued the author and his party on August 20, 1908.

In a letter written in the fall of 1916, near the end of his life, London recalled the panic and exhilaration of the incident:

Such was the steaming, tropical setting, packed with danger and thrills, fears and horrors, beauty and high adventure, that forms the background of the collection of stories you now hold in your hands. But, entertaining as they are, these are not merely the stuff of pulp fiction or boys’ adventures, for they yield a great deal more under close examination than has hitherto been believed.

These unjustly neglected short stories, which Jack London wrote between 1908 and 1916, give evidence of a master at the top of his form. Consider, among many other strengths, their flashes of insight into the nature of colonialism; their brilliant portrayal of fully developed characters; their detailed and vigorous depiction of the natural setting; their geographical and anthropological accuracy; their philosophical challenges to the majority of his readers’ core beliefs about the question of race; and their conscious experimentations with narrative voice, with point-of-view, and with ideas that a generation later would become classified under the heading of existentialism. Finally, perhaps the most important reason for collecting these nine stories is a formal, underlying principle that makes the text a unified whole: London delves here into an emotional examination of the profound social issues that confronted the Pacific region. The stories move from the depiction of a tentative hope for the brotherhood of man and the redemptive qualities of selflessness to the expression of persistent, darker themes of depravity, disgust, and decay that run through the last stories with increasing urgency.

I

The islands of the South Pacific were, to the western world, the last mystery of global exploration. Though no European knew they were there until the sixteenth century, islands and atolls dotted the surface of the Pacific, and a great many of them were inhabited. Here had been demonstrated the intrepid human spirit of epic exploration of the unknown, carried out perhaps seven centuries before the siege of Troy. Here were enacted in microcosm the same political challenges, erotic obsessions, and dark visions of divinity that had also tormented the lives of Europeans. Here, too, were played out for centuries the sanguinary conflicts of racial warfare that often seem to be a reflexive human response to Otherness, here made more horrific by the warriors’ widely reported drive to eat the bodies of their enemies and, in ways that varied from culture to culture, to preserve as trophies their opponents’ heads.

Papuan hunters probably migrated from New Guinea during the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago, perhaps literally walking to the Solomon region. With the subsequent warming of the planet and rising of the sea level, their short, dark-skinned descendants became islanders, and centuries later the place would be called by Europeans “black islands”—Melanesia. As well, these adventurers tended to be curious enough—and daring enough—to want to spread out across the unknown seas, indulging in heroic canoe journeys, long before any reliable systems of navigation had been discovered. Somehow, they managed to settle throughout the Solomons and the New Hebrides, and got all the way to Fiji, an archipelago of some three hundred islands in the virtual center of the South Seas.

The process took centuries to accomplish, and Melanesian hold on Fiji was still newly established when the black explorers met a new challenge. Light-skinned medieval Polynesians, after having spent more than a thousand years colonizing the islands to the east of their Samoan homeland, had decided to canoe toward the west, aggressively establishing settlements wherever possible on all but the most marginally fertile islands.

Though scarcely any more precise than that of the Melanesians, Polynesian navigational élan was impressive: they believed they could gauge their distance from land by dipping one of the crew over the bow of the canoe into the sea. The immersed individual could then sense through his testicles the vibrations borne by the waves resounding off the shore. The elders, too, had a system known as kavenga, which allowed the voyagers to consult patterns in the stars.⁴

In Fiji, the two cultures, black and bronze, met in mutual horror of each other. Even today, remains of impressively fortified villages in the islands provide evidence of the centuries-long struggle for dominion that ensued between Melanesian and Polynesian warriors during subsequent generations. Violence and bloodshed became a way of life in Fiji, and cannibalism and headhunting purportedly became their grimly formal and ecstatically ritualized expression.

After a battle came the celebration. Warriors reenacted their achievements and enlarged on their prowess, hurling insults at their vanquished opponents, whose butchered bodies were readied for the fires. In some cases, it is believed that, as the frenzied ceremonies proceeded, some victims were left alive in order to assure the freshness of the meat. In other Pacific regions, traditions demanded that the major bones be broken and the victims tenderized through a day’s soaking in water. For the most effective eating of their grisly repast, the Fijians designed a special tool keenly sought today by curio collectors—a four-pronged fork that gave participants access to the choicest pieces of flesh. These were usually offered first to the chief, who accepted them with formal acknowledgment. The feast was followed by more boasting and self-congratulatory rhetoric as the excitement began to take a sexual turn. One horrified white castaway, whose name history has forgotten, left behind a short account of his experience in 1809: “That night was spent in eating and drinking and obscenity. The blood drank [sic] and the flesh eating seemed to have a maddening effect on the warriors. I had often seen men killed and eaten, but I never heard or saw such a night as that. Next morning many of the poor women were unable to move from the continuous connections of the maddened warriors.”⁵

This was the world discovered by the first curious probes of European exploration when, in 1567, Alvaro de Mendana sailed from Peru into the South Pacific. Puffed with the divine ambition of the Renaissance, Mendana longed to learn about the Unknown, a motivation that was coupled with his hope to claim new land for Spain and new souls for the Church. Also, he had heard legends of a land filled with gold, Terra Australis Incognita. By maintaining a course of due west, Mendana somehow missed most of the islands between Peru and the Solomons. When he at last spotted a large landmass, he called it Santa Ysabel. He was delighted with the prospect of exploring these new finds and giving them names. Guadalcanal (sometimes spelled “Guadalcanar”), for example, is a corruption of Wadi al-Kanar, the name of the hometown of one of his Arab officers. Perhaps Mendana named the entire group Yslas su Llamen de Salomon in the hope that the suggestion of the biblical King Solomon’s unlimited wealth would make financial supporters eager to fund future ventures.

These early efforts struck the template for future relationships between Europeans and the islanders, for the expedition was plagued with relentless violence. Convinced of their racial superiority, the Spaniards preferred to take what they wanted from the population, incorrectly assuming that the natives could not tell they were being cheated. Mistreatment of natives far surpassed mere dishonesty, however. The Spanish soldiers assigned to Mendana’s expeditions were cruel, sadistic, and often casually murderous, sometimes killing islanders for sport. Mendana left under a cloud, frustrated by the continual, often fatal, tensions between the blacks and the whites, which he himself had unthinkingly created.⁶

On his return to Peru, instead of awakening European interest in the region, Mendana’s reports tended to dampen investor enthusiasm. In fact, it took him nearly three decades to raise funds to return to the area. A happy accident during his second voyage in 1595 resulted in his discovery of the Marquesas Islands, but his primary scheme demanded that he not linger unnecessarily in the pleasures of exploration, so he soon continued westward. An ambitious and daring expedition, this second voyage was undertaken with a fleet of four ships, filled with nearly three hundred men and women, including Mendana’s wife. Their hope was nothing less than to convert the natives and colonize the land of the Solomon Islands. Ironically, this time Mendana couldn’t find the Solomon Islands at all; in his excitement over their original discovery, he had made a mistake in plotting the location.⁷

He finally lighted on Nendo, an island in the easternmost region of the Solomon group, just a few miles from the islands he sought. The explorer renamed the place Santa Cruz, and he eagerly began his scheme to forge a community. However, it took the settlers a mere ten weeks to confirm that they were not up to the challenge presented by these rugged islands and their fierce inhabitants. With Mendana laid up with fever, the vicious excesses of some of the Spanish soldiers worsened. Ultimately, the enfeebled Mendana was coerced into agreeing to execute the military commander of the expedition in order to restore discipline and end the wanton cruelty to the natives. It did not work. A party of soldiers murdered Malope, the main chief of the area, even though he had been willingly cooperating with the expedition. Mendana never rallied from his fever, and he finally died there at the age of fifty-four, having lived only to see his fabulous islands lost and his ambitious colonial adventure dissolved in misery and futility.

Though European sailors occasionally spotted the legendary Solomon Islands, they were not formally rediscovered until 1767—and then only by accident. Captain Cartaret, an Englishman, found Santa Cruz and later sighted Malaita, though he had trouble believing that these almost mythical places really existed.

Meanwhile, the most famous of all sea-borne explorers, Captain James Cook, charted much of the Pacific in his appropriately named vessels, Resolution and Adventure. From 1768 until his murder at the hands of Hawaiian islanders in 1779, Cook sailed into unknown seas. His daring explorations, for good or ill, were largely responsible for creating an interest in discovering and exploiting the resources of Oceania. In 1788, one of the greatest experiments in penal history—shipping and virtually marooning boatloads of English convicts in Australia—began with the voyage of a prison ship commanded by Captain Shortland. On his way back, after dropping off his cargo of felons, Shortland confirmed Cartaret’s discovery.⁸

In sharp contrast to the indifference experienced by Mendana almost two centuries earlier, word of the find spread rapidly, leading to a number of British and French exploratory projects in the area. By the early nineteenth century, something else contributed to European awareness of the Pacific region. During the great age of the whaling industry, ships often anchored in Solomon Island lagoons, where crewmembers would take their ease for short periods. These adventurers were so rough and tumble (or so unimaginative) that they showed no fear of the headhunters often dwelling in the interior of many of the islands. Sometimes marooned recalcitrants and deserters from whaling vessels became island inhabitants themselves—the first beachcombers.⁹ In some cases, these men took wives, raised families, and for a number of years threw themselves fully into native life.

More wild and ruthless were the sandalwood traders.¹⁰ By the mid-nineteenth century, enterprising white men had learned of four related facts: the Solomon Islands enjoyed a relatively large population of pigs; Chinese merchants desired sandalwood for incense and soap and as liners for small boxes; the people of the New Hebrides desired pork, but had few pigs; and the islands of the New Hebrides were full of sandalwood, a virtual weed that choked more desirable plants. In a more sensible world, an obvious cycle of simple trade would evolve, resulting in benefits to all parties. Instead, only massacre and villainy followed the sandalwood men wherever they went. Some of it was even internecine: so fierce was the competition among the traders that, once they had stuffed their ships to the gunwales with the fragrant wood, it was typical of them on their departure to shoot randomly into the villages that lined the island beaches. The purpose of such criminality was purely commercial. They wanted the islanders to hate the sight of any white men, so that any competitors in the trade following in their wake would be attacked and perhaps killed by the angry islanders. Apparently sublimely confident of their superiority, or merely heedless of the probability that they themselves would also suffer consequences should they return for another load, the sandalwooders also traded such weapons as Snider rifles and steel-headed tomahawks for wood.

Ostensibly on a more businesslike level were the copra producers, including Lever’s Pacific Plantation, Ltd. (later Lever Brothers), Burns Philp South Seas Company, W. R. Carpenter, the Samoan Reparations Estates, and smaller concerns that established themselves throughout the Pacific, some building impressive facilities in the region. The enterprising could grow coconut trees on plantations or else gather nuts from the beaches of nearby islands, dry the meat, and render it into an oil that would be used primarily in the United States and Britain to make soap, margarine, cooking oils, and cosmetics. The demand for copra always exceeded the supply and thus encouraged the growth of the industry throughout the South Seas.

But even in this apparently benign business, the white intruders managed to bring misery to the islands, for a fundamental axiom of plantation life was that white people could not do manual work in the tropical climate. The prevailing impression in Australia was that white-skinned people would be killed by exposure to the intense sun, so plantation owners were convinced that they required black-skinned workers. Fortified by this racist logic, they conceived that labor must be drawn from other races. First it was indentured Indians, then Chinese, and finally black islanders from Melanesia who were, as the euphemism went, “recruited” by blackbirding. Since it was believed that white farmers, particularly women and children, could not work effectively under the tropical sun, it would make sound practical sense to recruit Pacific islanders to provide the labor force on cotton plantations. In their correspondence—and probably in their hearts as well—these Australian and British entrepreneurs were clear about the distinction between the recruiting of laborers and the capturing of slaves, especially because Britain had, in the 1830s, taken the moral high ground by emancipating all the slaves in the Empire, and consequently her government’s officers would inspect very closely the methodology of the labor recruiting project. The concept of islander labor carried with it as well a humanitarian intention (however misguided) to raise the standard of living for these laborers by exposing them to the advantages of middle-class customs and values.

Meanwhile, the urgency of the Australian cotton venture was intensified by the outbreak of the American Civil War, which helped potential investors to see the opportunity presented in the opening up of another source to supply the world’s market, now that cotton from the American South would be unavailable for the foreseeable future. In the spring of 1863, agricultural visionary Robert Towns had gained permission to outfit his first recruiting vessel, the Don Juan, under the command of Captain Grueber, and by late summer the first Kanakas (islanders) arrived in Brisbane, having signed an indenture for a period that could vary between one and five years. Though Grueber’s voyage went without misadventure, it turned out to be the beginning of a cycle of bloodshed and iniquity that would characterize cultural interactions in the South Seas for more than three-fourths of a century.¹¹

Indeed, it can be argued that the darkest side to the colonial enterprise was labor recruiting. Blackbirding was carried out by small bands of generally ruthless rascals in small vessels, cruising the coastal shores throughout the South Pacific and seeking recruits. Over the decades, tens of thousands of Solomon Islanders were gathered: sometimes kidnapped, sometimes sold by their own kin, sometimes terrorized into “volunteering” to work on the cane or copra plantations. The dangerous practice of sailing around the South Pacific kidnapping natives promised a lot of fast money and excitement, provided its practitioners were not hacked to death by resentful islanders or flung into jail by the British inspectors. Blackbirding could be forceful, violent, and coercive; and it was not unusual for a chief to sell the recruiters members of his own tribe or slaves captured in intertribal fighting. However the recruits were obtained, blackbirders then would sell their labor contracts to a plantation. The recruits would typically serve an indenture for a sum of six pounds per year. Work on plantations was physically demanding: typical tasks included clearing land, planting crops, harvesting and drying copra, and building roads. These arduous and onerous tasks were nothing like the normal daily drill for any of the natives, for their culture had never taught them the spartan European virtues of providing service through backbreaking work for foreign bosses.

Furthermore, with the clearing of land came exposure to black-water fever and malaria, fearful diseases that in one year could fell an estimated 10 percent of the workmen. These diseases remain serious threats to people living in the area. As recently as the early 1990s, the World Health Organization cited the Solomon Islands as one of the world’s most dangerous environments for malarial infection.¹² The most serious form of the illness, Falciparum, or cerebral malaria, accounts for two out of three cases in the Solomons. Most islanders are likely to fall into malarial fevers once a month; men who have not had an attack in four years count themselves very lucky; and nursing mothers pass the disease on to their babies. By the late 1990s, insecticide spraying brought the danger down, but, in Jack London’s time, anybody who spent time on Guadalcanal was likely to become infected.

Creating a further strain on morale, European owners of plantations found it very difficult to hire white management because of low pay, extreme isolation, and primitive living conditions; in some cases only the dregs of society were available. Degraded sadists and sodden alcoholics were sometimes hired without any inquiry into their sordid pasts. Such overseers, not paid well themselves and removed from their employers’ supervision, had little incentive to treat the laborers well. On some isolated plantations, beatings and sometimes murder could be concealed easily. In his essay on London’s novel Adventure, Lawrence Phillips cites Amié Césaire’s assertion that “colonisation works to decivilize the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.”¹³ One of London’s literary heroes, Joseph Conrad, made this danger the center of his story Heart of Darkness, in which the commercial agent Kurtz descends into savagery after a prolonged involvement with colonialism. And, of course, this is, on one level at least, London’s very theme in several of the stories in this collection.¹⁴

That the colonialist experience is still capable of twisting civilized moral values was demonstrated as recently as 1988, in New Caledonia. As part of a move to quash the New Caledonian independence movement in 1984, seven French planters ambushed and killed ten unarmed aboriginals. Though evidence indicated that they were apparently guilty, the Frenchmen were acquitted in a 1988 trial that raised international concern. In retaliation, a group of Kanaks kidnapped sixteen French policemen and held them hostage in a cave. Three hundred elite French troops stormed the cave, massacring nineteen Kanaks and summarily executing six others who had surrendered. Their bodies were so bullet ridden that none could be positively identified. The French soldiers responsible for this action have never been charged.¹⁵

Such was the prevailing attitude of white labor recruiters toward the Pacific islanders at the beginning of the twentieth century that it is little wonder that laborers often deserted into the bush or, once they had finished their indenture, were loath to sign for a second term. And once they had been repatriated, they did not encourage other members of their tribes to sign indentures.¹⁶ The Kwaio natives of the interior of Malaita offer a prime example of the kind of racial tension that the economic system fostered. They were particularly hesitant and often resisted the efforts of the blackbirders violently. Deserved or not, so savage was the reputation of the natives on Malaita that it was not until years after the Londons’ visit to the area that a white settlement was effected.¹⁷

Even twenty years after the period London describes in his stories, Malaita was far from stable, as evidenced by the Kwaio Rebellion of October 1927. The District Officer in charge of the administration of justice on the island was William Bell, an extremely able man by all accounts, with a reputation for dealing firmly but fairly with natives. Though admired and honored by the islanders for his calm authority, by the 1920s the Englishman had become strangely subject to fits of anger and even brutality, occasionally even striking the Malaitans under his authority. Bell’s superiors, concerned about the number of injuries caused by the careless handling of the many Snider rifles in the possession of the Malaitans, ordered Bell to confiscate all of these guns during a public meeting.

Though Bell felt that this was a bad idea, he knew he had to proceed. Bell was well aware of the bitterness with which the warriors chafed under foreign bullying. Particularly offensive to them was the idea of parting with their guns. Some of those weapons, habitually unmaintained and rusted from the moist tropical environment, were occasionally more dangerous to the person firing them than to any target aimed at, but some of them functioned well enough to kill enemies. Whether the guns worked or not, the men had used their Sniders as emblems of their masculinity and self-reliance since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and “top gun” status was accorded island ramos—paid killers—who had managed to hoard the precious ammunition. It occurred to Bell that he might conveniently carry out his orders by confiscating their Sniders at the same time that he collected the annual three-shillings-a-head tax. This tax itself reveals some of the cynicism the colonial whites felt toward the blacks who were under their control. Each of the Kwaio families was ordered to pay a tax of three shillings per male member of the family, ostensibly to help maintain the government services, including the safety provided by a police force and justice assured by Bell’s trial process. However, as the government knew, the only way a Kwaio could possibly obtain European money was by enlisting with the recruiters for the plantations. Through his intelligence officers, Bell knew that resistance to the tax was threatening to take the form of open rebellion, but his confidence seemed to know no bounds, and he went ahead with his plans anyway, reluctant to back down before the blacks.

He set up a temporary meeting place in a pleasant-looking valley called Gwee’abe and began to collect the tax and the rifles. While Bell was somehow distracted during the process, an island strongman named Basiana crept up behind him, raised his old Snider over his head like a club, and with a single stroke crushed Bell’s skull. At once, the Kwaios turned on the other government representatives and, in a wild rush, massacred all fourteen of them. Because of the small number of white people in all the Solomons—rarely more than six hundred souls—native violence and rebellion were constant dangers.¹⁸

And then there were the missionaries. Even the first exploratory expeditions mounted by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century had as one of their prime goals the conversion of the pagan people of the Pacific to Christianity. However, such were the perceived evils of Roman Catholicism that many Protestants sincerely considered orthodoxy only a little less wicked than headhunting itself. And so, simultaneous with the swollen cupidity that brought traders and profiteers to the South Seas, Protestants from America and England set out as early as the 1790s to bring a non-Catholic view of salvation to the heathen islanders.

It is tempting to sneer at the middle-class pomposity and narrow-minded certitude that motivated flocks of Protestants to uproot themselves from the security of a normal life at home to cross dangerous seas and settle treacherous islands, but to do so is to miss the genuine heroism of the venture. Pacific missionaries often represented the minority splinter sects that bristled from the core of Protestantism: Boston Calvinists, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Pentecostal enthusiasts shouldered each other for dominion from island to island. There was no urge to ecumenism. Each group sought to convince the respective islanders that it taught the Only True Religion, and this claim tended to be taken at face value by their phlegmatic congregations. Even today, travelers to the Solomons are advised to avoid flippancy on the topic of religion; islanders tolerate differences of opinion, but not indifference of attitude.

Often, along with their teachings, the missionaries, like the explorers and traders before them, brought diseases common in the Western world, against which the islanders had no immunity. Even without the notion of germs or viruses, the natives were able to note the conjunction between the arrival of churchmen and the outbreak of new and fatal sicknesses. Ultimately, health-conscious tribesmen frequently massacred many missionary families. The natives had been terrified of “white” diseases since the early days of the sandalwood traders, who would sometimes purposely spread deadly diseases as revenge against uncooperative islanders. Whether the white men came to exploit the people or resources or to save their immortal souls, tragedy seemed inevitably to result from the meeting of the races.¹⁹

By the time Jack London sailed his yacht, the Snark, out of San Francisco Bay in the spring of 1907, the Pacific region had been in racial turmoil for three hundred years.

II

The voyage of the Snark grew ineluctably out of the character of Jack London. That boat, he determined, was to be an expression of his own will—its construction and later journeys a physical representation of the idea the thirty-one-year-old author expressed with the words “I like. I am so made.” Because he planned a round-the-world trip, London was adamant about overseeing the Snark’s construction personally, designing her every detail, selecting only the best materials available, securing the most modern, efficient engines. London’s itinerary seems ambitious even today. The fifty-seven-foot ketch was to sail from San Francisco to the South Seas, the canals of China, the Nile, the Thames, the Seine, the Atlantic, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the Gulf of Mexico before returning home via Cape Horn. But no one could have foreseen the circumstances that would intervene in their plans—not the least of them the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which happened the very day the keel was being laid. The great fire that followed kept all shipbuilding on a considerably lower priority and caused all materials and supplies to be three times more expensive than before.

Finally, the Snark weighed anchor on April 23, 1907, with its first destination being Hawaii. From the beginning, however, there were troubles with the Snark; contractors had cheated London relentlessly, resulting in unreliable engines, substandard fittings, and a leaking hull. To make matters worse, he was sailing with an untested and sometimes incompetent crew. The most reliable of the crew—indeed, the only one of the group to last the whole voyage—was a tall, strapping, twenty-two-year-old Midwesterner named Martin Johnson, who had signed on as cook, though his claimed expertise in that regard was less valuable than his determined resolution to tinker with the Snark’s problematical engines. After the cruise, Johnson began a career of adventurous independent filmmaking and photography. For three decades, traveling with his wife, Osa, he took thousands of feet of motion pictures and thousands of still photos of wild animals and indigenous people in exotic locales. For a generation of audiences, Martin and Osa Johnson’s exhibition of photographs and films often provided Americans with the only information they would ever be likely to receive about life in the remote corners of the world.

Though it took nearly a month—delayed long enough to have generated rumors that they had been lost at sea—the London party eventually arrived in Hawaii on May 20. There the Snark was refitted and repaired, while Jack and Charmian enjoyed the pleasures of the island paradise, riding, surfing, dining and dancing, touring plantations, getting sunburned, and generally behaving like the tourists they were. And typically for Jack, almost everything they did occasioned or suggested a story. For example, one evening they attended a military dance that inspired “The House of Pride.”²⁰ From shipmate Bert Stolz, Jack may have learned the story behind London’s “Koolau the Leper.” Stolz was the son of the law enforcement agent shot by the real-life Koolau.²¹ Later Jack visited the leper colony on Molokai. Jack and Charmian also stayed as guests at the 50,000-acre Haleakala Ranch, and rode into the huge volcanic crater known as the House of the Sun. Jack even got involved in a saloon brawl, which he improbably attributed to drinking “a couple of cocktails” on an empty stomach, but which Charmian understood to be a need to blow off steam after all the delays they had endured.

From there they sailed to the Marquesas where they visited the Typee Valley, which had fired Jack’s imagination when he had first read Melville’s novel. Jack was disappointed with what he found—islanders very different from those Melville had described, sick and debilitated from contact with white men’s diseases.

The Snark’s touchy engines caused more problems as they continued on to Tahiti. On arrival Jack was dismayed to learn of a negative article about him written by no less than President Teddy Roosevelt, who called Jack a “nature faker” for suggesting in his fiction that animals could think. About the same time, London was disappointed to learn that the Snark’s Captain Warren had been inflating the repair bills for the Snark and pocketing the money for himself. He was fired. On Bora Bora, Jack and Charmian became friends with a native couple, a warm association that inspired Jack’s story “The Heathen.” In Samoa, the Londons visited the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson, one of Jack’s favorite authors. Here also, Jack lectured on socialism in the Central Hotel in Apia and participated in the local tradition of stone fishing. And finally on to the Solomons, where they visited a large copra plantation, photographed cannibals, tried hashish, and went on their blackbirding expedition with Captain Jansen. Here they also met Harold Markham, who may have been an inspiration for London’s intrepid character Captain David Grief.

Jack and Charmian had the time of their lives, experiencing excitement and danger all along the way, as Jack’s The Cruise of the Snark (1911) and Charmian’s The Log of the Snark (1915) attest. Charmian was the best of shipmates. Unmistakably feminine and deeply in love with Jack, she yet was far from the stereotype of the delicately reserved and sheltered Edwardian woman. She thrilled at the thought of real adventure and eagerly took part in every aspect of the voyage, including putting herself in danger of bodily harm from the perils of remote seas, exotic diseases, and threats from islanders widely reputed to be savages. Every day of the voyage Jack kept to his customary writing stint of one thousand words. Charmian meanwhile gamely kept up with typing the manuscripts of his novel Martin Eden, along with a series of short stories, nine of which are included in the present volume.

Troubles, though, still arose. Occasionally the Londons became lost, battled through severe storms, and once almost died of thirst. These experiences, as he wrote in his boyish scrawl day after day, vitalized London’s Pacific fiction. However, some of their trials were far from glamorous. In his chapter on the Solomon Islands in The Cruise of the Snark, Jack detailed the enervating effects of malaria as well as the virulent infections that resulted whenever one of them got even the slightest open wound, forming massive “Solomon sores.”²² Beyond even these, Jack became afflicted with a variety of exotic ailments, including bowel inflammations and a frightening one that caused the skin of Jack’s hands to peel off in large patches.²³

By late October of 1908 almost all the crew of the Snark were suffering from various ailments. Most common were Solomon sores, infections that refused to heal in the hot and damp climate of the islands. Jack suffered most. His teeth gave him almost constant problems, and he took every opportunity to visit dentists. He was also concerned, mistakenly as it turned out, that his worsening skin condition and deformed fingernails and toenails might be early symptoms of leprosy. Finally Jack decided their journey would have to be interrupted so that he could seek medical attention in Sydney.

It was here that Jack was first prescribed opium for his postoperative pain, and in the years that followed he turned increasingly to the narcotic for relief as his physical conditions worsened. Ironically, an arsenic compound he was using as a medicine for his skin condition probably exacerbated Jack’s kidney problems.²⁴

After several months recuperating in Sydney and with a side-trip to Tasmania, Jack and Charmian reluctantly and sadly decided that their dream of a world cruise would have to be deferred. On April 8, 1909, they boarded the Tymeric for Guayaquil, Ecuador, where they arrived on May 19. Jack felt stronger as the days passed, and they crossed the Andes to Quito to do some sightseeing before returning to Guayaquil and catching the S.S. Erica to Panama. From there, they steamed to New Orleans aboard the S.S. Turrialba. On October 21, 1910, Jack and Charmian finally reached Oakland and soon returned to their beloved Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen.

The Snark was sold in the South Seas for a fraction of its original cost. The new owners turned it into a blackbirding ship, an ironic finale for such a game vessel. In her memoir, I Married Adventure, Osa Johnson recalled seeing the ship in the summer of 1917:

Only the hatch cover remains today.²⁶

Back home in the warm and inviting atmosphere of Sonoma Valley, Jack’s health steadily improved, and within a few months he seemed to be completely recovered.²⁷ Jack now threw himself into enlarging and improving his ranch, determined to implement all the new agricultural techniques of the day. He also began putting into reality another dream, Wolf House, a huge lodge to be situated on the side of Sonoma Mountain looking out on the beautiful Valley of the Moon. The house was built out of rough-hewn redwood logs and uncut volcanic boulders quarried from the area. At the same time that he tackled this monumental project, Jack also kept up a steady stream of correspondence, entertained a seemingly endless list of visitors, and, of course, continued to write.

London indeed had many successes and much happiness in his last few years, but failures and personal sadness also marked this final period of his life. Jack was saddened when one of his prize horses died. The bitter divorce in 1904 from his first wife, Bess, continued to cause estrangement from his daughters Joan and Becky. Wolf House was destroyed by fire shortly before the Londons were to move in. Jack and Charmian’s infant daughter, Joy, died two days after her birth. The author was involved in legal tangles over the ranch and movie rights to his books. These emotional strains inevitably affected his worsening physical condition, one that he did little to ameliorate since he continued to eat unwisely, smoke incessantly, drink intemperately, and generally drive himself to physical exhaustion. The progress of his kidney disease and the pain-killing drugs he was taking for its symptoms both continued to take their toll. Jack London died at Beauty Ranch on November 22, 1916. Charmian continued to live on the ranch. She built the massive residence she called “The House of Happy Walls,” corresponded with friends, wrote books, and lovingly kept her husband’s memory alive. She outlived Jack by nearly forty years and died on January 13, 1955, designating that her home become a museum to commemorate their lives. She never remarried.

During the last two years of his life, Jack and Charmian spent a great deal of their time in Hawaii and developed a deep affection for the islands, as Charmian testified in her book Our Hawaii. Perhaps here they came close to the paradise they had sought during the voyage of the Snark. In any case, just as he had done during his trip to the Klondike, Jack had acquired during the Snark voyage a wealth of material for his writing, and the Pacific occupied London’s imagination in ways that were at least as complex as his better-known fascination with the frozen Northland.²⁸ Indeed, from the idyllic languor of “The Water Baby” to the monstrous agonies of “The Red One,” Jack’s later fiction continued to bring him back to the South Seas.

III

The nine stories in this volume are arranged in the order Jack London wrote them, as determined by James Williams in his article “Jack London’s Works by Date of Composition.” As Jeanne Campbell Reesman has pointed out, the stories give evidence of the author’s interest in literary experimentation. In her book Jack London: A Study of the Short Fiction, she explains: “London’s entire life was a sort of experiment, and he could not resist the challenge of seeing life from as many vantage points as possible, from within ethnic communities scattered across the Pacific Ocean, from feminine as well as masculine points of view, from the minds of both the ruling class and the ghetto.”²⁹ The settings of these stories tend to grow out of the cruise of the Snark, generally reflecting the east-to-west movement of the voyage: “The Seed of McCoy” is set in the Tuamoto Archipelago; “The Chinago,” in Tahiti; “The Heathen,” in Bora Bora; “The Whale Tooth,” in Fiji; and the rest, in the Solomon Islands.

“The Seed of McCoy,” written first and set easternmost, contains London’s positive vision of redemption made possible by sacrifice. “The Red One,” written last and set far to the west, represents the author’s ever-deepening sense of alienation and perhaps a kind of racial guilt that underlies his final characterization of white men in the Pacific. Though these features were present from the earliest works in this collection, they became more intensified in the years between 1908 and London’s death in 1916.

The tales collected in this volume have been little read and rarely discussed in print or classrooms, in part because there is a kind of “common knowledge” that they defend racist assumptions. The charge, however, is fraught with irony, since it seems to have been hard for London in his own day to sell these stories to the popular media for the very opposite reasons. Editors at the turn of the twentieth century often were not interested in fiction that depicted the brutal details of white colonialism—stories in which the magazine-reading public’s widely accepted assumption of white supremacy would be exposed to uncomfortable scrutiny.

It is the business of the writer to awaken in the reader some emotion, generated by the reader’s involvement with the text. Certainly, some writers can evoke sympathy, laughter, anxiety, and other similar emotional responses, as long as the reader willingly enters into the transaction. The reader may also enter into an intellectual exchange and perhaps alter an opinion through the reading of a convincing argument. Jack London wrote more than his share of literature in which he voiced his own position and opinions, particularly in his volatile socialist writings. On the other hand, he also often wrote with his emotions concealed, as a good Naturalist author ought to do. Naturalism, in its purest form as a literary school, imposed the discipline of writing with a scientifically detached descriptive attitude, even though the writer personally might be outraged about the situation he so objectively describes. Also significant in Naturalistic fiction is a moral dimension, one in which social injustices will be explored, resulting in a sense of disturbance or even outrage in readers. Naturalist writers, perhaps even more than others, demand that their readers do their own thinking and come to their own conclusions. It is important to understand that a description of a racist scene is not necessarily an endorsement of racism, any more than Swift’s “Modest Proposal” is really a document advocating British exploitation of Ireland. In any case, as Engels pointed out, the writer “does not have to serve the reader on a platter the future historical resolution of the social conflicts he describes.”³⁰

Recently these issues have become more interesting and challenging. In the years since the Second World War, many philosophers and literary theorists have pointed out that the act of reading itself is fraught with more complexities than common sense might suggest. These critics argue that it is unduly simplistic to assume that emotions awakened in the reader are related closely to the intentions of the writer. They go on to claim that no one can guarantee closure—absolute identification—between the writer’s originating idea and the reader’s response. Some of them say that such interpretive closure, however obvious it might seem to common sense, is actually an indemonstrable and probably unnecessary notion. Texts are public while originating ideas and authorial intentions are private. No one can know with any level of certainty what Jack London, the author, really thought or intended. As we, the editors, have approached these stories, one belief has emerged: if London had as his originating idea the intention of depicting racism as unambiguously just and ethical, it seems to us that he did a bad job of it. London scholar Lawrence Phillips seems to agree, suggesting that London’s Pacific fiction “fails miserably as an exemplar to underpin an argument for racial hierarchy and superiority.”³¹ This belief has convinced the editors that it is time to approach these texts from other perspectives.

Apart from the critical response to the South Seas stories, it is rare for London to be charged with an inability to deal subtly with his material. Thus London’s socialist stories may be analyzed with due attention to their unexpressed (but nonetheless obvious) politically subversive implications. London’s “The Apostate,” for example, grimly details the life of a child of a white, working-class, urban single parent, but no one would read the story as an endorsement of the injustices growing out of the uncaring economic system described in the tale. In London’s Pacific fiction, however, his straightforward depiction of racism and its attendant brutalities seems, in our contemporary political climate, somehow supportive of “the inevitable white man” and of the colonialist system that exploited the human and natural resources of the South Seas. A careful reading, however, will reveal that these stories cannot be read so superficially. Indeed, we have difficulty in understanding how any reader can interpret these texts as representing or encoding a racist intention at all.

Nevertheless, though the critical literature centering on London’s Pacific fiction is sparse, and most of the stories have not been widely read, some people continue to assume that London’s work expresses a racist thesis. Those who do not like what they perceive to be the political agenda of the stories included here might support their condemnation of London by arguing that his representations of ethnicity are distorted, and that such distortions cannot be excused by urging that similar representations were widespread at the time. If racism is objectively wrong today, then it was wrong in the past as well. Racists had to have made the decision to be racists—and they are therefore culpable for their choice, without recourse to anthropological or sociological analyses of the “causes” of prejudice, just as a thief must do his stretch, even though he had been born into and raised by a family of thieves.

But this rather simplistic argument fails to account for the complexity of London’s fiction. As one consequence of modern considerations of the proper and ethical relations that ought to exist within a racially diverse world population, readers of our day may tend to be uncomfortable with London’s depiction of islander characters, perhaps because in some way he ought to have described them as behaving like noble, urbane Western sophisticates. It could be argued that this embarrassment itself betrays a racist reluctance to believe that these indigenous peoples often looked, acted, and intentionally decorated themselves in ways they hoped would enhance their formidable ferocity. It is no surprise that the most objective anthropologists of the period—with the possible exception of Franz Boas—would have labeled these people as “savages.” Boas, writing in 1928, argues that

Instead of acknowledging universal ideals being filtered through differing behaviors, today there somehow exists a need to deny the behaviors or appearances, patronizingly refashioning naked headhunters into freethinking noblemen who were merely misunderstood by the white explorers who saw them. Fear of the cultural Other is indeed betrayed by early European accounts of islander appearance and behavior. Perhaps it would make reports of the clash of these different worlds less embarrassing for today’s readers, if only islander customs had been reported with anthropological objectivity.³³

Furthermore, there are complicated moral issues in these stories to confront. Blacks as well as whites commit criminal acts, and one of the underlying features of Pacific life rarely far from London’s mind is cannibalism. Despite modern reluctance to confront this controversial topic, even the most broad-minded among us would agree that consuming human flesh is not acceptable as an “alternative life style.” It may be tempting to excuse hideous tortures and murderous activities by discovering their “causes” in culture and tradition. The danger of providing such a rationale for cannibalism is that it exhibits the same kind of moral relativism considered inappropriate when used as an explanation of the white racism of the period. To say that only white people ought to be held to an objective ethical standard is itself a racist statement.

So marked has this discomfort become that some representatives of contemporary anthropology have actually argued that the practice of ritual cannibalism never, in fact, occurred. These critics, most notably the controversial anthropologist William Arens—whose interest in this argument has unwillingly earned him the nickname “Mr. Cannibalism”—have criticized the limited and sometimes dubious reliability of the evidence, concluding that the allegations arise from white racist fears of alterity, supplemented by testimony provided by islander informants whose waggish sense of humor may have prompted them to tell the wide-eyed white inquirers what they wanted to hear. Other scientists, however, who have studied aboriginal cultures in Australia and New Guinea, argue that the evidence for the pervasiveness of cannibalism is too strong to brush aside. Pacific expert Laurence R. Goldman concludes that the “articulation of regional patterns based on linguistic and historical associations between cultures . . . compel us to appreciate that the case for past cannibalism in parts of Papua New Guinea is no longer an issue for the majority of Melanesian scholars.”³⁴ Moreover, another indication of the persistence of the practice comes from medical science. Recent research has shown that kuru, a debilitating and fatal neurological condition observed in isolated populations in New Guinea, is caused only by eating human brains infected with this prion agent. The disease was first recognized in the early 1900s and achieved epidemic proportions in the 1960s, when over a thousand people died.³⁵

Because the question has not been studied with the same depth as in New Guinea, the practice of cannibalism in the Solomon Islands has not been verified. Whether the natives of the Solomons were cannibals or not, however, certainly Jack London had every reason to believe that they were. As an author though, he seems not to have been interested in placing blame for the excesses of violence or lack of morality on either side. It was in the interests of the Naturalist writer to maintain at least the emotive pose of objectivity. Though London does not use his authorial voice to mitigate or excuse the behavior of the natives, the careful reader will also notice that he refrains from doing likewise for his white characters. London’s stance in these tales is consistently even-handed, showing us the islanders as he found them and pulling no punches, in the same way that he describes the crimes of the white invaders. If there are few heroes in these tales, all of them happen to be islanders. Indeed, readers of London’s day who sought a sanitized version of the colonial scene might well have been shocked by the way the author refused to offer them heroic white characters, often choosing to show instead the point of view of people of color.

London, however, certainly was capable of taking the other perspective, as he did in his South Seas novel Adventure, written during the same period as the majority of the stories in this collection. Long regarded by London’s readers as a failure, Adventure tells the tale of a small group of white plantation managers who base their authority over a blackbirded work force on their unquestioned conviction of their own racial superiority. Owing to its apparently complete disregard for modern standards of political correctness—or even basic humanity—the novel seems shocking and insensitive today. Clarice Stasz notes that Adventure is a departure from the evenhandedness with which London examines racial conflict in his short fiction, pointing out its failure to use “comic rhetoric in ways that foster the effectiveness of related works.” Stasz further argues that missing in the novel but present in the short fiction is the successful depiction of “the ever-present threat of violence and disease, the corruption of the Whites, the concept of survival despite crude aggression.”³⁶

However gifted and insightful London was as a writer, still his understanding was limited by his own cultural background. But even to take the effort to describe the world through the eyes of nonwhite characters shows that London was (to use a self-congratulatory and chronocentric phrase) ahead of his time.³⁷

It is, of course, obviously—almost necessarily—true that the response of the white visitors at the turn of the twentieth century was without question biased and riddled with racism. After all, they had come in the first place, both entrepreneur and missionary, with the conviction of their own cultural and spiritual superiority. Both sought for different reasons to exploit or sublimate the cultures of the people they found. Both, consciously or unconsciously, often succeeded in exploiting and even eradicating the islands’ people as well.

Many readers coming to these wild, hell-bent-for-leather stories for the first time might not be aware that London’s anthropological and geographic details accurately depict the people, places, and customs of the region. Some of these details came from the Londons’ own experiences; others, from grisly accounts given them by eyewitnesses such as the missionary at Maluu, J. St. George Caulfeild.³⁸

Trophies of the old days are still visible on the islands today, as on the hill of the appropriately named Skull Island, in the Solomons’ Western Province, where human heads have been saved and stacked in a grisly tabernacle. For ten Solomon dollars you can hire a guide to visit it today. Some senior islanders, who obviously enjoy a good story, still recall with chuckling gusto the peculiar pleasures of man eating. In a recently filmed interview, Enos, a Vanuatu chief, with an unconscious dereliction of the past tense, explained the allure: “If you are champion—a strong man—then we will eat you because we will be strong like you. And we will use all your bones to make arrow to kill other people. Very sweet—better than all other meat. That’s what they say. . . . Cannibalism is finished about 1939. They eat some white man.”³⁹

Enos’s testimony, however, presents some intriguing challenges. First, though cannibalism may have declined in the region, colonial officials were still making arrests in Papua of groups caught in the act of carrying human meat away from a tribal raid as recently as the 1970s. Second, Enos’s psychoanalytic thesis in explaining cannibalism—the literal incorporation of the object of desire—is tainted by the failure of any modern anthropologist to find evidence of this belief in the cultures of practicing cannibals. A witty Papuan informant blandly responded, when told that a man might gain the strengths of another man by eating him, “If you eat a bird, can you fly?” The actual motivation for cannibalism appears instead to have been the victor’s expression of ultimate contempt for the defeated enemy.

Serious and thorough anthropological research indicates that even the most urgent contemporary desire for political correctness cannot gloss over the historical evidence of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and head-hunting throughout the Pacific, lasting for decades past the time of London’s fiction. But it is also true that white South Seas veterans often embellished the horrors of the island customs for newcomers. London actually made use of this practice in his short story “The Terrible Solomons.” Moreover, because he never witnessed a cannibal feast himself, it is certain that all Jack’s knowledge of cannibal activities was drawn from these sometimes mendacious old hands, supplemented by his reading of the experiences of other white visitors.

Jack and Charmian may also have heard other accounts of islander savagery that might have stemmed from misinterpretation. It is likely, for example, that white men seeing a collection of skulls in the interior of Malaita would not take the time to inquire about whose heads they were. Sensibly cautious white visitors would probably assume that these were the preserved heads of enemies—even though such collections were actually shrines and those of valued family members who had died—usually of natural causes.⁴⁰ But if the stories circulating about the headhunters of the Solomon Islands were sometimes exaggerated for effect, it seems to have been a widespread and quite sincere feeling that one’s life was constantly in danger in the region, whether islander or white visitor.

London’s stories set in the South Seas show the author’s interest in questions of race, culture, justice, and heroism. Though obviously refusing to ignore the violence committed by both sides, London accurately and consistently showed the islanders as individuals who had to deal, in one way or another, with white intrusions—of capitalist brutality, of inhumane legal systems, of foreign diseases, and of racist social practices. Ambivalent about the character of the white intruders, and sympathetic to the plight of islanders caught up in the grinding mill of European economic and religious expansion, London takes a stance in these stories that allows him to elicit from the reader a deep sense of uncertainty about the morality of the South Seas adventure itself.

Through what surely are the inexplicable vagaries of public taste, these stories have been overshadowed by the popularity of London’s Northland fiction, and many are hardly available to readers today. Few of them have received any scholarly attention whatever—and, when these stories have been discussed, they usually have been dismissed, occasionally with some asperity, often because of an apparently hasty and superficial reading of what are actually layered and densely ambiguous texts.⁴¹

London’s Pacific fiction reflects the political turmoil, economic piracy, physical violence, religious idealism, and racial antagonism of a remote and romantic location, where white men sought to wrest a fortune from a people for whom they often had little more than contempt. Jack London was there, and these stories emerging from his Pacific adventure demonstrate as clearly as any of his works his characteristic ability to tell riveting stories that are driven by social and philosophical themes.

Once apparently confident of the possible redemption of the colonialist enterprise, London ended by writing stories chronicling white penetration into the Solomon Islands that can scarcely be read without a wince. Like his literary hero Joseph Conrad, London became increasingly absorbed by the “fascination of the abomination.” In the weird and problematic motivations, the wild potential for moral corruption, the inhuman savagery of which both sides in the venal project were capable, and the stench and rot and meaninglessness at the core of this racial interaction, London found his own heart of darkness.

Source

From Jack London’s Tales of Cannibals and Headhunters (2006) by Gary Riedl and Thomas R. Tietze. Copyright © 2006 by University of New Mexico Press. Reprinted with permission of University of New Mexico Press.