Grove Koger
January 12 is the birthday of American novelist and short story writer Jack London, who was born on this day in 1876. In today’s entry in the series I’m calling “Sea Fever,” I talk about his final novel of the sea.
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The Mutiny of the Elsinore. Macmillan, 1914
On March 2, 1912, Jack London, his wife Charmian, their servant Nakata, and their fox terrier puppy Possum took passage on the four-masted bark Dirigo in Baltimore, bound for Seattle. London planned to spend his time working on a new novel, to be called The Valley of the Moon, but the voyage would provide material for yet another novel, The Mutiny of the Elsinore.
One of the last working “windjammers,” the Dirigo (above) was not rated to carry passengers, and although London paid for their passage, he and Charmian and Nakata were required to sign on as crew members, London as first mate, Charmian as stewardess, and Nakata as cabin boy. Aside from the savage gales that the Dirigo encountered as it rounded the notoriously stormy Cape Horn, the voyage was memorable for the many bedbugs that Charmian found in her bunk. Despite his ostensible rank of first mate, London himself spent many of the daylight hours perched on the mizzen-top, the platform built on top of the lowest section of the ship’s third, or mizzen, mast. (He also took a number of photographs of the ship, one of which you see a few paragraphs below.)
By the time the Dirigo reached Seattle on July 26, nearly five months after it had set sail, London had completed The Valley of the Moon with ten days to spare. But for our purposes, the most important result of the voyage was The Mutiny of the Elsinore, the ominously titled novel which was published two years later.
London’s narrator in Mutiny, the world-weary Pathurst, is taking his voyage around the Horn out of boredom, as his life has “lost its savour” and there is nothing he is “keen on.” Not only is he tired of his fellow-men, he has also tired of women. “I had endured them, but I had been too analytic of the faults of their primitiveness, of their almost ferocious devotion to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with them.” Pathurst is dismayed, then, to learn that the Elsinore is to have a female passenger—the captain’s daughter.
Despite Pathurst’s misgivings, Captain West himself strikes Pathurst as reassuringly competent, “as poised as a king or emperor.” Pike, the first mate and a “splendid figure of a man,” is a veteran of the legendary clipper ships that once loaded their precious cargo of tea at Hong Kong. However, Mellaire, the second mate, is a puzzle. Pathurst is “aware of the feeling that comes to one in the forest or jungle when he knows unseen wild eyes of hunting animals are spying upon him.”
And the crew? “[A] more wretched, miserable, disgusting group of men I had never seen in any slum,” observes Pathurst. “Their clothes were rags. Their faces were bloated, bloody, and dirty. I won’t say they were villainous. They were merely filthy and vile. They were vile of appearance, of speech, and action.” The Elsinore may be a sailing ship, but the glory days of sail, it seems clear, have passed.
We eventually learn more about Mellaire and exactly what kind of hunting animal he is, but only after Captain West makes a terrible miscalculation as the ship struggles—and struggles—to round the Cape. It is only later that the “ridiculous and grotesque” mutiny of the book’s title takes shape.
Biographers and critics have not been kind to The Mutiny of the Elsinore. In Wolf: The Lives of Jack London (Basic Books, 2010), James L. Haley mentions it in two sentences, while Earle Labor devotes only an end note to it in Jack London: An American Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), although he includes an appreciative comment by Bert Bender. And it’s only Bender, in Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, with a fine cover illustration by Tony Angell), who seems to appreciate the book’s qualities.
For Bender, the novel is notable for its picture of the “degenerated state” of sailing ships and their crews, and for London’s realization that mutiny is a natural feature of human evolution. For most readers, the novel’s qualities include London’s first-hand description of life at sea and particularly his treatment of the Elsinore’s desperate travails at Cape Horn. The novel’s major weakness is the presence of Captain West’s daughter, Margaret. Just as the presence of a female castaway weakens the final section of London’s most famous novel, The Sea Wolf (1904), so, too, Margaret and her evolving relationship with Pathurst are the novel’s most conventional elements. We may fault London for being too eager to give the reading public what it wanted, but it’s important to remember that he depended on that same public for his income.
I’ll conclude with a word about the fate of the Dirigo, for which I’m indebted to WreckSite. On the morning of May 31, 1917, near Eddystone Lighthouse, the Dirigo was torpedoed by a German submarine. A contingent of German sailors boarded the ship, seized her papers, and proceeded to sink her. The crew of the Dirigo were allowed to escape in a small boat, with the submarine captain advising them to “steer by the wind,” adding that the land was “not far off.” The sailors were subsequently rescued by a fishing boat and taken to the English port of Plymouth.
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