August 26, 2009
Jack London, seal-skinner (1893)
On this day in 1893, a 17-year-old Jack London returned to San Francisco after a seal-hunting expedition on the Sophia Sutherland. He left a 17-year-old greenhorn whose experience with boats was limited to sailing in San Francisco Bay.
The ship had traveled to Hawaii, the remote islands off Japan, the Bering Straits, and Alaska. On their way out, the ship encountered a heavy storm in which he was lashed to the wheel for an hour’s shift to keep the ship on course.
At the seal-hunting grounds, London joined the crew in clubbing and skinning hundreds of white seals, the deal running red with blood and entrails, and watched as a school of sharks feasted on the meat tossed overboard. The sight disgusted him, and he used the experiences in his book “The Sea-Wolf”:
We ran to the north and west till we raised the coast of Japan and picked up with the great seal herd. Coming from no man knew where in the illimitable Pacific, it was traveling north on its annual migration to the rookeries of Bering Sea. And north we traveled with it, ravaging and destroying, flinging the naked carcasses to the shark, and salting down the skins, so that they might later adorn the fair shoulders of the women of the cities.When he returned, he supported his family by working in a jute mill, earning ten cents an hour for a 10-hour shift. That fall he earned his first money writing, winning a “Best Descriptive Article” contest run by the San Francisco Morning Call. His entry, "The Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan," earned him $25. After earning a dollar a day in the mill, small wonder he saw a more promising future writing.
But for the next year, he was a failure as a writer. Everything was rejected. He pawned his good suit, his typewriter and his bicycle to pay for postage. But the self-taught writer succeeded with publication in the Atlantic Monthly, and then book contract with Houghton Mifflin.Born: Zona Gale, novelist, playwright, Portage, Wis., 1874; John Buchan, novelist, biographer, historian, Perth, Perthshire, Scotland, 1875; Guillaume Apollinaire (ps. Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzki), poet, Rome, 1880; Earl Biggers, mystery author, Warren, Ohio, 1884; Christopher Isherwood, novelist, playwright, Disely, Cheshire, 1904; Julio Cortázar, novelist, short-story writer, Brussels, Belgium, 1914; Barbara Ehrenreich, feminist social critic, novelist, essayist, Butte, Mont., 1941; Will Shortz, New York Times crossword puzzle editor, Crawfordsville, Ind., 1952.
Died: Charles Scribner, publisher, editor, Lucerne, Switzerland, 1871; William James, psychologist, Chocorua, N.H., 1910; Frank Harris, novelist, critical essayist, memoirist, Nice, France, 1931; Franz Werfel, novelist, poet, playwright, Hollywood, 1945; Charles Lindbergh, aviator, memoirist, Maui, Hawaii, 1974; Mika Waltari, novelist, Helsinki, Finland, 1979; Tex Avery (ps. Fred Bean Avery), animator, Burbank, Calif., 1980; Irving Stone, novelist, Los Angeles, 1989; Evelyn Wood, educator, Tucson, Ariz., 1995.
Quote for the Day: “I never considered any career other than puzzles, and I was willing to endure a life of poverty to do this.” — Will Shortz, crossword puzzle creator, who was born today in 1952, and demonstrates the value of going your own way.
Also from “Writers 365”:
- G.B. Shaw’s The End of the Affair (1893)
- Oscar Wilde Blows It (1894)
- Stephen Crane’s Bitter Heart (1895)
- Stephen Crane: I Fought the Law and the Law Won (1896)
- Jack London catches gold fever (1897)
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