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The Cruise Of The Snark (2000)

The Cruise of the Snark (2000)

Book Info

Author
Genre
Rating
3.68 of 5 Votes: 2
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ISBN
0924486465 (ISBN13: 9780924486463)
Language
English
Publisher
sheridan house

About book The Cruise Of The Snark (2000)

On April 23, 1907, Jack London sailed out of San Francisco Bay to Hawaii, accompanied by his wife and a small crew, aboard the ship he built, the Snark. The details of that journey, which would take London and crew throughout the South Pacific and ultimately to Australia, are recounted in The Cruise Of The Snark.On their journey, they encountered an amazing variety of hospitality from nearly everyone they met, the exception being the cannibals of the Solomon Islands. They also encountered an astonishing variety of illness, which ultimately forced London to call of the expedition.What’s interesting about this book is to look at what the South Pacific (and even the world in general) was like in 1907, especially in light of reading Diamond’s Guns, Germs & Steel. London maintains a sort of genial good nature throughout his writing about the voyage of the Snark but the diseases and illnesses he’s talking about were passed back and forth from outsiders to residents and from residents to outsiders. And those diseases and illnesses caught and carried by London and his crew could not have been easy to bear. They would develop fevers and live ulcers that ate their skin on an almost regular basis by the time their journey came to an end.The chapter on the leper colony on Molokai in Hawaii was particularly interesting. Until the disease was cured in the 40’s, all Hawaiians diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) were sent to a colony on the island of Molokai. This colony was the center of much sensationalist journalism, so much so that London claimed one resident asked him to set things straight by writing about what the colony was really like. London was obviously affected by the people he met on Molokai because his description has a loving quality to it.The other chapter that stood out for me was on surfing, how London saw it and how he learned to do it. Surfing was first observed by Europeans in 1767, but it’s still pretty groovy to read about a man learning to surf in 1907.And a great mystery was cleared up! London describes a group of natives from Tanna Island. “Before we could catch our breaths a swarm of black Tannese was alongside and aboard – grinning, apelike creatures with kinky hair and troubled eyes, wearing safety pins and clay pipes in their slitted ears…” That’s where the fashion came from! The island of Tanna! I thought at first London was calling something a safety pin that differed from what I understand to be a safety pin. However, research tells me the safety pin was invented (or reinvented, apparently) in 1849 by one Walter Hunt. That means those islanders very well could have been wearing safety pins! My one complaint is that the book is a bit jumbled in places and a little repetitive. The Cruise Of The Snark could use a good editing and some footnotes.Overall, a really interesting read.

The Cruise of the Snark By Jack London I read most of this book on the Journey home from Russia and it somehow seemed appropriate considering the start of our trip to be reading a book about a trip that had more than it's share of disasters.This Jack London book chronicles his attempt to go on a round the world trip with his second wife Charmaine in a boat of his own design and build. The trip was meant to last 7 years but was cut short to about 18 months in due to the accumulation of diseases and disasters befalling Jack and his crew.His first mistake was to try to build his own boat it went way over budget and didn't live up to Jacks hopes for the Snark, it was almost falling apart on the first leg of the journey and leaking where it was meant to be water tight.But his descriptions of the events as they unfold and the good times they had in going from San Francisco to Hawaii are totally gripping they then make the insane mistake of sailing on to the Marquesas that takes them through the doldrums and some of the toughest oceans on earth. Through good times in Tahiti and the Society Islands and then into the troubles that came in the new Hebrides and Soloman Islands it really sounds like places you would never want to go to, with horrible descriptions of all sorts of nasty fleash eating Ulcers and scratchy scratchy, as well as fevers caused by malaria and islanders that wanted there heads on platters.The fact that Jack never fully recovered from this trip and died a few years later adds to the sense of foreboding I got as I read this book. It is an absolute classic travel tale and my copy is published by National Geographic and a must for all travel junkies.

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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 visited as well. I also loved that his wife went on the ocean voyage with him. And last of all, I even like some of this politics. Back in my younger days I had a VW bug with a license plate that read, "The Snark." That is how much I loved London. I remember when I was driving to Glen Ellen to see his home one day, as I often had, a man stopped me to comment on my license plate, and I told him that I wanted to paint my car pale yellow, and he replied that boats that color sink. I never painted my car yellow, maybe for that reason; I painted it an alpine white, and it sank a few weeks later when I ran off the road into a wooden corral that meant to keep the horses inside. A neighbor stopped to help me keep the horses inside and my husband rebuilt the neighbor's corral. I should have painted my car yellow. Anyway, I spent many a day traveling from Berkeley to Glen Ellen, either alone or with friends, and we would spend the day at Jack London's home, going into the museum, walking the grounds, picnicking, and sitting by the lake. At that time I had only read "The Call of the Wild," and I was not impressed by it, not because of the way it was written but because of its rawness, its graphic details. For this same reason I don't read much of Ernest Hemingway but love the places he lived, although not his life. I wanted London's life. So while I read about the Snark at the Jack London museum, I never read another book by him. I did read his biography a few years ago and loved it. But this year I had decided to read "The Cruise of the Snark" and then onto some of his other works. I will also read more of Hemingway but plan to skim over the graphic details of bull fighting, etc. But this book was somewhat boring most of the time, which made it hard to want to pick it back up. I really had hoped to have learned much more about the natives, and I had also hoped that it would have been more adventuresome. It certainly was not "Kon-Tiki" or even "Paddle to the Amazon"--books that I recommend to all who love adventure. This book read like a ship's log, so it felt like to me that he had been keeping this log and then that is what he handed in to his publisher. Sure some of the stories were interesting, but that is all, just interesting, not exciting. I especially liked the story of Nature Man and then the story of their bouts with disease since they were both more interesting and ies were more developed as stories. The other stories seemed to go nowhere.
—josey

Looking over people's reviews and my own experience of recommending this book, I have found that people are on or off with it. I found it delightfully entertaining from London's adventures in the realm of ship building to nautical navigation it was THE adventure to do. You must consider, would you as a writer take on the open waters of the ocean? And with such curiosity and open discussion of the encounters with natives and experiences London does an excellent job of dictating his wonder. Also, it may have been the trip that led him toward his youthful demise as he contracts tropical diseases. Who knows, but it is certainly an interesting page in an outspoken writer's life.
—Jordan

I really loved this book, the trip was amazing, being it was so long ago andjust a unique thing to do at the time. It would be unique now as well. The onlyreason I did not give it 5 stars is because Jack London got sick, well, everyoneaboard his boat did, and had to abort the world cruise in Australia so wemissed out on all the interesting observations Jack would have made on the restof the trip. I also wish he had commented on his wife's feelings about making thetrip more than he did. Still, loved it!
—Linda

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