The Cruise of the Snark

First edition of this travel narrative with reproductions of the photographs Jack London took during his voyage, including one in color as frontispiece. Copy from the first printing.

Publisher's light blue binding, with a color depiction of the sailing ship “Snark” on the front cover, title and author in gilt on the front cover, smooth spine with gilt title, author and publisher. Very slight rubbing to the binding, otherwise a very fine copy.

In April 1907, Jack London set sail from San Francisco aboard a 45-foot sailboat, accompanied by his wife Charmian and a small crew. The name of this ketch, built at the writer's own expense, was inspired by Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark. The initial plan - a seven-year voyage around the world - was ambitious, and the learning was largely done on the job: London taught himself celestial navigation along the way.

The crossing of the Pacific took them first to Hawaii, then on to the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, Bora Bora, Fiji, Samoa and finally the Solomon Islands. The voyage was beset by practical difficulties - the construction of the boat, which was very costly, proved defective - and above all by serious health problems: in the Solomons, London contracted a skin disease that forced him to cut the expedition drastically short.

In 1909, the Snark was finally sold in Australia, at a loss, and the Londons returned to the United States, the voyage ending after a little over two years instead of the seven originally planned. The account Jack London drew from it, The Cruise of the Snark, brings together articles written as the adventure unfolded, first published in magazines before being compiled in book form.

In Hawaii, the Londons stayed on for several months. Jack then learned to surf under the patronage of the “Hawaiian Prophet” Alexander Hume Ford, an American from South Carolina who had fallen in love with the archipelago. Originally a sacred practice, surfing declined sharply from 1820 onwards, owing to the combined effect of missionary repression and epidemics that decimated the indigenous population. It revived in the early twentieth century thanks to a twofold movement: the cultural revalorization of the sport by the Hawaiian monarchy, then its transformation into a codified sport spread throughout the West. In 1908, Alexander Hume Ford founded the Outrigger Canoe Club, thereby institutionalizing the practice on the model of a Western-style sports club, and wrote several articles on the subject. Jack London, already a celebrated author, was among the very first to praise it in literary terms, helping to establish surfing in the Western imagination as a sport in its own right rather than an ethnographic curiosity.

The Hawaiian stay was also marked by the couple's visit to the leper colony on Molokai, where London, in the chapter he devotes to this experience, sought to refute the sensationalist depictions that the press of the day circulated about the fate of the patients. He describes an organized community with its churches, a bandstand, a shooting club, sports teams and medical facilities.

The photographic illustration is one of the distinguishing features of the work. An already experienced photographer, Jack London took aboard the Snark a whole arsenal of cameras, which were also used by Charmian and Martin Johnson, a member of the crew. Some four thousand photographs were brought back from the voyage, a large selection of which illustrates the printed text. This large pictorial material, unusual for a travel narrative of the period, contributed to the book's commercial success upon publication, showing its readers lands then almost unknown to the general Western public.

A fine copy of this travel narrative, illustrated with the numerous photographs taken during the crossing by Jack London and his companions, and whose essay on surfing is among the very first texts to celebrate this Polynesian practice as a sport.