"Aboard the Snark" by Jack London, 1907
"We had no engagements to keep, no trains to catch, and there were no morning newspapers over which to waste time."
In 1907 Jack London, his wife Charmian, and a small crew set sail on board his ketch the Snark from San Francisco Bay, visiting Hawaii and the South Pacific.
The world faded as the procession of the weeks marched by. The world faded until at last there ceased to be any world except the little world of the Snark, freighted with her seven souls and floating on the expanse of the waters. Our memories of the world, the great world, became like dreams of former lives we had lived somewhere before we came to be born on the Snark. After we had been out of fresh vegetables for some time, we mentioned such things in much the same way I have heard my father mention the vanished apples of his boyhood. Man is a creature of habit, and we on the Snark had got the habit of the Snark. Everything about her and aboard her was as a matter of course, and anything different would have been an irritation and an offence.
There was no way by which the great world could intrude. Our bell rang the hours, but no caller ever rang it. There were no guests to dinner, no telegrams, no insistent telephone jangles invading our privacy. We had no engagements to keep, no trains to catch, and there were no morning newspapers over which to waste time in learning what was happening to our fifteen hundred million other fellow-creatures.
But it was not dull. The affairs of our little world had to be regulated, and, unlike the great world, our world had to be steered in its journey through space. Also, there were cosmic disturbances to be encountered and baffled, such as do not afflict the big earth in its frictionless orbit through the windless void. And we never knew, from moment to moment, what was going to happen next. There were spice and variety enough and to spare.
From The Cruise of the Snark by Jack London, 1911, available on Amazon*
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More from Jack London:
Jack London’s story “The Nature Man” from The Cruise of the Snark (1911)
More sea stories:
Richard Henry Dana’s story “Loss of a Man” from Two Years Before the Mast (1840)
Richard Henry Dana’s story “A Flogging” from Two Years Before the Mast (1840)
Charles Dickens’s story “The Passage Home” from American Notes (1842)
Joshua Slocum’s story “Samoan Paradise” from Sailing Alone Around the World (1900)
Joshua Slocum’s story “Encountering Black Pedro” from Sailing Alone Around the World (1900)
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Image: Jack London's "The Snark," Port of Tahiti, 1907 by Alphonse Emile Sondag, circa 1920, private collection, public domain.