The Human Drift

Jack London

• Publisher: Read & Co. Classics
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781528712361
• eBook ISBN: 9781528787208
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1917, "The Human Drift" is a collection of essays and short sketches by Jack London, also including a number of plays and his introduction to Richard Henry Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast". The titular essay, "The Human Drift", explores humankind's spread across the continents throughout history and the predicted results and eventual end of this 'drift'. John Griffith London (1876 – 1916), commonly known as Jack London, was an American journalist, social activist, and novelist. He was an early pioneer of commercial magazine fiction, becoming one of the first globally-famous celebrity writers who were able to earn a large amount of money from their writing. London is famous for his contributions to early science fiction and also notably belonged to "The Crowd", a literary group an Francisco known for its radical members and ideas. Other notable works by this author include: "Martin Eden" (1909), "The Kempton-Wace Letters" (1903), and "The Call of the Wild" (1903). Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

SIX.

A CLASSIC OF THE SEA

Introduction to “Two Years before the Mast.”

Once in a hundred years is a book written that lives not alone for its own century but which becomes a document for the future centuries. Such a book is Dana’s. When Marryat’s and Cooper’s sea novels are gone to dust, stimulating and joyful as they have been to generations of men, still will remain “Two Years Before the Mast.”

Paradoxical as it may seem, Dana’s book is the classic of the sea, not because there was anything extraordinary about Dana, but for the precise contrary reason that he was just an ordinary, normal man, clear-seeing, hard-headed, controlled, fitted with adequate education to go about the work. He brought a trained mind to put down with untroubled vision what he saw of a certain phase of work-a-day life. There was nothing brilliant nor fly-away about him. He was not a genius. His heart never rode his head. He was neither overlorded by sentiment nor hag-ridden by imagination. Otherwise he might have been guilty of the beautiful exaggerations in Melville’s “Typee” or the imaginative orgies in the latter’s “Moby Dick.” It was Dana’s cool poise that saved him from being spread-eagled and flogged when two of his mates were so treated; it was his lack of abandon that prevented him from taking up permanently with the sea, that prevented him from seeing more than one poetical spot, and more than one romantic spot on all the coast of Old California. Yet these apparent defects were his strength. They enabled him magnificently to write, and for all time, the picture of the sea-life of his time.

Written close to the middle of the last century, such has been the revolution worked in man’s method of trafficking with the sea, that the life and conditions described in Dana’s book have passed utterly away. Gone are the crack clippers, the driving captains, the hard-bitten but efficient foremast hands. Remain only crawling cargo tanks, dirty tramps, greyhound liners, and a sombre, sordid type of sailing ship. The only records broken to-day by sailing vessels are those for slowness. They are no longer built for speed, nor are they manned before the mast by as sturdy a sailor stock, nor aft the mast are they officered by sail-carrying captains and driving mates.

Speed is left to the liners, who run the silk, and tea, and spices. Admiralty courts, boards of trade, and underwriters frown upon driving and sail-carrying. No more are the free-and-easy, dare-devil days, when fortunes were made in fast runs and lucky ventures, not alone for owners, but for captains as well. Nothing is ventured now. The risks of swift passages cannot be abided. Freights are calculated to the last least fraction of per cent. The captains do no speculating, no bargain-making for the owners. The latter attend to all this, and by wire and cable rake the ports of the seven seas in quest of cargoes, and through their agents make all business arrangements.

It has been learned that small crews only, and large carriers only, can return a decent interest on the investment. The inevitable corollary is that speed and spirit are at a discount. There is no discussion of the fact that in the sailing merchant marine the seamen, as a class, have sadly deteriorated. Men no longer sell farms to go to sea. But the time of which Dana writes was the heyday of fortune-making and adventure on the sea—with the full connotation of hardship and peril always attendant.

It was Dana’s fortune, for the sake of the picture, that the Pilgrim was an average ship, with an average crew and officers, and managed with average discipline. Even the hazing that took place after the California coast was reached, was of the average sort. The Pilgrim savoured not in any way of a hell-ship. The captain, while not the sweetest-natured man in the world, was only an average down-east driver, neither brilliant nor slovenly in his seamanship, neither cruel nor sentimental in the treatment of his men. While, on the one hand, there were no extra liberty days, no delicacies added to the meagre forecastle fare, nor grog or hot coffee on double watches, on the other hand the crew were not chronically crippled by the continual play of knuckle-dusters and belaying pins. Once, an...

Table of contents

• Jack London
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