Jack London Returns from His First Sea Venture
Today, August 26, 2012, marks the one hundred and nineteenth (119) anniversary of the day that seventeen-year-old Jack London returned from a eight-month seal-hunting voyage that ranged from the northern Pacific coast of the United States and Canada, and eventually to Japan.
On January 20, 1893, a week or so after his seventeenth birthday, London signed the articles that enrolled him as a merchant sailor on the hunting vessel Sophie Sutherland. London describes his adventures in his alcoholic memoirs, John Barleycorn, and the trip was the source of his very first published story, A Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan, which had been published by the San Francisco Morning Call newspaper on November 11, 1893, when he was still only seventeen.
With this trip and the subsequent narrative the seed was planted for a literary career that was fully launched in 1899 -- which included more than two hundred (200) short stories, twenty-three (23) novels, and several memoirs and nonfiction works -- and ended only with London's death at age forty in 1916.
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