Popular Culture Review
dominance and entrepreneurial daring in the tropics” (Castille, “Adventure,”
333) and salvages the colonial dream that perished with Martin Eden in midfor an expanding, globalized market—much as Martin Eden himself has been
exploited to supply the bourgeois literary marketplace.
Both Martin Eden and Adventure are literary products of the cruise of
the Snark. In 1907, Jack London, his wife Charmian and a small crew had left
Oakland on what was intended to be an around-the-world voyage, beginning
who kept a sharp eye on the literary marketplace. Much as the hard Yukon
production. Again he would impose his iron will and employ his superb body to
master the overwhelming natural forces surrounding him. He would then turn
his physical achievements into texts for commercial distribution and monetize
his costly voyage on the Snark, his custom-built craft. However, because of
illness, breakdown and malaise, he abandoned the cruise in December 1908
in the British Solomon Islands, barely a third of the way around the globe.
Jack London, who had promoted himself as a perfect evolutionary
specimen, was a very sick man. He was suffering from rotting teeth, malarial
fevers, diarrhea, an ulcerated rectum, yaws (a bacterial disease that causes
lesions), and another frightening ailment that thickened parts of his skin with
silvery white scale (which he feared might be leprosy). London himself had
succumbed to “the very forces of ‘natural selection’ ironically and actually
represented by his deteriorating white skin” (Phillips 91). He was only 32 years
old, and he was humiliated by his physical degeneration in the green hell of
Melanesia. Even worse than his ailments was the cure. He treated himself
and his crew with a highly toxic mercury-chloride salt, applied to deep, open
sores. Giving up the cruise, the Londons took a steamer from Guadalcanal to
Sydney. There, Jack had rectal surgery and received arsenic treatments for
his mysterious skin disease, diagnosed as severe psoriasis, which causes
swathes of skin to peel off. At the hospital he also was given opium for pain
relief; this was the start of his drug dependency, which was severe by the time
of his death. Also, the mercury and arsenic “medical” treatments he received
almost certainly damaged his renal system. Chronic uremia led to kidney
and heart failure, bringing on his early death in 1916 at age 40 (Sinclair 157,
246; Reesman 110). Despite his collapse on the Snark—and the collapse of
his self-concept as an Aryan superman—the voyage was a success for texthis bestselling travel book The Cruise of the Snark (1911). He also wrote
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