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EDITION POWER 27 Ye
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GUIDE
LANGUAGE
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LITERATURE

ALPACA-IN-CHIEF
Daniel Berdichevsky
I.
II.
III.
IV.
This guide breaks down the theme of water in literature and Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf
into bite-sized, easily digestible statements. Here are a few style notes for those new to
DemiDec:

▪ Bolded terms flag key terms and phrases. They are grouped and defined in the power
lists at the end of the guide for quick review.

▪ Additional information is flagged in a plain footnote that clarifies areas of vagueness

or inaccuracy in the guide, or as an Enrichment Fact for the curious. Additional
commentary, sarcasm, and humor can be found in signed footnotes.

Curriculum breakdown
1
15%

4
35% 2
10%
1
2
3
4

3
40%

Here are some study tips if you’re having trouble deciding how to start:

▪ If you have one month left, review the resource guides

▪ If you have one week left, look over your Power Guides (like this one!)

▪ If you have one day left, check out the Cram Kits, take a deep breath, and get some rest.

Good luck!
 ▪

Historical Overview: The Stories of Water

 Ancient Times and the Middle Ages
 Human origin stories often center on the importance of water
 Civilization emerged on the land near bodies of water
 The Ganges and Nile rivers, as well as the Mediterranean Sea, supported the birth
of culture on their banks
 The Ganges’s relevance to religion dates back more than 3,000 years
 Water is central to human story-telling because it is a crucial resource for every
civilization
 The seas provide food to fishers and the skies send rain to bless crops
 That water is such an important part of life justifies its importance as a part of
religious narratives
 In many cultures, these religious narratives seek to explain characteristics of water
 Traditionally, one significant trait of water is that it is fickle
 Gods that rule over waterways are often described in stories across cultures as
being vengeful or playful
 Water is often considered capricious
 People used the mood and temperament of these gods to explain weather
events and the features of local bodies of water
 Sea stories make up some of the earliest written works
 The Tale of the Ship-Wrecked Sailor was published around 1300 BCE in Egypt
 The story follows an official’s misadventure on the sea
 The Odyssey is a Greek epic poem attributed to Homer
 The poem dates to circa 800 BC
 The story follows Odysseus after the Trojan War
 He is journeying across the sea to return to his wife
 The Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, is the antagonist of the story
 Odysseus’s adventure includes many now-staples of the seafaring literature
genre, such as shipwrecks, sea monsters, and whirlpools
 Water also served as an inspiration to the intellectuals of the ancient world
 Greek philosopher Plato described water in two ways
 “The first form
of matter” “Liquid of the
whole verification”


Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer and mathematician, wrote Geographia in 150 CE
 The text included maps and a discussion about the size of the Atlantic and
Indian oceans
 Sea stories became more obviously religious during the Middle Ages
 Popular poems from the era reflected on God and explored spirituality through
water
Poem Date
The Seafarer 945 CE
The Voyage of Saint Brendan 1118 CE
The Pilgrim’s Sea Voyage and Sea Sickness N/A
 The economic power of water became increasingly clear
 Societies developed more sophisticated technology for navigation
 Larger and better ships spurred international trade
 Trade routes followed
 The Age of Discovery
 The Age of Discovery started during the fifteenth century
 Economic pressures and technological advancement opened opportunity
 Nations engaged in exploration and colonization on a scale not seen before
 The political strife of the time, as well as the beginning of new nations on the
Atlantic coast in Europe, made seafaring lucrative for merchants and explorers
 Contemporary writers increasingly focused on water
 The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye is an important early political poem from 1436 or
1437
 It argues that England should have governmental power over the seas
 It also proposes increasing the navy’s size and influence on trade
 Dutch lawyer and philosopher Hugo Grotius wrote Mare Liberum in 1609
 The text recommended against restricting sea trade
 Grotius wished to keep waters international
 The title translates to “Freedom of the Seas”
 English jurist John Selden wrote Mare Clausum1 in response
 This response was published in 1635
 The text argued that empires had a right to extend into the seas
 As sea voyages became more common, writers experimented with form
 John Milton wrote “Lycidas” in 1638
 The poem centers on a catastrophic shipwreck
 Edmund Waller explored island life in 1645 with “The Battle of the Summer
Islands”

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  Andrew Marvell wrote about the Caribbean islands
 He published his poem “Bermudas” in 1681
 William Shakespeare prominently featured water-related disasters in several of
his plays
 These include Twelfth Night, Pericles, and The Tempest
 The plays come from 1602, 1609, and 1623 respectively
 Literature during this time often featured water as a belligerent antagonist
 This literary period is called the Early Modern era
 Many works portrayed water as an overwhelming and antagonistic force
 The stories were often tragic
 The Eighteenth Century
 The development of industry focused on the seas
 Common people could participate in colonization
 During the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England, one popular new profession was
to embark on the seas in groups of two or three ships
 Colonial powers at the beginning of the era included Spain, Portugal, England,
France, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Prussia
 The United States did not launch a colonial effort until it achieved sovereignty
 The eighteenth century was well underway by that point
 Colonists and explorers spread the influence of their home country everywhere,
including the Americas, Oceania2, Asia, and Africa
 Soldiers, sailors, and missionaries were the first main groups of explorers
 By the turn of the century, North and South America were under the control of
colonial powers
 As time went on, Africa felt similar effects along its coasts
 The fervor of colonization spurred a new wave of literature steeped in water-related
excitement
 One of the first modern novels came from this approximate era:
 Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe in 1719
 The book was extremely popular
 It spawned many reprints
 Defoe published two other books with similar themes
 The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton catered
to the contemporary interest in piracy
 A General History of the Pyrates34 was not fiction but rather a biographic
collection that explored the lives of famous English pirates
 The wave of sea narratives continued through the rest of the century
 Tobias Smollett published The Adventures of Roderick Random in 1748
 Smollett himself was a navyman

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  The story follows a young Englishman and his experiences working on two
British ships
 Olaudah Equiano wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa in 1789
 Equiano’s memoir detailed his time as an enslaved person being transported
from Africa to the United States and then to England
 The book was published in London and met wide interest
 In 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
 The first-person narrative poem about a difficult sea journey was not well-liked
at the time but is famous now
 Colonization fever inspired many authors to write about life on the sea or events
related to the ocean
 It also further incentivized innovation in the ship-building industry
 Naval engineers in the United States and England experimented with steam power
 American experiments began on the North Atlantic seaboard, but quickly
moved west
 The Nineteenth Century
 Steam ships dominated the sea during the early nineteenth century
 They were faster, more reliable, and required fewer crew members than sail-driven
ships
 Around this time, older sail-driven ships were often converted to steam power or
scuttled entirely
 Submarines also debuted around this time
 Commercial water travel became even more affordable and common, and this further
increased interest in stories with related subjects

Classic Works of Nautical Fiction from the Nineteenth Century

Title Author(s) Year

The Journals of Lewis and Clark Lewis and Clark 1814
“Old Ironsides” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 1830
Two Years Before the Mast Richard Henry Dana Jr. 1834
“The Wreck of the Hesperus” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1842
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life Herman Melville 1846
Moby Dick, or The Whale Herman Melville 1851
Walden; or, Life in the Woods Henry David Thoreau 1854
“As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” Walt Whitman 1860
Toilers of the Sea Victor Hugo 1866
“Dover Beach” Matthew Arnold 1867
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne 1870
Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson 1882
Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain 1883
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884
Captain Courageous Rudyard Kipling 1896
“The Open Boat” Stephen Crane 1897
 Literary representations of nature and water evolved over the course of the century
 Romantic writers focused on the beauty and wonder of the natural world
 Naturalists and Realists took scientific, unflinching positions
 They were reacting against the Romantic awe at the force of water
 A new genre, nautical fiction,
mixed the styles of three
genres
 Nautical fiction had other
Adventure
names Historical
 It was also called naval, fiction

sea, and maritime

fiction Travel
 James Fenimore Cooper has narratives

been said to have produced

the first English nautical novel
 The text was The Pilot: A
Tale of the Sea, published
in 1824 Nautical fiction
 Cooper was a professional
sailor first
 The story was about a
naval pilot during the Revolutionary War
 Cooper differentiated his novel from others of the time by inverting the role of
water in the text
 Water was the safe, familiar place
 Land inhabited the role traditionally filled by water: foreign and dangerous
 The perspective of the novel looked toward the sea instead of the shore
 Cooper repeated this characteristic in his next two novels
 The Red Rover was published in 1827
 Afloat and Ashore was published in 1844
 Sea-looking narratives grew in popularity because of public interest in the topic
 Cooper’s success also helped
 These texts had two common characteristics

1. • Main action occuring on the open seas

• Conflict centered on the difficulties and
2.
dangers associated with sailing
 American authors Herman Melville and Maturin Murray Ballou wrote in this style
about whaling, fishing, and sailing
 Edgar Allen Poe wrote about a stowaway in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
  French author Eugene Sue channeled his naval experience into stories about
pirates and slavers
 Sue was directly inspired by Cooper
 French sailor and shipowner Edouard Corbiere wrote in this genre
 Other French maritime adventure novelists include Alexandre Dumas, Jules
Verne, and Victor Hugo
 Frederick Marryat may have been co-founder of the genre
 Marryat was an English navy officer
 He expanded on some of the themes in Cooper’s work
 Namely, these themes were heroism and proper conduct while at sea
 Marryat’s work inspired other veterans of the sea to write
 The Twentieth Century
 Literary modernism debuted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
 Modernist texts focused on the individual and often criticized Western morality
 This manifested as an extremely common trope in maritime literature

An individual at sea struggles

against his environment and
faces the diffculties of suvival
while learning about his
humanity

 The authors were rebelling against the superiority of a “civilized” lifestyle

Twentieth-Century Literature Building on the “Lone Figure at Sea” Trope

 Postmodernism followed World War II in the mid-twentieth century,

  Postmodern maritime literature used water and life at sea to explore the author’s
disillusionment

Twentieth Century Postmodern Literature Prominently Featuring Water

 Nautical fiction as a genre continued to burgeon during the twentieth century

Nautical Fiction of the Twentieth Century

 The Twenty-First Century

 Water has remained a popular narrative focus in the twenty-first century
 Water and its concomitant themes became increasingly political topics
 World-wide climate change inspired many authors to innovate with the
themes water often evokes
 The idea of a world with too much or too little water has provoked many literary
responses
 Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water, from 2010, explored Sudanese water
shortage
 Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, from 2015, was a sci-fi novel about the effect
of drought in the American Southwest caused by climate change
 Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, from 2017, explored the effects of rising
sea levels on New York City
 The protagonist of Jarrod and Neal Shusterman’s Dry, from 2018, was a teenage
girl facing drought in California
 A Diversity of Texts
 Water as a theme or centerpiece in literature can fit into essentially any genre
 This fact illustrates the centrality of water to human experience

Recurrent Themes and Symbols: The Meaning of Water

 Water’s universality has made it an extremely common element of storytelling
 As a symbolic element, water has a huge variety of connotations
 Life and Fertility
 Water represents life
 Today, scientists hold that life originated in the seas
 Religious creation myths also reinforce this theme
 The Enuma Elish, of Mesopotamia, is a creation story featuring the world’s
creation alongside two water gods
 In Norse legend, humanity came from water after the world unfroze
 According to Egyptian mythology, the god Hapi created the Nile river to make
life possible
 More recent stories have executed this theme differently
 In the nonfiction Sea Around Us and Under the Sea Wind, Rachel Carson
seeks to explain how vital the health of Earth’s oceans are
 J.G. Ballard’s 1964 The Drought explores the effects on society of reducing
access to water
 Water represents birth and fertility
 Fetuses grow in a watery amniotic sac
 These sacs break with a rush of water during labor or childbirth
 The connection between birth and water is quite intuitive
 J.C. Cooper’s An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols discusses the
relationship between birth and water
 Water has inherent connection to motherhood
 Water-related symbols and bodies of water are often associated with
femininity
 Water preserves life
  Human civilization depends on the regularity of the water cycle
 Rain has a historical connection to the divine because of its necessity to life
 Destruction
 Water symbolizes death
 Many cultures and religions have stories featuring water filling a destructive role,
often claiming many lives
 The Native American Chippewa tribe tell of a great flood that kills all but a few
 Nanabozho is the evil spirit credited with this act
 Chinese culture has the Gun-Yu myth
 In this story, a father and son make heroic efforts to mitigate damage from
a catastrophic flood
 Abrahamic religions have the Great Flood story in which God sends a
worldwide flood to kill the sinners
 The story presents water as cleansing the sin of the world, but it still
participates in the destruction motif
 Flood myths are largely absent from African cultures
 Water represents imbalance and chaos
 Anxiety about climate change has increased this meaning of water
 The chaos often manifests in stories about hurricanes
 Dave Egger’s 2009 book Zeitoun and Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 book Salvage the
Bones center on Hurricane Katrina
 Purity and Purification
 In stories and in life, water is a cleansing force
 Baptism in Christianity is said to wash away sin with blessed water
 In Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623), Lord and Lady Macbeth, kill their king
 Afterward they wash their hands to wash themselves of guilt symbolically
 Depth and the Unknown
 Water represents fear of the unknown
 Until the advent of submarine expeditions, deep water was mysterious
 Even today, the inaccessibility of the deep ocean renders it very difficult to study
 Canadian oceanographer Dr. Paul Snelgrove testifies that scientists know
more about the surface of Mars and the Moon than the ocean depths
 The deep water’s potential to contain anything has provoked anxiety for millennia
 Authors have drawn on this uncertainty for creative inspiration
 H. G. Wells wrote “The Sea Raiders” in 1896
 In the story, terrifying squid suddenly emerge from the ocean and
spontaneously disappear after wreaking havoc
 Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea features a monstrous submarine
roaming the ocean
 The creator of this submarine is named “Captain Nemo”
 Peter Benchley’s 1974 Jaws confronts readers5 with a large and vicious great
white shark
 Water represents the mind

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  The human psyche is not well understood and harbors unknown dangers, just like
deep water
 Authors often use water to reflect the circumstances of a character’s mind
 In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Captain Ahab’s sea-based obsession
represents the psyche’s unknowability
 Movement
 Water represents movement and change
 Rivers are associated with time
 A river’s water flows in one direction only
 Rivers also represent boundaries or liminal spaces
 A liminal space is a “doorway”
 In the story “A River Runs Through It,” rivers represent multiple kinds of
movement
 They represent constant change in the lives of the narrator and his brother
 Rivers represent crossing from life to death
 Water represents unrest
 Waves often represent the irritability of the ocean and its fickle, powerful nature
 Tides represent balance
 A body of water lacking tides or waves can represent either peace or stagnation
 Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century poem “Dover Beach” ties the speaker’s
mood to the motion of water
 Revelation and Release
 Water represents revelation and release
 Rain, and especially storms, symbolizes build-up and release
 This theme often accompanies characters’ gaining knowledge or the culmination
of a character’s personal conflict
 12 Angry Men, directed in 1954 by Reginald Rose, is a courtroom drama
 The story follows 12 jurors arguing about whether to convict a man
 A storm builds with the rising action and a downpour brings the climax
 ▪

Genre: A Historical Overview of Nautical Fiction

 Jack London published The Sea-Wolf in 1904
 The novel uses multiple genres, most importantly nautical fiction
 It is also an adventure story and psychological thriller
 Soon after it was published, The Sea-Wolf was well received
 The Guardian called “remarkable with freshness and vivacity”
 Historically, nautical literature contains several consistent tropes
 The genre often explores certain themes and archetypes
 nautical literature focuses on technical explanations of naval life
 Accuracy is particularly important to the genre
 The Pilot6 supposedly created because of the mistakes made in another
author’s novel
 Cooper apparently disliked Sir Walter Scott’s 1821 book The Pirates
 The Sea-Wolf tends to work within these tropes, rather than subvert them
 Nautical fiction writers tended to be men from colonial nations
 This fact carries significant philosophical implications
 Worldviews promoted in nautical literature often have colonial messages that
employ rhetoric closely related to white supremacy
 Masculinity
 Masculinity is a common theme in nautical literature
 Most nautical fiction is written by male authors
 Nautical narratives engage with traditional masculinity in similar ways
 The definition of traditional masculinity has shifted over time
 Trends in nautical literature reflect this
 Susan Bassnett says that these works mirror the notions of masculinity of the time
 Early works in the genre explored gentlemanliness, manners, and bravery
 Frederick Marryat’s works are good examples
 Later works portrayed a darker and more complex side of seafaring masculinity
 Literature from the mid-nineteenth century, such as 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea and Moby Dick, represent this change

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gentlemanliness, manners, darker and more complex
bravery masculinity
 Other texts focus instead on men’s social role
 William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth trilogy supplies a useful example
 Women are seldom present in nautical fiction stories
 When they do make an appearance, they occupy limited roles
 They are mostly passengers not engaged with the difficult maritime lifestyle
 Sometimes, they appear in stories as sex workers, damsels in distress, or
otherwise in ways that objectify their femininity
 Sometimes stories from this genre outright reject femininity
 These features often conflict with water’s archetypal feminine nature
 Class
 Class-related themes naturally appear in nautical literature
 The trades in nautical fiction are often violent, physically demanding, or both
 The demands of those trades made emotional distance and stoicism common
 In this way, traditional notions of masculinity are reinforced
 The difficulty of life at sea reserved it primarily for working-class men
 Those with the wealth to live comfortably chose not to subject themselves to the
conditions of sea life
 Characters in maritime fiction are typically either poor or pressed into service
 Class conflict also manifests in the differing value systems of those at sea
 The Sea-Wolf explores the conflict between the practical working-class and the
intellectual upper-class
 Industry and Capitalism
 Seafaring is, first and foremost, an economic pursuit
 Nautical literature relies on technical language to describe the myriad ways that men
at sea earn money
 In keeping with the theme of cutthroat capitalism, they often compete for
resources
 In The Sea-Wolf, they compete for seals
 Competition can take place between rival ships of entire countries
 Captain Ahab in Moby Dick chases a single-minded obsession
 Sacred Hunger and Feeding the Ghosts feature greedy, remorseless characters
 The authors of Sacred Hunger and Feeding the Ghosts are Barry Unsworth and
Fred D’Aguiar, respectively
 The attention to the details of capitalist industry found in nautical literature has mixed
effects
 The authors’ opinions about economic issues bleed into the work
 We can glimpse the economic climate and major philosophies of the time
 Race
 Maritime fiction often contains problematic and outdated relationships with race
 Common manifestations of this are slurs, slavery, harmful stereotypes,
infantilization of native cultures, and violence against people of color
 Early maritime literature often depicted people of color as uncivilized or chattel
  Joseph Conrad published books with notably racist content
 The N----- of the ‘Narcissus’ reveals its racism in the title
 Heart of Darkness depicted Africans and their enslavement in so racist a way that
many authors have petitioned for the text’s removal from Western reading lists
 Most notably, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe brought awareness to this issue
 Even nautical fiction with somewhat progressive themes tends to portray native
islanders as savage and cannibalistic
 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Moby-Dick are both guilty of this
 These racial issues come from white supremacy in the United States and Britain
 Most nautical literature came from these two countries at the height of colonialism
 Nautical literature became an implicit vehicle to dehumanize those of other races
 It was a tool to justify violence and slavery

A Superb Meteor: The Life and Adventures of Jack London

 London’s Infancy
 Jack London was born in San Francisco, California, on January 12, 1876
 His original name was John Griffith Chaney
 His mother was Flora Wellman and his father may have been astrologer William
Chaney
 Wellman claimed that Chaney abandoned her after she refused to obtain an
abortion
 She attempted suicide
 Virginia Prentiss cared for London for slightly less than a year after his birth
 Prentiss was a formerly enslaved woman
 She was a maternal figure long after she took care of him in his infancy
 Once Wellman had remarried, London reunited with her and took her new husband’s
name
 London’s Early Life
 Jack London grew up in the working class
 He worked his first jobs very early in his life
 These experiences inspired many of his novels and short stories
 He took his first job at thirteen years old, working in a cannery
 Eventually, he took out a loan to purchase a sloop
 He used his sailboat to poach oysters in the San Francisco Bay
 He called himself an “oyster pirate”
 His sloop became damaged after a few months
 London signed on to the California Fish Patrol
 This department is now called the California Department of Fish and Wildlife
 In 1893, he joined a sealing team bound for the coast of Japan
 This experience played a significant role when London wrote The Sea-Wolf in 1904
 London titled his first published work “Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan”
 This short story drew on his experiences as a sealer a few months prior
 The simultaneous economic depression in the United States made it difficult for
London to find reliable work
  After spending time jailed for vagrancy, London enrolled in high school
 Following high school, London went to the University of California, Berkeley
 The owner of local bar Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon in Oakland,
California helped London achieve this milestone
 While in university, London was a regular at the saloon
 Many of his stories draw inspiration from this time
 The saloon catered primarily to sailors, including Alexander McLean
 Alexander McLean inspired The Sea-Wolf’s Wolf Larsen
 Eventually, London dropped out of college for several reasons
 After finding newspaper articles revealing London’s parentage in 1897, he reached
out to Chaney
 Chaney denied being London’s father and accused Wellman of lying about the
circumstances of her pregnancy
 Financial difficulties also made continuing college unfeasible
 Very few working-class people went to college at that time
 He did not respect or admire his privileged classmates
 Yukon territory beckoned London
 The Yukon is in northwestern Canada
 He determined to mine for gold during the Klondike Gold Rush
 London returned home in 1898 with fewer than five dollars in gold
 While on his expedition, he listened to the stories that the other miners told
 These stories were the real prize of his time in the Yukon
 After his gold-rush bust, London focused on writing and having children
 He married Elizabeth “Bessie” Maddern in 1900
 He called her his Mother-Girl
 They married to have children, not out of love
 Joan arrived in 1901, and Bessie in 1902
 In the summer of 1903, London started an affair with Charmain Kittredge
 She was a close friend to London’s wife
 London’s romance with Kittredge modeled the romance in The Sea-Wolf
 Earle Labor explores this connection
 The tension prompted London to move his family to Glen Ellen, California
 He gained more time to work on The Sea-Wolf, too
 After London’s stint in Asia as a war correspondent, he and Bessie divorced
 Before London’s divorce finalized, he joined the Bohemian Club
 The club was a social circle of artists and authors
 It included Ambrose Bierce, John Muir, and b
 After London’s divorce, London remarried to Kittredge in 1905
 The two sailed together
 They took their yacht the Snark to Australia
 London dubbed Kittredge his “Mate-Woman”
 London’s Implicit and Explicit Beliefs
 Compared to contemporary nautical fiction, London’s portrayal of women was
somewhat progressive
 The protagonist of The Iron Heel is a woman
 Maud Brewster, in The Sea-Wolf, is one of few female characters in the genre
 Sexism still appears in much of his work
 London believed in the power of eugenics
 He supported forced sterilization for convicts and the developmentally disabled
 He believed that people of Anglo-Saxon heritage were superior to all other
people, including other white people
 People of Anglo-Saxon heritage come from England
 He even referred to Anglo-Saxon people as “the only true supermen”
 London advocated reducing the ability of the lower classes to reproduce
 He also believed that heredity explained class differences
 In other words, class differences existed because of inborn, inherited traits
 Most simply, poor people were poor because they had bad genes
 London was a white supremacist, albeit an idiosyncratic one
 He simultaneously believed that racism was a tool that the West used to
aggrandize itself and that people of color were inferior
 After calling racism self-righteous, he said “so be it”
 When immigration from Asia increased in the late nineteenth century, London
participated in the contemporary xenophobia
 He wrote “The Unparalleled Invasion”
 The story details world powers using biological warfare against China
because of China’s unchecked population growth
 London urged the white boxer Jim Jeffries to unseat black boxer and heavyweight
world champion Jack Johnson
 Jack Johnson earned his title in 1908
 He asked Jeffries to leave his alfalfa farm and rescue “The White Man”
 London advocated for socialism
 London joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1896
 Years later, he ran for the mayoral seat of Oakland as a part of the Socialist
Party of America
 He did not win, but
continued to write and
advocate for socialism arrest for
 His essay “How I Became a vagrancy
Socialist” explains the origin of his
working living
worldview conditions in conditions in
 London’s Literary Career the cannery the Klondike
 London’s first novel was The Cruise of
the Dazzler, published in 1902
 The target audience was children Socialism
and teenagers
 It was an adventure novel based on
London’s time hunting oysters
 London’s next work was The Call of
the Wild, published in 1903
 In 1904, London wrote and published The Sea-Wolf
  London also joined the San Francisco Examiner during 1904
 He was a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War
 President Roosevelt had to bring London back to the United States
 London was arrested numerous times in Japan and Korea
 London co-authored The Kempton-Wace Letters with Anna Strunsky
 London’s 1907 novel Before Adam promoted eugenics
 The plot centers on a fictional race of “Fire People” dominating other subgroups
of people through technological supremacy
 Human evolution is also a significant theme
 The Iron Heel is London’s political novel grappling with future economic tyranny in the
United States
 The novel predicts that the social and political environment, not technology, will
allow an oligarchy to gain power
 London’s Martin Eden was ostensibly a critique of American individualism
 Critics of his work suggested that it was anti-socialist
 London rejected this opinion
 Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf all focus on class
 In many instances, London had a glib attitude toward plagiarism
 He was unbothered by the accusation that he had plagiarized a speech from a
British magazine and inserted it into The Iron Heel
 He claimed that he made his living “turning journalism into literature”
 London’s The Call of the Wild bore similarities to Egerton Young’s My Dogs in
Northland, for which he was attacked
 London chose not to deny that he used Young’s work as a source
 London drew heavily on his experiences traveling
 His time at sea, in the Klondike, and traveling Japan and Hawaii were particularly
valuable fonts of creative inspiration
 London also used the people who were important to him as influences on his work
 Prentiss and his wives were competent, independent women
 These traits likely affected the relatively7 progressive attitude with which he
portrayed women in his stories
 London wrote several stories with empathetic depictions of people of color
 He liked Japanese culture
 His belief in white supremacy was clear nonetheless
 “The Mexican,” “The Chinago,” and “Koolau the Leper” show such beliefs
 London’s Work in Contemporary Context
 Jack London was a Naturalist and Realist
 The late nineteenth century saw readers’ attention shift from Romanticism to
Realism and Naturalism
 The American Civil War disillusioned people, prompting this shift
 Realists attempted to reflect reality as accurately as possible
 The Romantics had focused on portraying beauty and emotion
 Often, Realist stories centered on the difficult conditions of the lower class

7
 They also reached for objectivity and logic, often inspired by science
 Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser were four
influential realists
 The Realist movement frequently took a journalistic tone
 These four Realist writers had experience writing for newspapers
 Naturalist writing was related to but distinct from Realism
 Naturalists explored how an individual’s or group’s identity might come to be
 Often, it analyzed social structure in the context of heredity and environment
 Frank Norris is credited as the father of American Naturalism
 Norris was also a Bohemian Club member
 Naturalists were inspired by Charles Darwin
 They tried to use his models to explain social and economic phenomena
such as poverty
 Naturalist literature is often fatalistic
 It explores themes related to pessimism and survival
 The End of London’s Life and His Legacy
 London may have died by suicide or of any of a myriad of health complications
 He was an alcoholic
 His lifestyle made him prone to scurvy, dysentery, and more
 London died in 1916, aged 40, in great pain
 His ashes were scattered in Sonoma, California, near his Glen Ellen cabin
 He said he would rather be a “superb meteor” than die comfortably and in obscurity
 His legacy today lives on in the fame of many of his texts
 Modern reminders also attest to his life
 A California square, a mountain in British Columbia, a California state park in
Sonoma, and a lake in Eastern Russia are all named after him
 He inspired the Discovery Channel miniseries Klondike in 2014
 The U.S. Postal Service made him into a stamp in 1986
 He was part of the Great Americans series of stamps

Plot and Structure: Summarizing The Sea-Wolf

 General Synopsis
 Humphrey Van Weyden is the protagonist of The Sea-Wolf
 Van Weyden is a “soft,” academic type
 Captain Wolf Larsen is the antagonist in The Sea-Wolf
 He is also the character referred to in the story as “The Sea-Wolf”
 Larsen captures Humphrey and forces him to work as a seal hunter
 The story is about how Humphrey changes throughout his time on Larsen’s
vessel
 The story is linear, told chronologically from Humphrey’s perspective
 It uses a traditional dramatic structure
 Chapter One
 The story opens as Humphrey watches the crew members on a ferry
 He is a passenger sailing home from visiting a friend
  The ship is called the Martinez
 He is in San Francisco Bay
 Humphrey contemplates skill specialization
 Specialization allows those of different crafts to enjoy the fruits of each other’s
labor
 Another passenger interrupts his musings
 He is afraid that the Martinez will crash into another ship
 The ships do crash and Humphrey jumps into the cold water
 Before succumbing to unconsciousness, he realizes he is being pulled out to sea
 After he wakes up, he makes eye contact with someone on a passing ship
 The ship saves Humphrey
 Chapter Two
 Two sailors on the ship that saved him try to rouse him
 The sailors are friendly, noticing that Humphrey is wealthy
 Humphrey offers to tip one of them once he has dried off
 Humphrey is aboard the Ghost
 The ship is a schooner headed to Japan for seal-hunting
 A schooner is a type of masted ship
 The man who tells Humphrey that the captain is “Wolf” Larsen does not know
Larsen’s real name
 He also warns Humphrey to be on his guard around Larsen
 Humphrey investigates a commotion on deck once he has regained his faculties
 A man is dousing another supine man with water while the captain paces, agitated
 The man on his back is dying
 The captain appears large and strong
 The man dies after a short time
 He died of over-partying at the ship’s last stop
 Having two fewer hands angers the captain
 Chapter Three
 Larsen asks his crew to prepare to bury the dead man and suggests that Humphrey
perform a ceremony
 Humphrey objects by saying that he is not a preacher
 On prompting from the captain, Humphrey says that his occupation is
“gentleman,” which angers Larsen
 Humphrey fruitlessly asks to be taken to shore
 Larsen tells Humphrey that he looks weak and that working on the ship will
toughen him up
 Humphrey, again fruitlessly, requests to be taken to another passing ship
 Humphrey calls out to the passing ship offering money to save him
 Larsen tells the ambassador from the other ship that Humphrey is drunk, so the
other vessel sails off
 Humphrey realizes that Larsen is pressing him into service
 His first job is kitchen duty
 Larsen orders the dead man’s body be dumped into the sea and everyone returns to
their jobs
 Chapter Four
 The crew ceases treating Humphrey particularly well
 Thomas Mugridge dubs Humphrey “Hump,” and the nickname sticks
 Mugridge is the cook
 Humphrey finds his position disagreeable
 He injures himself on his first day of work
 A wave slams the ship, launching him against the deck and hurting his leg
 The other crewmembers have no sympathy for Humphrey’s plight
 Humphrey ruminates on his situation
 He feels debased because he believes himself to be above his work
 He is also frustrated by the perceived stupidity of his fellows
 Chapter Five
 The cook bothers and robs Humphrey
 After being assigned to tidy the captain’s quarters, Humphrey happens upon Larsen’s
library
 His collection includes Browning, Darwin, Shakespeare, and Tennyson
 Humphrey believes that Larsen is intelligent because of this library
 Humphrey confronts Larsen intending to discuss the cook’s robbery
 Despite being unsympathetic to Humphrey concerning the theft, the two bond
over a philosophical debate
 Chapter Six
 Humphrey gossips with another sailor, Johnson, and learns that Larsen is known to be
brutal and cruel
 One of the sails on the ship becomes jammed in the rigging
 Humphrey knows by now that there is a safer way and a more dangerous way of
resolving this issue
 The safer way is to lower the sail and hoist it again
 Larsen opts for the more dangerous way
 Larsen sends a yong sailor named Harrison up the rigging and refuses to let
him down until he loosens the jam, terrifying the boy
 After witnessing the captain’s display, Humphrey debates the intrinsic value of life
 Larsen rejects Humphrey’s position that life has inherent value
 Humphrey accuses Larsen of misunderstanding Darwin’s concept of survival of the
fittest
 He censures Larsen for dangerously sending the boy up the rigging
 Chapter Seven
 Larsen and Humphrey talk
 Humphrey watches the night sky
 Chapter Eight
 When the cook and captain gamble, Humphrey recognizes the money Mugridge stole
 Humphrey wants to get his money back
 His strategy is to discuss ethics with Larsen
 He intends to convince him to return the stolen money
 Larsen’s rejoinder cites Spencer, appealing to self-interest above all else
 Significantly, Larsen orders Mugridge to serve Larsen and Humphrey while they debate
  This order indicates a power shift in Humphrey’s favor
 Chapter Nine
 Larsen and Humphrey occupy their time in discussion
 Humphrey is temporarily relieved of his duties
 Mugridge is disgruntled at Larsen’s apparent favoritism for Humphrey, intimidates
Humphrey by sharpening a knife in plain view of Humphrey
 This intimidation tactic is extremely effective
 When another shipmate gives Humphrey with a knife of his own, Humphrey sharpens
his knife before Mugridge
 The tactic works
 Mugridge backs off from Humphrey
 Humphrey earns some clout among the crew
 Chapter Ten
 Larsen and Humphrey’s relationship deepens
 Humphrey compares it to that of a king and his jester
 Larsen enjoys the intellectual stimulation of their discussions
 Larsen suffers a migraine
 Humphrey assists Larsen in getting to his bed
 Meanwhile, Larsen gloats about inventing something
 Humphrey finds Larsen extremely beautiful at this point
 Humphrey asks Larsen why Larsen is not “great”
 Larsen attributes his lack of greatness to family history and conditions of his birth
 Larsen says that Humphrey knows Larsen better than any other man than Larsen’s
brother, “Death” Larsen
 Chapter Eleven
 The crew tells Humphrey that they will probably encounter Death Larsen
 The confrontation will be violent because Death and Wolf hate each other
 Larsen and Humphrey debate the Bible and Omar Khayyam
 Omar Khayyam was a twelfth-century Persian poet, philosopher, and
mathematician
 To make a point, Larsen strangles Humphrey until he falls unconscious
 Chapter Twelve
 The events of this chapter are explicitly described as intense and brutal
 When Johnson complains about the crew’s waterproof clothing, Larsen beats
Johnson savagely
 This outburst raises tensions
 Chapter Thirteen
 The cook explains his life and personal worldview to Humphrey
 Mugridge thinks that it was never possible for him to have a happy and satisfying
life
 Johnson’s recovery from Larsen’s beating progresses
 Humphrey listens to a confrontation between two crew members
 He happily meditates on his relative lack of enemies on the ship
 Larsen has another migraine
 Chapter Fourteen
 Humphrey thinks about the fact that his community lacks women
 He regrets taking for granted the feminine presence in his life
 The mate, Johanson, disappears during the night
 Larsen makes an appearance on deck soaked in blood
 Larsen then attempts to find the person who attacked him
 In the darkness below deck, seven crewmates attack Larsen
 Larsen wins the fight
 Chapter Fifteen
 Humphrey finds himself in a precarious position
 After the brawl, Humphrey had hidden in earshot of the failed mutineers
 The sailors discuss their dissatisfaction at the outcome and worry that Larsen will
discover who participated in the attempted coup
 Larsen then calls for Humphrey to come to deck, forcing Humphrey to exit his
hiding place
 The sailors do not attack Humphrey upon his emergence, but he promises not to tell
Larsen who attacked him
 Despite Humphrey’s wishes, Larsen replaces Johanson as mate with Humphrey
 Chapter Sixteen
 Humphrey adjusts to his matehood
 Larsen has yet another headache
 He endeavors to make his crew miserable nonetheless
 His wrath is especially directed to those he suspects had a hand in the failed mutiny
 Harrison and Kelly attempt to escape during the filling of the water barrels
 Henderson and Smoke shoot out their oars
 They return to the Ghost
 Johnson and Leach plan to mutiny again
 Leach expects his own death in the attempt
 He enlists Humphrey to give his father a goodbye message
 Chapter Seventeen
 Larsen’s ship finally approaches the coast of Japan
 Seals migrating toward the Bering Sea cross the Ghost’s path
 The ship mobilizes to kill the seals
 Suddenly, a storm sweeps the sea, endangering the lives of the sealers
 Larsen, Mugridge, and Humphrey take pains to save their sealers from the violent
storm
 Chapter Eighteen
 Larsen, Mugridge, and Humphrey managed only to save most of the crew by the time
the storm clears
 Larsen has another headache, forcing Humphrey into a leadership position
 Johnson and Leach escape the Ghost on a sealing vessel
 This act enrages Larsen
 The crew searches for Johnson and Leach’s lifeboat
 Humphrey considers risking violence to protect them
 They do find a lifeboat
  It does not contain either man
 Instead, they find the survivors of an unrelated shipwreck
 One of these survivors is a woman, Maud Brewster
 Larsen tasks Humphrey with looking after Brewster
 Brewster requests that Humphrey set her ashore
 Humphrey warns her not to expect sympathy from the captain
 Chapter Nineteen
 The rescued castaways are forcefully incorporated into the crew
 Humphrey threatens to kill Larsen if he harms Johnson and Leach
 He assumes they have been found
 Larsen promises not to “lay a hand on them”
 The Ghost encounters Johnson and Leach’s stolen vessel and chases them for hours
 The Ghost chases its prey into a storm, where Larsen loses track of the stolen boat
 Humphrey assumes that Johnson and Leach wrecked in the storm and drowned
 One of the men rescued shortly before the chase asks Humphrey to explain the
disturbing turn of events
 Humphrey blames Larsen’s character
 Humphrey implies a contradiction between Larsen’s promise and his course of action
 Larsen’s rejoinder asserts that he never laid a hand on them
 Humphrey forms an intent to be responsible for Brewster’s safety
 He does so even though he is unsure of his ability to be responsible for himself
 Chapter Twenty
 Brewster comes before the crew for the first time
 She asks when they will reach Japan
 Larsen tells her they will reach Japan in three or four months when the hunting
season is over
 Brewster calls this arrangement unfair
 Larsen points to Humphrey as an example of how serving on the Ghost
engenders character development
 He calls Humphrey an expert on fairness
 He hopes that Brewster learns the value of hard work
 She claims to work as a writer
 Humphrey realizes that he is familiar with some of Brewster’s writing
 He reviewed one of her books
 Humphrey and Brewster, in full view of Larsen, discuss literature and each other’s work
 Excluding Larsen from the conversation annoys Larsen
 Larsen proclaims himself intellectually inferior
 He says that for the purposes of their conversation, he “doesn’t count”
 Brewster and Humphrey worry that Larsen will punish them for their friendship
 Chapter Twenty-One
 Larsen is grumpy because of his intellectual exclusion during chapter twenty
 He takes out his rage on the cook
 Larsen uses an unkempt kitchen as pretense to bind Mugridge with a rope
 Larsen proceeds to toss him into the sea to be dragged along by the ship
 The sailors are delighted
  Brewster and Humphrey find Larsen’s outburst distasteful
 A shark attacks Mugridge while he is being dragged by a rope, taking off a foot
 Humphrey takes it upon himself to tend to Mugridge
 The other crew members are responsible for killing the shark
 Larsen expresses no remorse
 Chapter Twenty-Two
 Brewster confronts Humphrey about being complicit with the endemic violence on the
Ghost
 Humphrey gives her two pieces of advice for her safety
✓ stick with him
✓ feign enthusiasm
 Larsen interrupts their conversation to dismiss Humphrey after seeing the two
together
 As he walks away, he is relieved to see that Brewster appears to follow his advice
 Chapter Twenty-Three
 Larsen and Humphrey both develop romantic feelings for Brewster
 Humphrey and Brewster are alarmed by this development in Larsen
 Chapter Twenty-Four
 Two sailors make flirtatious advances on Brewster in the mess hall
 Larsen banishes them from the room in a fit of jealousy
 At the same moment, another sailor announces smoke from another ship visible in
the distance
 Initially, the crew worry about the possibility of a hostile Russian cruiser
 Instead, the distant vessel is Death Larsen’s Macedonia
 Death’s hunters spoil the harvest for the crew of the Ghost
 Brewster and Larsen argue about the philosophy of money
 Chapter Twenty-Five
 Death’s crew steal Larsen’s prey for five days before Larsen orders his crew to attack
their antagonists
 Larsen chases Death’s sealers and captures them on the Ghost
 Brewster unintentionally impresses Larsen by refusing to hide inside the ship
during the ordeal, dismaying Humphrey
 Larsen and Humphrey argue about who between them is braver
 Death, in his relatively new steam ship, chases the older Ghost once he discovers that
Larsen is capturing his crew
 Larsen directs the Ghost into a fog bank and orders the ship silent, escaping
successfully from Death’s chase
 Larsen’s captives are pressed into service on the Ghost
 Chapter Twenty-Six
 After the Ghost escaped into the fog, Humphrey tends to the wounded
 The crew of the Ghost remains silent in the fog bank, hiding from the Macedonia
 Humphrey and Brewster threaten to alert the Macedonia
 Larsen threatens any who call out with death
 Larsen makes a jealous remark alleging Brewster’s interest in Humphrey
 Larsen is jealous of their relationship
  The three discuss temptation
 Their debate refers to Milton and Khayyam again
 Humphrey goes to sleep but awakens to find Larsen attempting to sexually assault
Brewster
 Humphrey intervenes, bludgeoning Larsen
 Brewster intervenes in turn, preventing Humphrey from beating Larsen to death
 Larsen has a headache and is incapable of discerning his combatant
 He calls for Humphrey’s help after Humphrey is finished beating him
 Humphrey complies, helping Larsen back to his quarters
 Humphrey does not believe his or Brewster’s lives are secure
 Humphrey and Brewster smuggle supplies and take a lifeboat to escape the Ghost
 They compliment each others’ bravery
 Chapter Twenty-Seven
 In the stolen lifeboat, Brewster insists Humphrey allow her to steer
 He finds her beauty and power attractive
 He teaches her some of the nuances of sailing
 Humphrey estimates they will arrive on the shores of Japan in five days
 Chapter Twenty-Eight
 Inclement weather plague Humphrey and Brewster on their journey
 Brewster and Humphrey are unable to swim
 Reaching shore is difficult once they find land
 They see a herd of seals
 They infer there might be people around protecting the seals
 They dub the island they land on “Endeavor Island”
 Chapter Twenty-Nine
 Humphrey and Brewster realize they lack supplies once they set up camp
 After exploring, Humphrey finds another lifeboat, but no signs of life
 He is demoralized to think that others failed to survive on Endeavor island
 He chooses not to reveal this observation to Brewster
 Humphrey thinks that Larsen’s predictions about him were correct
 He also takes pride in being able to take care of the Brewster and himself
 Chapter Thirty
 To survive, Humphrey will hunt seals for food while Brewster will fashion a shelter
 Humphrey nearly reveals his feelings for Brewster
 Chapter Thirty-One
 They arduously complete their shelters
 Brewster has an ominous feeling of foreboding
 Chapter Thirty-Two
 Humphrey wakes up to find the Ghost beached outside of his tent
 His first thought is to mercy kill Brewster in her sleep
 Instead, he chooses to kill Larsen
 Humphrey equips his shotgun and furtively makes his way onto the beached vessel
 Humphrey discovers Larsen and they talk
 Larsen antagonizes Humphrey, attempting to get Humphrey to kill him
  Larsen tells Humphrey that Death caught up to the Ghost, took the crew, and
stranded Larsen in his ship
 Larsen has a migraine, so Humphrey takes provisions and goes back to camp for coffee
 Chapter Thirty-Three
 When Larsen does not disembark the ship, Brewster begins to fret
 She worries that he is dying, so Humphrey goes back onto the ship to check
 Humphrey finds Larsen, who appears to have gone blind, trying to take care of himself
 Larsen imagined himself to have set a trap for Humphrey, but he is wrong
 Chapter Thirty-Four
 Brewster and Humphrey consider Larsen to be an obstacle to their survival
 They would like to repair the ship and set sail, but Larsen attempts to forbid it
 Humphrey defies Larsen and quotes Larsen in the ensuing argument
 Larsen tells Humphrey he plans to die on the island
 Chapter Thirty-Five
 Despite an effort to watch Larsen, he manages to destroy much of the ship’s rigging
 Nevertheless, they persevere
 Chapter Thirty-Six
 Brewster and Humphrey use salvage from the island in their repair efforts
 The work is still long and difficult
 Larsen tries to damage the project
 Humphrey threatens to kill him, which successfully deters Larsen
 Brewster hears of Larsen’s further antagonism
 She suggests imprisoning him on the ship
 Larsen fakes a headache to get close to Humphrey during Humphrey’s and Brewster’s
conversation
 Despite being suspicious of Larsen’s headache, Humphrey yields to Brewster’s
appeal to help him
 Larsen tries to asphyxiate Humphrey
 Brewster almost bludgeons him with a seal club
 A sudden, real headache gets him first
 In the steerage cabin, Humphrey binds Larsen
 Chapter Thirty-Seven
 Humphrey and Brewster move their base of operations onto the Ghost
 They even go back to the rooms they inhabited before deserting
 Larsen’s headache becomes so severe that he loses all control of his right side
 He believes his illness to be due to a tumor or cancer of some kind
 Larsen regrets becoming too weak to kill Humphrey
 Humphrey undoes Larsen’s restraints
 He remains wary because Larsen’s feisty personality is still very much intact
 Larsen lights his bedding on fire with a lamp
 Humphrey and Brewster both detect this
 Humphrey finds Larsen in the smoke and prevents the fire from intensifying
 Larsen can no longer speak, forcing him to communicate via pen and paper
 Chapter Thirty-Eight
 Larsen’s condition worsens
  He cannot hold a pen
 He can only answer “yes” or “no” questions
 Larsen’s disintegration causes Brewster to break down into tears
 Humphrey finishes his repairs, making the Ghost seaworthy at last
 He checks on Larsen to find him alive but incapable of movement
 Chapter Thirty-Nine
 The three of them set sail for Japan
 Because there are only two capable sailors on the ship, the work is very difficult
 Poor weather worsens their situations
 Humphrey awakens one day to find Larsen has died
 Once the storm passes, Humphrey sews a canvas sleeve into a burial pod for Larsen
 Larsen’s burial at sea is reminiscent of the first death Humphrey witnessed
during his involuntary voyage
 Suddenly, Humphrey sees a United States Coast Guard ship
 They are rescued by the Coast Guard cutter
 A cutter is a type of masted ship
 Humphrey and Brewster kiss

Historical Context: London’s Sources of Inspiration

 London compared inspiration to something one must chase “with a club”
 It is not something that will arrive if one is patient
 Personal Context
 London modeled characters in The Sea-Wolf off people he met
 His frequent visits to Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon brought him into
contact with many sailors, including Alexander and Dan McLean
 The brothers were infamous for being brutally efficient seal hunters from
Canada
 That London modeled Wolf Larsen after Alexander McLean is readily apparent
when comparing Larsen’s traits to those London used to describe McLean
 One might speculate that Humphrey is based on London himself
 Both are intellectuals at heart, thrust into dangerous and exciting
misadventures
 London’s background as a sailor is, of course, absent in Humphrey
 London also based Maud Brewster on his wife, Charmaine Kittredge
 London also drew inspiration from events in his past
 He had experience on a sealing schooner just like the Ghost
 He traveled to Japan to hunt seals on the Sophia Sutherland in 1893
 He was also called “Wolf” by fellow crewmates
 Historical Context of the Setting
 Seal hunting had a complicated history by the time London wrote The Sea-Wolf
 Sea-faring industries boomed in the late 1800s
 The advent of the rifle aided the industry
 Though seal hunting was originally for survival among northern indigenous people,
it became widely popular for other practical reasons
  Seals supplied fat for lamps, cooking, soap, and leather treatment
 Their pelts and meat were useful in their own right
 Sealers killed hundreds of thousands of seals annually during the nineteenth
century
 Seal populations contracted
 Herds of seals became progressively rarer
 The industry grew more competitive
 The industry focused originally on the seals in the Atlantic, but focus shifted
toward Pacific seal populations in the late 1700s
 By the 1840s, sealing was reputed to be an extremely dangerous and risky profession
 This became truer once international bodies began regulating the profession
 The Bering Sea Dispute/ Bering Sea Controversy saw Great Britain, the United
States, and Russia negotiate sealing regulation between 1887 and 1890
 The United States’ position held that protecting seal populations was the
responsibility of the international community
 The dispute led to the creation of the Bering Sea Arbitration of 1893
 The compact protected a small area around the Pribilof Islands (Northern
Fur Seal Islands)
 It disallowed firearms and explosives
 Hunting was prohibited between May 1 to July 31
 Permits were necessary to hunt there legally
 The arbitration was largely ineffective
 Japan ignored the agreement completely
 Later, in 1911, the four nations formed a more strictly regulatory treaty
 This eventually dissolved
 Though these early measures didn’t directly protect marine mammals very
effectively, they set a precedent
 The United States ratified the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972
 This protected marine mammals and criminalized hunting seals
 That Wolf Larsen is described as a poacher cues indicates that some international
regulations exist
 There also seems to be a general disregard for these regulations
 The text likely takes place between when the book was written and when London
hunted seals, himself (between 1893 and 1904)
 These contextual elements raise the stakes for the characters and allow keen
readers to reevaluate some of Larsen’s actions
 A political undercurrent is introduced with the understanding that the actions
of the characters could have significant international consequences
 There is a distinct possibility that the crew return home without many spoils,
due to the reduced seal population
 This explains Larsen’s defensive attitude toward what he sees as “his”
hunting grounds, and his willingness to go to extremes
 Philosophical and Scientific Context
 Philosophical conflict in The Sea-Wolf is a driving force for the themes
  Larsen and Humphrey are written to be foils to each other, both in their role in the
story and as philosophical actors
 Larsen represents the bestial, selfish part of human nature
 He argues for the centrality of self-interest and views emotional and
physical strength as paramount
 He has a prodigious library including texts by Darwin and Shakespeare
 Humphrey represents the spiritual part of human nature
 He argues for the possibility of altruism and intrinsic goodness to mankind
 The two refer to many historical intellectuals and philosophers
 Darwin, Shakespeare, Khayyam, Herbert Spencer, Milton, Dowson, and
Browning are a few89
 Between 1896 and 1903, London read much from Marx, Darwin, Spencer,
Nietzsche, and more
 These thinkers strongly influenced London’s writing
 This was true most of all, according to London, for Nietzsche
 Larsen’s ideology and character arc draw on London’s understanding of Nietzsche
 Particularly, the deterioration of Larsen’s health is relevant to both Nietzsche and
London’s criticism of the philosopher
 Nietzsche had a severe mental breakdown in 1889
 Rumors held that his health problems originated from the psychic strain
imposed on him by his philosophizing
 London wrote Larsen partly to critique Nietzsche’s idea of the ubermensch
 The “ubermensch” was Nietzsche’s idea of a man who was so great and self-
guided that their existence justified the existence of the entire species
 This idea came from Nietzsche’s 1883 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
 It translates to “super-man”
 London’s representation of Nietzsche’s ideas often lacked nuance
 Larsen was outwardly racist, which Nietzsche would have scorned
 London’s position was that a superman would be materialistic and eventually
succumb when unable to resolve ideological contradictions
 Larsen is London’s best attempt to represent this idea
 Arthur Schopenhauer is another philosopher whose ideas permeate The Sea-Wolf
 Schopenhauer published two works pertinent to The Sea-Wolf
 The World as Will and Representation suggests that life is a constant
struggle to continue existing, for the individual and for the world
 This text was published first in 1818, and later expounded upon in 1844
 On the Basis of Morality outlines Schopenhauer’s understanding of the
universe as containing a universal justice
 The text argues that destruction is an intrinsic property of pleasure and its
pursuit

9
  Thus, a life focused on pursuing pleasure is largely meaningless
 Schopenhauer’s fix for this is to pursue restraint and asceticism
 To be ascetic is to quiet one’s need for pleasure
 Thus we negate pleasure’s destructive nature and reduce suffering
 Both Humphrey’s and Larsen’s ideologies draw on Schopenhauer’s works
 The focused primarily on the role of pleasure in an individual’s life
 Larsen latches on to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic outlook on the value of life
 He uses a lack of inherent value in life to justify his selfish lifestyle
 In chapters six and eight, Larsen applies this outlook to life and pleasure,
respectively
 Humphrey argues for the more humanistic side of Schopenhauer’s philosophy
 He argues that compassion is more important than pleasure
 Social Darwinism is the last main underpinning of the philosophy of The Sea-Wolf
 Social Darwinism held that social conditions were subject to evolutionary pressures
 Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species (1859)
 This seminal work analyzed the progression and divergence of finch
populations due to different environmental pressures
 From this text came the now-prevalent theory of evolution by natural
selection
 Herbert Spencer took Darwin’s theory and ran with it
 He wrote Principles of Biology in response, in which he coined the term
“survival of the fittest”
 This application of evolutionary theory to society brought about Social
Darwinism
 This philosophy was disputed in its time and now is entirely debunked
 Its principles revolved around the concept that society naturally rewards those
who exhibit positive traits
 The most intelligent thus assume leadership positions
 The implication is that the victor in Larsen and Humphrey’s metaphorical struggle
has the superior philosophy
 Chapters eight and ten mention and cite Darwin’s and Spencer’s work
 Literary Context
 The Sea-Wolf was penned during the Realist and Naturalist heyday
 That many themes and metaphors call back to Darwin and Spencer is one
manifestation of the Realist and Naturalist traditions
 Another key feature of Naturalist and Realist literature is the story’s focus on
survival against difficult conditions
 Humphrey must endure shipwrecks, social alienation among his crewmates,
living on an island, and philosophical sparring with Larsen
 Many characters fail to succeed on this front
 Larsen finds himself degraded into little more than a husk
 Johnson and Leach’s death after Larsen pursued them mercilessly into a
storm is another example
 Pessimism is commonly present in Naturalist writing
 This trait is common in The Sea-Wolf
  Hope is fleeting throughout the story
 Many characters believe something terribly sad to be immutably true about
their lives
 Each is arguably correct
 Humphrey never deserved painful, traumatizing months on the sea
 Larsen never rose to the greatness to which he aspired
 Mugridge failed to escape his destitution
 Johnson died, just as he predicted
 London’s objective, detached tone is characteristic of Naturalism
 The demanding, stressful work aboard the Ghost is never romanticized
 Rather, it is consistently described in such a way as to render in clear detail the
painful and unjust nature of life at sea
 Because Humphrey is the narrator, we might expect a sentimental tone with
frequent emotional sidebars
 The opposite ends up being true
 Humphrey notes mostly details about his difficult tasks and the conditions
under which he is expected to perform them
 The exception is Humphrey’s seeming fascination with Larsen’s body
 Humphrey also elaborately explains his disdain for Larsen’s
philosophical outlook
 Despite his miserable conditions, Humphrey acts deliberately and logically
 He also maintains emotional distance from all the other characters besides
Brewster and Larsen
 This distance, too, is characteristic of Naturalism

Characters: Key Players in The Sea-Wolf

 Characters in The Sea-Wolf
 London’s characters have philosophical and metaphorical functions
 Humphrey Van Weyden
 Van Weyden is our narrator and protagonist
 He undergoes a radical change throughout the novel
 He changes from a privileged idler to a hardworking man of action
 We learn early that he is wealthy
 He is a writer and scholar but does not seem to depend on these occupations
for his livelihood
 At first, he observes his surroundings with detachment
 He ignores a fellow passenger’s concerns aboard the Martinez
 The screams of frightened, drowning passengers annoy him
 His concern is only for himself—and barely
 He has never had to be responsible for anyone else
 He lives up to his accusations of being an “emotionless monster” and “analytical
demon”
 Van Weyden represents an elite detached from the struggles of the working-class
 When asked for his profession, he replies “gentleman”
 “Gentleman” is not a profession
 It means that his money comes from his inheritance
 He “stands on dead men’s legs”
 His money earns him respect from the crew of the Ghost at first
 Under Wolf Larsen’s regime, however, cash has no value
 Van Weyden loses his power
 Over the course of the book, he regains it
 Van Weyden toughens up over the course of the novel
 He shares that his friends call him “Sissy”
 He is appalled by the sailors’ cruelty
 Eventually, he becomes used to it
 The toughening up of his hands symbolizes this shift from soft to hard
 Toward the beginning of the novel, he says that doctors have noted the softness
and weakness of his muscles
 He notes with interest that they harden over the course of his labors
 His character hardens as well
 He becomes able to control his emotions
 He buries Wolf Larsen at sea at the end of the novel
 He uses the same words that Larsen used to bury a sailor in the first moments
of Van Weyden’s adventure
 Thus, we see that he has developed emotional callousness
 The changes in his name manifest the changes in his character

First aboard ship Beginning work Promoted to Devoted to Maud

• nameless • Hump Mate • Humphrey
• Mr. Van Weyden
 Despite these changes, Van Weyden does not alter his philosophical or ideological
convictions
 He believes in goodness and justice
 He only resorts to violence to save Maud
 He escapes nonviolently
 Despite many provocations, he does not kill Larsen
 He is deeply honorable
 His love for Maud remains hidden until he feels he will not be coercing her by
revealing it
 Van Weyden is a fundamentally good man
 He is privileged in wealth and status
 He also undergoes a character transformation that makes him admirable
 He implicitly critiques the cynicism and malice of Wolf Larsen
 Like Jack London, he is a scholar and also a brave adventurer
 Wolf Larsen
 Larsen is the novel’s antagonist
 He is a foil to Van Weyden
 He does not change over the course of the novel
 He never alters his convictions or his behavior
 He is strong and handsome
 He fights off seven men single-handedly
 Van Weyden frequently admire Larsen’s masculine beauty
 His face does not reflect his cruelty
 Unlike Van Weyden, Larsen is physical and animalistic
 He pays no heed to the rules of society
 He is governed only by desire
 His primary desire is for profit
 He is manipulative and capricious to people who end up under how power
 He effectively kidnaps Van Weyden and Brewster to teach them a lesson
 He throws Mugridge overboard
 He kidnaps the Death’s hunters
 His actions show him to exemplify capitalism “who steals my purse steals my
 He sacrifices life for financial gain right to live … For he steals my
 He frequently alludes to capitalist bread and meat and bed, and in
principles doing so imperils my life. There are
 The law of supply and demand governs his not enough soup-kitchens and
life bread-lines to go around, you
 Larsen embodies the ideology of Social know, and when men have
Darwinism nothing in their purses they usually
 He also appears to be an embodiment of die, and die miserably—unless
Nietzsche’s übermensch they are able to fill their purses
 His strength gives him the ability to rule pretty speedily”
over others
 He stays so strong that he is able to sabotage Van Weyden’s work even when
he is nearly on his deathbed
 Despite his brutality, Larsen is well-read and intelligent
 He is skilled at mathematics and invention
 His pet project is an accurate and easy-to-use navigation device
 His low birth has prevented him from rising in the world
 This fact is an expression of determinism
 In the waste of Larsen’s life, we can see the influence of Naturalism
 Naturalist works explore the effects of social position on human lives
 He was born in Norway to Danish parents
 He was raised on fish and put on a boat early
 All his brothers left to become fishermen
 He himself left home at 12 to become a cabin-boy
 Larsen never had the opportunity to explore other ways of life
 However, he still thinks of himself as superior
 London claimed to have written Larsen as a No man makes opportunity. All the
critique of Nietzsche great men ever did was to know it
 However, Larsen is easy to admire when it came to them … I should
 He is an anti-hero but also sympathetic have known the opportunity, but it
 Larsen claims that he is doing Van Weyden a never came”
favor
  He is not unusually cruel to Van Weyden
 He promotes him and engages him in intellectual conversation
 By the end of the novel, Larsen is an object of pity
 He is abandoned and sickly
 However, he is still full of life
 We can see something to admire in his indomitable will
 Maud Brewster
 Brewster is a mirror of Van Weyden
 She is a sheltered writer who is shocked by
Larsen and shipboard life
 Whereas Van Weyden has some laughable
qualities, Brewster is beyond reproach
 She is compassionate, sympathetic, brave, and
womanly (in the logic of the novel)
 Her appearance in the novel brings an innocent
perspective back to the ship
 She looks at the ship with fresh eyes
 We can see how much Van Weyden has
changed in the advice he gives her
 Brewster replaces Van Weyden as the weakest and
most feminine person aboard ship
 Unlike many other women in nautical novels, she
is a fully formed character
 Kittredge probably influenced her creation
 Van Weyden calls her “my woman, my mate”
 London called Kittridge “mate-woman”
 Brewster is a feminine ideal
 She is young and beautiful, but also wise and
intellectual
 In her own right, she is a successful writer
 She is not afraid of violence or hard work
 She remains relentlessly feminine
 It is no wonder that everyone seems to fall for her
 Van Weyden falls in love with her quickly
 She is also attractive to the hunters
 Wolf Larsen menaces her
 The struggle aboard the Ghost becomes truly
Darwinian
 The men are fighting for the chance to mate
 Her presence on board brings up the specter
of sexual selection
 Whomever Brewster chooses will implicitly be
the one whose genes will survive
 She chooses Van Weyden
 Thus, the Nietzschean superman fails
She is “mature, resourceful,
emotionally responsive, shrewd
in her assessment and control
of her environment, possessed
of great good humor, and
determined to survive. In all,
she is easily the most
impressive human being to set
foot on the Ghost. The men in
her world seem hopelessly
narrow, obsessive, self-
deceived, self-destructive,
solipsistic, and therefore, in
one way or another, doomed.”
—Forrest Robinson
Larsen’s eyes when he looks at
Brewster:
“ordinarily grey and harsh, they
were now warm and soft and
golden, and all a-dance with
tiny lights that dimmed and
faded, or welled up till the full
orbs were flooded with
glowing radiance
… “with Hump’s ascension—
and his victory in the battle for
the attentions of Maud—Wolf
simply becomes biologically
unnecessary, and like the
Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon
Men who went before him,
Wolf goes metaphorically
extinct at the end of the novel”
 The Seamen
 Although we do learn the names of many of the seamen, they are not fully rounded
characters
 They represent types you might find on a ship
 The dead man at the beginning of a novel smiles in death
 He seems defiant
 The British cook Mugridge represents class struggle
 Larsen has philosophical convictions about capitalism
 Mugridge embodies them
 At first, he tries to gain favor with Van Weyden
 Van Weyden says he has “memories of tips received in former lives”
 Later, he steals Van Weyden’s money “I never ‘ad no chance, not ‘arf
 Theft is a way of life a chance. ‘Oo was there to
 He is a tragic figure send me to school, or put
 Life has not been kind to him tommy in my ‘ungry belly, or
 He is a victim of poverty and circumstance wipe my bloody nose for me,
 In him, we see another figure of the w’en I was a kiddy? ‘Oo ever
novel’s determinism did anything for me, heh? ‘Oo,
 In contrast, Van Weyden will most likely I s’y?
survive his time aboard the Ghost just fine
 Mugridge spends most of the book injured or sick
 This physical infirmity mirrors his social condition
 Mugridge strikes the final blow
 He destroys the Ghost’s sails
 Johnson and Leach are the most admirable of the sailors
 They are not sheltered like Brewster and Van Weyden, but they are moral
 Their morality is more rough and violent
 They mutiny in order to overturn the violent Larsen
 Having to fight does not undermine their essential goodness
 It does, however, show that goodness does not always win
 Larsen does not kill them outright, but he causes their death by drowning
 He forces them to continue sailing in small boats during a terrible storm
 Leach knows that he will die
 He asks Van Weyden to carry a message to his father
 Death Larsen is Wolf Larsen’s brother
 As his name suggests, he is even crueler than his brother
 The two are fierce enemies
 Unlike Wolf, Death is uneducated
 Wolf envies him his ignorance
 Wolf blames education for making him miserable
 At first, Wolf seems to best Death by trapping his hunters
 This occurs after Death has used his many ships to block Wolf’s hunters
 In the end, Death takes his revenge
Themes: Persistent Motifs in The Sea-Wolf
 The Sea-Wolf as a philosophical novel
 Despite the plot’s adventure, The Sea-Wolf grapples with many philosophical, moral,
and ideological issues
 Philosophy
 The Sea-Wolf grapples with Nietzsche’s work
 London offers an alternative to the super-man
 He explores the implications of Darwinism
 Darwin’s theory of evolution seemed to suggest that species improve over time10
 Wolf is an “unevolved” man
 We can see this trait in his animalistic name
 He has no trappings of civilization
 He relies on instinct, self-interest, and amorality
 In contrast, Van Weyden is perhaps “overevolved”
 He is too civilized and consequently soft
 He does not and need not work
 However, he proves himself capable of change
 He comes to see that violence does have some benefits
 Larsen also learns more about civilization through his reading
 However, he does not change
 In the end, Brewster chooses Van Weyden
 Thus, London suggests that the ability to change and combine both
brutality and civilization is the winning combination
 Masculinity and Femininity
 London’s letters show that he was interested in questions of masculinity and femininity
 Larsen is a conventional male
 He is strong and physical
 Violence is his answer to most problems
 At the same time, he is intelligent and London was interested “in
intellectual showing a man and a woman
 He is particularly adept with math, science, who complement each other in
and philosophy an ideal androgynous union
 He seems to lack emotions because each has a sense of
 His decisions rely on logic and individual identity that
detachment transcends conventional
 He is also very handsome concepts of gender roles”
 Van Weyden is so “feminine” that he has the nickname “Sissy”
 His muscles are “small and soft, like a woman’s”
 He admires Larsen’s appearance and calls him “beautiful”
 He is not overly emotional but he does show compassion and concern for others
 The two men fall on opposite ends of a continuum
 Neither man is ashamed of himself
 Van Weyden is teased for his weakness, but he does not condemn himself

10
 He continues to value himself
 Even when he becomes stronger, he remains “soft” in personality
 Larsen’s death shows clearly where London’s values lie
 Brewster is also not a conventional woman “We may be feeble
 She is neither passive nor continually in distress land-creatures without
 These qualities seem to increase her desirability to legs, but we can show
men Captain Larsen that we
 We see that there are many ways to be a are at least as brave as
woman he”
 She continually seeks to prove her strength

refuses to hide demands to works hard on

helps to sail
during the row during the Endeavor
the Ghost
skirmishes escape Island
 She is most likely based on Kittredge
 Kittredge and other women in London’s life showed him that women could be
strong and independent
 Capitalism and Class
 London was a socialist
 He had early and brutal experience of class conflict
 From an early age, he worked in a variety of low-wage and dangerous jobs
 Van Weyden represents the ruling class
 When the novel opens, he has been visiting a friend’s summer home
 All his wants and needs are satisfied
 Money can buy him anything
 He tries to buy his freedom for 1,000 dollars
 In contrast, the men aboard ship must work
 They can only survive if their trip is successful
 The need to survive means that they must take positions aboard the Macedonia
even though they know of Larsen’s brutality
 The Sea-Wolf is explicit about the difficulty of shipboard life
 Van Weyden injures his leg when a great wave throws him against the deck
 Violence breaks out among the sailors
 Hunters defend their grounds with guns
 Larsen captures and coerces sailors to work
 He sends a young sailor up into the rigging
 This violence takes place in the service of woman’s fashion
 Van Weyden says that it occurs “for women’s sake”
 Women wear sealskin capes and muffs11
 Larsen’s philosophy encapsulates the law of supply and demand
 He undermines the sacredness of life by claiming that life is low-value because it
is so abundant
 Because he does not value life, he spends his men’s life in pursuit of his aims
 Implicitly, capitalism works in the same way

11
  Capitalist bosses exploit cheap and abundant labor in order to provide useless
goods
 Taken to its extreme, capitalism devalues human life
 Taken to its extreme, capitalism discounts suffering in the name of profit
 Fairness and Determinism
 The backgrounds of the different characters allow The Sea-Wolf to explore the role of
fairness in human outlines
 People are born into different circumstances
 Generally, the conditions between them widen over time
 Larsen regrets that he never had the opportunity to become a great man
 Mugridge claims that life has been unfair to him
 Van Weyden agrees
 Brewster says that it is unfair that she has ended up on the Ghost
 We see that, in many cases, the characters are right to notice the unfairness
 Their life circumstances are mostly beyond their control

Water
 Water in The Sea-Wolf
 The Sea-Wolf is a nautical novel
 Thus, water is crucial to the story
 Water creates the fog that leads to the Martinez’s shipwreck
 Water destabilizes Van Weyden
 It results in his hardship, changes, and victory
 The novel focuses on the maritime industry of seal-hunting
 In its detailing of life aboard a seal-ship, it shows the economic importance of the
sea
 Water also serves many literary functions
 It is the basis of character development
 It also becomes a character in its own right
 It is capricious and fickle
 It hands him over to Wolf Larsen but also provides the means of his escape
 The characters cannot walk away from the ship
 The water surrounds them
 Setting
 The novel takes place aboard the Ghost and on Endeavor Island
 The ocean is crucial to both environments
 The sea isolates both settings
 It prevents Van Weyden from escaping
 The water forms a barrier between the Ghost and civilization
 Van Weyden must learn to function in this new element
 He must learn to dodge the waves and sail the ship
 He must master the water to escape
 The Ghost sails the North Pacific
 The Pacific is the world’s largest and deepest ocean
 Conditions vary widely

 The North Pacific is harsher than the South
 The winds are fickle
 The novel takes place during the Bering Sea Dispute
 Harbor seals, elephant seals, fur seals, and northern fur seals all called the North
Pacific home
 Hunting had tanked their numbers by the late nineteenth century
 Most hunting had moved to the North Atlantic
 The novel thus takes place in a setting of scarcity and possible illegality
 The North Pacific is also home to many shark species
 This menace adds to the danger
 Imagery
 Naturalist and nautical literature tends to eschew excess description
 However, London often describes the sea with great detail and flair
 He also uses elaborate language to describe Wolf Larsen’s body

I steal odd moments to gaze and gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the
world possessed. Above, the sky is stainless blue—blue as the sea itself, which under the
forefoot is of the colour and sheen of azure satin. All around the horizon are pale, fleecy
clouds, never changing, never moving, like a silver setting for the flawless turquoise sky.

The eyes—and it was my destiny to know them well—were large and handsome, wide apart as
the true artist’s are wide, sheltering under a heavy brow and arched over by thick black eyebrows.
The eyes themselves were of that baffling protean grey which is never twice the same; which runs
through many shades and colourings like intershot silk in sunshine; which is grey, dark and light,
and greenish-grey, and sometimes of the clear azure of the deep sea. They were eyes that
masked the soul with a thousand guises, and that sometimes opened, at rare moments, and
allowed it to rush up as though it were about to fare forth nakedly into the world on some
wonderful adventure,—eyes that could brood with the hopeless sombreness of leaden skies; that
could snap and crackle points of fire like those which sparkle from a whirling sword; that could
grow chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that could warm and soften and be all a-dance
with love-lights, intense and masculine, luring and compelling, which at the same time fascinate
and dominate women till they surrender in a gladness of joy and of relief and sacrifice.

 Van Weyden hates his forced labor aboard the ship

 He still manages to find great beauty in the sea
 He also acknowledges the sea’s great power and brutality
 It nearly kills him
 It also strands him aboard the Ghost
 It does kill Leach and Johnson
 The sea is both protagonist and antagonist
 London describes Larsen’s appearance with great detail and nearly Romantic imagery
 He explores the interrelationship between appearance and character
 These descriptions allow him to connect character to environment
 They link man and nature
 The bodies and sea seem to be interconnected
  Wolf Larsen’s face is “aglow … as the sea itself”
 Mugridge’s eyes “[swim] like lazy summer seas
 Symbolism
 Water represents the duality of nature
 It gives life
 The seals support the men
 The water allows Van Weyden to live
 It baptizes him into a new life aboard the Ghost
 It also takes life
 A sailor is buried right after Van Weyden is rescued
 Water takes different weather-related forms
 Fogs and storms occur repeatedly
 They obscure the sailors’ sight
 They also represent the unknown
 The Martinez collides with another ship in the San Francisco Bay
 Johnson and Leach are driven into a haze that becomes a violent storm
 It envelops them in death
 Larsen dies as the rebuilt Ghost fights its way through a storm
 Ships represent different ways of life
 The Martinez represents Van Weyden’s carefree, privileged existence
 It enters the fog carelessly
 When it wrecks, Van Weyden’s old life also drowns
 The Ghost represents hardship and struggle
 It takes several sailors from death to life
 For Van Weyden and Brewster, it also represents adventure
 This adventure changes them
 It takes away their privilege but gives them new life and courage
 Style and Genre
 As a nautical novel, the Sea-Wolf opens on and remains at sea
 It takes place on the Pacific Ocean
 It is set amid seal-hunters
 Its world of seal-hunting is on the decline
 It also engages with masculinity and class
 Like many nautical novels, it is told from a white Anglo perspective
 By making his main character a non-sailor, London is able to introduce and explain
many nautical terms in a natural way
 The novel represents many different perspectives of life on a ship
 It also allows London to explore philosophical questions that occupied many
people during the early twentieth century
 It brought those questions to a wide audience
 When we read it today, we can still consider the implications of a life determined by
water
AUTHORS—LITERARY
 Alexandre Dumas (15)
 Alistair MacLean (15)
 Ambrose Bierce (25)
 Andrew Marvell (12)
 Anna Strunsky (25)
 Mark Twain (14, 27)
 John Muir (25)
 Lewis and Clark (14)
 Barry Unsworth (23)
 C.S. Forester (15)
 Robert Browning (29, 37)
 Chinua Achebe (23)
 Charles Nordhoff and James
Norman Hall (15)
 Daniel Defoe (13)
 Dave Eggers (18)
 Ernest Dowson (37)
 Edgar Allen Poe (15)
 Edmund Waller (12)
 Edouard Corbière (15)
 Erskine Childers (15)
 Eugène Sue (15)
 Frank Norris (25, 27)
 Frans G. Bengtsson
 Fred D’Aguiar
French writer of nautical fiction
Author of H.M.S. Ulysses (1955)
Writer and member of the Bohemian Club
Seventeenth-century English poet who wrote “Bermudas”
Author with whom Jack London co-wrote The Kempton-Wace
Letters
Realist American author of many novels set on the Mississippi
River, including
Naturalist and writer; member of the Bohemian Club
Explorers who traveled to the Pacific coast after the Louisiana
Purchase and recorded their observations
Author of Sacred Hunger, a nautical novel with a greedy and
heartless protagonist
Author of Horatio Hornblower series (1947-1967)
Nineteenth-century poet whose complex philosophical works
interest Wolf Larsen
Nigerian writer who called for the removal of Joseph Conrad’s The
Heart of Darkness from Western reading lists
Authors of the Bounty trilogy (1936)
Eighteenth-century novelist and writer of Robinson Crusoe as well
as several other nautical texts
Author of Hurricane Katrina novel Zeitoun (2009)
late-nineteenth-century Decadent poet; Brewster recites lines by
Dowson to Wolf Larsen
Author of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, about a stowaway
Author of “The Battle of the Summer Islands” (1645)
French sailor and shipowner who wrote many maritime novels
Author of Riddle of the Sands (1903)
French author inspired by James Fenimore Cooper; he used his own
naval experience to write books about piracy and slavery
Author and member of the Bohemian Club; often considered the
father of American Naturalism
Author of 1941 work of nautical fiction Röde Orm/ The Long Ships
Author of Feeding the Ghosts, a work of nautical fiction featuring a
greedy and heartless character
 Frederick Marryat (15, 21)
 Gore Vidal (15)
 H. G. Wells (19)
 H. M. Tomlinson (15)
 Hammond Innes (15)
 Hans Kirk (15)
 Herman Melville (14, 15, 20,
22)
 Herman Wouk (15)
 Homer (11)
 Henry David Thoreau (14)
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(14)
 J.G. Ballard (17)
 James Fenimore Cooper (14-
15, 21)
 Jarrod and Neal Shusterman
 Jesmyn Ward (18)
 John Milton (12, 33, 37)
 Joseph Conrad (15, 23)
 Jules Verne (14, 15, 29)
 Kim Stanley Robinson (15, 18)
 Linda Sue Park
 Matthew Arnold (14, 20)
 Maturin Murray Ballou (15)
 Nicholas Monsarrat (15)
 Olaudah Equiano (13)
 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
(14)
 Paolo Bacigalupi (16)
Former English Royal Navy officer who wrote early and perhaps
foundational works of nautical literature; his tests emphasized the
bravery and gentlemanliness of masculinity
Author of 1946 work of nautical fiction Williwaw
Author of 1896 short story “The Sea Raiders” about man-eating
squid who terrorize a coastal community
Author of 1927 work of nautical fiction Gallions Reach
Author of 1956 work of nautical fiction The Wreck of the Mary Deare
Author of 1928 work of nautical fiction The Fishermen
Author of Moby-Dick, Typee, and other nautical novels
Author of The Caine Mutiny (1951)
Supposed author of The Odyssey, an epic seafaring tale from c. 800
BCE
Author of Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854)
Author of “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (1842)
Author of The Drought (1964)
Author of The Pilot (1824) and probable founder of English nautical
fiction; write detailed and accurate novels about heroism at sea
Authors of 2018 novel Dry
Author of the Hurricane Katrine novel Salvage the Bones (2011)
Seventeenth-century poet; wrote “Lycidas” about the death of a
friend in a shipwreck
Nineteenth-century writer whose works, many of them nautical,
often expressed highly racist viewpoints
French writer of nautical and adventure novels; author of 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea
Author of New York 2140 (2017), about a flooded New York City
Author of A Long Walk to Water (2010) about the Sudanese water
crisis
Nineteenth-century poet; author of “Dover Beach”
American author of nautical fiction
Author of 1947 novel H. M. S. Marlborough Will Enter Harbor and
The Cruel Sea (1951)
Enslaved man whose 1798 narrative of captivity and the
international slave trade was widely read
Author of “Old Ironsides” (1830)
Author of Ship Breaker (2010) and Water Knife (2015), about
drought in the American Southwest
 Patrick O’Brian (15-16)
 Peter Benchley (19)
 Rafael Sabatini (15)
 Reginald Rose (20)
 Richard Henry Dana Jr. (14)
 Richard Hughes (15)
 Robert Louis Stevenson (14)
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (13)
 William Shakespeare (12, 29,
37)
 Sir Walter Scott (21)
 Stephen Crane (14)
 Alfred Tennyson (29)
 Theodore Dreiser (27)
 Tobias Smollett (13)
 Upton Sinclair (27)
 Victor Hugo (14, 15)
 William Golding (15, 21)
 Walt Whitman (14)
CHARACTERS
 “analytical demon” (41)
 Captain Ahab (20, 23)
 Captain Nemo (19)
 Death Larsen (30, 34, 46)
 Emotionless monster (41)
 Fire People (26)
 Humphrey Van Weyden (28-
52)
 Johnson (29-31, 40, 43, 45, 49,
51, 52)
Author of Master and Commander (1969) and Aubrey-Maturin
series (1969-2004)
Author of 1974 book Jaws about a terrorizing shark
Author of The Sea Hawk (195)
Creator of 12 Angry Men (1954)
Author of Two Years Before the Mast (1834)
Author of A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)
Author of Treasure Island (1870)
Author of 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
Famous English playwright, several of whose plays revolve around
a shipwreck; his character Lady Macbeth attempts to cleanse
herself of murder by washing her hands
Author of The Pirates (1821); the many mistakes in this novel
inspired James Fenimore Cooper to write The Pilot
Naturalist author
Nineteenth-century poet whose works Wolf Larsen reads
American Naturalist author
Author of The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748)
Naturalist author who wrote journalistic social critiques
French author of Toilers of the Sea (1866)
Author of Pincher Martin (1956) and To the Ends of the Earth
Poet of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1866)
Nickname for Van Weyden
Monomaniacal sea captain of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; he
relentlessly pursues a white whale
Slightly crazed submarine captain of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea
Brother of Wolf Larsen; he is uneducated and even crueler than
Wolf
Description that Humphrey Van Weyden’s friends use for him
Race of technologically advanced people who dominate human
society in Jack London’s 1907 eugenics novel Before Adam
Wealthy gentleman who ends up effectively imprisoned aboard the
Ghost and undergoes a change wherein he learns to use the
physical side of his masculinity along with the intellectual and
moral side; protagonist of The Sea-Wolf
Sailor aboard the Ghost; one of the only men to stand up against
Larsen; mutinies twice and ends up drowning because of Larsen’s
actions
 Leach (31, 40, 45, 46, 48, 51,
52)
 Maud Brewster (25, 31-34,
40-52)
 Odysseus (11)
 Thomas Mugridge (29-32, 34,
40-41, 43, 45, 48, 49)
 Wolf Larsen (24, 28-30, 32-35,
37-44, 46-49, 51)
Sailor aboard the Ghost; one of the only men to stand up against
Larsen; mutinies twice and ends up drowning because of Larsen’s
actions
Writer who ends up stranded on the Ghost in The Sea-Wolf;
London’s and Van Weyden’s ideal woman
Sea-faring protagonist of c. 800 BCE epic poem The Odyssey
English cook aboard The Sea-Wolf; he expresses the viewpoint that
human outcomes are determined by a person’s social class and
position
Captain of the Ghost in The Sea-Wolf; a cruel but fiercely
intelligence and supremely handsome man, Wolf Larsen embodies
the survival of the fittest philosophies of Herbert Spencer and is an
exploration and condemnation of Nietzsche’s übermensch

DATES
 “A River Runs Through It” (15, 1976 short story by Norman Mclean in which the flow of time is like
20) a river running through the lives of the narrator and his brother
 January 12, 1876 (23) Date of Jack London’s birth
 1300 BCE (11) Approximate date of the Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor
 1436/7 (12) Date of Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, an English political poem that
argued for a strong navy and English control of the seas
 1602 (12) Year in which Hugo Grotius published Mare Liberum, arguing that
the seas were an international territory open for trade
 1635 (12) Year in which John Selden published Mare Clausum, arguing that
seas ought to belong to the nations they bordered
 1719 (13) Year in which Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, a shipwreck
and adventure narrative that spawned many imitators
 1789 (13) Year in which Olaudah Equiano published The Interesting Narrative
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, a narrative of his kidnapping,
captivity, and transportation across the Middle Passage
 1798 (13) Year in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge published “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner”, a long poem about an ill-fated sea voyage
 1818 (38) Year in which Schopenhauer first published The World as Will and
Representation; it was revised and expanded in 1844
 1821 (21) Year in which Walter Scott published The Pirates
 1824 (14) Year in which James Fenimore Cooper published The Pilot: A Tale
of the Sea, often considered to be the first English sea novel
 1844 (38) Year in which Schopenhauer revised and expanded his 1818 work
The World as Will and Representation
 1859 (39) Year in which Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species
 1883 (14, 38) Year in which Mark Twain published Life on the Mississippi and
Nietzsche published Thus Spake Zarathustra
 1893 (24, 36, 37) Year in which Jack London signed on with the sealing schooner
Sophia Sutherland; date of the Bering Sea Arbitration that set limits
on seal hunting around the Pribilof Islands
 1896 (14) Year of Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous and H. G. Wells’s
“The Sea Raiders” ; Jack London joined the Socialist Labor Party in
this year; London launches on a program of reading including
Darwin, Spencer, Marx, Nietzsche and others
 1897 (14) Year in which Stephen Crane’s “Open Boat” was published; London
discovers his paternity
 1900 (15, 24) Year in which Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim was published; London
married Bessie Madden in this year
 1901 (27) Year in which London’s first child Joan was born
 1902 (24) Year in which London published his first novel, The Cruise of the
Dazzler
 1903 (24) Year in which London fell in love with Charmian Kittredge
 1904 (15, 21, 25, 37) Year in which The Sea-Wolf was published; Jack London became a
war correspondent for the San Francisco Examiner
 1905 (40) Year in which London married Kittredge;
 1907 (26) Year in which London publishes his eugenics novel Before Adam
 1908 (25) Year in which London urged white boxer Jim Jeffries to win against
Black boxer Jack Johnson
 1916 (27) Year in which London died, age 40
 2014 (27) Year of Discovery Channel miniseries Klondike based on Jack
London’s life
 3,000 years (11) Age of some stories about the divinity of the Ganges
 40 (27) Jack London’s age at death
 800 BC (11) Approximate date of Homer’s Odyssey

GROUPS AND ORGANIZATIONS

 Bohemian Club (24, 27)
 California Department of Fish
and Wildlife (24)
 California Fish Patrol (24)
 U.S. Postal Service (28)
 United States Coast Guard
(35)
Artists’ and writers’ social club in San Francisco that included many
well-known writers of the early twentieth century; London joined
them
Current name of the agency that used to be the California Fish
Patrol
State agency for which Jack London worked after abandoning his
oyster piracy
Agency that put Jack London on a stamp
Agency whose ship rescues Brewster and Van Weyden at the end
of The Sea-Wolf
HISTORICAL ERAS AND EVENTS
 Age of Discovery (12)
 American Civil War
 Early Modern era (12)
 Fifteenth century (12)
 Hurricane Katrina (18)
 Klondike Gold Rush (24-26)
 Russo-Japanese War (25)
 Trojan War (11)
LITERARY GENRES AND MOVEMENTS
 Adventure story (14)
 Maritime fiction (14)
 Modernism (15)
 Naturalism (14, 26, 27, 40, 43,
50, 52)
 Nautical fiction (14, 15, 21, 22,
23, 52)
 Naval fiction (14)
 Postmodernism (15)
 Psychological thriller (21)
 Realism (14, 26, 27, 40)
 Romanticism (14, 26, 27, 51)
 Sea fiction (14)
 Sea-looking narratives (15)
Era starting in the fifteenth century in which many European
nations explored the globe, seeking adventure and profit
Event that soured many writers on Romanticism and led to the
flowering of Realism and Naturalism
Time period from approximately 1400 to 1700 during which literary
representations of water often stressed its hostile and fickle nature
Century in which Europe’s naval explorations launched the Age of
Discovery
Destructive 2005 hurricane that hammered New Orleans and
inspired Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun (2009) and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage
the Bones (2011)
Late-nineteenth-century rush on Canada’s Yukon territory in search
of gold; most seekers came back with nothing
War for which Jack London reported from Japan
Conflict from which Odysseus is heading home in the Greek epic
The Odyssey
One of the genres that makes up nautical fiction
See Nautical fiction
Literary movement that emphasized individualism and turned away
from traditional Western morals; arose out of post-World War II
dissatisfaction and ennui
Literary movement that sought to explain social conditions
through heredity and environment; derived from Realism but often
took an even darker turn
Fiction set onboard a ship, usually at sea, generally characterized
by accurate detail and attention to issues of masculinity, class, and
race
See Nautical fiction
Mid-twentieth century literary movement arose out of post-World
War II disillusionment
Genre that partially describes The Sea-Wolf
Literary movement that attempted to depict the way things were;
Realist authors were often reacting against earlier Romantic
portrayals of nature and society
Literary movement that celebrated the awe and terror inspired by
nature and the Sublime
See Nautical fiction
Narratives that looked toward the sea rather than the land; early
forms of or precursors to nautical fiction
LITERARY WORKS—POEMS
 “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of
Life” (14)
 “Bermudas” (12)
 “Dover Beach” (14, 20)
 “Lycidas” (12)
 “Old Ironsides” (14)
 “The Battle of the Summer
Islands” (12)
 “The Wreck of the Hesperus”
(14)
 Libelle of Englyshe Polycye
(12)
 The Odyssey (11)
 The Pilgrim’s Sea Voyage and
Sea Sickness (12)
 The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner (13)
 The Seafarer (12)
 The Tale of the Ship-Wrecked
Sailor (11)
 The Voyage of Saint Brendan
(12)
LITERARY WORKS—STORIES, NOVELS, PLAYS
 “A River Runs Through It” (15,
20)
 “The Open Boat” (14)
 “The Sea Raiders” (19)
 12 Angry Men (20)
 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(14, 15, 19, 21)
 A General History of the
Pyrates (13)
 A High Wind in Jamaica (15)
1860 Walt Whitman poem
1681 Andrew Marvell poem about the Caribbean
1867 Matthew Arnold poem in which the movement of the water
mirrors the state of the speaker’s mind
1638 poem by John Milton about the death of his friend in a
shipwreck
1830 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. poem
1645 Edmund Waller poem
1842 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem
English political poem from 1436/7 that argues for the necessity of
England’s controlling the water around it
C. 800 BCE epic poem about the seafaring adventures of Greek
hero Odysseus
Medieval poem that uses sea voyaging as a metaphor for spiritual
growth
1798 poem about an ill-fated sea voyage by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
c. 945 CE poem that used sea voyaging as a metaphor for spiritual
growth
C. 1300 BCE Egyptian tale about a shipwrecked official
C. 1118 poem that used sea voyaging as a metaphor for spiritual
growth
1976 short story by Norman Mclean in which the flow of time is like
a river running through the lives of the narrator and his brother
1897 Stephen Crane short story
1896 H.G. Wells short story about man-eating squid
1954 Courtroom drama by Reginald Rose in which a building storm
reflects the tension of the drama
Underwater nautical novel by Jules Verne, published in 1870
Book by Daniel Defoe that provided biographical accounts of
English pirates
Richard Hughes’s 1929 book
 A Long Walk to Water (16)
 Afloat and Ashore (15)
 Aubrey-Maturin series (16)
 Bounty Trilogy (15)
 Captain Blood: His Odyssey
(15)
 Captains Courageous (14)
 Chance (15)
 Dry (16)
 Feeding the Ghosts (23)
 Gallions Reach
 H.M.S. Marlborough Will Enter
Harbor (15)
 H.M.S. Ulysses (15)
 Heart of Darkness (21, 23)
 Horatio Hornblower series
(15)
 Jaws (19)
 Life on the Mississippi (14)
 Lord Jim (15)
 Macbeth (19)
 Moby-Dick, or The Whale (14,
20, 21, 22, 23)
 My Dogs in Northland (25)
 New York 2140 (16, 18)
 Pericles (12)
 Pincher Martin (15)
 Robinson Crusoe (13)
 Rode Orm/The Long Ships
 Sacred Hunger (23)
 Salvage the Bones (18)
Linda Sue Park’s 2010 book about drought in Sudan
1844 James Fenimore Cooper novel
Nautical novels by Patrick O’Brian (1969-2004)
James Normal Hall’s nautical trilogy (1936)
1922 Rafael Sabatini book
1896 Rudyard Kipling novel
1913 Joseph Conrad novel
2018 novel by Jarrod and Neal Shusterman about a teenage girl in
the aftermath of a drought
Work of nautical fiction by Fred D’Aguiar
1927 work of nautical fiction by H. M. Tomlinson
1947 work of nautical fiction by Nicholas Monsarrat
1955 work of nautical fiction by Alistair MacLean
Famous work of nautical literature by Joseph Conrad; criticized by
Nigerian author Chinua Achebe for its racist portrayal of Africans
Nautical series by C. S. Forester, written 1937 to 1967
1974 book by Peter Benchley about a terrorizing shark; made into
a popular movie
1883 Mark Twain work
1900 Joseph Conrad novel
1623 Shakespeare play in which Lady Macbeth attempts to clean
herself of sin by washing her hands
1851 work of nautical fiction by Herman Melville in which Captain
Ahab monomaniacally pursues a white whale; in the book, the sea
represents the unknowable depths of the human unconscious
Book by Egerton R. Young from which Jack London drew heavily in
writing Call of the Wild
2010 novel by Kim Stanley Robinson that takes place in a New York
flooded by rising sea levels
1609 Shakespeare play in which a shipwreck plays an important
role
1956 novel by William Golding
1719 Daniel Defoe novel about a protagonist who suffers multiple
shipwrecks
1941 novel by Frans G. Bengtsson
Berry Unsworth novel with a greedy and heartless protagonist
2011 novel about Hurricane Katrina by Jesmyn Ward
 Sea Around Us (15, 17)
 The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (14)
 The Adventures of Roderick
Random (13)
 The Caine Mutiny (15)
 The Cruel Sea (15)
 The Drought (17)
 The Fishermen (15)
 The Hunt for Red October (16)
 The Interesting Narrative of
the Life of Olaudah Equiano,
or Gustavus Vassa (13)
 The Journals of Lewis and
Clark (14)
 The Life, Adventures and
Piracies of the Famous
Captain Singleton (13)
 The N----- of the ‘Narcissus’
(23)
 The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym (15)
 The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea
(14)
 The Pirates (21)
 The Red Rover (15)
 The Rescue (15)
 The Riddle of the Sands (15)
 The Rover (15)
 The Sea Hawk (15)
 The Ship That Died of Shame
(15)
 The Tempest (12)
 The Water Knife (16)
 The Wreck of the Mary Deare
(15)
 To the Ends of the Earth (15,
21)
1951 Rachel Carson work about the environmental importance of
the oceans
1884 novel by Mark Twain
1748 novel by Tobias Smollett, which tells of the experience of a
young man aboard British ships
1951 novel by Herman Wouk
1951 Nicholas Monsarrat novel
1964 J.G. Ballard novel
1928 Hans Kirk novel
1984 Tom Clancy novel
1789 work by Olaudah Equiano about his captivity and
transportation along the Middle Passage
Journals written by Lewis and Clark during their early-nineteenth-
century travels across the territories of the Louisiana Purchase and
beyond
Popular work by Daniel Defoe
Racist Joseph Conrad novel
Edgar Allan Poe work about a stowaway
1824 James Fenimore Cooper novel often considered the first
proper English work of nautical fiction
1821 Walter Scott novel whose inaccuracies may have inspired
James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot
1827 James Fenimore Cooper novel
1920 Joseph Conrad novel
1903 Erskine Childers novel
1923 Joseph Conrad novel
1915 Rafael Sabatini novel
1952 Nicholas Monsarrat novel
1623 Shakespeare play in which a shipwreck features prominently
2015 Paolo Bacigulupi science fiction novel about a drought-
ravaged future
1956 Hammond Innes novel
William Golding’s 1980-89 trilogy
 Toilers of the Sea (14)
 Treasure Island (14)
 Twelfth Night (12)
 Two Years Before the Mast
(14)
 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian
Life (14)
 Typhoon (15)
 Williwaw (15)
 Zeitoun (18)
LITERARY WORKS—JACK LONDON
 Before Adam (26)
 “Typhoon Off the Coast of
Japan” (24)
 Martin Eden (26)
 The Call of the Wild (24, 25,
26)
 “The Chinago” (26)
 The Cruise of the Dazzler (24)
 The Kempton-Wace Letters
(25)
 The Iron Heel (25, 26)
 “The Mexican” (26)
 The Sea-Wolf (15, 21-24, 25,
26, 28, 35-39, 40, 42, 45, 48-
49, 50-53)
 “Koolau the Leper” (26)
 “The Unparalleled Invasion”
(26)
 “How I Became a Socialist”
(26)
PEOPLE
 Alexander McLean (24, 35, 36,
38)
1866 Victor Hugo novel
1882 Robert Louis Stevenson novel
1602 Shakespeare play that revolves around a shipwreck
1834 Richard Henry Dana, Jr. work
1846 Herman Melville novel
1902 Joseph Conrad novel
1946 book by Gore Vidal
2009 Dave Eggers book about Hurricane Katrina
Jack London’s 1907 eugenics novel, in which a technologically
advanced race of Fire People dominate the world
Jack London’s prize-winning short story inspired by his time aboard
the Sophia Sutherland
1909 Jack London novel that explores political philosophy
Famous Jack London novel; he faced accusations of plagiarism for
this work
London short story that empathetically portrays people of color
1902 Jack London adventure novel based on his days as an oyster
pirate
Work written by Jack London and Anna Strunsky
Jack London novel about the rise of tyranny in the United States;
he faced accusations of plagiarism for this work
London short story that empathetically portrays people of color
1904 Jack London novel about the experience of an elite
intellectual pressed into service aboard a sealing ship captained by
a cruel captain
London short story that empathetically portrays people of color
Racist Jack London work about immigration from Asia
Jack London essay that detailed the experiences of his early life that
led to his having “rampant individualism …. Pretty effectively
hammered out of him”
Sailor on whom London based Wolf Larsen
 Charmian Kittredge (24-25,
44)
 Jim Jeffries (26)
 Joan (27)
 Dan McLean (35)
 Elizabeth “Bessie” Maddern
(24, 25, 27)
 Flora Wellman (23)
 Jack Johnson (26)
 Jack London (15, 21, 23-27,
35-38, 40-53)
 William Griffith Chaney (23-
24)
 Theodore Roosevelt (25)
 Virginia Prentiss (23)
PLACES
 Africa (13, 18, 23)
 Americas (13)
 Asia (13, 26)
 Atlantic (11, 36, )
 Belgium (13)
 California (16, 23, 24, 27)
 Egypt (11)
 England (12)
Jack London’s second wife; he started an affair with her during his
marriage to Maddern and called her his “Mate-Woman”; her
independence and intelligence probably inspired the portrayal of
Maud Brewster
White boxer whom London urged to beat African American Jack
Johnson and “rescue” the “White Man”
First child of London and Bessie Maddern
Cruel brother of notoriously cruel Canadian sailor Alexander
McLean; inspired London’s portrayal of Wolf and Death Larsen
Jack London’s wife; they married to have children together and not
out of love; he called her “Mother-Girl” and they eventually
divorced
Jack London’s mother who attempted suicide after his alleged
father urged her to obtain an abortion
African-American 1908 heavyweight boxing champion whose
victory disgusted Jack London
Early twentieth-century author of adventure novels, including
nautical fiction; author of The Sea-Wolf
Astrologer and likely father of Jack London
United States president who intervened to bring Jack London
home after his arrests while covering the Russo-Japanese War
Formerly enslaved woman who helped raise Jack London
Continent first colonized by European nations in the eighteenth
century; flood myths are rare here;
Region that many European nations colonized
Continent colonized by European nations in the eighteenth
century; Jack London wrote a story objecting to increased Asian
immigration
Ocean whose boundaries Ptolemy described in Geographia;
European nations on this ocean explored and colonized many
other regions starting in the fifteenth century; sealing ships
plundered the North Atlantic
Nation that pursued global trade and colonization in the
eighteenth century
Birthplace and home of Jack London
Source of The Tale of the Ship-Wrecked Sailor, about an official
returning from a failed sailing expedition
Nation that pursued global trade and colonization; source of
several legal writings about the necessity for terrestrial nations to
control their seas
 Enuma Elish (17)
 France (13, 15)
 Ganges (11)
 Glen Ellen (24)
 Heinold’s First and Last
Chance Saloon (24, 35)
 Indian Ocean (11)
 Japan (24, 29, 31, 33, 35, 36,
50)
 Mediterranean Sea (11)
 Mesopotamia (17)
 Netherlands (13)
 Nile (11)
 North Pacific (36, 50)
 Oceania (13)
 Portugal (13)
 Pribilof Islands (Northern Fur
Seal Islands) (36)
 Prussia (13)
 San Francisco (23, 25)
 San Francisco Bay (24, 28, 50)
 Sonoma, California (27)
 Spain (13)
 Sudan (16)
Mesopotamian creation myth that tells of the world emerging from
chaotically swirling water
Country home to Eugène Sue, Edouard Corbière, Alexandre Dumas,
Jules Verne, and Victor Hugo
River in Southeast Asia around which several civilizations have
arisen
California location to which London relocated his family during his
affair with Charmian Kittredge
Oakland bar that London frequented while he studied for entrance
to the University of California and during his time enrolled
Ocean whose bounds Ptolemy explored in his 150 CE work
Geographia
Destination of the schooner on which Jack London sailed and which
inspired his first published piece; location where London
conducted war reportage; destination of the Ghost in The Sea-Wolf;
nation that hunted many seals in the North Pacific and came into
conflict with the United States and Britain
Sea between North Africa, Western Asia, and Southern Europe;
important waterway to many early civilizations
Western Asian region where settled agriculture first developed;
source of Enuma Elish creation myth, in which the world emerged
from swirling waters
Nation that pursued global trade and colonization in the
eighteenth century
River that sustained life in Ancient Egypt
Location of disputes over seal hunting in the late nineteenth
century, as overhunting led to population decline;
South Pacific region colonized by European powers starting in the
eighteenth century
Nation that pursued global trade and colonization in the
eighteenth century
Small zone in the Bering Sea to which seal hunting was limited after
the Bering Sea Arbitration of 1893
Nation that pursued global trade and colonization in the
eighteenth century
City of Jack London’s birth and much of his life
Body of water where Jack London pirated oysters in his youth; in
The Sea-Wolf, the ferry Martinez wrecks here
Location where Jack London spent the end of his life
Nation that pursued global trade and colonization
Setting of Linda Sue Park’s 2010 A Long Walk to Water
 The United States (13, 14, 24,
37)
PHILOSOPHERS AND SCHOLARS
 Arthur Schopenhauer (37, 38-
39)
 Captain Ahab (20, 23)
 Charles Darwin (27, 37, 39)
 Dr. Paul Snelgrove (19)
 Earle Labor (25)
 Herbert Spencer (29, 37, 39-
40)
 Hugo Grotius (12)
 J.C. Cooper (17)
 John Selden (12)
 Plato (11)
 Ptolemy (11)
 Rachel Carson (15, 17)
 Susan Bassnett (21)
Nation that pursued global trade and colonization from the
nineteenth century; home to Jack London; source of many nautical
novels
Nineteenth-century philosopher who saw all life as a struggle and
pleasure as destructive; inspired Jack London’s depiction of Wolf
Larsen
Monomaniacal sea captain of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; he
relentlessly pursues a white whale
Naturalist who developed the theory of evolution by natural
selection through his observations of finches on the Galapagos
Islands; he published his findings in On the Origin of Species
Canadian oceanographer who has declared that we know more
about the surface of the Moon and Mars than about the deep
ocean
Scholar who argued that the relationship between London and
Kittredge inspired the relationship between Brewster and Van
Weyden
Nineteenth-century philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and
sociologist who applied Darwin’s ideas to human society and
coined the term “survival of the fittest”; his ideas led to eugenics
Dutch lawyer and philosopher who wrote Mare Liberum in 1609 to
argue for freedom of the seas
Scholar who wrote An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional
Symbols and argues that water inherently symbolizes the “Great
Mother” and feminine principles
English judge and lawyer who responded to Hugo Grotius’s Mare
Liberum with Mare Clausum, arguing that terrestrial nations should
control the seas
Ancient Greek philosopher who called water “the first form of
matter” and “the liquid of the whole verification”
Greek mathematician and astronomer who wrote Geographia in
150 CE
Biologist whose The Sea Around Us and Under the Sea Wind
explained the ocean’s important environmental role
Scholar who argues that nautical novel express their society’s
attitudes toward masculinity
RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY
 Mare Clausum (12)
 Abrahamic religions (18)
 Chippewa (18)
 Great Flood story (18)
 Gun-Yu myth (18)
 Hapi (17)
 Nanabozho (18)
 Norse legends (17)
 Omar Khayyam (30, 33, 37)
 Poseidon (11)
 Religious creation myths (17)
TERMS—JACK LONDON’S LIFE
 “Mate-Woman” (25, 44, 47)
 Cannery (24)
 Guardian (21)
 “Mother-Girl” (24)
 San Francisco Examiner (25)
 “Superb meteor” (23, 27)
 Oyster pirate (24)
TERMS—POLITICS AND LAW
 Bering Sea Dispute/ Bering
Sea Controversy (36)
 Colonization (12)
1635 work by John Selden that argued that nations should control
the seas
Religions that share a story of God sending a great flood to destroy
sinful humanity
Native American group with a story about an evil spirit Nanabozho
who sends a great flood to kill most living things
Story about a large flood common in the histories of many cultures
and religions
Chinese myth about a father and son who stop a flood
Egyptian god who poured water into the Nile
Character in a Chippewa story about a great flood
Stories in which the world emerges from a melting, ice-filled void
Mystical Persian poet whose works were translated or adapted by
Edward Fitzgerald in 1859; subject of many debates between Wolf
Larsen and Van Weyden
Greek water god who torments Odysseus in The Odyssey
Stories about the origin of the world; in many cultures, these myths
involve water and water gods
Jack London’s nickname for Charmian Kittredge
Location of Jack London’s first job around age 13
London newspaper that described The Sea-Wolf as “remarkable
with freshness and vivacity”
London’s nickname for his wife, Elizabeth “Bessie” Maddern
Newspaper for which Jack London wrote war correspondence
Simile that Jack London used to described his preferred mode of
living
Term that London used to describe himself during his work as an
oyster poacher in the San Francisco Bay
Conflict between Russia, Great Britain, and the United States over
declining seal populations in the North Atlantic
The settling or exploitation of a less powerful nation by another
more powerful one; European nations colonized other areas of the
globe starting in the sixteenth century, generally to the great
destruction of the peoples and lands they colonized
 Marine Mammal Protection
Act of 1972 (36)
 Socialism (26)
 Socialist Labor Party (26)
 Socialist Party of America (26)
TERMS—SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
 “Liquid of the whole
verification” (11)
 “The first form of matter” (11)
 “The only true supermen”
 Anglo-Saxon (26)
 Climate change (16, 18)
 Determinism (27, 43, 45, 49)
 Eugenics (26)
 Social Darwinism (39, 43)
 Survival of the fittest (39)
 Theory of evolution by
natural selection (39)
 übermensch (38, 43)
VESSELS
 Ghost (28, 29, 31, 32-37, 40-
52),
 Martinez (28, 41, 48, 49, 51,
52)
Act that outlawed hunting of seals and other marine mammals in
the United States; long-term result of seal-hunting treaties
Ideology that advocates for the owning of the means of production
by workers rather than an owner class; Jack London’s brutal
experiences as a laborer convinced him to adopt socialism
Political party that Jack London joined in 1896
Political party under which Jack London unsuccessfully ran for
mayor of Oakland
One way in which Greek philosopher Plato described water
One way in which Greek philosopher Plato described water
Phrase that Jack London applied to people of Anglo-Saxon
ancestry
Group of people that Jack London and other eugenicists believed
to be superior to all other people; the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain
in the fifth century
Global shifts in climate exacerbated by human activity; fears of
climate change inform much contemporary literature about water
Ideology that holds that all events are controlled by forces outside
of the human will; belief in determinism was a key feature of much
Naturalist writing
Discredited pseudoscience that erroneously applied Darwin’s
theory of evolution by natural selection to attempt to “perfect”
humanity through controlling which people had children
Pseudoscience that attempted to apply Darwin’s theories of
evolution by natural selection to explain class differences
Phrase that Herbert Spencer coined when he applied Darwin’s
theory of evolution by natural selection to social conditions
Charles Darwin’s theory that organisms evolve over time to
become better adapted to their environments
Nietzsche’s conception of a man so superior that his existence
justifies all of humanity; Jack London’s portrayal of Wolf Larsen is
supposedly an exploration and criticism of the concept
Wolf Larsen’s ship in The Sea-Wolf; Humphrey Van Weyden is
effectively imprisoned aboard this ship
San Francisco Bay ferry that sinks and strands Van Weyden at the
beginning of The Sea-Wolf
 Snark (25)
 Schooner (24, 28, 33, 36, 43,
52, 52)
 Sophia Sutherland (36)
WORKS—OTHER
 An Illustrated Encyclopaedia
of Traditional Symbols (17)
 Geographia (11)
 Klondike (27)
 Mare Clausum (12)
 Mare Liberum (12)
 On the Basis of Morality (39)
 On the Origin of Species (39)
 Principles of Biology (39)
 The World as Will and
Representation (38)
 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (38)
 Under the Sea Wind (15)
 Walden; or, Life in the Woods
(14)
The yacht on which Jack London and Charmian Kittredge sailed
Large masted ship
Sealing schooner on which Jack London traveled to the coast of
Japan in 1893
Work in which J.C. Cooper writes that “all waters are symbolic of
the Great Mother and associated with birth”
Second-century work by Ptolemy that explored the bounds of the
Atlantic and Indian oceans
2014 Discovery Channel miniseries based on Jack London’s life
1635 work by John Selden that argued that nations should control
the seas
1609 work by Hugo Grotius that argued that the seas should be
free
Work in which Schopenhauer proposes the idea of eternal justice,
the constant battle for existence, and the desirability of reducing
our dependence on pleasure
Charles Darwin’s 1859 book that proposed the theory of evolution
based on his observation of finches in the Galapagos
Herbert Spencer work that introduced the term “survival of the
fittest” and helped lead to eugenics
1818 Schopenhauer work that argued that the world results from a
desire to be
1883 work by Nietzsche that proposes the idea of the übermensch
1941 book by Rachel Carson
1854 work by Henry David Thoreau
12
This test is a mix of straightforward, resource-guide based questions and some questions that quite
frankly had me scratching my head. First, the good news: although many of The Sea-Wolf questions
give a source from the text, the answers to almost all of the questions come directly from the Resource
Guide. The only two tricky plot questions are 23 and 26, but your handy Power Guide does include
those facts—so read it carefully.

The Critical Reading passage is a classic of high school literature. The correct answer for # includes
extra adjectives, which is generally a hint in the right direction. I find #3 to be a poor question, since
without greater context it’s difficult to know that the answer is A. You could probably make an
argument for a couple others as well.

Question 8 is a gimme, since The Odyssey is the only text mentioned in USAD. Both 9 and 10 are
straightforward, straight-from-the-guide questions. 11 bugs me because the title of the book should
be in a restrictive clause rather than a non-restrictive one and because the answer choices should be
possessive, but it doesn’t impede answering the question, which asks a simple fact-recall.

Question 23 is a date question, but a reasonable one as it asks the publication date of The Sea-Wolf;
you should probably learn that. Question 18 is a vocab question; it should be relatively easy to arrive
at the correct answer, although note that the definition of dilettante is not dated and I don’t really
know why the test says that it is,

A note on the sources: the answer guide gives the page numbers for the work, but really the answers
are all available in the resource guide with the exceptions of the plot questions 23 and 26.