Commemorating Jack London’s 150th Birthday
The famous writer Jack London was known for his global adventures. His training ground and lifelong love was San Francisco Bay. When a friend suggested he move to Los Angeles at 27 years old, Jack replied, “Nay, nay, I am wedded to ‘Frisco Bay.”
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of Jack London’s birth on January 12, 1876, here is a look at the six boats he sailed on the Bay. In 1889, at age 13, Jack bought a splintered dinghy for $2 that he rowed around the Oakland Estuary. At 14, he bought a cobbled-together centerboard skiff that he used to deliver beer to boats and gather unwanted gear from vessels to sell to the junkman. He also sailed out to Yerba Buena Island to fish for rock cod.
Throughout the second half of his 15th year, his skiff gathered barnacles while he worked 70 hours a week at an Oakland fruit cannery. He wrote in his memoir, John Barleycorn, “I remembered the wind that blew every day on the Bay, the sunrises and sunsets I never saw; the bite of the salt air in my nostrils, the bite of the salt water on my flesh when I plunged overside. There was only one way to escape my deadening toil … I must earn my bread on the water.”
His chance came when a Bay pirate announced he was selling the Razzle Dazzle. Jack borrowed $300 from his Black foster mother, Jennie Prentiss, to buy it. He quit the cannery and joined a rough crowd of pirates who poached oysters from private beds when the Bay supported a robust and lucrative exotic oyster industry. Even though he was on the wrong side of the law, he was back on his beloved Bay. In a novel he later wrote about Bay pirates, The Cruise of the ‘Dazzler’, he recreated a scene from firsthand impressions: “The sky was clear, and the air had the snap and vigor of early morning about it. The rippling water was laughing in the rays of the sun just shouldering above the eastern skyline. To the south lay Alcatraz Island, and from its gun-crowned heights a flourish of trumpets saluted the day. In the west, the Golden Gate yawned between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay.”
Within a few months, the mainsail of the Razzle Dazzle caught fire during a raid of Chinese shrimpers. Jack sold his boat for scrap and joined another teen pirate, Scratch Nelson, on the Reindeer. While a petty thief and a wharf rat, Jack picked up sailing skills from Scratch. “We strained her open and sailed her open and sailed her open continually,” he said.
