A thousand deaths by Jack London

last day when the earth shall pass into nothingness. Nor does

science, despite its radium speculations and its attempted

analyses of the ultimate nature of matter, give us any other word

than that man will pass. So far as man’s knowledge goes, law is

universal. Elements react under certain unchangeable conditions.

One of these conditions is temperature. Whether it be in the test

tube of the laboratory or the workshop of nature, all organic

chemical reactions take place only within a restricted range of

heat. Man, the latest of the ephemera, is pitifully a creature of

temperature, strutting his brief day on the thermometer. Behind

him is a past wherein it was too warm for him to exist. Ahead of

him is a future wherein it will be too cold for him to exist. He

cannot adjust himself to that future, because he cannot alter

universal law, because he cannot alter his own construction nor

the molecules that compose him.

It would be well to ponder these lines of Herbert Spencer’s which

follow, and which embody, possibly, the wildest vision the

scientific mind has ever achieved:

“Motion as well as Matter being fixed in quantity, it would seem

that the change in the distribution of Matter which Motion

effects, coming to a limit in whichever direction it is carried,

the indestructible Motion thereupon necessitates a reverse

distribution. Apparently, the universally-co-existent forces of

attraction and repulsion, which, as we have seen, necessitate

rhythm in all minor changes throughout the Universe, also

necessitate rhythm in the totality of its changes–produce now an

immeasurable period during which the attractive forces

predominating, cause universal concentration, and then an

immeasurable period during which the repulsive forces

predominating, cause universal diffusion–alternate eras of

Evolution and Dissolution. AND THUS THERE IS SUGGESTED THE

A Collection of Stories

13

CONCEPTION OF A PAST DURING WHICH THERE HAVE BEEN SUCCESSIVE

EVOLUTIONS ANALOGOUS TO THAT WHICH IS NOW GOING ON; A FUTURE

DURING WHICH SUCCESSIVE OTHER EVOLUTIONS MAY GO ON–EVER THE SAME

IN PRINCIPLE BUT NEVER THE SAME IN CONCRETE RESULT.”

That is it–the most we know–alternate eras of evolution and

dissolution. In the past there have been other evolutions similar

to that one in which we live, and in the future there may be other

similar evolutions–that is all. The principle of all these

evolutions remains, but the concrete results are never twice

alike. Man was not; he was; and again he will not be. In

eternity which is beyond our comprehension, the particular

evolution of that solar satellite we call the “Earth” occupied but

a slight fraction of time. And of that fraction of time man

occupies but a small portion. All the whole human drift, from the

first ape-man to the last savant, is but a phantom, a flash of

light and a flutter of movement across the infinite face of the

starry night.

When the thermometer drops, man ceases–with all his lusts and

wrestlings and achievements; with all his race-adventures and

race-tragedies; and with all his red killings, billions upon

billions of human lives multiplied by as many billions more. This

is the last word of Science, unless there be some further,

unguessed word which Science will some day find and utter. In the

meantime it sees no farther than the starry void, where the

“fleeting systems lapse like foam.” Of what ledger-account is the

tiny life of man in a vastness where stars snuff out like candles

and great suns blaze for a time-tick of eternity and are gone?

And for us who live, no worse can happen than has happened to the

earliest drifts of man, marked to-day by ruined cities of

forgotten civilisation–ruined cities, which, on excavation, are

found to rest on ruins of earlier cities, city upon city, and

fourteen cities, down to a stratum where, still earlier, wandering

herdsmen drove their flocks, and where, even preceding them, wild

hunters chased their prey long after the cave-man and the man of

the squatting-place cracked the knuckle-bones of wild animals and

vanished from the earth. There is nothing terrible about it.

With Richard Hovey, when he faced his death, we can say: “Behold!

I have lived!” And with another and greater one, we can lay

ourselves down with a will. The one drop of living, the one taste

of being, has been good; and perhaps our greatest achievement will

be that we dreamed immortality, even though we failed to realise

it.

SMALL-BOAT SAILING

A Collection of Stories

14

A sailor is born, not made. And by “sailor” is meant, not the

average efficient and hopeless creature who is found to-day in the

forecastle of deepwater ships, but the man who will take a fabric

compounded of wood and iron and rope and canvas and compel it to

obey his will on the surface of the sea. Barring captains and

mates of big ships, the small-boat sailor is the real sailor. He

knows–he must know–how to make the wind carry his craft from one

given point to another given point. He must know about tides and

rips and eddies, bar and channel markings, and day and night

signals; he must be wise in weather-lore; and he must be

sympathetically familiar with the peculiar qualities of his boat

which differentiate it from every other boat that was ever built

and rigged. He must know how to gentle her about, as one instance

of a myriad, and to fill her on the other tack without deadening

her way or allowing her to fall off too far.

The deepwater sailor of to-day needs know none of these things.

And he doesn’t. He pulls and hauls as he is ordered, swabs decks,

washes paint, and chips iron-rust. He knows nothing, and cares

less. Put him in a small boat and he is helpless. He will cut an

even better figure on the hurricane deck of a horse.

I shall never forget my child-astonishment when I first

encountered one of these strange beings. He was a runaway English

sailor. I was a lad of twelve, with a decked-over, fourteen-foot,

centre-board skiff which I had taught myself to sail. I sat at

his feet as at the feet of a god, while he discoursed of strange

lands and peoples, deeds of violence, and hair-raising gales at

sea. Then, one day, I took him for a sail. With all the

trepidation of the veriest little amateur, I hoisted sail and got

under way. Here was a man, looking on critically, I was sure, who

knew more in one second about boats and the water than I could

ever know. After an interval, in which I exceeded myself, he took

the tiller and the sheet. I sat on the little thwart amidships,

open-mouthed, prepared to learn what real sailing was. My mouth

remained open, for I learned what a real sailor was in a small

boat. He couldn’t trim the sheet to save himself, he nearly

capsized several times in squalls, and, once again, by

blunderingly jibing over; he didn’t know what a centre-board was

for, nor did he know that in running a boat before the wind one

must sit in the middle instead of on the side; and finally, when

we came back to the wharf, he ran the skiff in full tilt,

shattering her nose and carrying away the mast-step. And yet he

was a really truly sailor fresh from the vasty deep.

Which points my moral. A man can sail in the forecastles of big

ships all his life and never know what real sailing is. From the

time I was twelve, I listened to the lure of the sea. When I was

fifteen I was captain and owner of an oyster-pirate sloop. By the

time I was sixteen I was sailing in scow-schooners, fishing salmon

with the Greeks up the Sacramento River, and serving as sailor on

the Fish Patrol. And I was a good sailor, too, though all my

cruising had been on San Francisco Bay and the rivers tributary to

A Collection of Stories

15

it. I had never been on the ocean in my life.

Then, the month I was seventeen, I signed before the mast as an

able seaman on a three-top-mast schooner bound on a seven-months’

cruise across the Pacific and back again. As my shipmates

promptly informed me, I had had my nerve with me to sign on as

able seaman. Yet behold, I WAS an able seaman. I had graduated

from the right school. It took no more than minutes to learn the

names and uses of the few new ropes. It was simple. I did not do

things blindly. As a small-boat sailor I had learned to reason

out and know the WHY of everything. It is true, I had to learn

how to steer by compass, which took maybe half a minute; but when

it came to steering “full-and-by” and “close-and-by,” I could beat

the average of my shipmates, because that was the very way I had

always sailed. Inside fifteen minutes I could box the compass