Человеческий прорыв

The Human Drift

Small-Boat Sailing
Four Horses and a Sailor
Nothing that Ever Came to Anything
That Dead Men Rise up Never
A Classic of the Sea
    A Wicked Woman (Curtain Raiser)
    The Birth Mark (Sketch)

***
 "The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd
   Who rose before us, and as Prophets Burn'd,
      Are all but stories, which, awoke from Sleep,
   They told their comrades, and to Sleep return'd."

The history of civilisation is a history of wandering, sword in hand, in
search of food.  In the misty younger world we catch glimpses of phantom
races, rising, slaying, finding food, building rude civilisations,
decaying, falling under the swords of stronger hands, and passing utterly
away.  Man, like any other animal, has roved over the earth seeking what
he might devour; and not romance and adventure, but the hunger-need, has
urged him on his vast adventures.  Whether a bankrupt gentleman sailing
to colonise Virginia or a lean Cantonese contracting to labour on the
sugar plantations of Hawaii, in each case, gentleman and coolie, it is a
desperate attempt to get something to eat, to get more to eat than he can
get at home.

It has always been so, from the time of the first pre-human anthropoid
crossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-bushes beyond, down
to the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores to-day, to go to work in the
coal-mines of Pennsylvania.  These migratory movements of peoples have
been called drifts, and the word is apposite.  Unplanned, blind,
automatic, spurred on by the pain of hunger, man has literally drifted
his way around the planet.  There have been drifts in the past,
innumerable and forgotten, and so remote that no records have been left,
or composed of such low-typed humans or pre-humans that they made no
scratchings on stone or bone and left no monuments to show that they had
been.

These early drifts we conjecture and know must have occurred, just as we
know that the first upright-walking brutes were descended from some kin
of the quadrumana through having developed "a pair of great toes out of
two opposable thumbs."  Dominated by fear, and by their very fear
accelerating their development, these early ancestors of ours, suffering
hunger-pangs very like the ones we experience to-day, drifted on, hunting
and being hunted, eating and being eaten, wandering through thousand-year-
long odysseys of screaming primordial savagery, until they left their
skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, and their bone-scratchings in
cave-men's lairs.

There have been drifts from east to west and west to east, from north to
south and back again, drifts that have criss-crossed one another, and
drifts colliding and recoiling and caroming off in new directions.  From
Central Europe the Aryans have drifted into Asia, and from Central Asia
the Turanians have drifted across Europe.  Asia has thrown forth great
waves of hungry humans from the prehistoric "round-barrow" "broad-heads"
who overran Europe and penetrated to Scandinavia and England, down
through the hordes of Attila and Tamerlane, to the present immigration of
Chinese and Japanese that threatens America.  The Phoenicians and the
Greeks, with unremembered drifts behind them, colonised the
Mediterranean.  Rome was engulfed in the torrent of Germanic tribes
drifting down from the north before a flood of drifting Asiatics.  The
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, after having drifted whence no man knows,
poured into Britain, and the English have carried this drift on around
the world.  Retreating before stronger breeds, hungry and voracious, the
Eskimo has drifted to the inhospitable polar regions, the Pigmy to the
fever-rotten jungles of Africa.  And in this day the drift of the races
continues, whether it be of Chinese into the Philippines and the Malay
Peninsula, of Europeans to the United States or of Americans to the wheat-
lands of Manitoba and the Northwest.

Perhaps most amazing has been the South Sea Drift.  Blind, fortuitous,
precarious as no other drift has been, nevertheless the islands in that
waste of ocean have received drift after drift of the races.  Down from
the mainland of Asia poured an Aryan drift that built civilisations in
Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra.  Only the monuments of these Aryans remain.
They themselves have perished utterly, though not until after leaving
evidences of their drift clear across the great South Pacific to far
Easter Island.  And on that drift they encountered races who had
accomplished the drift before them, and they, the Aryans, passed, in
turn, before the drift of other and subsequent races whom we to-day call
the Polynesian and the Melanesian.

Man early discovered death.  As soon as his evolution permitted, he made
himself better devices for killing than the old natural ones of fang and
claw.  He devoted himself to the invention of killing devices before he
discovered fire or manufactured for himself religion.  And to this day,
his finest creative energy and technical skill are devoted to the same
old task of making better and ever better killing weapons.  All his days,
down all the past, have been spent in killing.  And from the
fear-stricken, jungle-lurking, cave-haunting creature of long ago, he won
to empery over the whole animal world because he developed into the most
terrible and awful killer of all the animals.  He found himself crowded.
He killed to make room, and as he made room ever he increased and found
himself crowded, and ever he went on killing to make more room.  Like a
settler clearing land of its weeds and forest bushes in order to plant
corn, so man was compelled to clear all manner of life away in order to
plant himself.  And, sword in hand, he has literally hewn his way through
the vast masses of life that occupied the earth space he coveted for
himself.  And ever he has carried the battle wider and wider, until to-
day not only is he a far more capable killer of men and animals than ever
before, but he has pressed the battle home to the infinite and invisible
hosts of menacing lives in the world of micro-organisms.

It is true, that they that rose by the sword perished by the sword.  And
yet, not only did they not all perish, but more rose by the sword than
perished by it, else man would not to-day be over-running the world in
such huge swarms.  Also, it must not be forgotten that they who did not
rise by the sword did not rise at all.  They were not.  In view of this,
there is something wrong with Doctor Jordan's war-theory, which is to the
effect that the best being sent out to war, only the second best, the men
who are left, remain to breed a second-best race, and that, therefore,
the human race deteriorates under war.  If this be so, if we have sent
forth the best we bred and gone on breeding from the men who were left,
and since we have done this for ten thousand millenniums and are what we
splendidly are to-day, then what unthinkably splendid and god-like beings
must have been our forebears those ten thousand millenniums ago!
Unfortunately for Doctor Jordan's theory, those ancient forebears cannot
live up to this fine reputation.  We know them for what they were, and
before the monkey cage of any menagerie we catch truer glimpses and hints
and resemblances of what our ancestors really were long and long ago.  And
by killing, incessant killing, by making a shambles of the planet, those
ape-like creatures have developed even into you and me.  As Henley has
said in "The Song of the Sword":

   "_The Sword Singing_--

   Driving the darkness,
   Even as the banners
   And spear of the Morning;
   Sifting the nations,
   The Slag from the metal,
   The waste and the weak
   From the fit and the strong;
   Fighting the brute,
   The abysmal Fecundity;
   Checking the gross
   Multitudinous blunders,
   The groping, the purblind
   Excesses in service
   Of the Womb universal,
   The absolute drudge."

As time passed and man increased, he drifted ever farther afield in
search of room.  He encountered other drifts of men, and the killing of
men became prodigious.  The weak and the decadent fell under the sword.
Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperous in fat valleys and rich
river deltas, were swept away by the drifts of stronger men who were
nourished on the hardships of deserts and mountains and who were more
capable with the sword.  Unknown and unnumbered billions of men have been
so destroyed in prehistoric times.  Draper says that in the twenty years
of the Gothic war, Italy lost 15,000,000 of her population; "and that the
wars, famines, and pestilences of the reign of Justinian diminished the
human species by the almost incredible number of 100,000,000."  Germany,
in the Thirty Years' War, lost 6,000,000 inhabitants.  The record of our
own American Civil War need scarcely be recalled.

And man has been destroyed in other ways than by the sword.  Flood,
famine, pestilence and murder are potent factors in reducing
population--in making room.  As Mr. Charles Woodruff, in his "Expansion
of Races," has instanced: In 1886, when the dikes of the Yellow River
burst, 7,000,000 people were drowned.  The failure of crops in Ireland,
in 1848, caused 1,000,000 deaths.  The famines in India of 1896-7 and
1899-1900 lessened the population by 21,000,000.  The T'ai'ping rebellion
and the Mohammedan rebellion, combined with the famine of 1877-78,
destroyed scores of millions of Chinese.  Europe has been swept
repeatedly by great plagues.  In India, for the period of 1903 to 1907,
the plague deaths averaged between one and two millions a year.  Mr.
Woodruff is responsible for the assertion that 10,000,000 persons now
living in the United States are doomed to die of tuberculosis.  And in
this same country ten thousand persons a year are directly murdered.  In
China, between three and six millions of infants are annually destroyed,
while the total infanticide record of the whole world is appalling.  In
Africa, now, human beings are dying by millions of the sleeping sickness.

More destructive of life than war, is industry.  In all civilised
countries great masses of people are crowded into slums and
labour-ghettos, where disease festers, vice corrodes, and famine is
chronic, and where they die more swiftly and in greater numbers than do
the soldiers in our modern wars.  The very infant mortality of a slum
parish in the East End of London is three times that of a middle-class
parish in the West End.  In the United States, in the last fourteen
years, a total of coal-miners, greater than our entire standing army, has
been killed and injured.  The United States Bureau of Labour states that
during the year 1908, there were between 30,000 and 35,000 deaths of
workers by accidents, while 200,000 more were injured.  In fact, the
safest place for a working-man is in the army.  And even if that army be
at the front, fighting in Cuba or South Africa, the soldier in the ranks
has a better chance for life than the working-man at home.

And yet, despite this terrible roll of death, despite the enormous
killing of the past and the enormous killing of the present, there are to-
day alive on the planet a billion and three quarters of human beings.  Our
immediate conclusion is that man is exceedingly fecund and very tough.
Never before have there been so many people in the world.  In the past
centuries the world's population has been smaller; in the future
centuries it is destined to be larger.  And this brings us to that old
bugbear that has been so frequently laughed away and that still persists
in raising its grisly head--namely, the doctrine of Malthus.  While man's
increasing efficiency of food-production, combined with colonisation of
whole virgin continents, has for generations given the apparent lie to
Malthus' mathematical statement of the Law of Population, nevertheless
the essential significance of his doctrine remains and cannot be
challenged.  Population _does_ press against subsistence.  And no matter
how rapidly subsistence increases, population is certain to catch up with
it.

When man was in the hunting stage of development, wide areas were
necessary for the maintenance of scant populations.  With the shepherd
stages, the means of subsistence being increased, a larger population was
supported on the same territory.  The agricultural stage gave support to
a still larger population; and, to-day, with the increased food-getting
efficiency of a machine civilisation, an even larger population is made
possible.  Nor is this theoretical.  The population is here, a billion
and three quarters of men, women, and children, and this vast population
is increasing on itself by leaps and bounds.

A heavy European drift to the New World has gone on and is going on; yet
Europe, whose population a century ago was 170,000,000, has to-day
500,000,000.  At this rate of increase, provided that subsistence is not
overtaken, a century from now the population of Europe will be
1,500,000,000.  And be it noted of the present rate of increase in the
United States that only one-third is due to immigration, while two-thirds
is due to excess of births over deaths.  And at this present rate of
increase, the population of the United States will be 500,000,000 in less
than a century from now.

Man, the hungry one, the killer, has always suffered for lack of room.
The world has been chronically overcrowded.  Belgium with her 572 persons
to the square mile is no more crowded than was Denmark when it supported
only 500 palaeolithic people.  According to Mr. Woodruff, cultivated land
will produce 1600 times as much food as hunting land.  From the time of
the Norman Conquest, for centuries Europe could support no more than 25
to the square mile.  To-day Europe supports 81 to the square mile.  The
explanation of this is that for the several centuries after the Norman
Conquest her population was saturated.  Then, with the development of
trading and capitalism, of exploration and exploitation of new lands, and
with the invention of labour-saving machinery and the discovery and
application of scientific principles, was brought about a tremendous
increase in Europe's food-getting efficiency.  And immediately her
population sprang up.

According to the census of Ireland, of 1659, that country had a
population of 500,000.  One hundred and fifty years later, her population
was 8,000,000.  For many centuries the population of Japan was
stationary.  There seemed no way of increasing her food-getting
efficiency.  Then, sixty years ago, came Commodore Perry, knocking down
her doors and letting in the knowledge and machinery of the superior food-
getting efficiency of the Western world.  Immediately upon this rise in
subsistence began the rise of population; and it is only the other day
that Japan, finding her population once again pressing against
subsistence, embarked, sword in hand, on a westward drift in search of
more room.  And, sword in hand, killing and being killed, she has carved
out for herself Formosa and Korea, and driven the vanguard of her drift
far into the rich interior of Manchuria.

For an immense period of time China's population has remained at
400,000,000--the saturation point.  The only reason that the Yellow River
periodically drowns millions of Chinese is that there is no other land
for those millions to farm.  And after every such catastrophe the wave of
human life rolls up and now millions flood out upon that precarious
territory.  They are driven to it, because they are pressed remorselessly
against subsistence.  It is inevitable that China, sooner or later, like
Japan, will learn and put into application our own superior food-getting
efficiency.  And when that time comes, it is likewise inevitable that her
population will increase by unguessed millions until it again reaches the
saturation point.  And then, inoculated with Western ideas, may she not,
like Japan, take sword in hand and start forth colossally on a drift of
her own for more room?  This is another reputed bogie--the Yellow Peril;
yet the men of China are only men, like any other race of men, and all
men, down all history, have drifted hungrily, here, there and everywhere
over the planet, seeking for something to eat.  What other men do, may
not the Chinese do?

But a change has long been coming in the affairs of man.  The more recent
drifts of the stronger races, carving their way through the lesser breeds
to more earth-space, has led to peace, ever to wider and more lasting
peace.  The lesser breeds, under penalty of being killed, have been
compelled to lay down their weapons and cease killing among themselves.
The scalp-talking Indian and the head-hunting Melanesian have been either
destroyed or converted to a belief in the superior efficacy of civil
suits and criminal prosecutions.  The planet is being subdued.  The wild
and the hurtful are either tamed or eliminated.  From the beasts of prey
and the cannibal humans down to the death-dealing microbes, no quarter is
given; and daily, wider and wider areas of hostile territory, whether of
a warring desert-tribe in Africa or a pestilential fever-hole like
Panama, are made peaceable and habitable for mankind.  As for the great
mass of stay-at-home folk, what percentage of the present generation in
the United States, England, or Germany, has seen war or knows anything of
war at first hand?  There was never so much peace in the world as there
is to-day.

War itself, the old red anarch, is passing.  It is safer to be a soldier
than a working-man.  The chance for life is greater in an active campaign
than in a factory or a coal-mine.  In the matter of killing, war is
growing impotent, and this in face of the fact that the machinery of war
was never so expensive in the past nor so dreadful.  War-equipment to-
day, in time of peace, is more expensive than of old in time of war.  A
standing army costs more to maintain than it used to cost to conquer an
empire.  It is more expensive to be ready to kill, than it used to be to
do the killing.  The price of a Dreadnought would furnish the whole army
of Xerxes with killing weapons.  And, in spite of its magnificent
equipment, war no longer kills as it used to when its methods were
simpler.  A bombardment by a modern fleet has been known to result in the
killing of one mule.  The casualties of a twentieth century war between
two world-powers are such as to make a worker in an iron-foundry turn
green with envy.  War has become a joke.  Men have made for themselves
monsters of battle which they cannot face in battle.  Subsistence is
generous these days, life is not cheap, and it is not in the nature of
flesh and blood to indulge in the carnage made possible by present-day
machinery.  This is not theoretical, as will be shown by a comparison of
deaths in battle and men involved, in the South African War and the
Spanish-American War on the one hand, and the Civil War or the Napoleonic
Wars on the other.

Not only has war, by its own evolution, rendered itself futile, but man
himself, with greater wisdom and higher ethics, is opposed to war.  He
has learned too much.  War is repugnant to his common sense.  He
conceives it to be wrong, to be absurd, and to be very expensive.  For
the damage wrought and the results accomplished, it is not worth the
price.  Just as in the disputes of individuals the arbitration of a civil
court instead of a blood feud is more practical, so, man decides, is
arbitration more practical in the disputes of nations.

War is passing, disease is being conquered, and man's food-getting
efficiency is increasing.  It is because of these factors that there are
a billion and three quarters of people alive to-day instead of a billion,
or three-quarters of a billion.  And it is because of these factors that
the world's population will very soon be two billions and climbing
rapidly toward three billions.  The lifetime of the generation is
increasing steadily.  Men live longer these days.  Life is not so
precarious.  The newborn infant has a greater chance for survival than at
any time in the past.  Surgery and sanitation reduce the fatalities that
accompany the mischances of life and the ravages of disease.  Men and
women, with deficiencies and weaknesses that in the past would have
effected their rapid extinction, live to-day and father and mother a
numerous progeny.  And high as the food-getting efficiency may soar,
population is bound to soar after it.  "The abysmal fecundity" of life
has not altered.  Given the food, and life will increase.  A small
percentage of the billion and three-quarters that live to-day may hush
the clamour of life to be born, but it is only a small percentage.  In
this particular, the life in the man-animal is very like the life in the
other animals.

And still another change is coming in human affairs.  Though politicians
gnash their teeth and cry anathema, and man, whose superficial
book-learning is vitiated by crystallised prejudice, assures us that
civilisation will go to smash, the trend of society, to-day, the world
over, is toward socialism.  The old individualism is passing.  The state
interferes more and more in affairs that hitherto have been considered
sacredly private.  And socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a
new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.
In short, socialism is an improved food-getting efficiency.

Furthermore, not only will socialism get food more easily and in greater
quantity, but it will achieve a more equitable distribution of that food.
Socialism promises, for a time, to give all men, women, and children all
they want to eat, and to enable them to eat all they want as often as
they want.  Subsistence will be pushed back, temporarily, an exceedingly
long way.  In consequence, the flood of life will rise like a tidal wave.
There will be more marriages and more children born.  The enforced
sterility that obtains to-day for many millions, will no longer obtain.
Nor will the fecund millions in the slums and labour-ghettos, who to-day
die of all the ills due to chronic underfeeding and overcrowding, and who
die with their fecundity largely unrealised, die in that future day when
the increased food-getting efficiency of socialism will give them all
they want to eat.

It is undeniable that population will increase prodigiously-just as it
has increased prodigiously during the last few centuries, following upon
the increase in food-getting efficiency.  The magnitude of population in
that future day is well nigh unthinkable.  But there is only so much land
and water on the surface of the earth.  Man, despite his marvellous
accomplishments, will never be able to increase the diameter of the
planet.  The old days of virgin continents will be gone.  The habitable
planet, from ice-cap to ice-cap, will be inhabited.  And in the matter of
food-getting, as in everything else, man is only finite.  Undreamed-of
efficiencies in food-getting may be achieved, but, soon or late, man will
find himself face to face with Malthus' grim law.  Not only will
population catch up with subsistence, but it will press against
subsistence, and the pressure will be pitiless and savage.  Somewhere in
the future is a date when man will face, consciously, the bitter fact
that there is not food enough for all of him to eat.

When this day comes, what then?  Will there be a recrudescence of old
obsolete war?  In a saturated population life is always cheap, as it is
cheap in China, in India, to-day.  Will new human drifts take place,
questing for room, carving earth-space out of crowded life.  Will the
Sword again sing:

   "Follow, O follow, then,
   Heroes, my harvesters!
   Where the tall grain is ripe
   Thrust in your sickles!
   Stripped and adust
   In a stubble of empire
   Scything and binding
   The full sheaves of sovereignty."

Even if, as of old, man should wander hungrily, sword in hand, slaying
and being slain, the relief would be only temporary.  Even if one race
alone should hew down the last survivor of all the other races, that one
race, drifting the world around, would saturate the planet with its own
life and again press against subsistence.  And in that day, the death
rate and the birth rate will have to balance.  Men will have to die, or
be prevented from being born.  Undoubtedly a higher quality of life will
obtain, and also a slowly decreasing fecundity.  But this decrease will
be so slow that the pressure against subsistence will remain.  The
control of progeny will be one of the most important problems of man and
one of the most important functions of the state.  Men will simply be not
permitted to be born.

Disease, from time to time, will ease the pressure.  Diseases are
parasites, and it must not be forgotten that just as there are drifts in
the world of man, so are there drifts in the world of micro-organisms--
hunger-quests for food.  Little is known of the micro-organic world,
but that little is appalling; and no census of it will ever be taken,
for there is the true, literal "abysmal fecundity."  Multitudinous as
man is, all his totality of individuals is as nothing in comparison
with the inconceivable vastness of numbers of the micro-organisms.  In
your body, or in mine, right now, are swarming more individual entities
than there are human beings in the world to-day.  It is to us an
invisible world.  We only guess its nearest confines.  With our powerful
microscopes and ultramicroscopes, enlarging diameters twenty
thousand times, we catch but the slightest glimpses of that profundity of
infinitesimal life.

Little is known of that world, save in a general way.  We know that out
of it arise diseases, new to us, that afflict and destroy man.  We do not
know whether these diseases are merely the drifts, in a fresh direction,
of already-existing breeds of micro-organisms, or whether they are new,
absolutely new, breeds themselves just spontaneously generated.  The
latter hypothesis is tenable, for we theorise that if spontaneous
generation still occurs on the earth, it is far more likely to occur in
the form of simple organisms than of complicated organisms.

Another thing we know, and that is that it is in crowded populations that
new diseases arise.  They have done so in the past.  They do so to-day.
And no matter how wise are our physicians and bacteriologists, no matter
how successfully they cope with these invaders, new invaders continue to
arise--new drifts of hungry life seeking to devour us.  And so we are
justified in believing that in the saturated populations of the future,
when life is suffocating in the pressure against subsistence, that new,
and ever new, hosts of destroying micro-organisms will continue to arise
and fling themselves upon earth-crowded man to give him room.  There may
even be plagues of unprecedented ferocity that will depopulate great
areas before the wit of man can overcome them.  And this we know: that no
matter how often these invisible hosts may be overcome by man's becoming
immune to them through a cruel and terrible selection, new hosts will
ever arise of these micro-organisms that were in the world before he came
and that will be here after he is gone.

After he is gone?  Will he then some day be gone, and this planet know
him no more?  Is it thither that the human drift in all its totality is
trending?  God Himself is silent on this point, though some of His
prophets have given us vivid representations of that 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 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 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 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 around and back
again.  And there was little else to learn during that seven-months'
cruise, except fancy rope-sailorising, such as the more complicated
lanyard knots and the making of various kinds of sennit and rope-mats.
The point of all of which is that it is by means of small-boat sailing
that the real sailor is best schooled.

And if a man is a born sailor, and has gone to the school of the sea,
never in all his life can he get away from the sea again.  The salt of it
is in his bones as well as his nostrils, and the sea will call to him
until he dies.  Of late years, I have found easier ways of earning a
living.  I have quit the forecastle for keeps, but always I come back to
the sea.  In my case it is usually San Francisco Bay, than which no
lustier, tougher, sheet of water can be found for small-boat sailing.

It really blows on San Francisco Bay.  During the winter, which is the
best cruising season, we have southeasters, southwesters, and occasional
howling northers.  Throughout the summer we have what we call the "sea-
breeze," an unfailing wind off the Pacific that on most afternoons in the
week blows what the Atlantic Coast yachtsmen would name a gale.  They are
always surprised by the small spread of canvas our yachts carry.  Some of
them, with schooners they have sailed around the Horn, have looked
proudly at their own lofty sticks and huge spreads, then patronisingly
and even pityingly at ours.  Then, perchance, they have joined in a club
cruise from San Francisco to Mare Island.  They found the morning run up
the Bay delightful.  In the afternoon, when the brave west wind ramped
across San Pablo Bay and they faced it on the long beat home, things were
somewhat different.  One by one, like a flight of swallows, our more
meagrely sparred and canvassed yachts went by, leaving them wallowing and
dead and shortening down in what they called a gale but which we called a
dandy sailing breeze.  The next time they came out, we would notice their
sticks cut down, their booms shortened, and their after-leeches nearer
the luffs by whole cloths.

As for excitement, there is all the difference in the world between a
ship in trouble at sea, and a small boat in trouble on land-locked water.
Yet for genuine excitement and thrill, give me the small boat.  Things
happen so quickly, and there are always so few to do the work--and hard
work, too, as the small-boat sailor knows.  I have toiled all night, both
watches on deck, in a typhoon off the coast of Japan, and been less
exhausted than by two hours' work at reefing down a thirty-foot sloop and
heaving up two anchors on a lee shore in a screaming southeaster.

Hard work and excitement?  Let the wind baffle and drop in a heavy tide-
way just as you are sailing your little sloop through a narrow
draw-bridge.  Behold your sails, upon which you are depending, flap with
sudden emptiness, and then see the impish wind, with a haul of eight
points, fill your jib aback with a gusty puff.  Around she goes, and
sweeps, not through the open draw, but broadside on against the solid
piles.  Hear the roar of the tide, sucking through the trestle.  And hear
and see your pretty, fresh-painted boat crash against the piles.  Feel
her stout little hull give to the impact.  See the rail actually pinch
in.  Hear your canvas tearing, and see the black, square-ended timbers
thrusting holes through it.  Smash!  There goes your topmast stay, and
the topmast reels over drunkenly above you.  There is a ripping and
crunching.  If it continues, your starboard shrouds will be torn out.
Grab a rope--any rope--and take a turn around a pile.  But the free end
of the rope is too short.  You can't make it fast, and you hold on and
wildly yell for your one companion to get a turn with another and longer
rope.  Hold on!  You hold on till you are purple in the face, till it
seems your arms are dragging out of their sockets, till the blood bursts
from the ends of your fingers.  But you hold, and your partner gets the
longer rope and makes it fast.  You straighten up and look at your hands.
They are ruined.  You can scarcely relax the crooks of the fingers.  The
pain is sickening.  But there is no time.  The skiff, which is always
perverse, is pounding against the barnacles on the piles which threaten
to scrape its gunwale off.  It's drop the peak!  Down jib!  Then you run
lines, and pull and haul and heave, and exchange unpleasant remarks with
the bridge-tender who is always willing to meet you more than half way in
such repartee.  And finally, at the end of an hour, with aching back,
sweat-soaked shirt, and slaughtered hands, you are through and swinging
along on the placid, beneficent tide between narrow banks where the
cattle stand knee-deep and gaze wonderingly at you.  Excitement!  Work!
Can you beat it in a calm day on the deep sea?

I've tried it both ways.  I remember labouring in a fourteen days' gale
off the coast of New Zealand.  We were a tramp collier, rusty and
battered, with six thousand tons of coal in our hold.  Life lines were
stretched fore and aft; and on our weather side, attached to smokestack
guys and rigging, were huge rope-nettings, hung there for the purpose of
breaking the force of the seas and so saving our mess-room doors.  But
the doors were smashed and the mess-rooms washed out just the same.  And
yet, out of it all, arose but the one feeling, namely, of monotony.

In contrast with the foregoing, about the liveliest eight days of my life
were spent in a small boat on the west coast of Korea.  Never mind why I
was thus voyaging up the Yellow Sea during the month of February in below-
zero weather.  The point is that I was in an open boat, a _sampan_, on a
rocky coast where there were no light-houses and where the tides ran from
thirty to sixty feet.  My crew were Japanese fishermen.  We did not speak
each other's language.  Yet there was nothing monotonous about that trip.
Never shall I forget one particular cold bitter dawn, when, in the thick
of driving snow, we took in sail and dropped our small anchor.  The wind
was howling out of the northwest, and we were on a lee shore.  Ahead and
astern, all escape was cut off by rocky headlands, against whose bases
burst the unbroken seas.  To windward a short distance, seen only between
the snow-squalls, was a low rocky reef.  It was this that inadequately
protected us from the whole Yellow Sea that thundered in upon us.

The Japanese crawled under a communal rice mat and went to sleep.  I
joined them, and for several hours we dozed fitfully.  Then a sea deluged
us out with icy water, and we found several inches of snow on top the
mat.  The reef to windward was disappearing under the rising tide, and
moment by moment the seas broke more strongly over the rocks.  The
fishermen studied the shore anxiously.  So did I, and with a sailor's
eye, though I could see little chance for a swimmer to gain that surf-
hammered line of rocks.  I made signs toward the headlands on either
flank.  The Japanese shook their heads.  I indicated that dreadful lee
shore.  Still they shook their heads and did nothing.  My conclusion was
that they were paralysed by the hopelessness of the situation.  Yet our
extremity increased with every minute, for the rising tide was robbing us
of the reef that served as buffer.  It soon became a case of swamping at
our anchor.  Seas were splashing on board in growing volume, and we baled
constantly.  And still my fishermen crew eyed the surf-battered shore and
did nothing.

At last, after many narrow escapes from complete swamping, the fishermen
got into action.  All hands tailed on to the anchor and hove it up.
For'ard, as the boat's head paid off, we set a patch of sail about the
size of a flour-sack.  And we headed straight for shore.  I unlaced my
shoes, unbottoned my great-coat and coat, and was ready to make a quick
partial strip a minute or so before we struck.  But we didn't strike,
and, as we rushed in, I saw the beauty of the situation.  Before us
opened a narrow channel, frilled at its mouth with breaking seas.  Yet,
long before, when I had scanned the shore closely, there had been no such
channel.  _I had forgotten the thirty-foot tide_.  And it was for this
tide that the Japanese had so precariously waited.  We ran the frill of
breakers, curved into a tiny sheltered bay where the water was scarcely
flawed by the gale, and landed on a beach where the salt sea of the last
tide lay frozen in long curving lines.  And this was one gale of three in
the course of those eight days in the _sampan_.  Would it have been
beaten on a ship?  I fear me the ship would have gone aground on the
outlying reef and that its people would have been incontinently and
monotonously drowned.

There are enough surprises and mishaps in a three-days' cruise in a small
boat to supply a great ship on the ocean for a full year.  I remember,
once, taking out on her trial trip a little thirty-footer I had just
bought.  In six days we had two stiff blows, and, in addition, one proper
southwester and one rip-snorting southeaster.  The slight intervals
between these blows were dead calms.  Also, in the six days, we were
aground three times.  Then, too, we tied up to the bank in the Sacramento
River, and, grounding by an accident on the steep slope on a falling
tide, nearly turned a side somersault down the bank.  In a stark calm and
heavy tide in the Carquinez Straits, where anchors skate on the channel-
scoured bottom, we were sucked against a big dock and smashed and bumped
down a quarter of a mile of its length before we could get clear.  Two
hours afterward, on San Pablo Bay, the wind was piping up and we were
reefing down.  It is no fun to pick up a skiff adrift in a heavy sea and
gale.  That was our next task, for our skiff, swamping, parted both
towing painters we had bent on.  Before we recovered it we had nearly
killed ourselves with exhaustion, and we certainly had strained the sloop
in every part from keelson to truck.  And to cap it all, coming into our
home port, beating up the narrowest part of the San Antonio Estuary, we
had a shave of inches from collision with a big ship in tow of a tug.  I
have sailed the ocean in far larger craft a year at a time, in which
period occurred no such chapter of moving incident.

After all, the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat sailing.
Looking back, they prove to be punctuations of joy.  At the time they try
your mettle and your vocabulary, and may make you so pessimistic as to
believe that God has a grudge against you--but afterward, ah, afterward,
with what pleasure you remember them and with what gusto do you relate
them to your brother skippers in the fellowhood of small-boat sailing!

A narrow, winding slough; a half tide, exposing mud surfaced with
gangrenous slime; the water itself filthy and discoloured by the waste
from the vats of a near-by tannery; the marsh grass on either side
mottled with all the shades of a decaying orchid; a crazy, ramshackled,
ancient wharf; and at the end of the wharf a small, white-painted sloop.
Nothing romantic about it.  No hint of adventure.  A splendid pictorial
argument against the alleged joys of small-boat sailing.  Possibly that
is what Cloudesley and I thought, that sombre, leaden morning as we
turned out to cook breakfast and wash decks.  The latter was my stunt,
but one look at the dirty water overside and another at my fresh-painted
deck, deterred me.  After breakfast, we started a game of chess.  The
tide continued to fall, and we felt the sloop begin to list.  We played
on until the chess men began to fall over.  The list increased, and we
went on deck.  Bow-line and stern-line were drawn taut.  As we looked the
boat listed still farther with an abrupt jerk.  The lines were now very
taut.

"As soon as her belly touches the bottom she will stop," I said.

Cloudesley sounded with a boat-hook along the outside.

"Seven feet of water," he announced.  "The bank is almost up and down.
The first thing that touches will be her mast when she turns bottom up."

An ominous, minute snapping noise came from the stern-line.  Even as we
looked, we saw a strand fray and part.  Then we jumped.  Scarcely had we
bent another line between the stern and the wharf, when the original line
parted.  As we bent another line for'ard, the original one there crackled
and parted.  After that, it was an inferno of work and excitement.

We ran more and more lines, and more and more lines continued to part,
and more and more the pretty boat went over on her side.  We bent all our
spare lines; we unrove sheets and halyards; we used our two-inch hawser;
we fastened lines part way up the mast, half way up, and everywhere else.
We toiled and sweated and enounced our mutual and sincere conviction that
God's grudge still held against us.  Country yokels came down on the
wharf and sniggered at us.  When Cloudesley let a coil of rope slip down
the inclined deck into the vile slime and fished it out with seasick
countenance, the yokels sniggered louder and it was all I could do to
prevent him from climbing up on the wharf and committing murder.

By the time the sloop's deck was perpendicular, we had unbent the boom-
lift from below, made it fast to the wharf, and, with the other end fast
nearly to the mast-head, heaved it taut with block and tackle.  The lift
was of steel wire.  We were confident that it could stand the strain, but
we doubted the holding-power of the stays that held the mast.

The tide had two more hours to ebb (and it was the big run-out), which
meant that five hours must elapse ere the returning tide would give us a
chance to learn whether or not the sloop would rise to it and right
herself.

The bank was almost up and down, and at the bottom, directly beneath us,
the fast-ebbing tide left a pit of the vilest, illest-smelling, illest-
appearing muck to be seen in many a day's ride.  Said Cloudesley to me
gazing down into it:

"I love you as a brother.  I'd fight for you.  I'd face roaring lions,
and sudden death by field and flood.  But just the same, don't you fall
into that."  He shuddered nauseously.  "For if you do, I haven't the grit
to pull you out.  I simply couldn't.  You'd be awful.  The best I could
do would be to take a boat-hook and shove you down out of sight."

We sat on the upper side-wall of the cabin, dangled our legs down the top
of the cabin, leaned our backs against the deck, and played chess until
the rising tide and the block and tackle on the boom-lift enabled us to
get her on a respectable keel again.  Years afterward, down in the South
Seas, on the island of Ysabel, I was caught in a similar predicament.  In
order to clean her copper, I had careened the _Snark_ broadside on to the
beach and outward.  When the tide rose, she refused to rise.  The water
crept in through the scuppers, mounted over the rail, and the level of
the ocean slowly crawled up the slant of the deck.  We battened down the
engine-room hatch, and the sea rose to it and over it and climbed
perilously near to the cabin companion-way and skylight.  We were all
sick with fever, but we turned out in the blazing tropic sun and toiled
madly for several hours.  We carried our heaviest lines ashore from our
mast-heads and heaved with our heaviest purchase until everything
crackled including ourselves.  We would spell off and lie down like dead
men, then get up and heave and crackle again.  And in the end, our lower
rail five feet under water and the wavelets lapping the companion-way
combing, the sturdy little craft shivered and shook herself and pointed
her masts once more to the zenith.

There is never lack of exercise in small-boat sailing, and the hard work
is not only part of the fun of it, but it beats the doctors.  San
Francisco Bay is no mill pond.  It is a large and draughty and variegated
piece of water.  I remember, one winter evening, trying to enter the
mouth of the Sacramento.  There was a freshet on the river, the flood
tide from the bay had been beaten back into a strong ebb, and the lusty
west wind died down with the sun.  It was just sunset, and with a fair to
middling breeze, dead aft, we stood still in the rapid current.  We were
squarely in the mouth of the river; but there was no anchorage and we
drifted backward, faster and faster, and dropped anchor outside as the
last breath of wind left us.  The night came on, beautiful and warm and
starry.  My one companion cooked supper, while on deck I put everything
in shape Bristol fashion.  When we turned in at nine o'clock the weather-
promise was excellent.  (If I had carried a barometer I'd have known
better.)  By two in the morning our shrouds were thrumming in a piping
breeze, and I got up and gave her more scope on her hawser.  Inside
another hour there was no doubt that we were in for a southeaster.

It is not nice to leave a warm bed and get out of a bad anchorage in a
black blowy night, but we arose to the occasion, put in two reefs, and
started to heave up.  The winch was old, and the strain of the jumping
head sea was too much for it.  With the winch out of commission, it was
impossible to heave up by hand.  We knew, because we tried it and
slaughtered our hands.  Now a sailor hates to lose an anchor.  It is a
matter of pride.  Of course, we could have buoyed ours and slipped it.
Instead, however, I gave her still more hawser, veered her, and dropped
the second anchor.

There was little sleep after that, for first one and then the other of us
would be rolled out of our bunks.  The increasing size of the seas told
us we were dragging, and when we struck the scoured channel we could tell
by the feel of it that our two anchors were fairly skating across.  It
was a deep channel, the farther edge of it rising steeply like the wall
of a canyon, and when our anchors started up that wall they hit in and
held.

Yet, when we fetched up, through the darkness we could hear the seas
breaking on the solid shore astern, and so near was it that we shortened
the skiff's painter.

Daylight showed us that between the stern of the skiff and destruction
was no more than a score of feet.  And how it did blow!  There were
times, in the gusts, when the wind must have approached a velocity of
seventy or eighty miles an hour.  But the anchors held, and so nobly that
our final anxiety was that the for'ard bitts would be jerked clean out of
the boat.  All day the sloop alternately ducked her nose under and sat
down on her stern; and it was not till late afternoon that the storm
broke in one last and worst mad gust.  For a full five minutes an
absolute dead calm prevailed, and then, with the suddenness of a
thunderclap, the wind snorted out of the southwest--a shift of eight
points and a boisterous gale.  Another night of it was too much for us,
and we hove up by hand in a cross head-sea.  It was not stiff work.  It
was heart-breaking.  And I know we were both near to crying from the hurt
and the exhaustion.  And when we did get the first anchor up-and-down we
couldn't break it out.  Between seas we snubbed her nose down to it, took
plenty of turns, and stood clear as she jumped.  Almost everything
smashed and parted except the anchor-hold.  The chocks were jerked out,
the rail torn off, and the very covering-board splintered, and still the
anchor held.  At last, hoisting the reefed mainsail and slacking off a
few of the hard-won feet of the chain, we sailed the anchor out.  It was
nip and tuck, though, and there were times when the boat was knocked down
flat.  We repeated the manoeuvre with the remaining anchor, and in the
gathering darkness fled into the shelter of the river's mouth.

I was born so long ago that I grew up before the era of gasolene.  As a
result, I am old-fashioned.  I prefer a sail-boat to a motor-boat, and it
is my belief that boat-sailing is a finer, more difficult, and sturdier
art than running a motor.  Gasolene engines are becoming fool-proof, and
while it is unfair to say that any fool can run an engine, it is fair to
say that almost any one can.  Not so, when it comes to sailing a boat.
More skill, more intelligence, and a vast deal more training are
necessary.  It is the finest training in the world for boy and youth and
man.  If the boy is very small, equip him with a small, comfortable
skiff.  He will do the rest.  He won't need to be taught.  Shortly he
will be setting a tiny leg-of-mutton and steering with an oar.  Then he
will begin to talk keels and centreboards and want to take his blankets
out and stop aboard all night.

But don't be afraid for him.  He is bound to run risks and encounter
accidents.  Remember, there are accidents in the nursery as well as out
on the water.  More boys have died from hot-house culture than have died
on boats large and small; and more boys have been made into strong and
reliant men by boat-sailing than by lawn-croquet and dancing-school.

And once a sailor, always a sailor.  The savour of the salt never stales.
The sailor never grows so old that he does not care to go back for one
more wrestling bout with wind and wave.  I know it of myself.  I have
turned rancher, and live beyond sight of the sea.  Yet I can stay away
from it only so long.  After several months have passed, I begin to grow
restless.  I find myself day-dreaming over incidents of the last cruise,
or wondering if the striped bass are running on Wingo Slough, or eagerly
reading the newspapers for reports of the first northern flights of
ducks.  And then, suddenly, there is a hurried pack of suit-cases and
overhauling of gear, and we are off for Vallejo where the little _Roamer_
lies, waiting, always waiting, for the skiff to come alongside, for the
lighting of the fire in the galley-stove, for the pulling off of gaskets,
the swinging up of the mainsail, and the rat-tat-tat of the reef-points,
for the heaving short and the breaking out, and for the twirling of the
wheel as she fills away and heads up Bay or down.

JACK LONDON
On Board _Roamer_,
Sonoma Creek,
April 15, 1911