JACK LONDON’S YOKOHAMA SWIM
AND HIS FIRST TALL TALE

When Jack London wrote his recollections of his early drinking exploits, he described an incident from his 1893 seal-hunting voyage as "a red letter event," one to be "remembered and narrated with pride."¹ The event was his long midnight swim from Yokohama back to his ship, the schooner Sophia Sutherland, anchored about a mile out in the harbor. The exploit was apparently much talked of, both on the ship and ashore, making London into something of an overnight sensation.

London’s understandable glow of pride did indeed cause him to remember and narrate this exploit on at least four occasions. In addition to the presumably factual account in John Barleycorn, Joan London reports that a few years later he told the story, with additional details, to "a chance acquaintance on the road."² And not surprisingly, the episode turns up in his fiction. Under the title of "A Night’s Swim in Yeddo Bay," it becomes one of the stories he published in the Oakland High School Aegis in 1895; and in 1903, in a quite different version, with the title shortened to "In Yeddo Bay," it was published as a juvenile adventure tale in St. Nicholas.³ Thus, as James E. Sisson has observed, like the better-known "To Build a Fire," the accounts of the Yokohama swim provide another example of a twice-told tale.⁴ Though the later St. Nicholas version well enough deserves its present obscurity, a comparison of the two stories does offer an insight into London’s ability to use the same material to strikingly different effects. And perhaps equally important, the early Aegis version deserves attention for the considerable artistry with which, even as a nineteen-year-old high school student, London could write in the mode of the humorous frontier tall tale.⁵

Before turning to the two short stories, however, we might first examine the episodes on which they were based. The facts, it turns out, are not so easy to pin down. This is London’s description in John Barleycorn, written nearly twenty years after the event:

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Nothing in this account is inherently unlikely, yet on two major points it differs from the version in Joan London’s biography:

These accounts obviously give different—though not necessarily conflicting—versions of why London made the swim. Implicitly, the second version also casts doubt on London’s claim in John Barleycorn that the police brought his clothes out to the ship for identification. Both of these apparent inconsistencies deserve a closer look.

To begin with, neither of the two accounts can be assumed trustworthy. Despite his assertion to an editor that John Barleycorn is "bare, bald, absolute fact, a recital of my own personal experiences," London is known to have embroidered the truth of his alcoholic binges, and he may even have made up some episodes out of whole cloth or attributed to himself adventures that had happened to others.⁶ Joan London’s version, moreover, is suspect as a third-hand as told to’’ account; the ‘‘acquaintance on the road’’ is not named and the source is undocumented and therefore unverifiable. Joan London was a scrupulous and, on the whole, an objective biographer of her father, yet we cannot be certain that this story was not considerably transformed during its multiple tellings. In his book on his tramping experiences, The Road, London attributed his story-telling ability to the necessity of inventing a plausible reason for cadging a meal. The fact that London told this second version of the story to a chance acquaintance on the road" gives us little confidence that he had not suffered a recurrence of his former inclination to fabricate adventures.⁷

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The two sources seem to conflict most sharply over the question of why London made the swim. He may well have been drunk, as he claims in John Barleycorn; but even if he were, that fact seems only a partial explanation, leaving many questions unanswered. If it were simply a drunken stunt, did he perform it on his own initiative, either on a whim or to prove something to himself? Or did some shipmate dare him to do it, challenging him to prove himself the "able seaman" he had claimed to be—not entirely legitimately—when he signed on for the voyage? Throughout his life London put himself to this kind of test, and the challenge of a daredevil venture might have provided a sufficient motive even without the added stimulus of drink. On the other hand, the simple explanation that he was drunk would seem not to preclude the possibility that he had gotten into a fracas with the police and had plunged into the harbor in a desperate effort to escape them, much as Joan London describes.

Yet if the police-chase really occurred, why would he have neglected to mention it in John Barleycorn, where it would have enhanced the drama of the whole episode? The answer seems to be that it does appear in John Barleycorn but in an earlier episode, at the Bonin Islands, where he and his shipmates were involved in a drunken melee during which they burst through teahouse walls and generally ran amok in defiance of the virtually helpless police (John Barleycorn, pp. 152-54). Did London confuse the two debauches in his memory, or even deliberately fuse them for the benefit of the "acquaintance on the road," to make a good story better? Is it even possible that the confusion occurs in John Barleycorn and that both the police-chase and the swim did occur together at Yokohama?

To complicate matters still further, in the two short stories London gives yet another reason for the swim. In each of these stories the protagonist swims back to the ship because he has lost his money and cannot pay the sampan fare, which the boatman demands in advance. Yet parts of this version, too, may have been borrowed from the Bonin Islands escapade, where London recalls being robbed not only of his money but also of his watch and some of his clothes (John Barleycorn, p. 156). This earlier drinking episode seems suspiciously close to the two fictional versions, in one of which (the Aegis story) the money was lost during a drunken brawl, whereas in the other (the St. Nicholas story) it was probably lost to a pickpocket. Thus, short of an infusion of reliable external evidence, there seems no way to determine precisely what led up to the plunge into the harbor, though on balance the John Barleycorn version, for all its apparent concealments, seems the more plausible.

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Equally frustrating is any attempt to discover the sequence of events after London reached the ship. In John Barleycorn he says he went "soundly to sleep" while the water-police searched the harbor for his body and brought his clothes out for identification. The implication is that he remained unaware that he was believed drowned until he awoke and was told by his shipmates. Possibly, as the two short stories have it, the crew had not discovered his presence and therefore in good faith sent the police away with the impression that he was indeed drowned. Yet each of the short stories goes beyond this plausible account to have its protagonist not sound asleep but merely dozing, so that he can awaken in time to overhear the police and crew discuss the possible drowning. The latter event unquestionably has the ring of fiction—especially in light of the improbable actions that result from it. It therefore casts doubt on whether the police came out to the ship at all.

Joan London’s account increases the doubt. According to her version, London "did not know" that the police believed him drowned; consequently, he was "surprised" by their awe-struck faces when they saw him alive the next day. If his shipmates had really learned of the drowning report from a policemen’s visit to the ship the night before, they surely would have told him about it as soon as they found him safe aboard. Thus, if we could only be certain that Joan London’s report is accurate, the most plausible conclusion would be that the police never came out to the ship. Did London consciously fabricate the policemen’s visit in John Barleycorn as well as in the short stories? He was not incapable of doing so. Or, by late 1912, when John Barleycorn was written, conceivably he remembered his short stories more vividly than the events on which they were based, thus unconsciously preferring a lively fiction to a less dramatic fact.

We are left, then, with the fair certainty that London did make a lengthy swim, the reason for which, however, we can only conjecture. Equally cloudy are the exact circumstances of the report of London’s drowning, the search for his body, and the revelation of his survival. Even London’s presumably factual accounts of the episode are sufficiently inconsistent to force us to treat the two short stories as essentially fiction—based, no doubt, on a core of personal experience but greatly embellished by London’s imagination. Although according to his wife London claimed that the stories in the Aegis "drew little upon my imagination, but were more relations of real incidents than anything else,"⁸ such a statement—at least as it concerns "A Night’s Swim in Yeddo Bay"—is no more accurate

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than his assertion that John Barleycorn is "absolute fact." London frequently complained of his lack of the power of "origination,"⁹ but once he had a core of experience to build on, he seldom had difficulty inventing the details to flesh it out into a readable narrative. In this instance that quality of imagination is all the more visible, for he has created out of a single body of material two stories more notable for their differences than for their similarities. The two protagonists, the tones, and the narrative methods of the two stories are as far apart as they could conceivably be.

In an effort to describe those differences, James E. Sisson says that the Aegis version is "told with the restraint of a Hemingway" and is "a simple narration of the confrontation between a common sailor called Charley (Jack London) and the sampan operators of Yokohama harbor (the Establishment)." The St. Nicholas version, on the other hand, Sisson describes as "a much more complex story" in which "the common sailor of the former version now becomes Alf Davis, Anglo Saxon, arrayed against the Oriental. "‘a This account of the differences could scarcely be more misleading. Though Sisson correctly observes that the Aegis story differs from the St. Nicholas version in being a first-person narrative, he is surely mistaken in suggesting that its narrator-protagonist, Long Charley, is Jack London. Described as a "grizzled, old merchant seaman," Charley is clearly a fictional character. Nor is the story told with anything remotely resembling Hemingway’s restraint; on the contrary, it is told with the comic gusto and wild exaggerations of a frontier tall tale. The racial theme, furthermore, is not confined to the St. Nicholas version; it appears in both, albeit differently and more subtly in the Aegis story. Initially, at least, far from being the "simple" tale that Sisson describes, the tall-tale version is more sophisticated artistically and, on the whole, a more engaging performance than the juvenile adventure tale.

The two stories share a number of elements of plot. In each of them, a sailor, ashore at Yokohama while his ship is anchored about a mile out in the harbor, discovers that he has lost his money and cannot pay the sampan fare in advance, but his pride balks at the boatman’s demand for a more valuable article of clothing as an alternative to the fare. After unsuccessfully soliciting the help of the police, he jumps in the water and swims out toward the ship, to the astonishment and dismay of the previously jeering onlookers. Slipping aboard the ship unnoticed and finding the air of the forecastle stuffy, he drops off to sleep in a secluded corner of the deck, at which point a police launch approaches carrying his clothes and

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inquiring whether he has reached the ship safely. Since no one aboard has seen him, he is at first feared drowned; but at length his presence is revealed—his exploit gaining him considerable celebrity and, from the sampan men, the triumphant "freedom of the harbor."

In the juvenile adventure story, "In Yeddo Bay," London shapes these ingredients into an unremarkable example of a genre that he sometimes turned to~ especially during the early years of his career, when he needed to crank out a quick potboiler." Its protagonist is a rather prim young sailor named Alf Davis, who bears little more resemblance to the young Jack London than does the bibulous old mariner of the earlier story. From the beginning, the episodes are pitched to a juvenile audience, calculated to arouse suspense and give London a chance to demonstrate didactically that Alfs Yankee pluck is superior to the sinister rapacity of the Japanese. The lines of racial conflict are simplistically drawn, and the prose has the schoolmarmish flavor typical of juveniles of the era, as in this early scene in a restaurant when AIf discovers he has lost his money:

Alf finally manages to scrape together the twenty-five sen for his meal. But since he has nothing left for the sampan fare, in the face of the clamorous demands of the boatmen "all the dogged stubbornness of his race" leads him to resolve "that he would die rather than submit to the indignity of being robbed of a single stitch of clothing. Not value, but principle, was at stake." When the crowd of boatmen becomes more menacing, Alf stoutly defends himself with his "white man’s fist," which the "dark-skinned peoples, the world over, have learned to respect." From this point on, the story follows the plot-lines already indicated, Alf’s swim being climaxed by his dramatic appearance before his shipmates and the police.

To this charmless story the earlier version, "A Night’s Swim in Yeddo Bay," provides a happy contrast. Though no one would pretend that it deserves a place beside the classics of Southwest humor, it does reveal considerable virtuosity and inventiveness, and a welcome

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comic sense that is enfeebled or nonexistent in London’s better-known work. Somewhere London must have read a few frontier tall tales since he is aware, for example, of the standard device of the narrative frame in which part of the comic effect is achieved by casting the improbable narrator and his outlandish exaggerations against the skepticism of his more sedate audience. London’s frame, in fact, resembles that in T. B. Thorpe’s classic of the genre, "The Big Bear of Arkansas," in which the hyperbolic hunting yarn is told by the roaring frontiersman Jim Doggett in the bar of a Mississippi River steamboat to a crowd of rowdy skeptics, including the more restrained and rather pompous frame-narrator.

If London’s use of the frame is less sophisticated than Thorpe’s or the early Mark Twain’s, it is nevertheless effective enough. The setting is a seamen’s bar, presumably on the San Francisco waterfront, and, like the setting of Thorpe’s "Big Bear," is plainly theatrical. The grizzled old sailor, Long Charley, knows how to play to an audience, "Striking an attitude, without which, as his old chum, Bill Nandts, said, it was impossible for him to spin a yarn." Skillfully lubricating the imaginations of his listeners by plying them with drinks, Charley regales them with increasingly preposterous exaggerations—all the while maintaining a deadpan earnestness, setting his glass "down on the bar with a slam, as though inviting criticism or controversy. But none dared to oppose him."

The humor of Charley’s challenge to his listeners is all the greater for the "whopper" with which he begins his tale—a fine piece of comic irony in which he baits the seamen’s prejudices by pretending to praise the Japanese as paragons: "Yes, a mighty nice set of people are them same Japs, for all their being half civilized, which I deny, and say right here that for smartness, push and energy, learning, honesty, politeness and general good-naturedness, their like can’t be beat. And when it comes to comparing them to our people, for real moral goodness and purity, why, we ain’t in it." Charley’s mock-denial that the Japanese are only half-civilized sets us up for the lronies to follow, as does his insistence that, for all their virtues, the chief Japanese desire is to be more like us.

As an example of this "longing to be . . . Europeanized or Americanized," Charley offers the subject of clothes. The Japanese, he says, are "only too quick to discard their old habits and way of doing things for the newer and more improved customs and methods of ours. Why, take the simple matter of dress, for instance. From the lowest beggar in the street to the highest dignitary in the land, they all want to be European in their dress. Pretty near all that can afford

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it dress like us, and sometimes those who can’t put themselves to pretty shifts in order to do so." Here indeed is the racial theme, but with a twist of comic irony unfortunately lacking in the more blatant racism of the St. Nicholas story. Having prepared his listeners to admire the Japanese imitation of the virtues of Western enterprise, Charley has slyly implied that those same Western "virtues" will lead the "enterprising" Japanese to try to fleece him of his Western clothes. The racial qualities are thus evenly apportioned, the Anglo-Saxon’s talent for commercial chicanery being nicely balanced by the Oriental’s eagerness to learn that trick.

After this artfully ironic beginning, the tale reverts to the more standard ingredients of the comedy of sailors on shore-leave. Having been "ashore half the night, carrying on as only a reckless young rat knows how," Charley gets mixed up in a number of street brawls, for he is "about half seas under" and doesn’t "care a snap for anything." In keeping with the spontaneity of a barroom yarn, London has Charley wander off into a digression on the changes in the Yokohama piers in the time since his appearance there, and then wander back to his main story with a comic nautical simile that pictures him meandering tipsily down a Yokohama street: "Along I came, taking in the whole street in a way that reminded me of the drunken fisherman, who, with thirty-two points in the compass, steered thirty more." After thus tacking back and forth, Charley at length reaches the harbor, where he hopes to hire a sampan for the trip back to the ship.

Especially revealing of the differences between the two versions of the story are the contrasting descriptions of the old sampan man. Confronted with several eager candidates, Alf Davis simply selects "the most favorable-looking one, an old and beneficent-appearing man with a withered leg." That Alf could find this cagey old operator "beneficient-looking" is testimony less to Oriental inscrutability than to his own innocence, but in any case the contrast with Long Charley’s lavish description is stark:

I soon engaged an old codger, who seemed like those battered armors which one sees in museums and such places. He must have been at least sixty years old, and, with great height, he was as lean as a skeleton; while his whole body was nothing but a mass of wrinkles. Here and there, as the light from a brazier, charcoal fire, shone on his sunburned hide, I could see big black and white scars of all descripions. He was the most battered old hulk one would wish to meet with, and his voice was in harmony with the rest of him. It was as thin and shrill and piping as

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a child’s, and it made me fidget as he bowed and ducked before me.

But this grotesquely sinister old man with the voice of a child is assisted by a child with "the bearing and assurance of a grown man," and such incongruities unsettle the tipsy Charley to the extent that he mismanages his entry into the boat, coming down "all in a heap, as though [he] intended going through the bottom of the rickety craft." It is the "precocious little youngster," then, who holds out his hand and says, "very laconically, . . . ‘Pay now,’" and then tries to bargain up for a shirt or a coat. In the other story, Alf Davis had responded to this gambit with a display of chauvinistic truculence, but Charley merely observes offhandedly that "I was very obstinate myself in those days, and wouldn’t give in."

Charley’s obstinacy takes the form of an "impassioned harangue to the motley mob, who cheered and jeered [him] by turns, not understanding a word of [his] discourse." But the drunken Charley has unwisely chosen to deliver his harangue from the top of "a big block of hewn granite." The result is that "bye and bye [he] fell off the stone on top of them, nearly mashing two or three." And as the epic swim begins, whereas Alf Davis runs "straight to the end of the pier" and dives "cleanly and neatly into the water," Charley’s attempt at a dignified entry has a different outcome: "I started down the stone steps with the tread of a hero; but the tide was out, and, slipping on the slimy ooze which covered them, I went heels over head, bumpety bump, all the way down to the bottom. I struck the water with a mighty splash, to the accompaniment of the hoarse shouts of the enthusiastic crowd."

As for the swim itself, the juvenile tale emphasizes its difficulty. Since the ship "was fully a mile away, and in the darkness it was no easy task to get her bearings," London creates suspense by having Alf execute several tricky navigational maneuvers before reaching the ship safely. Long Charley’s swim, on the other hand, comes as a comic anticlimax after the heroic pratfalls of the earlier action. "It was not much of a swim," he says, "—hardly a mile—and I soon found myself alongside." Clearly London has already mastered the comic art of playing off the hyperbolic treatment of the ordinary against the laconic understatement of improbable heroics.¹²

Finally, the two stories differ sharply in how they handle the revelation that the protagonist has survived the swim. In the juvenile tale, Alf has begun to doze off when he hears the approach of the policeboat and the worried conversation between the police and the crew, at which point he underscores his triumph with a grand

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Soon boats are plying back and forth, and the Harbor Master is "run down and spilled into the water by the police boat, which was just then engaged in an exciting chase of a poor, bewildered fisherman, to whom, with startling intuition, they had attributed all the trouble." From this point the chaos increases geometrically:

The frightened fisherman, now that he was saved by the accident, lost his head, and fouled the bowsprit of a Norwegian bark, near us, and capsized. Then a whole fleet of custom-house boats, thinking it was a preconcerted plan of the smugglers to land illicit goods during the excitement, came dashing across the harbor in all directions. And how they overhauled the frightened "sam pans" and fishing craft with great fierceness, in the heroic discharge of their duty!

And, to cap the climax, the aged keepers of the two light ships, on either side of the narrow opening in the great breakwater, seeing the lights of a P. and O. steamer approaching, thought it was an invasion of the Chinese. So they hurriedly extinguished both lights, and the big passenger steamer ran aground in the darkness.

The action then winds down to the next day’s d6nouement, when Charley, like Alf, is awarded the freedom of the harbor. But whereas Alf finds himself surrounded by "shouting and gesticulating, though very respectful, sampan men," Charley goes ashore to a less dignified reception, with the sampan men commencing "a great jabbering and laughing whenever [hell] hove in sight." Comic hero to the end, he closes his yarn in the midst of his barroom audience, with his old chum Bill Nandts summoning all hands to "drink to the health of

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Long Charley, the best old ‘shell back’ that ever sailed out of ’Frisco."

Admittedly, this story lacks the strong vernacular style of frontier humor at its best, and it depends heavily on standard devices of drunken-sailor comedy: the nautical figure of speech, the epic pratfall, and the snowballing hyperbole of harbor rumor. Only in the introduction does the comedy achieve any verbal subtlety. Yet the frontier tall tale has lived a vigorous literary life precisely because it can tolerate a wide range of comic techniques and effects, at times casting the crude and even the revolting against the expectation of a more fastidious taste. Surely frontier humor is, of necessity, esthetically subversive, challenging the preference of genteel high culture for verbal elegance and inoffensive subject matter, making the reader laugh even as his taste is assaulted. Jack London, whose experience of the ragged edges of life equaled or surpassed that of Melville or Mark Twain, seems to have understood this purpose, even if at this point he could pursue it with only partial success. But even a partial success in this early venture in the comic tall tale does point to a constant purpose of his later, more serious fiction—a determination to venture below the surface of polite literature and show life as it is. At his best, early and late, London manages to do just that.

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹John Barleycorn (New York: Century, 1913; rpt. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, nd.), p. 161.
   ²Jack London and His Times: An Unconventional Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1939; rpt. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1968), p. 52. Among London’s other biographers, the event is mentioned only by Philip S. Foner, Jack London: American Rebel (New York: Citadel 1947), p. 12.
   ³ "A Night’s Swim in Yeddo Bay," The High School Aegis, 10, No. 9 (May 27, 1895), 10-12; rpt. in Jack London’s Articles and Short Stories in The (Oakland) High School Aegis, ed. James E. Sisson (Cedar Springs, Mich.: The London Collector 1971). "In Yeddo Bay," St. Nicholas, 30 (February 1903), 292-296; rpt. in Dutch courage and Other Stories (New York: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 119-134. Quotations in this article are from the London Collector edition of the first story and from the Dutch Courage edition of the second.

4 Introduction to Jack London’s Articles and Short Stories in The (Oakland) High School Aegis. p. 4.

5 Though frontier tall tales appeared infrequently in London’s mature work, he did occasionally turn one our. Two other examples, both published in 1901, are "Bald-Face" (also collected in Dutch Courage), a Kiondike sourdough’s tale of being chased by a grizzly, and "A Hyperborean Brew" (collected in The Faith of Men, 1904), in which another Klondike adventurer in a Dawson saloon tells how he outwitted a tribe of Eskimos by brewing them a liquor of unearthly potency. "A Hyperborean Brew" is the better of the two, although neither is particularly distinguished.

6 The claim that John Barleycorn is factual occurs in Letters from Jack London, ed. King Hendricks and Irving Shepard (New York: Odyssey, 1965), p. 372. For evidence to the contrary,

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see Sam S. Baskett, "Jack London on the Oakland Waterfront," American Literature, 27 (1955), 363-371.

7 The Road (New York: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 9-10. At one point London tells of being treated to a lavish breakfast by two maiden ladies whom he entertains "not alone with my adventures, but with the adventures of all the other fellows with whom I had rubbed shoulders and exchanged confidences. I appropriated them all.. . . well, well, and what of it? It was a fair exchange. For their many cups of coffee, and eggs, and bites of toast, I gave full value" (pp. 56-57) .

8 Charmian London, The Book of Jack London (New York: Century, 1921), I, 190.

9 5ee, for example, an 1899 letter to his friend Cloudesley Johns, in Letters from Jack London, p. 54.

10 Introduction to Jack London’s Articles and Short Stories in The (Oakland) High School Aegis, pp. 4-5.

11 London’s first published novel, The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902), was a juvenile, as was an early collection of stories, Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905). Many of the early juvenile tales scattered through the magazines, including "In Yeddo Bay," were collected posthumously in the Dutch courage volume.

12 Conceivably it is this occasional use of comic litotes that leads James E. Sisson mistakenly to associate the prose with Hemingway’s restraint.

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