Through the South Seas with Jack London

In 1907, a Kansas farm boy named Martin Johnson reads that Jack London is building a yacht bound for the South Seas, and decides he must be on it. Through sheer nerve and a talent for cooking, Johnson convinces the famous author to take him along. What follows is a front-row seat to one of the most ambitious voyages of the Edwardian age: the construction of the ill-fated Snark, a dreamed-of ship that will carry London, his wife Charmian, and a handful of dreamers across waters that have claimed better vessels. Johnson captures the romance and terror of those pre-war Pacific years, the languid weeks between islands, the terror of reef passages, and the strange, Often heartbreaking encounters with peoples whose worlds are about to be swept away by modernity. This is adventure writing before it became formulaic, when the ocean still held secrets and a young man from the plains could still reinvent himself under foreign stars.