In his letter of January 30, 1913 to William Ellsworth of the Century Company, London
wrote that The Mutiny of the Elsinore “will be quite different from any other novel
I ever wrote, and it will be quite different from any other sea-novel ever written by
anybody else” (Hendricks and Shepard, 1966, pp. 369, 370). This urges us to see The
Mutiny as a new experiment in London’s career. Commenting on The Mutiny in California
Writers (1983), Stoddard Martin notes that “wrongly condemned as his worst novel, The
Mutiny is certainly London’s most ironic, and Pathurst and Margaret his one really odious
couple ” (Martin, 1983, p. 36). The Mutiny is a proletarian novel, a conscientious exposure
of certain facts in capitalist society. Its temper is revolutionary throughout, and contains
many echoes of the motifs dominating the proletarian novel. The literary realism, which
London achieves in this solidly realized novel of contemporary life in capitalist society,
indicates that his writing is radical rather than reformist.
The Mutiny of the Elsinore, in the first instance, tells how a world-weary, wealthy
playwright, John Pathurst, undertakes a voyage aboard a steel-built clipper captained by
Nathaniel West to sail round Cape Horn. During his initiation and coming to manhood
under the inspiration of hardships and the Captain’s daughter, and with another Wolf
Larsen as the first mate, he exposes the nightmare of the social pit which Jack London
once saw in the slums of London, and in the jail in Buffalo. The Captain dies off the Horn,
the mates kill each other, and the crew mutiny. It was initially serialized by the Hearst
Press under the title The Sea Gangsters and later published by MacMillan as The Mutiny
of the Elsinore. |
