Jack London was a man of many talents. Talented at writing and generating controversies. Also famous for his oratory, on December 21, 1905, he stood on a podium at Harvard to speak to more than a thousand students on the topic of revolution. Since January, the 29-year-old Californian author had started a series of talks on socialism at different universities in the United States.
That was a hectic year. On the one hand, he enjoyed the best-sellers of Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolfwhile in the passionate sphere his marriage to Bessie London hit rock bottom. On November 19, the week following his legal divorce from his first wife, he celebrated a second marriage to the feminist, writer and his former secretary, Charmian Kittredge.
London’s biography is full of shadows, tumbles and leaps. Since he was young, the need for work pushed him from one place to another, in increasingly worse conditions. He was a newspaper seller, an ice delivery man, a merchant sailor, a laborer in a railway power plant, a cannery worker, an oyster pirate, a train peddler, a gold digger, even a correspondent for the Russo-Japanese War.
His years of wandering, misery and exploitation led to constant pain that made him cling to the sedative morphine. Hopeless by the doctors, on one of those occasions he administered an overdose that his battered body could not withstand and he died on November 22, 1916, when he was barely forty years old.
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Jack was a sailor. It was inevitable for him to talk about ships and voyages. “The sky, the sea, the hills, the wild… I love them and I must have them,” he said. The sea attracted his innermost being, and became as much a part of his public image as his wide-brimmed cowboy hat and his tales of adventure. He traveled a lot around the world. Then he thought that nothing made him more excited than traveling with his new wife. “Let’s do it,” he said. “When do we leave?” she simply answered. The moment seemed too wonderful to be true.
They were due a honeymoon. Six days after appearing in a white silk shirt in the Harvard auditorium, Jack paused his lecture series and boarded a United Fruit Co. ship heading south to the Caribbean seas. In 1921, Charmian – already London’s widow – published a book of memoirs that included the couple’s tour of Jamaica and Cuba.
From that visit, in addition, is preserved in the collection of the Huntington Library, in California, a album with hundreds of photographs taken by London during their honeymoon; Of them, more than seventy correspond to transit through Cuba. It is worth noting that, in parallel with his fifty books, the man best known for The call of the jungle and white fang demonstrated photojournalist skills. Camera in hand, he documented his globe-trotting experiences, and it is even said that he left a monumental archive of 12,000 plates. Hence, the graphic testimony of their romantic journey is eloquent enough in impressions and information to fit this story.
The honeymoon’s first stop is Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. After spending four days there, they leave for Santiago de Cuba, on the Spanish steamer. Oteriwhich is so “small and dirty” that leaves both of them stunned. Due to the fragility of the ship when faced with the tide, “Jack himself collapsed. […] on the stern rail, completely seasick for the first time in his nautical history,” Charmian maintains in his narration.
Early on January 6, 1906, they sailed the narrow channel that opens the maritime doors to Santiago. The entrance to the bay is a picture worth admiring, with the imposing Morro and La Estrella on one side, and on the other, La Socapa with its archaeological canyons and Cayo Smith full of colorful chalets rising from the sea. London does not resist activating his camera, and by capturing this coastal landscape he inaugurates his postcards of Cuba.
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In Santiago, the couple stays in a place that Charmian calls Hotel del Alba, which he describes as a “vaulted room with a balcony with golden iron railings.” They rest there for an hour. With no more time to waste, they take a car that takes them to see the city. They find Santiago a unique city, with its welcoming climate, boisterous people, steep streets and a hanging market. Jack sees much more than he can photograph. They browse some stores looking for lace clothes, and he buys a colorful fan to give his beloved a “light Spanish touch,” according to local custom.
The walk ends at San Juan Hilla bloody battlefield in July 1898, during the Spanish-Cuban-North American War. Dodging the weeds that hide a cemetery of forgotten names and rickety carriages, Jack portrays Charmian perched next to the trunk of the Tree of Peace, a corpulent ceiba tree that serves as a monument. Like them, many American tourists made a pilgrimage to Santiago in the Republican years just to feel the pride and pain of history, in that scenario where hundreds of their compatriots fell.
In the evening, the Londons go to dinner at the Venus Cafe as “guests of a charming gentleman who was enjoying the remainder of his life with one lung. This was always a vivid memory for Jack, who incorporated it somewhere in his fiction.” Such brief signs are not enough to identify that hospitable Santiago resident who was clearly one of the few who interacted or knew of the presence of the famous writer and his wife.
However, she pours more carefully her fleeting sensations on the Santiago evening: “I was dressed in a soft pink dress. Languidly swinging my sequined and pearl-handled fan to the sound of a square music band, in the warm and lazy air under the palms, I wondered if anything in our adventures to come could compare with the romance that floated there.”
Then they attend a theater performance. After the last act they return to their hotel room, and spend some time “shamelessly gazing at the luxurious Spanish interiors and balconies across the narrow street, where ladies and gentlemen entertained themselves in their courtly ways. I’m sure Jack delighted in that that night; but I’m more sure that seven-eighths of his satisfaction was deposited in his girlfriend, for whom every moment was like a precious pearl and as such endures,” Charmian emphasizes.
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The next day they begin the train transfer to Havana. By the way, the widow reveals the anecdote of a painful incident that almost ruined Jack’s vacation. Upon arriving at the railway terminal, one of “Jack’s self-proclaimed upsets” occurs when he is dissatisfied with the fare demanded by the driver. London suspects that he is trying to scam him and the two get into a verbal dispute that almost turns into fist-fighting dialect.
“Jack,” she testifies, “incensed by the blatant falsehood of the taxi driver who dropped us off at the station, became the nucleus of a gesticulating and obviously not harmless mob. As the time of departure approached, he shouted at me to board. Only the fact that Jack had tickets and money in his possession prevented him from going to jail at the last moment, rather than humiliating his Anglo-Saxon pride before the insolent half-breeds.” Here he draws back the curtains on his racist side.
According to Charmian’s version, the driver – whom he calls “utterly crazy” –, in the well-worn ruse of taking advantage of the naive and cheeky tourist, tried to charge him an “extra fare” without imagining that the customer had Buck’s nose. Even so, it is noteworthy that the untamed roosters do not tolerate anyone singing louder in their yard, and so they fell on the gringo with their unmistakable handsomeness.
Distracted by the fight, Jack almost misses the train and is forced to reach a ladder that is already in motion. Fortunately for the Londons, they manage to leave for Havana at the scheduled time, without any conflict other than the memory. Of that trip, which takes them a day, there are no references in the book to intermediate stops or more details than a hyperbolic description of the “rich country that we crossed at full speed that golden day, and an Egyptian sunset between small hills that looked like pyramids that one’s gaze searched between pink, yellow and lilac for a sphinx. All of this forged by Jack’s creative faculties. At intervals he would withdraw into himself to take notes for a novel that I now give myself He realizes that he never wrote: The flight of the duchess”.
Although in the set of images you can see country men in the middle of different agricultural areas, busy plowing with a team of oxen or carrying baskets with products, which suggests that they were taken during the journey. Either way, one senses that they thoroughly enjoyed it.
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In the capital, curiously, they do not stay in a hotel but in a guest house, located at Consulado and Neptuno, which they like for its fresh rooms and its flowery patio. As in Santiago, they walk as much as they can through the capital that looks “dreamy,” in Charmian’s words. “Of course, we saw everything there was to do and see in such a short stay.”
In the bay they go up to a scythe to circumnavigate the twisted skeleton of the Mainethey visit the Cabaña Fortress and the Morro Castle, take a sea bath and later have fun watching a Basque pelota game in the popular Jai-Alai. After the sports recreation they attend a splendid banquet at the Miramar Hotel, on Prado and Malecón.
The photographic material confirms that they also walk through El Vedado, visit the Colón Cemetery and reach the town of Santiago de las Vegas. At the El Rincón sanatorium they exchange with some patients. “It would take an entire book to recount the afternoon we spent in the lazaret,” claims Charmian, adding that from that experience they would begin to become interested in “the tragedy of the leper.”
Finally, on January 11, 1906, they left on the steamer halifax via Key West. Back home Jack London resumes his lecture tour delivering “The Coming Crisis” at the Grand Central Palace in New York, and begins to build the Snarktheir two-masted sailboat on which they will travel around the world for seven years.
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Jack London established a deep sense of connection with the places he visited and often transferred those influences to his literary work. That is why it is not unreasonable to assume that this, his most romantic trip, meant an unforgettable moment in his short existence and a turning point in his career.
Given his socialist concerns in Cuba, he experienced the atmosphere of the streets, observed the disparity between rich and poor, the subsistence conditions of many people and the political, social and even ideological conflicts that marked that period of national debate on real independence.
But, above all, in the company of his wife he was fascinated by daily life on the island, the friendliness of the people and the vibrant environment of the cities. He enjoyed traditional music and rich cultural identity; He was impressed by the beauty of Cuba’s natural landscapes, its beaches, architecture and heritage sites. “We hate to leave Havana,” Charmian confesses in his memoir… “but the world is ahead.”
