Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 301, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 December 1912 — CRUISE WITH LONDON [ARTICLE]

CRUISE WITH LONDON

Companion of Writer Tells of Voyage to South Seas. Keeping Five Thousand Natives at Bay With Winchester an Incident of Two Years of Wandering.

Kansas City.—Martin Johnson, an actor and a son of a Jeweler at Independence, Kan., cruised for two years with Jack London in the South Sea Islands on board the forty-three-foot boat Snark. A special delivery stamp on his letter gained Johnson the place over 3,000 applicants, he said, in discussing the trip. - The Snark, equipped with a seventy-horse-power gasoline engine, left San Francisco on April 23, 1906, with five men and. one woman, Mrs. Jack London, on board. Johnson was the cook. Honolulu was reached twentyseven days later, and the boat sailed from there to Tahiti. But a violent storm drove it 1,200 miles out of its course, and it was reported to the world as lost with all on board. It was overdue five months, and back in the states London’s mother began to settle up his estate. From then until in July 1908, the boat made its way leisurely through the islands. On the Island of Malaita the boat struck a reef and was on the rocks for two days. Five thousand natives were kept from attacking the boat’s crew only through fear of the white man’s Winchesters. The islands stretch from Australia, the Philippineu and Hawaii to a point half way between Australia and South America. At spare times on the trip Johnson was making photographs—--7,000 in all —and moving pictures of wild animals, the people, their customs and their tribal dandes. “There are no morals, almost no religion in the South Sea islands,” he said. “Only here and there has Chris-

tianity replaced the old belief in tribal gods and the‘veneration of ancestors. In many of the islands there are marriage laws, but mostly marriage consists only in the purchase of a wife, or as many as a man can afford, with cocoanuts. Money is practically unknown —$60 will support a man a lifetime.

“And there are rare plants, mostly

orchids, where the streams are canopied over with beautiful foliage. And the ugly, leering faces of savages are painted and tattooed with hideous designs, their bodies cut with great scars of tribal wars or tribal dances. Here I am wearing trousers and shoea Why, out there where the sun always shines, clothes are a thing apart from a man.”