My delight was in that I had done it--not in the fact that twenty-two men knew I had done it.Within the year over half of them were dead and gone, yet my pride in the thing performed was not diminished by half.I am willing to confess, however, that I do like a small audience.But it must be a very small audience, composed of those who love me and whom I love.When I then accomplish personal achievement, I have a feeling that I am justifying their love for me.But this is quite apart from the delight of the achievement itself.This delight is peculiarly my own and does not depend upon witnesses.When I have done some such thing, I am exalted.I glow all over.I am aware of a pride in myself that is mine, and mine alone.It is organic.Every fibre of me is thrilling with it.It is very natural.It is a mere matter of satisfaction at adjustment to environment.It is success.
Life that lives is life successful, and success is the breath of its nostrils.The achievement of a difficult feat is successful adjustment to a sternly exacting environment.The more difficult the feat, the greater the satisfaction at its accomplishment.Thus it is with the man who leaps forward from the springboard, out over the swimming pool, and with a backward half-revolution of the body, enters the water head first.Once he leaves the springboard his environment becomes immediately savage, and savage the penalty it will exact should he fail and strike the water flat.Of course, the man does not have to run the risk of the penalty.He could remain on the bank in a sweet and placid environment of summer air, sunshine, and stability.Only he is not made that way.In that swift mid-air moment he lives as he could never live on the bank.
As for myself, I'd rather be that man than the fellows who sit on the bank and watch him.That is why I am building the Snark.I am so made.I like, that is all.The trip around the world means big moments of living.Bear with me a moment and look at it.Here am I, a little animal called a man--a bit of vitalized matter, one hundred and sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerve, sinew, bones, and brain,--all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible, and frail.I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose of an obstreperous horse, and a bone in my hand is broken.I put my head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned.I fall twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed.I am a creature of temperature.A few degrees one way, and my fingers and ears and toes blacken and drop off.A few degrees the other way, and my skin blisters and shrivels away from the raw, quivering flesh.A few additional degrees either way, and the life and the light in me go out.A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and Icease to move--for ever I cease to move.A splinter of lead from a rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal blackness.
Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life--it is all Iam.About me are the great natural forces--colossal menaces, Titans of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot.They have no concern at all for me.They do not know me.They are unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral.They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing humans to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death--and these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature, all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.
In the maze and chaos of the conflict of these vast and draughty Titans, it is for me to thread my precarious way.The bit of life that is I will exult over them.The bit of life that is I, in so far as it succeeds in baffling them or in bitting them to its service, will imagine that it is godlike.It is good to ride the tempest and feel godlike.I dare to assert that for a finite speck of pulsating jelly to feel godlike is a far more glorious feeling than for a god to feel godlike.
Here is the sea, the wind, and the wave.Here are the seas, the winds, and the waves of all the world.Here is ferocious environment.And here is difficult adjustment, the achievement of which is delight to the small quivering vanity that is I.I like.
I am so made.It is my own particular form of vanity, that is all.
There is also another side to the voyage of the Snark.Being alive, I want to see, and all the world is a bigger thing to see than one small town or valley.We have done little outlining of the voyage.
Only one thing is definite, and that is that our first port of call will be Honolulu.Beyond a few general ideas, we have no thought of our next port after Hawaii.We shall make up our minds as we get nearer, in a general way we know that we shall wander through the South Seas, take in Samoa, New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra, and go on up through the Philippines to Japan.Then will come Korea, China, India, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean.After that the voyage becomes too vague to describe, though we know a number of things we shall surely do, and we expect to spend from one to several months in every country in Europe.
