In the ways that some writers are remembered for their writings and ramblings in certain corners of the earth, Jack London's name evokes images of the Yukon, California locales, and the South Seas. Yet one of London's most adventurous forays abroad is a small footnote in his literary achievements. London covered the Russo-Japanese War as a correspondent in Korea. He journeyed across three different seas under hellish conditions, crossed the rugged mountainous terrain of Korea, and fought bureaucrats along the way, which included some jail time.

His experience on the Korean peninsula culminated in The Star Rover, which was written in 1915 and was the last of his fifty books. The most interesting chapter for connoisseurs of Korean-related literature is the story of Englishman Adam Strang, and it is in this chapter that London displays his uncanny descriptive powers of everyday Korea, making some of the same observations that correspondents and travel writers still make today.

London was 28-years old when he arrived in Tokyo representing Hearst newspapers. He and his fellow war correspondents were ordered by the Japanese authorities not to leave the city. Frustrated by being away from the action, London eventually slipped away and boarded an overnight steamer to Busan. With no sleeping rooms open, he spent the night on the frozen deck and it was a prelude to his journey ahead.

Like nearly all postwar South Korea, Busan has modernized to an unrecognizable version of what it once was. There are few traditional buildings left, and in their place are canyons of high rise cement apartment blocks, a thriving mix of industry and neighborhoods of neon signs. It is still a port city with some city-by-the-bay characteristics, which is representative of London's experience. The Jalgalchi fish market is still in existence and the fish, squid and octopus are chopped up on bloody planks while wharf rats scurry underfoot. Busan is known for a rumble-tumble dialect and the influx of foreign sailors that mix it up with the pimps, whores, and American soldiers down on Texas Street, an infamous nightspot.
Jalgalchi fish market.

In Busan, London took another steamer en route to Chemulpo (the chosen Dynasty name for the city of Incheon), but the Japanese military seized the ship at Mokpo and all passengers were removed and left to make their own plans ashore. Not to be left out of the war action he had to report, London bought a Korean junk and hired some local fishermen to help him sail up the coast of the Yellow Sea. In his earlier years, London was an oyster pilot and an experienced sailor and those skills must have served him well, since in his journal he writes, "Saturday, February 13, 1904: Driving snow squalls. Gale pounding the whole Yellow Sea upon us. So cold that it freezes salt water. O, this is a wild and bitter coast." And later in the Star Rover, he wrote, "We could glimpse the forbidding coast, if coast it might be called, so broken was it. There were grim rock isles and islets beyond counting, dim snow- covered ranges beyond, and everywhere upstanding cliffs too steep for snow, outjuts of headlands, and pinnacles and slivers of rock upthrust from the boiling sea."

Read the rest at Literary Traveler.

Copyright © James Card.