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This etext was prepared from the 1919 Mills and Boon edition
by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE HUMAN DRIFT
by Jack London
Contents:
The Human Drift
Small-Boat Sailing
Four Horses and a Sailor
Nothing that Ever Came to Anything
That Dead Men Rise up Never
A Classic of the Sea
A Wicked Woman (Curtain Raiser)
The Birth Mark (Sketch)
THE HUMAN DRIFT
"The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd
Who rose before us, and as Prophets Burn'd,
Are all but stories, which, awoke from Sleep,
They told their comrades, and to Sleep return'd."
The history of civilisation is a history of wandering, sword in
hand, in search of food. In the misty younger world we catch
glimpses of phantom races, rising, slaying, finding food, building
rude civilisations, decaying, falling under the swords of stronger
hands, and passing utterly away. Man, like any other animal, has
roved over the earth seeking what he might devour; and not romance
and adventure, but the hunger-need, has urged him on his vast
adventures. Whether a bankrupt gentleman sailing to colonise
Virginia or a lean Cantonese contracting to labour on the sugar
plantations of Hawaii, in each case, gentleman and coolie, it is a
desperate attempt to get something to eat, to get more to eat than
he can get at home.
It has always been so, from the time of the first pre-human
anthropoid crossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-
bushes beyond, down to the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores
to-day, to go to work in the coal-mines of Pennsylvania. These
migratory movements of peoples have been called drifts, and the
word is apposite. Unplanned, blind, automatic, spurred on by the
pain of hunger, man has literally drifted his way around the
planet. There have been drifts in the past, innumerable and
forgotten, and so remote that no records have been left, or
composed of such low-typed humans or pre-humans that they made no
scratchings on stone or bone and left no monuments to show that
they had been.
These early drifts we conjecture and know must have occurred, just
as we know that the first upright-walking brutes were descended
from some kin of the quadrumana through having developed "a pair
of great toes out of two opposable thumbs." Dominated by fear,
and by their very fear accelerating their development, these early
ancestors of ours, suffering hunger-pangs very like the ones we
experience to-day, drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating
and being eaten, wandering through thousand-year-long odysseys of
screaming primordial savagery, until they left their skeletons in
glacial gravels, some of them, and their bone-scratchings in cave-
men's lairs.
There have been drifts from east to west and west to east, from
north to south and back again, drifts that have criss-crossed one
another, and drifts colliding and recoiling and caroming off in
new directions. From Central Europe the Aryans have drifted into
Asia, and from Central Asia the Turanians have drifted across
Europe. Asia has thrown forth great waves of hungry humans from
the prehistoric "round-barrow" "broad-heads" who overran Europe
and penetrated to Scandinavia and England, down through the hordes
of Attila and Tamerlane, to the present immigration of Chinese and
Japanese that threatens America. The Phoenicians and the Greeks,
with unremembered drifts behind them, colonised the Mediterranean.
Rome was engulfed in the torrent of Germanic tribes drifting down
from the north before a flood of drifting Asiatics. The Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes, after having drifted whence no man knows,
poured into Britain, and the English have carried this drift on
around the world. Retreating before stronger breeds, hungry and
voracious, the Eskimo has drifted to the inhospitable polar
regions, the Pigmy to the fever-rotten jungles of Africa. And in
this day the drift of the races continues, whether it be of
Chinese into the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula, of Europeans
to the United States or of Americans to the wheat-lands of
Manitoba and the Northwest.
Perhaps most amazing has been the South Sea Drift. Blind,
fortuitous, precarious as no other drift has been, nevertheless
the islands in that waste of ocean have received drift after drift
of the races. Down from the mainland of Asia poured an Aryan
drift that built civilisations in Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra. Only
the monuments of these Aryans remain. They themselves
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