A Collection of Stories

A Collection of Stories

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Human Drift, by Jack London
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Title: The Human Drift
Author: Jack London
Release Date: April 27, 2005 [eBook #1669]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
HUMAN DRIFT***

Transcribed from the 1919 Mills and Boon edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

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