The Real Man Behind Jack London’s Legendary ‘Sea Wolf’

I have no idea what young boys read today.

Assuming, of course, that they read at all and it isn’t just computer games and watching videos and playing with their phones. (Mind you, they still play cowboys and Indians/cops and robbers, except that they call it paint ball.)

It’s nothing, I’m sure, like when I was young. Mind you, that was a few years ago. Back then (I’m speaking for myself) reading was it. Without the need of any encouragement from my parents or teachers my head was always buried in a book, and I don’t mean comic books.

My favourites were Mark Twain (in particular Tom Sawyer which I’ve read a half-dozen times) and Robert Louis Stevenson. There had to have been others besides The Hardy Boys; I remember reading stories about Canadian explorers, even enjoying my father’s monthly issue of Mechanix Illustrated.

I do recall Jack London’s White Fang but not The Sea-Wolf. That one didn’t come until many, many years later when, as a B.C. historian, I learned that London had based this infamous character on a real-life Victoria-based mariner, Capt. Alex McLean.

McLean never forgave him, by the way.

The irony is that McLean was a living, breathing legend in his own time whereas Wolf Larsen, the Sea-Wolf, was the product of London’s vivid imagination and gifted pen. Hollywood even made a movie about him in 1941, starring Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield.

Alex McLean, the real ‘Sea-Wolf,’ for those who believed him to be London’s role model, was long gone by then. But if London’s fictional character is still with us in literature, Alex McLean still resonates with those who know their B.C. maritime history and who enjoy a rollicking good sea story.

I’ll you about Alex McLean next week in the Chronicles but, thanks to a friend of his of 30 years’ standing, from a totally different slant than you’re likely to read elsewhere.

As a bonus, it’s from MacInnes’s 1926 book, Chinook Days which, long out of print, would otherwise cost you up to $100 for an original copy.

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PHOTO CAPTION: Capt. Alex McLean and his famous handlebar moustache was a living legend without any need of Jack London’s fictional ‘Sea-Wolf’ character. —Author’s collection