Make Westing

"Make Westing" is a short story by Jack London that explores themes of adventure, survival, and the natural world. Set during the Gold Rush era, the narrative follows a young man's journey as he ventures into the wild to seek fortune and a sense of purpose. In his encounters with the wilderness and the challenges of pioneer life, he learns valuable lessons about resilience and the untamed spirit of nature. London's vivid prose captures the beauty and brutality of the frontier, making it a compelling reflection on the human condition and the allure of the West.

								
Whatever you do, make westing! make westing!
--Sailing directions for Cape Horn.

For seven weeks the Mary Rogers had been between 50° south in the
Atlantic and 50° south in the Pacific, which meant that for seven weeks
she had been struggling to round Cape Horn. For seven weeks she had been
either in dirt, or close to dirt, save once, and then, following upon
six days of excessive dirt, which she had ridden out under the shelter
of the redoubtable Terra Del Fuego coast, she had almost gone ashore
during a heavy swell in the dead calm that had suddenly fallen. For
seven weeks she had wrestled with the Cape Horn gray-beards, and in
return been buffeted and smashed by them. She was a wooden ship, and her
ceaseless straining had opened her seams, so that twice a day the watch
took its turn at the pumps.

The Mary Rogers was strained, the crew was strained, and big Dan
Cullen, master, was likewise strained. Perhaps he was strained most of
all, for upon him rested the responsibility of that titanic struggle. He
slept most of the time in his clothes, though he rarely slept. He
haunted the deck at night, a great, burly, robust ghost, black with the
sunburn of thirty years of sea and hairy as an orang-utan. He, in turn,
was haunted by one thought of action, a sailing direction for the Horn:
Whatever you do, make westing! make westing! It was an obsession. He
thought of nothing else, except, at times, to blaspheme God for sending
such bitter weather.

Make westing! He hugged the Horn, and a dozen times lay hove to with
the iron Cape bearing east-by-north, or north-north-east, a score of
miles away. And each time the eternal west wind smote him back and he
made easting. He fought gale after gale, south to 64°, inside the
antarctic drift-ice, and pledged his immortal soul to the Powers of
Darkness for a bit of westing, for a slant to take him around. And he
made easting. In despair, he had tried to make the passage through the
Straits of Le Maire. Halfway through, the wind hauled to the north 'ard
of northwest, the glass dropped to 28.88, and he turned and ran before a
gale of cyclonic fury, missing, by a hair's breadth, piling up the Mary
Rogers on the black-toothed rocks. Twice he had made west to the Diego
Ramirez Rocks, one of the times saved between two snow-squalls by
sighting the gravestones of ships a quarter of a mile dead ahead.

Blow! Captain Dan Cullen instanced all his thirty years at sea to prove
that never had it blown so before. The Mary Rogers was hove to at the
time he gave the evidence, and, to clinch it, inside half an hour the
Mary Rogers was hove down to the hatches. Her new main-topsail and
brand new spencer were blown away like tissue paper; and five sails,
furled and fast under double gaskets, were blown loose and stripped from
the yards. And before morning the Mary Rogers was hove down twice
again, and holes were knocked in her bulwarks to ease her decks from
the weight of ocean that pressed her down.

On an average of once a week Captain Dan Cullen caught glimpses of the
sun. Once, for ten minutes, the sun shone at midday, and ten minutes
afterward a new gale was piping up, both watches were shortening sail,
and all was buried in the obscurity of a driving snow-squall. For a
fortnight, once, Captain Dan Cullen was without a meridian or a
chronometer sight. Rarely did he know his position within half a degree,
except when in sight of land; for sun and stars remained hidden behind
the sky, and it was so gloomy that even at the best the horizons were
poor for accurate observations. A gray gloom shrouded the world. The
clouds were gray; the great driving seas were leaden gray gloom shrouded
the world. The clouds were gray; the great driving seas were leadening;
even the occasional albatrosses were gray, while the snow-flurries were
not white, but gray, under the sombre pall of the heavens.

Life on board the Mary Rogers was gray,--gray and gloomy. The faces of
the sailors were blue-gray; they were afflicted with sea-cuts and
sea-boils, and suffered exquisitely. They were shadows of men. For
seven weeks, in the forecastle or on deck, they had not known what it
was to be dry. They had forgotten what it was to sleep out a watch, and
all watches it was, "All hands on deck!" They caught snatches of
agonized sleep, and they slept in their oilskins ready for the
everlasting call. So weak and worn were they that it took both watches
to do the work of one. That was why both watches were on deck so much of
the time. And no shadow of a man could shirk duty. Nothing less than a
broken leg could enable a man to knock off work; and there were two
such, who had been mauled and pulped by the seas that broke aboard.

One other man who was the shadow of a man was George Dorety. He was the
only passenger on board, a friend of the firm, and he had elected to
make the voyage for his health. But seven weeks of Cape Horn had not
bettered his health. He gasped and panted in his bunk through the long,
heaving nights; and when on deck he was so bundled up for warmth that he
resembled a peripatetic old-clothes shop. At midday, eating at the cabin
table in a gloom so deep that the swinging sea-lamps burned always, he
looked as blue-gray as the sickest, saddest man for'ard. Nor did gazing
across the table at Captain Dan Cullen have any cheering effect upon
him. Captain Cullen chewed and scowled and kept silent. The scowls were
for God, and with every chew he reiterated the sole thought of his
existence, which was make westing. He was a big, hairy brute, and the
sight of him was not stimulating to the other's appetite. He looked upon
George Dorety as a Jonah, and told him so, once each meal, savagely
transferring the scowl from God to the passenger and back again.

Nor did the mate prove a first aid to a languid appetite. Joshua Higgins
by name, a seaman by profession and pull, but a pot-wolloper by
capacity, he was a loose-jointed, sniffling creature, heartless and
selfish and cowardly, without a soul, in fear of his life of Dan Cullen,
and a bully over the sailors, who knew that behind the mate was Captain
Cullen, the lawgiver and compeller, the driver and the destroyer, the
incarnation of a dozen bucko mates. In that wild weather at the southern
end of the earth, Joshua Higgins ceased washing. His grimy face usually
robbed George Dorety of what little appetite he managed to accumulate.
Ordinarily this lavatorial dereliction would have caught Captain
Cullen's eye and vocabulary, but in the present his mind was filled with
making westing, to the exclusion of all other things not contributory
thereto. Whether the mate's face was clean or dirty had no bearing upon
westing. Later on, when 50° south in the Pacific had been reached,
Joshua Higgins would wash his face very abruptly. In the meantime, at
the cabin table, where gray twilight alternated with lamplight while the
lamps were being filled, George Dorety sat between the two men, one a
tiger and the other a hyena, and wondered why God had made them. The

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