"Once you become a sailor, you always remain a sailor," wrote Jack London about himself. The majority of "The Sea-Wolf," one of the best novels about the sea, was written on a convenient thirty-foot cutter named "Spray," which London had purchased with part of the two thousand dollars he had received, just a little earlier, from the sale of the rights to "The Call of the Wild." 

Inside a cabin that barely fit the kitchen and two bunks, London made weekly trips in the Gulf of San Francisco and the Delta of the Sacramento River, writing five to ten pages a day, sitting on the deck and enjoying the spring sunshine. 

In March 1904, almost a year later, while this novel was being published in installments in the magazine "Century," the daring twenty-eight-year-old author was on the verge of death from the cold, aboard an open Japanese junk, similar to a "sampans," sailing towards Korea in polar weather and winds that had temperatures many degrees below zero, in a stormy sea.