Content area
Full Text
Don MacGillivray. Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2008. 359 pp., illustrated; Paperback; ISBN 978-0-7748-1472-0; $29.95
This is a very interesting biography of a sea captain born in Cape Breton who was the model used by Jack London in creating the character of Wolf Larson in his best selling novel, The Sea-Wolf, published in 1904. Alex MacLean was born in East Bay in 1858 and died in Vancouver in 1914. He appears to have been a very flamboyant character, a man who became known as a daring sealing captain in the North Pacific. This well researched account of his life by Don MacGillivray is in part the story of a Gaelic-speaking Cape Bretoner who gained fame or notoriety far from home, and in part an investigation of how he came to be the model for London's most famous literary character.
It is also a book which gives much insight into the history of the sealing industry in the North Pacific from the 1880s to 1914. The seal fur industry was highly profitable in this period, and led to struggles between the United States, Russia, Japan and Britain (representing Canadian interests), for control of the sealing. This even at times led to threats of war, and there were numerous international tribunals held on the issue. One American company, with the support of the United States government, attempted to monopolize the Pacific sealing industry, based on the control of the breeding rookeries of the seals on the Aleutian islands. Alex MacLean and his older brother, Dan MacLean, were pioneers in pelagic (open sea) sealing. Instead of killing the seals on land, this involved shooting the seals from boats miles out to sea. They and other Canadian and American sealers also at times attempted to raid the rookeries. The American government regarded the pelagic sealing...