Ominous war clouds hovered over Japan and Russia as the new year began (1904). Five major syndicates asked Jack to go to the Orient and cover the threatening hostilities. He liked the offer from Hearst best and accepted his first assignment as a war correspondent for the San Francisco Examiner. He rushed The Sea-Wolf to completion in book form, requested Macmillan to send monthly checks to Bessie and the girls, told Eliza to give Miss Kittredge anything she wanted, and arranged for George Sterling and Charmian to edit and proofread The Sea-Wolf for him. On January 7, 1904, he sailed through the Golden Gate on the S.S. Siberia headed for Yokohama and Korea.

The world’s leading war correspondents were detained in Japan. Every pretext possible was used to keep them there. Permits of every kind were required, and each was preceded by mile of Japanese red tape. R.L. Dunn had gone to Korea, correctly guessing that the Japanese Army would make a surprise landing there. Jack noted that Dunn had slipped away and guessed what he had guessed, so three days after landing in Yokohama, on January 25, he set out on an all-day journey to Kobe.

The following morning he plunged out of Kobe in three rickshaws, with push-boys and pull-boys, racing to catch the express for Nagasaki. Then he traveled from Nagasaki to Moji searching for a steamer to Chemulpo. On arrival at Moji he bought a ticket to sail on Monday. Two days later he was still waiting and, as Jack put it, “Thereby hangs a tale of war and disaster, which runs the gamut of the emotions from surprise and anger to sorrow and brotherly love, and which culminates in arrest, felonious guilt and confiscation of property, to say nothing of monetary fines or alternative imprisonment.

“Having bought my ticket at the Osaka Schosen Kaisha office, I tucked it into my pocket and stepped out the door. Came four coolies carrying a bale of cotton. Snap went my camera. Five little boys at play—snap again. A line of coolies carrying coal—and again snap, and last snap.”

He was arrested by the police on February 1, and taken to jail in Kokura. The next day he appeared before the Public Procurator of the Kokura District Court and was fined five yen and had his camera confiscated. Had it not been for the intervention of United States Minister Griscom from the military prison in Shimonaseki he would have spent much more time in jail.

He was scheduled to sail on the Keigo Maru on the 8th, but discovered that the ship had been taken over by the government. Then he made a wild dash to catch a small steamer as it was getting underway for Fusan. He arrived aboard soaking wet from having to retrieve one of his trunks that fell overboard in the confusion. At Fusan he caught a little one-hundred-twenty-ton steamer loaded with Koreans and Japanese. The deck was piled so high it arrived at Makpo with a thirty-degree starboard list. At Makpo the ship was taken over by the Japanese Government, and the passengers were taken ashore.

Now Jack was mad and determined to get to Chemulpo. Chartering a junk, he sailed out into the Yellow Sea and along the coast of Korea. His Korean crew of three spoke no English, but somehow they all managed to keep going. It was a cold, miserable, stormy voyage. By nightfall they arrived in Kun San minus a mast and with a smashed rudder. Five Japanese had been given passage on the trip to Kun San. At the height of the storm, Jack had one man at the tiller, a Korean at each sheet, four scared Japanese, and a fifth too seasick to be scared.

Because the old junk was too badly damaged to be of use, he had to charter a new one. This time he had five Japanese crew members who knew no English. In Kun San there were rumors of fighting, but nobody knew whether war had been declared. It was so cold that the salt water froze as the breakers splashed over the side. There were no stoves—only charcoal boxes with a half dozen embers. Jack had bought one at a tiny Korean village for twelve and a half cents when they had landed for water.

Perhaps the liveliest eight days of Jack London’s life were spent in this small boat on the West Coast of Korea. The voyage turned out to be more adventuresome than even he wanted. He was voyaging up the Yellow Sea during February in below-zero weather. All he had to keep warm, other than the pitiful little charcoal box, was the thought of the rest of the correspondents bottled up in Japan—he was on the way to the front.

He was in an open boat, a sampan, on a rocky coast where there were no lighthouses, and where the tides ran from thirty to sixty feet. His crew members were Japanese fishermen. They couldn’t understand him and he couldn’t understand them. However, there was nothing monotonous about the trip. Jack never forgot one particular cold, bitter dawn, when, in the thick of driving snow, they took in the sail and dropped their small anchor. The wind was howling out of the northwest and they were on a lee shore. Ahead and astern all escape was cut off by rocky headlands, against whose bases burst the unbroken seas. To windward a short distance, seen only between snow squalls, was a low, rocky reef. It was this reef that inadequately protected them from the whole Yellow Sea that thundered in upon them.

The Japanese crawled under a rice mat and went to sleep. Jack joined them, and for several hours they dozed fitfully. Then a sea deluged them with icy water, and they found several inches of snow and ice on top of the mat. The reef to windward was disappearing under the rising tide, and moment by moment the seas crashed stronger and stronger over the rocks. The fishermen studied the shores anxiously. So did Jack, and with a trained sailor’s eye, though he could see little chance for a swimmer to gain that surf-hammered line of rocks. He concluded that they were paralyzed by the hopelessness of the situation. Yet their danger increased every minute, for the rising tide was robbing them of the reef that had been serving as a buffer. The sea was splashing aboard in growing volume, and they baled constantly. And still the fishermen eyed the surf-battered shore and did nothing.

At last, after many narrow escapes form complete swamping, the fishermen got into action. All hands toiled on the anchor and hove it up. Forward, as the boat’s head paid off, they set a patch of sail about the size of a flour sack, and they headed straight for shore. Jack unlaced his shoes, unbuttoned his great coat, and made ready for a quick partial strip a minute or so before they struck. But they didn’t strike, and, as they rushed in, he saw the beauty of what was happening. Before them opened a narrow channel, filled at its rising tide, and it was for that tide that the Japanese had so precariously waited. They ran through the breakers, ailed into a tiny sheltered bay, and landed on a beach where the salt sea of the last tide lay frozen in long, curving lines.

Sunday, February 14, they put into a Korean fishing village and spent the day and night. As Jack, exaggerating a little for emphasis, put it, “Five sailors, myself, and about twenty men, women, and children slept in a hut whose floor space equaled the size of a standard double bed.” Jack was the first white man ever seen in the village and was the center of attention for all. At midnight he made the mistake of showing his false upper teeth to an old man, who immediately aroused the house to see this miracle. At three o’clock everybody woke up for another series of demonstrations.

Monday the 15th they were on the last leg of the trip up the wild coast in the bitter cold. Jack wondered several times during the long day if he could stay alive long enough to make it. He nearly didn’t. He was a physical wreck. His ears, fingers, and feet were frozen. He said that he didn’t mind his condition so long as he got to the front. He said his physical collapse counted for nothing. He had been sent to the front to do newspaper work, and he wanted to do it.

As soon as he was able to move about he and R. L. Dunn started for the front. The Japanese monopolized the regular roads. They had to make their way through the ice-crusted rice fields.

Korea is a very mountainous country and traveling under the best conditions in winter is a tragedy. They had to beat the soldiers to a village in order to get a place to sleep. A village containing six houses would be utilized by a regiment of infantry. If they got to a village first they had a room against the soldiers. If the soldiers got there first they had no place to sleep.

Their entire stay in Korea was a succession of hardships that is almost impossible for anybody who has not visited the country during the winter to realize. They were held at Ping Yang by the Japanese Consul for a week. Their forced stay was the result of a complaint lodged with the Japanese Government by the correspondents of Tokyo who did not have the grit or the enterprise to get anywhere near the field of action. Finally they reached Sunan, one of the most northern towns of Korea. There they were put in a military prison for four days. Then they sent them back to Seoul.

They headed north over frozen mountains and through ice-covered valleys. When night came, they huddled up on the frozen ground and hoped that they would live long enough to get back home. At time it seemed an impossible dream. By February 24 they had arrived at Seoul and were staying at the Grand Hotel. Jack’s entourage consisted of three pack horses, two riding horses, one Japanese interpreter (Mr. Yuamada), one cook (Manyoungi), and two Mapus (Korean grooms).

By March 4 they had reached Ping Yang. Jack traveled one hundred eighty miles on horseback on Belle, the horse formerly owned by the Russian minister in Seoul. Their plan was to head north for Anju and maybe the Yalu River. C. Chinjo, Japanese acting consul forbade them to go any farther north, but late in the afternoon of March 8 they arrived at Poval Colli, a forlorn little village full of scared, cold people. It was snowing and everybody, including Dunn and London, was generally miserable.

The following day they were captured by Japanese soldiers and given strict orders to venture no farther north than one hundred yards. Dunn, the photographer/correspondent, and London, the correspondent/photographer, were disgusted and exasperated. The front was still forty miles away. The fact that they had penetrated farther north than any other correspondents in the war gave little solace. Dunn rode back to Seoul to beg permission for them to go on to the front. Jack remained in Sunan taking pictures. On March 13 the Japanese instead that he return to Seoul.

At last, on April 16, he was able to leave Seoul and five days later arrived in Wiju. There he watched the army move up and wrote an article, “Japanese Supplies Rushed to Front by Man and Beast.” On May 1 he rode across the Yalu River to Kuel-ina-Ching and on to the Chinese city of Antung, where he wrote “Give Battle to Retard Enemy.”

With Jack at First Army Headquarters were John Bass, Robert M. Collins, Walter Kirton, Oscar K. Davis, William Dinwiddie, James B. Hare, and Frederick Palmer. They were confined in a grove of pines on a hill slope near a temple located five miles from the Yalu and well out of sight of the river. Any hope of seeing a battle was futile since they were limited to riding or walking within a circle of two miles. The nearest contact with the front occurred when the Japanese general allowed them to watch the battle of Yalu—probably because he was fairly confident of victory with his fifty thousand men pitted against Russia’s five thousand. The Japanese even set up a fine place from which to view the fighting, several miles from the front on a high bluff. At least the correspondents could let the world know that whenever battles were fought there was smoke. However, they were so far away that they weren’t certain any noise was involved.

By the time the army headquarters and the correspondents had moved up to Feng-hwang-Cheng, Jack had sent nineteen articles and hundreds of pictures to Hearst, but had no idea whether any had reached San Francisco.

It became difficult for him to wheedle any particular favors, due to an altercation just prior to leaving for Seoul. Robert Dunn said, “When London finally left for the First Army front, near Yalu, he did paste a Japanese servant he caught stealing. Headquarters dressed Jack down, and kept him under arrest with out a hearing in military-racial ruckus.” Palmer fills in the details, “It was solved by explaining that London was a most gifted writer, with a strong sense of the pioneer American bushido, which responded with a blow of a fist to an insult.”

By June 4 Jack was thoroughly disgusted and gave up all hope of being able to accomplish anything that he was sent out to do. He decided to return home. Palmer reported that Jack was particularly irked at the restraints. When Palmer told him that he had to understand the Japanese way of doing things and suggested that, at least, the Japanese were very brave soldiers, Jack responded, “They may be brave, but so are the South American peccary pigs in their herd charges.”

The only redeeming feature of the whole Russo-Japanese War was the camaraderie he had enjoyed with Bobby Dunn. He told Dunn, “I’ve wasted five months of my life in this war.” A little humor had brought Dunn and London through many distressful situations, enabling them to do about the only reporting of any consequence that came out of the war. Jack’s humor was still intact as he said goodbye to his friend, “If we ever meet again, Bob, my memory will be your laughing at me and my laughing at you, and your knowing, and my knowing you know I am.”