Jack London 
The Human Drift 

Contents
The Human Drift — Small-Boat Sailing — Four Horses and a Sailor — Nothing that Ever Came to Anything — That Dead Men Rise up Never — A Classic of the Sea — A Wicked Woman (Curtain Raiser) — The Birth Mark (Sketch)

Most of the work was light-hearted, except for the title essay The Human Drift, where London discusses the way man has spread over the continents in waves throughout history and ponders the results and eventual end of this drift.

He speaks of Small-Boat Sailing so well that you feel you are there with him, and these are bits from his own adventures, not fiction. It is easy to see where the realism in his fiction comes from. The salt spray practically blows over you with every paragraph even in these short pieces.

A sailor is born, not made. And by "sailor" is meant, not the average efficient and hopeless creature who is found to-day in the forecastle of deepwater ships, but the man who will take a fabric compounded of wood and iron and rope and canvas and compel it to obey his will on the surface of the sea. Barring captains and mates of big ships, the small-boat sailor is the real sailor.