The Sea-Wolf

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1904

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Chapters 37-39Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 37 Summary

With Larsen taken prisoner, Maud and Humphrey leave their huts behind and move into the Ghost. Larsen is severely debilitated: The entire right side of his body is paralyzed. Humphrey and Larsen talk of philosophy like they used to, with Larsen stubbornly rejecting Humphrey’s comforting idea of an immortal soul. With the right side of his face paralyzed, Larsen’s smile is twisted. He promises not to smile again: “I smile internally, with my soul, if you please, my soul. Consider that I am smiling now” (269). Humphrey agrees to remove Larsen’s handcuffs. After another stroke impairs Larsen’s speech, he begins to write out his thoughts.

Winter arrives. Humphrey continues to work on the masts despite the weather while Maud focuses on sewing canvas for the sails, cooking their meals, and taking care of the weakened Larsen. Finally, after a long season, Humphrey and Maud get the boom steady on deck, and the ship is closer to being able to sail.

Then, Maud notices something is burning. They are dismayed to realize that Larsen has started a fire in the steerage in a last attempt to destroy the Ghost. Humphrey rushes below deck and encounters billowing smoke. He quickly rescues Maud from the smoke after she is unable to follow him, discovers that Larsen set fire to the mattress in the bunk above, and successfully puts out the fire. Fresh air restores Larsen to consciousness. He says, “Concentration is perfect. I am all here, and more than here” (275).

Chapter 38 Summary

Larsen slowly loses control of the left side of his body. Maud questions him about his belief in immortality, to which Larsen writes his last word: “B-O-S-H [...] It was Wolf Larsen’s last word, ‘bosh,’ skeptical and invincible to the end” (276). Larsen’s only remaining means of communication is faintly mouthing out simple words.

Humphrey and Maud discuss what they’re going to do next, with Maud casually calling herself “only one small woman” (277). This jolts Humphrey as he calls Maud by this phrase in his head as a term of endearment. His hopes for a reciprocated love grow stronger.

After several more days of preparation, the Ghost is ready to sail. Humphrey plans to use Larsen’s invention from Chapter 10, the star scale, to navigate.

Chapter 39 Summary

Maud and Humphrey prepare to depart from Endeavor Island. Their relationship is at a “tremulous” (279) stage in which Humphrey can hardly contain himself from declaring his love. They leave the island and strike out into open sea.

Humphrey struggles to man the ship by himself, hardly resting and battling adverse weather conditions. As he does this, Maud continues to cook the meals and look after both Larsen and Humphrey, who is near exhaustion one night and needs to be carried to bed. Humphrey sleeps for over 20 hours. When he wakes, he finds Maud at Larsen’s bedside: The captain has died overnight.

They bring Larsen’s body on deck and prepare to bury him at sea in the same way that Larsen had buried his once-mate directly after Humphrey was brought aboard the Ghost. As they stand on deck, they notice a ship on the horizon. The ship in turn notices them and approaches. Maud and Humphrey are finally saved. They embrace and, overcome with love and relief, confess their love for each other.

Chapters 37-39 Analysis

With his body incapacitated, Larsen reflects on what he believes to be the champion indicator of life: the ability to fight and take away another’s life: “Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest bit of the ferment to the end, to eat you. But to die this way” (268). Instead of having Humphrey kill Larsen in the end, by which London would imply the moral necessity of physical violence, London has Larsen’s character physically deteriorate from an uncontrollable and vague illness.

The nature of Larsen’s illness and death calls into question the distinction between doing and being that was the focus of much of Larsen’s philosophical discourse. For Larsen, being active and willful meant that he was alive. He measured the worthiness of his life by the amount of control he had over his body: the doing. Whenever Humphrey, or eventually Maud, brought up the topic of the soul and the soul’s immortality, Larsen scoffed. The soul, the being, did not factor into Larsen’s worldview. It is gravely ironic, then, that he should die paralyzed and deprived of doing. He has only to resort, bitterly, to being: “I can ponder life and death like a Hindu sage” (276). He rejected religion and the sentiment of a soul’s immortal salvation directly up until his death.

Larsen’s body becomes his tomb. Humphrey notes that Larsen’s mind is “walled by the living clay [...] It knew no body” (278). Larsen’s body is finally separated from the influence of his extreme will. Humphrey struggled under that will, but he prevailed with Maud’s assistance. Then Larsen’s own body failed under a will that was, perhaps, too controlling, too strong—too brutal.