The Cruise of the Snark is a non-fictional, illustrated book by Jack London chronicling his sailing adventure across the south Pacific in his ketch the Snark. Accompanying London on this voyage was his wife Charmian and a small crew. London taught himself celestial navigation and the basics of sailing and of boats during the course of this adventure and describes these details to the reader. During the voyage they visited exotic locations including the Solomon Islands and Hawaii. His first-person accounts and photographs provide insight into these remote places at the beginning of the 20th century. Jack London was an American author, journalist, and social activist, a pioneer in the world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush. He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as The Pearls of Parlay and The Heathen, and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.