"The Heathen" is a short story by the American writer Jack London. It was first published in Everybody's Magazine in August 1910. In the story, two people, from different cultural and racial backgrounds, are the only survivors of a ship that encounters a hurricane in the Pacific, and they remain together. The narrator, a pearl buyer named Charley, is a cabin passenger on a schooner, the Petite Jeanne, sailing from Rangiroa to Tahiti with a Kanaka crew, at the end of the pearling season in the Paumotas. The boat, having eighty-five deck passengers, is overloaded. Several passengers die of smallpox; Charley and the other cabin passengers drink whisky, until it runs out, in the belief that it will kill the smallpox germs. The boat is in the direct path of a hurricane. "The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne's decks flush with the rails, and, as her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human torrent.... Out of all my experiences I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow as it did.... It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it increased and continued to increase." John Griffith Chaney (1876–1916), better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and social activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction. His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in Alaska and the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen".
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