Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Reviewed by: Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf Kevin J. Hayes (bio) Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf, by Don MacGillivray. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008. xiv + 359 pp. Cloth, $98.00, Paper, $32.95. Don MacGillivray's Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf is an important work of scholarship. After such a resounding pronouncement, you may be tempted to stop reading this review already. Don't stop yet: I need to qualify that statement—signifi cantly. Captain Alex MacLean (1858–1914) is best known as the inspiration for Wolf Larsen in The Sea-Wolf (1904). By all accounts, MacLean was as colorful in real life as Larsen is in London's novel. There are some differences, of course. Fiercely competitive, MacLean seldom missed an opportunity to pick a fight, but, unlike his fictional counterpart, he was generally good-hearted and congenial. He respected those who treated him with respect, and scorned those who scorned him. MacGillivray's biography is the first book-length study of this stalwart captain to appear. MacLean was such a fascinating character that it seems strange no one has written his biography before. Why not? The quality of the surviving evidence may help to answer that question. The documentary evidence is spotty and inconsistent. After spending three decades researching MacLean's biography, MacGillivray must admit, "No papers of Alex MacLean have been uncovered." Though no manuscript material on MacLean's part survives, published interviews have captured [End Page 86] some of his personal utterances. After leaving his native Nova Scotia for the Pacifi c coast in the early 1880s, MacLean established himself as one of the finest sealers in the North Pacifi c. His intrepid adventures and brazen behavior made him something of a local celebrity in both San Francisco, California, and Victoria, British Columbia, the two places he called home. London first learned about him in the saloons along the Oakland waterfront in the 1890s. When The Sea-Wolf, a best seller, appeared in 1904, many readers around the San Francisco Bay recognized London's real-life inspiration. Since MacLean lived ten years beyond the publication of The Sea-Wolf, curious reporters often sought him out. They wanted to see how he compared with London's brutal, yet compelling protagonist. Though a rich oral tradition of MacLean legends developed during his lifetime, he was generally reticent to reveal too much about himself in the interviews. After his death in 1914, reporters sought out friends and enemies, shipmates, and crew members to get their take on what the "Sea Wolf" was really like. These reminiscences capture many of the traditional stories, obscured by the passage of years and embellished through frequent retellings. Overall, the interviews constitute only a small part of the pertinent evidence available to MacGillivray. Most of his information comes from empirical data regarding the sailing profession and sealing industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The challenge MacGillivray faced, therefore, was balancing the dry-as-dust empirical data with the thrilling yet circumspect reminiscences. MacGillivray never really achieves such balance. Instead, he privileges the empirical information and downplays the traditional stories. Consequently, this biography of one of the most thrilling characters to sail the Pacific in the late nineteenth century is remarkably devoid of thrills. Here's an example. While laying underwater telegraph cable off the coast of Halifax early in his career, MacLean got into a fight serious enough to land him in jail. Instead of emphasizing its dramatic elements, MacGillivray ends the episode with statistics indicating the large number of drunken sailors to appear before the Halifax magistrate over the next eleven years. MacGillivray's statistics are intended to mitigate MacLean's behavior; they only serve to defl ate the story. Tales of a later fight on a larger scale quickly entered the oral tradition. Relating an encounter between MacLean's ship and a British vessel in Drake's Bay, MacGillivray explains how one ship used its signal gun to lob potatoes at the other, which responded in kind. This great potato fight has considerable storytelling potential, but MacGillivray ends it in anticlimax by emphasizing the captain's fastidiousness. Using...
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction distillée sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Apprise à partir de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Gemma. Le mode candidate est l'union des têtes enseignantes seuillées; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont ni des étiquettes humaines ni des étiquettes directes de modèles de pointe.
Scores Codex et Gemma par catégorie
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,000 | 0,002 |
| Communication savante | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Science ouverte | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule tête enseignante, pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».