John Griffith London was born in San Francisco, the child of a spiritualist, Flora Wellman, and her common-law husband, William Henry Chaney, an itinerant astrologer. Although in later life Chaney denied to London that he was his father, the evidence leaves little doubt of his paternity. The year of her son's birth, Flora Wellman married John London, who accepted the boy as his own and gave him his name. The family's declining economic condition, the result of Flora's get-rich-quick schemes that invariably failed, entailed frequent relocation, so that London's boyhood was lonely and insecure. By age sixteen, however, he had borrowed the money to buy a sloop and established himself as "Prince of the Oyster Pirates" on San Francisco Bay. The next year he spent several months as a hand on a sealing schooner working the North Pacific; on his return to San Francisco he won first prize in a newspaper contest with his description of a typhoon off the coast of Japan. After a brief but debilitating stint shoveling coal in a power station, London joined in 1894 the western detachment of "Coxey's Army" for its bonus march on Washington, D.C.
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