Japan mobilizing for war with Russia!’ This electrifying message flashed to the major world capitals from foreign observers in St. Petersburg and Tokyo during the first days of 1904. For several years, czarist Russia had been penetrating southward into Manchuria with the steel bands of the Trans-Siberian Railroad–putting itself on a collision course with the newly expanding empire of Japan.

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The ultimate Russian objective was the occupation of Korea. Japan also sought to extend her hegemony to Korea and to get revenge for Russia’s interference during the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, which had resulted in Russian troops seizing Port Arthur and limiting the Japanese occupation of the Liaotung Peninsula. Between 1900 and 1903, Russian soldiers secretly infiltrated across the Yalu River into northern Korea, fully prepared to fight the Japanese for control of the country’s rich mines. Japan countered those moves with a movement of 25,000 troops to the independent Hermit Kingdom.

Recognizing that conflict was inevitable, the Japanese offered the Russians a compromise: Japan would accept the Russian occupation of Manchuria in return for Russian acceptance of the Japanese claims to Korea. The proposal was rejected by the Russians, who were confident that an Asian country would not challenge a major European military power.

The Japanese response to the rebuff was swift and aggressive. Army units moved to staging areas for deployment to Korea, while the Imperial Japanese Navy prepared to steam out to sea and engage the Russian Pacific Fleet.

The threat of war between a European power and an Asian nation that, in spite of the military modernization it displayed during the Sino-Japanese War, was still regarded in the West as an exotic, mysterious land sent journalists from the major world newspapers rushing to the Far East during the first weeks of 1904. On January 7, under a cold gray sky, SS Siberia sailed from San Francisco for Yokohama, carrying a contingent of war correspondents hungry for action on the Korean Peninsula. Among the group of experienced reporters was Jack London, who was representing the Hearst newspapers. London was on his first news assignment and had no experience as a reporter, but the 28-year-old writer had already received world acclaim for his novel The Call of the Wild and other stories about the 1897 Klondike gold rush.

London’s writings were based not solely on imagination but on his own adventures in the wild. In order to reach the Yukon gold fields, London and several companions had climbed the hazardous, snow-packed trail over Chilikoot Pass. On the other side, they sailed a hastily constructed boat across the white-capped waters of Lake Bennett and then down the treacherous, swirling waters of the Whitehorse Rapids. The ominous signs of the approaching Arctic winter forced London’s party to stop their trek and hastily build a cabin for shelter. After months of survival in the brutal Yukon, spring finally came and they were able to continue their journey to St. Michael on the Bering Sea.

London was also an experienced sailor and a crafty oyster pirate. He had traveled across the United States as a hobo and spent time in jail for vagrancy. Those harsh adventures gave him an edge over his fellow correspondents and would get him into the midst of the action to report the first skirmishes of the Russo-Japanese War.

On board Siberia was a fraternity of hard-bitten journalists who called themselves the Vultures. These newsmen had covered conflicts in every remote geographic region of the world: Egyptian uprisings, French Foreign Legionnaires fighting in Madagascar, Ashanti warriors clashing with British infantrymen in Africa, bloody battles under the burning Sudan sun, Greeks and Turks fighting ancient feuds, and Boer commandos slashing into British columns in the Transvaal.

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