Jack London · 1904 · sea

Jack London's 1904 sea novel, drawn from his own youth on a sealing schooner. A pampered San Francisco critic is fished out of the Bay after a ferry wreck and pressed into the crew of the Ghost under Wolf Larsen, a captain who is part philosopher and part brute. The hunt for fur seals carries them west across the Pacific to Japan and north along the Siberian coast, until Van Weyden, hardened at last, escapes with the poet Maud Brewster to a lonely northern island and a final reckoning with Larsen.

1. 1
   San Francisco Bay

   Humphrey Van Weyden, a soft literary critic, is pitched into the foggy Bay by a ferry collision and plucked from the water by the sealing schooner Ghost.

2. 2
   Yokohama

   Captain Wolf Larsen refuses to turn back and drives west across the lonely Pacific toward the Japan sealing grounds; off the coast they rescue the poet Maud Brewster from a foundering steamer.

3. 3
   The Sealing Grounds

   North among the seal herds off the Siberian coast, where Larsen clashes with his even crueller brother, Death Larsen.

4. 4
   Endeavour Island

   Van Weyden and Maud flee in an open boat and are cast away on a desolate seal island, where the wrecked Ghost and its dying captain at last drift in.