The Sea-Wolf

Humphrey Van Weyden is a comfortable San Francisco literary critic who has never worked with his hands. On a foggy January morning his ferry is struck in San Francisco Bay and he goes into the cold water alone. He is pulled aboard the Ghost, a sealing schooner outward bound for seven months, and meets her captain, Wolf Larsen: a self-taught, immensely strong man who keeps a shelf of worn books in his cabin and believes that life is only yeast, and that the strong are meant to eat the weak.

Wolf will not turn back. He renames Humphrey "Hump", makes him cabin boy under a bullying cook, and sets him to work. Humphrey learns to scrub, to cook, to climb and at last to stand up for himself; when the cook threatens him, he buys a knife of his own and is left alone after that. He also learns what the Ghost costs the men who sail her. A sailor is beaten for telling the truth, the crew tries to kill the captain in the dark, and two men steal a boat and run for the coast until Wolf hunts them down across the open sea. Humphrey, promoted to mate, watches all of it and says nothing.

Then the Ghost picks up castaways from a wrecked steamer, and one of them is Maud Brewster, a poet whose books Humphrey has reviewed. Her presence forces him to see himself clearly. When the crew is drunk and Wolf is struck down by the blinding headaches that have begun to come on him, Humphrey and Maud load a small boat and slip away into the night.

Weeks in the open sea bring them to a bare, seal-covered island they name Endeavour Island. There they build a stone hut, learn to feed and warm themselves, and find that they are far stronger together than either was alone. Then a broken ship drifts into their cove: the Ghost, with Wolf Larsen aboard and alone. His brother has bought away his crew, and he is going blind. Humphrey and Maud set out to raise new masts by hand and sail her home, while the man who once owned them fights them from his bunk to the very last day.