AustLit

Tom Denison tells a story of his days on Strong's Island after the wreck of 'Bully' Hayes's ship, the Leonora. Denison left Hayes's camp and was taken in by a local family. He relates the story of a fight between English Bob, and Englishman married to a local girl, and an American sailor, as told to him by English Bob's daughter.

Charles Wendall, a sailor, has lived amongst the Islanders for forty years. He is alarmed when a group of American missionaries, accompanied by an Islander convert, arrives on the island but the island chief, Togusa, has heard of missionaries and their work and turns them away. The missionaries depart, but they leave behind a deadly legacy.

A trader, separated from his wife because of her involvement with the suffragette movement, lives alone on Tarawa, an island of Kiribati, with his beloved pig, Brian. His wife writes to him and asks him to come home, but he cannot bear to leave Brian.

Prescott, an escaped convict, commits an atrocity against a group of sailors and other escapees when they refuse to join him in an act of piracy. His actions lead to his exile from Naura and he is forced to wander the Pacific trying to escape his reputation.

A young woman seeks to be reunited with her former love, now a trader in the Caroline Islands, but he has reasons for refusing to reply to her letters. Their love seems doomed, until a cyclone intervenes.

A beachcomber seeks revenge against a ship's captain who had him unfairly flogged and then abandoned him.

A young man is determined to collect pearl shell from an isolated part of New Britain, despite the warnings of more experienced traders. He pays a terrible price for not heeding their counsel.

A ship's captain devises a scheme to try and capture two sailors who had deserted their ships and are living on a Samoan island. The men manage to escape and are not heard of again for many years.

A ship's mate relates his experience when a group of Pacific Islanders, who are being taken to Tahiti to work on a sugar plantation, take over the ship.

A ship's captain and his supercargo spend an entertaining evening on a Samoan island.

A group of miners devise a plan to outwit a dishonest storekeeper to whom they are all heavily in debt.

A group of sailors desert from a ship to live amongst the Islanders. However their drunken and violent ways alienate the villagers, who take their revenge when the Islander wife of one of the men dies after he strikes her in a drunken rage.

Three friends throw themselves over a cliff when the parents of one of the girls, whose lover has died, try to force her into a marriage.

An old trader tells the story of a young woman, dying from a gunshot wound to the head, who is abandoned on the island of Majuro by a passing ship.

The Islander wife of a ship's captain refuses to let a male doctor attend to her after the birth of her baby.

An injured sailor is put ashore on an isolated island to be tended by a German doctor. The doctor declares he has given up medicine to study the mating behaviour of green turtles. The sailor is terrified when he learns what the doctor is really doing.

A sailor, imprisoned in Panama after beating a man who had insulted him, is helped to escape by a mysterious Spaniard who wants the sailor's assistance for a special mission.