AustLit

Tom Denison is sent to investigate a situation on an unnamed island in the Southwest Pacific where a trader is alleged to have shot an Islander. When Denison and the taciturn ship's captain arrive on the island they discover the trouble is over a girl the trader brought to the island. The captain buys the girl, intending to make a profit on her.

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

Mayhem ensues when Denison and Hayes feed alcohol to Mrs Maclaggan's billy goat.

An old Malay fisherman devises ingenious ways of making money.

A billygoat, being taken from Samoa to Fiji to fight with a hated businessman's much-feared ram, is trained to attack the businessman instead.

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.

Relates the idyllic seven months that Denison, the supercargo, lived in a village on the island of Kosrae, after the wreck of the blackbirder, 'Bully' Hayes's ship, the Leonora. The work appears to be largely autobiographical.

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.

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 sailor is offered a job managing a run-down poultry farm, but discovers his dreams of an easy life are not well-founded.

Denison tries his hand at editing, with predictably disastrous consequences.

Denison travels to Sydney looking for work. Eventually he meets an old acquaintance and is offered a position as supercargo on a trading ship.

A socially inept ship's captain incites an all-out brawl in a Samoan village.

A local man returns to his island with his granddaughter after thirty years absence. He and his granddaughter have adopted the Catholic religion, but during his absence the islanders have become Protestants and, led by the Hawaiian missionary teacher, persecute him and his granddaughter, refusing them land and sustenance. When a trader, Macpherson, tries to help the old man his store is tabooed by the islanders and he appeals to the captain of a visiting ship for assistance.

Tom Denison, a trader, has discovered the secret of making a remarkable type of soap. His rival, a German trader, is driven mad with the desire to obtain the secret, with tragic results.

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.

A trader rescues two hundred survivors of the ill-fated French settlement in New Britain, established by the Marquis de Rays and known as Nouvelle France. He insists they live on board their steamer until he can send them to Sydney. When two of the Frenchmen become rivals in love a duel is arranged, with farcical results.

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.

Saunderson, a man who believes he knows everything, refuses advice from Denison about handling dynamite. The results are catastrophic.