The Sea-Wolf

About the book

Humphrey Van Weyden survives an accident at sea and is taken aboard the sealing schooner Ghost, where rescue does not mean freedom. Captain Wolf Larsen compels him to work and subjects him to a harsh social order supported by physical power and an aggressively argued philosophy. Humphrey must acquire practical skills while defending assumptions about dignity and obligation that his earlier life had rarely tested. The arrival of Maud Brewster introduces another relationship and another set of responsibilities within the danger. London combines maritime action with extended conflict over what human beings owe one another. The narrator's education is therefore bodily as well as intellectual, asking whether competence and courage can be developed without accepting the captain's conviction that domination supplies its own justification.

• Power and morality
• Practical education
• Survival and dignity

Why read it

For a sea adventure that makes physical survival inseparable from a sustained argument about power and moral responsibility.

Novel · English text