The Sea-Wolf

A literary gentleman is picked out of San Francisco Bay by a sealing schooner whose captain is the strongest and most intelligent brute either of them has met. London had sailed on such a voyage at seventeen; the argument between Wolf Larsen and his prisoner is the argument London had with himself all his life and never settled. Fifty-seven plates of shipwreck, whale hunt and rescue by Aivazovsky and Turner carry the novel's sea violence in paint from 1771 to 1900.