Whaler ship Pilgrim sets sail for Valparaíso through the Pacific Ocean. Aboard the ship are Captain Hull, the ship's captain, and his crew, which includes the fifteen-year-old novice, Dick Sand; Mrs. Weldon, Dick's adoptive mother who climbed into the ship out of need of a trip to her homeland, the US, along with her son Jack, her entomologist cousin Bénédict and Jack's nanny, Nan; and the cook Negoro, a man with a dubious past. Along the trip, they also rescue five black men (Tom, Bat, Actéon, Hercule and Austin) and a dog named Dingo from a wrecked ship.
Their voyage sadly goes to hell when Captain Hull and his crew die attempting to hunt a whale. The passenger's fates are in the hands of Dick, who despite his age is quite capable of directing the ship with some help. Dick and the other passangers must struggle to survive the sea (and Negoro)'s challenges.
This work provides examples of:
- A Child Shall Lead Them: Dick is forced to take the helm of the ship even though he does not have the experience required. He does a good job at it - even managing to go around Cape Horn and its brutal storms - but Negoro takes advantage of his lack of experience to trick him into going to Africa.
- Artistic License – Biology: The African chief Moini Lunga burns to death because he's an alcoholic, and his body contains, in Verne's words, "so much alcohol" to become literally flammable. In Real Life, any person would be long dead from alcohol poisoning before this would be possible. True, in some rare cases the human body can burn on its own, but what does burn is actually body fat
, not consumed alcohol, which, in fact, is very efficiently broken by the body. It also takes a long time to ignite, due to high moisture content of the body, and the human has to be dead, unconscious or incapacitated, as the process is quite painful. - Artistic License – Geography: While a prisoner in Kazounde, set somewhere in central Angola in the area of the former Kingdom of Bihe, Mrs. Weldon overhears Joze Alvez talking to another slaver from Ujiji of the possible coming of Dr. Livingstone (who had been spied upon Lake Bangweulu) and just later of the Doctor's death. Straight line distance from the Kingdom of Bihe to the last place the Doctor saw alive in Zambia is more than 900 miles, and in the rough lands of Central Africa there was never a straight road to follow. Yet slavers talk of crossing such distances on foot with the ease modern people talk about flying.
- Big Damn Heroes: Hercule does this thrice during the second Story Arc. Captain Hull (who's alive there) in 1945 adaptation aids him in that.
- Central Theme: Slavery, and the effect it has on its sufferers.
- Contrived Coincidence: The plot is very coincidence-driven.
- Had Dick not existed, or not been adopted by the Weldons, or not met Captain Hull, or not been as adept as he is at sailing, or not been on the ship when it set sail for Valparaíso, the Pilgrim survivors would have been doomed to a painful death in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
- The same goes for Negoro. If he hadn't been hired as a cook for the Pilgrim, the ship would have landed in Valparaíso just fine, cutting the story's length in at least half.
- The Pilgrim catching sight of the Waldeck would be a very rare ocurrence. This is where Hercule and Dingo, two of the most important plot drivers, enter the story.
- Moini Lunga dies because the boiling soup he tries burns the alcohol in his body. This would require both an extremely heavy alcohol concentration and an unreasonably high temperature for the soup. Though it's actually flaming punch in the original, which makes it somewhat more realistic. OTOH, any person would long be dead from alcohol poisoning before their body absorb enough of it to become flammable. Most human body combustion cases are actually explained by the burning of the body fat, not alcohol.
- Diabolus ex Machina: Negoro and Harris are the embodiment of this trope. They just insert themselves into situations (Negoro by offering to work on the Pilgrim, Harris by being traveling through Angola and meeting Negoro) and screwing up everyone involved.
- Establishing Character Moment: Minutes into their first meeting, Harris asks Mrs. Weldon: "These Blacks are your slaves?" The events are set in the early months of 1873, just during the turbulent Reconstruction Era. To ask such question (even worse, to a lady of which he had been informed she was a social superior, wife of a shipping magnate) was a horrible example of rudeness, a dark prediction of worse things to come.
- The Dog Bites Back: This happens literally to Negoro, courtesy of Dingo, causing his Karmic Death.
- Karmic Death:
- A sadly heroic example: Captain Hull, a very experienced whale hunter, is killed by a humpback whale attempting to protect its kid.
- Drunkard king Moini Lunga dies because of alcohol flammation.
- In the second to last chapter, Negoro is killed by Dingo, the dog whose master he betrayed, robbed and killed.
- Mentor Occupational Hazard: Captain Hull dies very early into the story.
- Oh, Crap!: Dick, when he realizes Harris has left them stranded in the middle of an African forest.
- Race Lift: The slavers boss Joze Alvez is a mixed-race man in the book, while the Soviet film makes him white.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Nan. During the sailing sequence, she just stays in the background, to the point that it's really easy to forget about her. In the landing sequence, she gains a bit of importance by comforting Jack — then she dies in the slave caravan so to feed other slaves. After her death, she is only mentioned twice.
- Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: The description of the way slavers kidnapped and maltreated slaves, with forks, chains, shackles, whipping and cutting of the hands, is sickening.
- Spanner in the Works: Negoronote rigs the ship's compass to point to the different direction, so Dick, whose navigation skills are severely limited, sails the Pilgrim to Angola instead of Chile.
- Spared by the Adaptation: The Soviet 1945 film leaves both Nan and Captain Hull's whaling party alive.
- Story Arc: The plot is divided in two arcs helpfully tagged Part 1 and 2.
