Adventure

Adventure is a novel by Jack London, published by Macmillan in 1911. Set in the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific, waters the author had himself sailed, it follows David Sheldon, a young planter running the Berande copra plantation on his own while contending with malaria, tropical storms, labor disputes, and unscrupulous white traders who play by no rules but their own. One day Joan Lackland, an American woman, arrives on a schooner intending to buy the plantation; decisive, capable, and ready to raise a rifle during negotiations, she intrudes upon Sheldon's orderly life. In crisis after crisis the two move from rivalry to partnership, and affection quietly takes root. Yet the true test lies ahead: the violence of the islands, the black laborers trafficked to the plantations as forced workers, a revenge that retreats deep into the jungle, and the part every white "civilized" man plays in it all. Controversy over the book has never ceased: some regard it as a faithful reproduction of colonial-era racial prejudice, while others read in it London's irony toward "civilized arrogance." Woven through with tropical sunlight, salt-laden sea breezes, and the tense struggle for survival, it is a South Seas narrative that combines adventure, romance, and social critique.