The House of Mapuhi
A great typhoon sweeps over a small atoll, leaving the inhabitants shaken and tossed about, only to realize that nothing, really, has changed. 4/5

The Whale Tooth
It's always a good idea to listen to the advice of those who are wiser than you, even when you have the hand of God on your side. 3/5

Mauki
The tale of the son of a chief who is taken away to be a slave and then a plantation worker, Mauki, is full of the kind of detail that makes the South Sea Tales come alive and a pleasure to read. 5/5

"Yah! Yah! Yah!"
A tale of the horrible, horrible reprisals that occur when the natives cross the white man. 4/5

The Heathen
I loved this story of how two men can become brothers and in doing so force them to become the men the other has always known them to be. 5/5

The Terrible Solomons
Essentially, this is the early 20th century version of "Boys in the Hood." You know, "If you've never been to the ghetto, don't ever come to the ghetto, because you wouldn't understand the ghetto," only in sailor talk. 4/5

The Inevitable White Man
Inevitable is a strange word to describe an ethnicity but, after reading this story, it becomes the only one that seems even remotely capable of encompassing all of Europe's attitude towards the less charted regions of the world and why they claimed dominion over them. 5/5

The Seed of McCoy
Almost more of a prose poem than a story, the gentle telling of this story belies its desperate stakes as a captain races to get his ship onto a soft, sandy bed, before the fire in her hold consumes her. 4/5

The best story in this collection, hands down, is "The House of Mapuhi" for being harrowing yet human, and for never going in the direction I was expecting. Fantastic read.

The next best was "The Seed of McCoy" about an on-fire ship trying to find a safe place to beach in a dangerous archipelago.

As for the rest...well, buckle up for some highly uncomfortable reading. London illustrates a brutal side of colonialism that is hard to stomach, and while he's clearly critiquing it, the gleeful violence occasionally confused me as to what the author was actually wanting to get across.

A theme current in much of London's work is a Darwinian struggle to survive. His works epitomize a sort of literary naturalism. And never more so than in the collection of stories contained in South Sea Tales. Probably the most notable of them is the last one in the collection, "The Seed of McCoy," where a schooner in distress anchors outside Pitcairn's Island, the home of the descendants who mutinied aboard the HMS Bounty. During the course of the story, McCoy recounts the fate of the mutineers, and the captain of the endangered schooner realizes it is the blood of those men that runs through McCoy's veins and is all that stands between him and death. "The Seed of McCoy" is also one of London's best pure adventure tales, with disaster nipping at the heels of the crew and captain unceasingly until the very end.

As South Sea stories go, these are among the very best. But always look beneath the mere adventure to the motivations that power London's stories. The White Man's Burden, the natural virtues of the Wild Men of the islands, the overwhelming forces of nature--they are all there commenting on our ability to survive.

These stories really ranged from 1-3 stars. Most of the first ones were pretty good. A lot of them were way too long and incredibly dull.

The hurricane story was best, then each got progressively less. Not sure if the boat on fire was a metaphor, don't understand how they could keep sailing it.

Je n'ai pas forcément trouvé le sens de ce livre.... Je suis déçue malheureusement