The story opens with Buck, a large and powerful St. Bernard-Scotch Shepherd, living happily in California's Santa Clara Valley as the pampered pet of rich Judge Miller and his family. However, he is stolen by the gardener's assistant, Manuel, and sold to finance his gambling addiction. He is shipped to Seattle. Put in a crate, he is starved and ill-treated. When released, he attacks his overseer, known only as of the "man in the red sweater" but this man teaches the "law of the club", hitting Buck until he is sufficiently cowed (but the man shows some kindness after Buck stops). Buck is then sold to a pair of French-Canadian dispatchers from the Canadian government, François and Perrault, who take him with them to the Klondike region of Canada. There, they train him as a sled dog. From his teammates, he quickly learns to survive cold winter nights and the pack society. A rivalry develops between Buck and the vicious, quarrelsome lead dog, Spitz. Buck eventually beats Spitz in a fight. Spitz is killed by the pack after his defeat by Buck, and Buck eventually becomes the leader of the team.
When Francois and Perrault reach Dawson with their dispatches and are given new orders from the Canadian government, the team is then sold to a "Scottish half-breed" man, who is also working the mail service. The dogs must carry heavy loads to the mining areas, and the journeys they make are tiresome and long. One of the team, a morose husky named Dave, becomes sick and is eventually shot
Joe Bronson, instead of studying for a school exam, goes out kite-flying with his school friends; on their way back he gets involved in fights with gang members in a poor part of the city. After he fails the exam the next day, he walks out of school and takes a ferry across the bay to Oakland. Looking at the boats on the wharf, he imagines the exciting life on a boat.
His father, a businessman, has a liberal attitude to his son; but, critical of his recent behavior and poor school report, tells him that he might send him to a military academy. Joe later leaves a farewell note for his family; returning to Oakland, he joins the crew of a sloop, the Dazzler. The captain Pete Le Maire is known as "French Pete", and the one other crew member is 'Frisco Kid, a boy of about Joe's age.
He soon realizes that French Pete is involved in criminal activity. They take scrap iron from a factory; the job is abandoned when shots are fired. Later, they work as oyster pirates.
In 1906, Jack London began to build a 45-foot yacht on which he planned a round-the-world voyage, to last seven years.
The Snark was named after Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark. She had two masts and was 45 feet long at the waterline and 55 feet on deck, and London claimed to have spent thirty thousand dollars on her construction. She was primarily sail power; however, she also had an auxiliary 70-horsepower engine. She carried one lifeboat.
After many delays, Jack and Charmian London and a small crew sailed out of San Francisco Bay on April 23, 1907, bound for the South Pacific.
We ran down the Langa Langa Lagoon, between mangrove swamps through passages scarcely wider than the Minota, and passed the reef villages of Kaloka and Auki. Like the founders of Venice, these salt-water men were originally refugees from the mainland. Too weak to hold their own in the bush, survivors of village massacres, they fled to the sand-banks of the lagoon. These sand-banks they built up into islands. They were compelled to seek their provender from the sea. They developed canoe-bodies, unable to walk about, spending all their time in the canoes, they became thick-armed and broad-shouldered with narrow waists and frail spindly legs.
