By the will of fate, an art enthusiast, Humphry Van Weyden, finds himself captured and taken prisoner on the sea schooner "The Ghost," whose captain is a cruel and uncompromising Wolf Larsen. To survive, Humphry must learn the difficult profession of a sailor and figure out how to get along with a crew made up of petty criminals and murderers. But most important—and perhaps the hardest—thing of all is to find a common language with the captain, who does not recognize the value of human life and believes profit to be the only true purpose of existence.