Jim Colet is a clerk at a London shipping company, frustrated with his job and his tyrannical boss, Mr. Perriam. One day, after enduring one of Perriam’s more abusive tirades, Colet snaps and strikes him in the face—only for Perriam to drop to the floor, stone dead.

Colet is overwhelmed with guilt, but instead of turning himself in, he decides to stow away on a steamer bound for colonial Malaya. While the captain is unhappy to discover a stowaway, he’s also familiar with Perriam’s brutishness; and after Colet confesses to his crime, the captain offers Colet a job as the ship’s purser.

Thus begins Colet’s adventure on the steamer Altair , where he’s to encounters myriad dangers on his way to, and in, the far east reaches of the British Empire. But all the while the ghost of his crime haunts him, and he struggles with a powerful yearning to return to the gray piers of London.