London’s turn-of-the-century Pacific is a colonial universe of pearl traders, blackbirders, and plantation masters who ruthlessly exploit the islands and their people. In “Mauki,” a Melanesian slave keeps running away until dispatched to a Polynesian Alcatraz ruled by a demonic German named Max Bunster. With characteristic tautness, London sets the stage for yet another duel, this one between man and man rather than man and nature: “Bunster was a degenerate brute. But Mauki was a primitive savage. While both had wills and ways of their own.”

The phrase “primitive savage” jars twenty-first-century ears. So does London’s periodic use of “pickaninny” and “monkey” to describe dark-skinned islanders. London was a man of his times, and the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were rank with racism and social Darwinism. But London was also a poorhouse-reared child who became a cannery worker, rail tramp, and committed socialist. His sympathy for underdogs, of all backgrounds, courses through South Sea Tales, as it does through much of his other writing. In London’s fiction, brutes like Bunster rarely die peacefully in bed.

London also strips the South Sea of the myth and romance that have clouded the Pacific since James Cook introduced the ocean and its people to the West during three voyages of discovery in the eighteenth century. For the Enlightenment Europe of Cook’s day, the Pacific seemed an Edenic realm of “noble savages,” dwelling in a blessed state of nature. To the missionaries and imperialists who followed, these same natives became ignoble: naked heathens, destined to serve the white man and doomed by their inferior genes to perish. Then came steamships, package tours, and airplanes, transforming the Pacific of Western imagination into a hula-dancing, rum-soaked playground.

London, who saw the South Pacific for himself during a two-year voyage, paints a much more somber picture. The islanders in his stories aren’t Rousseauian innocents; they’re recognizable, flawed humans, struggling to survive the disease, drink, and dispossession brought on by Western contact. The narrator of “Good-bye, Jack” says of Hawaii: “The native women are sun-ripe Junos, the native men bronzed Apollos.” But a few pages on, this idealized vision shatters when the narrator confronts Hawaiians hideously disfigured by leprosy.

Nor are Western churchmen and merchants the civilizing force they imagine themselves to be. In London’s stories, most are greedy hypocrites who preach Christianity and submission—only to steal land and drive natives into near-extinction. “The missionary who came to give the bread of life remained to gobble up the whole heathen feast,” London writes of Hawaii. The tropical landscape, as rendered by London, also defies advertising stereotype. Rain sheets down, monstrous centipedes crawl into women’s hair, the jungle is a sea of “unrefreshing green,” and a coral reef looms as “a bleak and perilous place over which the seas broke unceasingly.” Of the Polynesian gulag to which the slave Mauki is exiled, London tells us: “Thomas Cook & Son do not sell tickets to it, and tourists do not dream of its existence.”

The dark tone of many of these stories reflects, in part, London’s disturbed state of mind and health. He first sailed to the South Pacific in 1907 on a ketch called the Snark, enduring a rough passage that ended in Tahiti. From there, London had to return to California to deal with his crumbling finances. Resuming his trip, he became so sick with illnesses such as yaws, a tropical disease causing ulcerated flesh, that he had to abandon the Snark once again and board a steamer to a hospital in Sydney. He later took refuge in Hawaii, immersed himself in the works of Jung and Freud, and wrote feverishly as both his health and the world unraveled. It seems forlornly appropriate that Jack London, who so potently evoked solitary combat against nature, died in 1916 at the age of forty, as millions of young men perished in the faceless trench warfare of the Western Front.

While the despair of London’s last years infuses his writing about the Pacific, the stories in South Sea Tales are nonetheless rich with moments of exotic wonderment. Mauki, a Solomon Islander, has no need for pockets; he lodges a knife in his thick hair, puts a pipe in his pierced ear, and loops the handle of a cup through a ring dangling from his nose. During storms in Polynesia, sea spray strikes walls “like the rattle of musketry” and the ocean becomes “a checker-board of squalls.” In Hawaii, even white businessmen “yield to the climate and the sun, and no matter how busy they may be, are prone to dance and sing and wear flowers behind their ears and in their hair.”

In these and other sharply observed scenes, London the journalist emerges, filing vivid dispatches from afar, much as he did in his reporting from the East London slums and Russo-Japanese War. His is not the finely burnished prose of a writing school graduate, imagining the world from the confines of a library carrel or New York loft. London, an extreme adventurer, lived what he wrote: a large life of risk and challenge, ranging from the frigid goldfields of the Yukon to the torpid heat of the South Pacific. This immersion gives his stories a raw, headlong immediacy we associate today with nonfiction adventures such as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air.

When London’s stories click, we are utterly there, at the edge of the world and the limit of human endurance. In “The Heathen,” a pearlbuyer named Charley is trapped aboard an overcrowded, smallpox-ridden schooner.