American merchant Captain Jeremiah Macy Hammond's trading empire faces pirates, violent storms, and illness as it forges new paths across the Pacific. There he meets Lady Yee, the Silver Lotus, daughter of a wealthy Cantonese merchant family.

The novel details the undoing of Peter Willems, a disreputable, immoral man who, on the run from a scandal in Makassar, finds refuge in a hidden native village, only to betray his benefactors over lust for the tribal chief's daughter. The story features Conrad's recurring character Tom Lingard, who also appears in Almayer's Folly (1895) and The Rescue (1920), in addition to sharing other characters with those novels. It is considered to be underrated...