After surviving an encounter with an escaped tiger, Jaffy Brown, a nineteenth-century street urchin, goes to work for Mr. Charles Jamrach, the famed importer of exotic animals, alongside Tim, a good but sometimes spitefully competitive boy with whom he forms a long, close friendship fraught with ambiguity and rivalry. Years pass and Mr. Jamrach recruits the two boys, now teenagers, to capture a fabled dragonlike creature during the course of a three-year whaling expedition. When a violent storm sinks the ship, the survivors, including Jaffy and Tim, are forced to confront man's relationship to the natural world and the wildness it contains.