This autobiographical story of a half-Norwegian, half-Eskimo orphan boy who was brought up in the Methodist Mission at Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands, separating the Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea, is the narrative of a life filled with unbelievable adventures, wildly improbable plays of fortune, almost inconceivably hard work and concentration upon a goal.

Nutchuk spent months working in a sulphur mine at the crater of a live volcano; fishing the stormy waters of the Bering Sea, and driving boats through the terrible tide-rips that sweep the passes between the islands; in a dimly-lit operating-room at the Mission, to which the sick and wounded came to be healed from all the islands and the seas for a distance of seven hundred miles.

The story of Nutchuk's first trip "outside" —the terrific impact of civilization upon primitive mind, in itself makes a story of difficulties different, though no less arduous than those faced in the arctic seas and amid smoking volcanoes.

How Nutchuk eventually went back to the States, to become a well known pianist, lecturer and artist, furnishes an extraordinary chronicle of adventure and the struggle of a man to find himself.

From the dust jacket