Perhaps you can imagine being cast away on a Pacific Island so deserted, so bare of everything people live on, that Robinson's Crusoe's life seems luxurious by comparison. Hal and Roger Hunt and their island friend, Omo, got marooned on one by a treacherous pearl trader, and their desperate struggle to survive with no tool but a knife, no matches, no fish line or hook or net, no vegetation on the land but palms, and above all no visible water supply, makes reading as exciting as you have met in a long time. There is even worse to befall Hal and Roger, but that you can't believe until you read it!

The marooning and what follows are the climax of the young men's voyage aboard the schooner Lively Lady on an assignment from an aquatic collector to bring back "the strangest things from the Seven Seas." On top of that is a hush-hush errand for a family friend who has planted a pearl-oyster bed in a secret spot of the Pacific and needs a report on how the oysters are doing. Careful though the friend is in telling Hal and Roger the bearing of the place, they fear they are overheard; and the tension of that fear endures to the end of the story. In between are encounters with swordfish, devilfish, sharks, and even "the nightmare of the Pacific," with hurricane and waterspout, and with the gang that seeks to foil the expedition.

From the dust jacket