The story concerns a man alone on New Year's Eve, who loves to "sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel" while he himself has never been "around the world, never has been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten." Some of the books he has read concern Christopher Columbus, James Bruce who searched for the source of the Nile, John Franklin who made an "unhappy overland Journey" and was lost searching for the northwest passage in the Canadian Arctic, "Men-selling despots" and the Atlantic slave trade, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer (1771-1806) who wrote Travels in the Interior of Africa and other adventure stories. He also touches on "one awful creature" by the name of Alexander Pearce who escaped from a penal colony on an island and cannibalized his fellow escapees.