Jack London’s Melanesian stories, as seen in South Sea Tales (1911), are imbued with what Tracey Banivanua Mar has called Melanesianism, a perspective that developed from early-nineteenth century European racial divisions of the Pacific into Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, the last of which is the only region and people named for their skin colour. Melanesianism ascribes the characteristics of savagery, brutality, and carnality to all Melanesian peoples. Set in the Solomon Islands, the stories considered here refer to the labour procurement practices known in their era as blackbirding, a form of slavery in all but name. These labourers worked on plantations that produced copra on a large scale to supply the soap-making industry in Australia. The tales examined here explore racial taxonomies that are at odds with other contemporary work by London, revealing an ambivalence in his perspectives to matters of race in the Solomon Islands. The stories have a rhythm that goes beyond the naturalism generally ascribed to London, moving them into the mythic and parabular, where the power of individual will transcends other factors.