As Moomintroll gets wasp-stung and must lie in bed, Moominpappa wants to cheer him up by telling him about his own adventurous youth. Pappa tells about his misunderstood childhood, how he escaped from an orphanage and about his historic meeting with an inventor called Hodgkins. He reveals his struggles in hefty storms on the boat Oshun Oxtra, and all his adventures in the autocrat Daddy Jones’s kingdom. Pappa established a colony, befriended with a ghost and —one stormy night— he rescued Moominmamma from the sea. And the rest is history.