Content Warning: These Chapter Summaries & Analyses discuss the source text’s use of outdated and offensive terms to discuss Indigenous cultures and its portrayal of colonial stereotypes of Indigenous people. Journey to the River Sea also depicts racist attitudes.

The story opens in 1910 at the Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies, a boarding school in London run by two unmarried sisters, Miss Banks and Miss Emily. The young protagonist is Maia, the only non-white girl in the class. She was orphaned two years earlier when her parents died in a train crash in Egypt, and this tragedy serves as the motive force of the plot. In the opening scene, Maia is in geography class and nervously awaiting the arrival of Mr. Murray, her interim guardian and her late parents’ lawyer. When he arrives, he announces that she will be going to South America to live with the Carter family, which consists of Mr. Clifford Carter (her father’s second cousin) and his wife and twin daughters. Maia is to travel there with a governess in a month’s time. When she returns to class, her friends are shocked and worried to learn that she must go live in a jungle, and her teacher assigns everyone homework to study facts about the Amazon.