Hamburg student Richard Kirbach indulges in an unusual hobby: he plays chess via shortwave with Arnold Pieper, an old German coconut planter in the South Seas. The men, who are so different, become so close that one day Pieper asks the young man for a big favor. Arnold has a capricious and rather volatile daughter named Lale, who, in his opinion, gets up to a lot of mischief in Europe. To put an end to this, Pieper quickly asks Richard to marry Lale, who is unknown to him. In order to make the marriage attractive to him, the fat old man also offers “prize money” of $5,000, which the poor student could really use.