Mary Grant has received a message in a bottle from her missing father, a sea captain. She enlists Jacques Paganel, a French geographer, Lord Glenarvan, owner of the Steam Navigation Company, and other searchers to rescue him as they travel the 37th parallel in South America and Australia.

Outside Covent Garden on a rainy evening in 1912, cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, meets linguistic expert Henry Higgins. Higgins, in turn, bets his companion, Colonel Pickering, that, within six months, he could transform Eliza into a proper lady, simply by teaching her proper English. The next morning, face and hands freshly scrubbed, Eliza presents herself on Higgins' doorstep, ready and willing to be turned into a lady.