"My first taste of freedom was almost my last. I very nearly balked at the blackness of the February night out beyond the iron gate and at the icy wind shrieking its warning in my ears. Go back, foolish girl. There is no place for you out here. But there was no place for me anywhere in Boston. Certainly not at the Worthen Female Academy; its forbidding stone face loomed in the dark behind me like the prison, the tomb it was. My only chance at freedom lay beyond that gate, and my passion for freedom was stronger than my fear; it only needed to be slapped and coaxed and bullied into life, like any infant thing."
So begins the saga of outcast half-Mohawk orphan Tory Lightfoot in The
Witch From The Sea. Abandoned to a Female Academy in Boston, she disguises
herself as a boy, and flees the stifling gentility of her civilized female
life for adventure on the high seas. But the merchant brig on which she stows
away is captured by pirates off the coast of Cuba, and Tory must join the
pirate crew to save her life. As the black schooner Blessed Providence
rackets around the Indies, Tory loses her disguise, but wins the freedom she
craves above all else, earning her place in the crew as log-keeper, lookout,
and spy. But fate, fever and the relentless U.S. Navy West India Squadron
intervene and Tory must risk her hard-won freedom to save the man she loves.
