This novel imagines the journey of a real but, until now, long-forgotten African boy who left Elmina in the Gold Coast in 1829 on a British ship, for the hope to travel to Holland. His ship was wrecked on rocks in January 1830 on the Isles of Scilly, Cornwall.

With a strong narrative drive, the story evokes the hard life on board a sailing ship. It relates the boy's meeting with members of the crew and his growing awareness of their world and its differences to his.

The African boy Kwame, who is unnamed and buried on St. Martin's, is a feisty, clever, and ambitious young man whose relationships with the crew expose the violence, bigotry, and hypocrisy of the world they came from.

This book explores the worlds of Europe and Africa. Its characters are vividly drawn, and the story evokes a changing world at a time when slavery was being defeated.