The Dark Frigate

Set in seventeenth century England, Philip Marsham loses his father and his position in London after an accident forces him to flee, so he walks to the port town of Bideford and signs on as a sailor aboard the Rose of Devon, alongside his friend Martin Barwick. Not long into the voyage, a boarding party led by a menacing figure known only as the Old One seizes the ship, and Philip, along with most of the crew, is forced to serve the pirates who now control her rather than be put ashore or killed outright. He resists every invitation to join the piracy in earnest, watching the men around him grow cruel and reckless with treasure while trying to keep some distance from the killing, and the pressure only worsens after his friend Will Canty is tortured and killed for information the pirates want. When a British warship finally corners the Rose of Devon, Philip slips away and helps the navy take the pirates, though his months aboard leave him under enough suspicion of complicity that he stands trial alongside the men he sailed with. He is acquitted only when the Old One, facing his own execution, unexpectedly testifies that Philip took no part in the plundering, a mercy from a man who has shown almost none to anyone else in the book. Philip goes on to serve Sir John Bristol during England's civil war and finally sails for Barbados, a young man who survived the sea rather than one it made rich.

Hawes writes in a dense, deliberately archaic style loaded with real nautical terms and seventeenth century phrasing, and it asks patience from a young reader in exchange for a genuinely tense, morally serious pirate story rather than a swashbuckling romp. The moral testing at its center, whether a decent man can stay decent among violent men who have taken away his choices, gives the adventure more weight than the genre usually carries.