Martin Conisby, five years a galley slave and living for revenge, gets his enemy, a map, and a woman he did not ask for, on an island where a dead buccaneer's treasure is buried. Farnol painted scenery in New York theatres and wrote his first novel on scraps between shifts after a foundry in Birmingham sacked him for fighting; the sea and the hatred here are both convincing, and the revenge is not the thing he ends up wanting.