The Golden Hawk

by Frank Yerby

First published 1948

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3.7(296)

Kit Gerado, known across the Caribbean as the Golden Hawk, has built his life around revenge for his mother’s murder. As a buccaneer captain he raids Spanish shipping and moves through the violent maritime borderlands of the West Indies, waiting for a chance to reach Don Luis del Toro, the powerful governor of Cartagena whom he holds responsible for the crime.
The pursuit carries Kit through sea battles, captured treasure, rival crews and dangerous relationships with women on both sides of the conflict. Yerby places the adventure inside the seventeenth-century struggle for wealth and imperial control in the Caribbean, where privateering, piracy and formal warfare repeatedly overlap and fortified Spanish ports such as Cartagena sit at the centre of Atlantic commerce.