The Cay

The Cay is a young adult novel by the American writer Theodore Taylor, published in 1969 and dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. Taylor wrote it in about three weeks, after more than ten years of thinking about an account he had read of a boy on a torpedoed ship who was last seen drifting away on a life raft.

Phillip Enright has grown up in Curacao and has absorbed his mother's opinions about people who are not like them. When German submarines make the island dangerous, she decides to take him to the United States, and the freighter they sail on is sunk on the way.

Phillip survives, and finds himself dependent on Timothy, an elderly sailor from the West Indies who is the only other person on the raft. By the time they reach a small island his head injury has taken his sight, which means that the person he has been taught to look down on is now the only thing between him and the sea. The novel is about the months the two of them spend on the cay, and about the assumptions a boy has to give up in order to survive with the man who is keeping him alive.