Timothy of the Cay

Timothy of the Cay is a novel by the American writer Theodore Taylor, published in 1994, and it works as a prequel to Timothy and a sequel to Phillip from the 1969 novel The Cay.

Timothy's story begins in Back O' All, the poorest part of the squatters' village at Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas, where he was abandoned as a baby and raised by a washerwoman named Hannah Gumbs. He forms a single ambition as a boy, to be the captain of his own schooner, and he means to name the boat after the woman he calls Tante Hannah even though she is no blood relation; the novel follows the attempts he makes at that dream, including the ships he signs onto as a cabin boy and the ones that sail without him. Phillip's chapters are quieter and more painful, since a boy who has learned to live without sight has to decide what he will accept from the doctors and what he will keep, and the book uses his recovery as a way of asking what he owes the man who got him home. Taylor wrote the novel for young readers long after the first book, and it is the one that gives Timothy a history of his own.