The Dark Frigate was the third sea novel for young adults that Charles Boardman Hawes wrote. His first, The Mutineers, is the story of a sixteen-yearold boy, Benjamin Lathrop, who sails for China, undergoes many hardships, and eventually returns to the outstretched arms of his loving family. The second, The Great Quest, chronicles the adventures at sea of twenty-year-old Josiah Woods, a passenger on board a ship that takes on a cargo of slaves.

In both of these earlier works, Hawes depicts ship captains as sadistic and suggests that life at sea is a great deal rougher than life on land. The conclusions of both novels also bring a measure of peace to their protagonists.

By the time he wrote the more inconclusive The Dark Frigate, Hawes had departed completely from the conventions of the romantic sea novel and had come to view the brutality of...