A Readers Guide for The Witch from the Sea

A Reader's Guide for
The Witch from the Sea

by Lisa Jensen

Plot Summary

Tory Lightfoot, a half-Indian orphan, resolves to runaway and find her freedom after years in Boston’s soul-stifling Worthen Academy for Women. Disguising herself by dressing like a young man, she heads for the wharfs in search of passage. Tory stows away aboard the New Hope, a heavily laden merchantman bound for Barbados. There she finds new kinds of constraints: hiding her sex, long difficult workdays and a first mate only too glad to make Tory’s service a living hell.

Then the New Hope is captured by pirates when the lumbering ship finds herself outsailed and outgunned. The pirates threaten to maim – or worse – every crewmember on the New Hope unless someone reveals where the more valuable cargo is stowed. Hoping to save her shipmates, Tory reveals to the pirates where money has been hidden. Though her act spares the men of the New Hope further violence, they turn on her as a traitor. Tory realizes that her only salvation is to accept the pirates’ invitation to join their crew! They willingly accept their new crewmate, until she is revealed to be a girl.

Pirate Captain Hart places her under his protection and bemusedly allows her to join his crew. On the New Hope she learned how to sail and can climb the sheets as well as any of the crew – but she knows nothing about fighting! Gradually, a Shakespeare-quoting pirate named Jack reluctantly teaches her to pirate.

All the while, her heart yearns for golden Matty Greenwood – a gentleman’s-son-turned- pirate. He looks for all the world like the dream lover foretold by a Fortuneteller in Boston, but he seems completely unaware of her existence. The pirates try to encourage Tory to leave the ship and live the life a woman should – but it seems her only options are to be a prostitute or the land-bound woman of a "buckra" man. And so Tory refuses to relinquish the pirate’s life – until her heart demands that she leave to protect the last man she thought she’d love!

The author would be delighted to participate in your group discussion of the book by email or speaker phone. For more information, please contact us at info@beaglebay.com.

Questions for Discussion:

What sort of life might Tory have to look forward to if she stayed in Boston as an orphan without income, connections and as a woman of color? Do you think she made the right choice? Could she have tried to achieve her goals in another way?
Researchers continue to find evidence of young women throughout history who disguised themselves as males to become soldiers or join ships’ crews–women whose stories were never told in conventional history books. If you lived in another age, would you choose this route in order to have your freedom? Do you have any foremothers who did unusual things in their time?
How difficult would it be for a woman to pass herself off as a man in a company of men? How would you go about it?
Social and economic conditions at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the revolt of the Spanish colonies against Spain lead men like Captain Hart, Nada, Hector and Jack to piracy. Do you think they would choose such a life in today’s society?
What did you think of Tory’s romantic choices? Would you have fallen for Matty, too? Or would you have seen the gentle heart beneath Jack’s facade? How early did you spot the first signs that Jack and Tory were falling in love with each other?
Tory slips in and out of her male and female clothing as the situation demands. In what ways does she struggle to find a balance between the male and female aspects of her identity?
Do you agree with Jasmine when she says Tory ought to stay home on Laguna Escondida and let the men go off pirating? Why or why not?
How is Tory similar to classic 19^th Century heroines like Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp? How is she different?