The King has pardoned every pirate on the water. Every account is cleared — except the ones written in people.Nassau, 1718. The pardon has emptied the pirate republic, and a boat with no colors crosses the reef at night for one name. Caesar was a Kingston house's joke on a freed pearl-diver called Kwasi. Then it became a flag any soul who needed shelter could fly — and a boat would answer. Now the name has a price on it, a hired imitator wearing it, and a Bristol underwriting house that has learned how to make a pirate's name pay.Aboard the schooner the islands call the Answer: Adu, a diver with ruined lungs who reads water by ear; Binta, who keeps the manifest of the raised — the book that runs the other way from the trade's; and Efua, nine years in the salt ponds, who counts for the man who cannot. Against them, a court that can hang a man on the oath of a witness it would not let be sworn, a policy written "lost or not lost," and the oldest question on the coast: what is a name worth, and who pays when it is spent?At St. Augustine, Charity Fox — sixteen, ship's-husband of a smuggling house, the ward of a wolf — signs a share in the trade in order to copy the book that proves it, and keeps a column no one is meant to read.A century and a half later, in a Key West that prices wrecks all day, a lighthouse keeper's daughter sells eleven Spanish coins to post one bond for a colored wrecker no white man on the island will stand surety for — and learns what spend it better was asking of her all along.Built on the documented record of the pardon summer, the fireship night, the South Sea Company's trade in people by the piece, and the Reconstruction admiralty court at Key West, THE BOAT CALLED CAESAR is a novel of names, articles, and the water that keeps no book — the second voyage of The Salt Kingdom.The Salt Kingdom, Book Two. A complete story. Begins three years after The Coast of Teeth and can be read on its own. Read more
