In Plymouth harbor, a seaman rowed out to board his ship in the midnight dark. Shore leave had been very wet and he slept soundly on deck–they weren’t too fussy on a pirate ship.

In the morning light, the surroundings looked strange and Sal found himself among peculiar people. He had boarded, by mistake, a ship known to history as the Mayflower, on her foyage to the New World.

How a blunt-spoken, hard-drinking, and hard-fighting pirate adjusted himself to life with the Pilgrims, after first bloodying Elder Brewster’s nose; how he admired a girl named Priscilla Mullins and came to blows with a rival suitor, named John Alden; how he helped Captain Standish defend the young colony against the Indians–all this is told in one of the livelist of all Donald Barr Chidsey’s gay and amusing yet realistic hisorical yarns.