Procas is a Pequot Indian boy captured during the Mystic Massacre in Connecticut in the early 17th century. His town, family, and his people are destroyed by Pilgrim and Puritan soldiers and their Indian allies. He is taken to Plymouth and then to Boston , where a Puritan tobacco farmer buys him and takes him to Bermuda as a slave to work tobacco. As an adult Procus is taken to Barbados when his master tires of the turmoil on Bermuda caused by the English Civil war, witch trials, and a slave revolt.
Daphne, her baby brother, and her mother are suffering from Cromwell’s ethnic cleansing of Catholic Ireland. They are starving and are tricked by “spirits” onto a ship bound for Barbados, where Daphne is sold to Procas’s master as a servant to care for his ailing wife. Procas is tasked with teaching her English and her duties. He takes pity on the poor bedraggled girl, knowing what she must be experiencing. When Daphne grows up into a lovely young woman, she and Procas marry and have a child, Mary, named after their master’s dead wife. Mary is a mustee, or part Indian, part European girl. Their relatively peaceful life comes to an end when their master retires, sells his tobacco farm, and moves in with his son in the Carolinas. They now must adjust to working for a sugar cane planter. A failed slave revolt and the murder of their owner results in disaster.
Joao is a young fisherman from the Bijagos Islands off Guinea-Bissau. He anticipates his coming circumcision that will mark him as an adult, who may marry and join others to raid the mainland for slaves to sell to then Portuguese. He goes out to fish and is captured by men from another island, is sold to a Portuguese mulatto trader, and taken to the Portuguese fort on the mainland. He works as a slave laboring on Sao Tome and in Brazil as a sugar cane slave and eventually is taken to Barbados where he becomes the fisherman for an English plantation. He is sent to bring a new kitchen servant to the plantation house. It is Mary, the mustee. They become friends and eventually fall in love. Their life is disrupted by another slave revolt and they must flee to St. Vincent, where they join the Caribs.