Timothy of the Cay is a book written by Theodore Taylor. It is a prequel for Timothy and a sequel for Phillip to the 1969 novel The Cay. Synopsis The book discusses Timothy's life before the events of The Cay, when he was living in "Back O' All," the poorest section of what was then the squatter's village of Charlotte Amalie, on the then Danish-held United States Virgin Island of St. Thomas (of which Virgin Island it is now the capital), and Phillip Enright's life after the same events. The theme to this story is making dreams a reality. Timothy According to Timothy of the Cay, Timothy had been abandoned as a baby at the residence in Back O' All where Hannah Gumbs, a former coal carrier turned washer-woman who reared him, was a squatter. As a boy, he formed a dream of one day being captain of his own schooner, which he meant to name after the woman he called "Tante Hannah." Even though she was not Timothy's biological aunt, Timothy still referred to her as this. When he tried to become a cabin boy on one ship, its captain took on a "bukra" boy instead because he was a negro (black person). A "bukra" was a white boy in the richer part of St. Thomas. When he finally got a job on another ship, the Gertrude Theismann, he believed he was only fourteen, but he claimed an age of sixteen. He later claimed to be sixty, younger than the more than seventy years of age he guesstimated he actually was, so he could become part of the crew on the Hato. Hannah Gumbs died during the second of Timothy's first four years at sea. Timothy came back home with clothes for her only to find that she was dead. Timothy worked long enough and hard enough, both at sea and on land, to be able to afford a schooner originally named the Tessie Crabb by what he guesstimated were his forties. Holding a master's license in the name of "Timothy Gumbs" (he would think of himself simply as Timothy, without a family name, for his entire life) by this time, he renamed this schooner the Hannah Gumbs, as he had always intended. Making his living as its "captain," Timothy gleaned an extensive enough knowledge of the sea to be able, in his last months, to help Phillip Enright