At thirteen, Tom Cringle enters the Napoleonic-era Royal Navy as a midshipman. Assigned at first to service in home water, Tom is soon transferred to the exotic West Indies, where war, piracy, smuggling, and slave running are the order of the day. In what Samuel Taylor Coleridge (author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) called a most excellent sea story, the hero of this tale advances from midshipman to lieutenant to a command of his own: the audacious little Wasp.