The Cay

by Theodore Taylor

LIKE SILENT, HUNGRY SHARKS that swim in the darkness of the sea, the German submarines arrived in the middle of the night.

Simile

Willemstad, on the island of Curaçao, the largest of the Dutch islands just off the coast of Venezuela.

I remember that on that moonless night in February 1942, they attacked the big Lago oil refinery on Aruba, the sister island west of us. Then they blew up six of our small lake tankers, the

One German sub was even sighted off Willemstad at dawn.

It was very hard to finish my breakfast because I wanted to go to Punda,

Fort Amsterdam where I could look out to sea.

If there was an enemy U-boat out there, I wanted to see it and join the people in shaking a fist at it. I was not f...

The whole world was at war, and now it had come to us in the w...

I couldn’t imagine that a shell from an enemy submarine would pick me out from all the buildings, or hit me

Character growth

So later in the morning, when she was busy making sure that all our blackout curtains were in place, and filling extra pots with fresh water, and checking our food supply, I stole away down to the old fort with Henrik van Boven, my Dutch friend who was also eleven.

imagining we were defending Willemstad against pirates or even the British.

“Pow, pow, pow!”

Onomatopoeia

For years, it guarded Willemstad. But this one morning, it did not look like a storybook fort at all. There were real soldiers with rifles and we saw machine guns. Men with binoculars had them trained toward the whitecaps, and everyone was tense.

Mood

They chased us away, telling us to go home.

Strangely, no ships were moving in the channel. The veerboots, the ferry boats that shuttled cars and people back and forth when the bridge was swung open, were tied up and empty.

“Every lake tanker was sunk,” I said. I didn’t know if that were true or not, but Henrik had an irritating way of sounding official since his father was connected with the government.

Relationship

His face was round and he was chubby.

Henrik said quietly, “Our Navy will come too,” and I didn’t want to argue with him. Everyone felt bad that Holland had been conquered by the Nazis.

Relationship

army officer

He growled, “Don’t you know they could shoot a torpedo up her...

The sea was empty; there was not even a sail on it. We suddenly became frightened and ran home to the Scharloo section where we lived.

guess my face was pale when I went into the house because my mother, who was in the kitchen, asked immediately, “Where have you been?”

Relationship

My mother got very upset. She grabbed my shoulder and shook it. “I told you not to go there, Phillip,” she said angrily. “We are at war! Don’t you understand?”

My mother closed her eyes and pulled me up against her thin body. She was like that. One minute, shaking me; the next, holding me.

“You’ll be safe if you do what we tell you to do. Don’t leave the yard again today.”

She seemed very nervous. But then she was often nervous. My mother was always afraid I’d fall off the sea wall, or tumble out of a tree, or cut myself with a pocketknife. Henrik’s mother wasn’t that way. She laughed a lot and said, “Boys, boys, boys.”

Relationship and characterization

They had phoned him that morning to say that the Germans might attempt to shell the refinery and the oil storage tanks, and that he must report to help fight the fires. I had never seen him so tired, and I didn’t ask as many questions as I wanted to.

Until the past year, my father and I had done a lot of things together.

But now he always seemed busy. Even on a Sunday, he’d shake his head and say, “I’m sorry, guy, I have to work.”

“Will they shoot at us tonight?”

“How many of them are out there?”

Character growth

I wanted to be able to tell Henrik exactly what my father knew about the submarines.

“Stop asking so many silly questions, Phillip. I told you not to do that.” Father looked at her strangely. He had always answered my questions. “He has a right to know. He’s involved here, Grace.” My mother looked back at him. “Yes, unfortunately,” she said. My mother, I knew, had not wanted to come to Curaçao in late

But the moment she saw it, my mother decided she didn’t like Curaçao and she often complained about the smell of gas and oil whenever the trade winds died down.

my mother decided she didn’t like Curaçao

She said it was nice and safe in Virginia.

“There’s no place nice and safe right now.”

Dutch, and there was no smell of gas or oil, and there weren’t as many black people around. Now, there was a cold silence between my mother and my father.

I kept thinking about the U-boats off our coast and those lake tankers with barefooted Chinese sailors on board. I guess I was waiting for the U-boats to send a shell toward Willemstad.

She said, “Well, then Phillip and I must go back. We’ll go back to Norfolk and wait until the danger is over.”

Conflict

My father said, “There’s more danger in the trip back, unless you go by air, than there is in staying here. If they do shell us, they won’t hit Scharloo.”

I thought about leaving the island, and it saddened me.

And I’d miss Henrik van Boven.

I also knew that Henrik and his mother would think us cowardly if we left just because a few German submarines were off Curaçao.

The next morning my father said that the Chinese crews on the lake tankers that shuttled crude oil across the sand bars at Maracaibo had refused to sail without naval escorts.

Conflict

They were angry with the Chinese crews, and on the third day, my father said that mutiny charges had been placed against them.

He explained to me what it must feel like to ride the cargoes of crude oil, knowing that a torpedo or shell could turn the whole ship into flames any moment.

Characterization

Soon, of course, we might also run out of fresh water.

Toward the end of the week, we began to run out of fresh vegetables because the schooner-men were also afraid. Now, my mother talked constantly about the submarines, the lack of water, and the shortage of food. It almost seemed that she was using the war as an excuse to leave Curaçao.

Conflict

But on that same day a Norwegian tanker, headed for Willemstad, was torpedoed off Curaçao, and fear again swept over the old city. Without our ships, we were helpless.

Conflict