Loreley Jones, daughter of the governor of the British Colony of Antigua, is orphaned when a hurricane sinks the ship taking her and her family from London to the Caribbean. After washing up on the shores of the Pirate’s Republic of Nassau, she is sold into slavery and her virginity is auctioned off. The highest bidder is the notoriously sadistic Gideon Graves, captain of the pirate ship Jezebel. He holds Loreley against her will and repeatedly assaults her, until she is rescued by the Jezebel’s quartermaster, Sebastian MacIssac.
Sebastian promises Loreley freedom, but only if she disguises herself as a man and works off the cost of her passage back to England aboard the Jezebel. She soon discovers, however, that the freedom she finds at sea is more attractive than the gilded cage of her former life, and even death can’t keep her from fulfilling her destiny.