1829. A bad year for the Isles of Scilly. There was starvation, overcrowding and villainy. Then two men came. One of them came when the emigrant ship Castletown was wrecked on a vicious night in Hell Bay. He was Nicholas Power, a brilliant young doctor with a secret too shameful to bear. The other came because he wanted to carve a kingdom from the unforgiving rocks of Scilly. He was Augustus Smith, a rich philanthropist with a will of iron. And the two men fought. First for power, then for a woman; the lovely Mary Prideaux, enchantress and friend of wild things. She was the spirit of the islands, and both men knew that whoever had possession of her had possession of the kingdom..Hell Bay is a giant tapestry of romance and adventure that sprawls across Scilly's islands and the violent seas around them. It is also a skilful interweaving of a fact and fiction by an author who is a descendant of Augustus Smith.