Briony Cameron's debut novel, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye, is an imagined look at the life of a female pirate captain sailing the Caribbean in the 17th century. While some of her contemporaries, like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, have become well known, Delahaye has been largely lost to history due to a lack of reliable records. Cameron acknowledges in the foreword that the narrative required many creative liberties, given the scarcity of information available about the heroine. In fact, several scholars now dispute whether she ever existed at all.

What alleged details do we have about Jacquotte Delahaye? She was supposedly born in Saint-Dominique in 1630, the daughter of a Haitian mother and a French father. Her mother is believed to have died in childbirth with Jacquotte's younger brother, who was disabled. When her father was killed during a raid by the British Navy, Jacquotte took to the sea and a life of piracy in order to provide for her brother and avenge their losses.

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