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The Weight of Gold
Paperback
Series: The Voyages of the Ballahoo, Book 3
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 7 2026
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.33
Height: 0.22 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Thirteen chests of king's gold. A ship with a price on her head. And every pirate in the eastern seas knows her name. Roop is fifteen years old. He has been promoted to first mate of the Ballahoo. He has a chest of gold in his name and a Captain who has just told him there is no harbor between Kili and the Cape where they can spend any of it without being killed for the rest. The schooner that chased them off the dragon island was one ship of a brotherhood, and the brotherhood is waiting.
Captain Tymothius Manik has a plan. The plan is to sail east instead of west. To run for the kingdom of Butan, a strange port of craftsmen and clever monkeys, where a remarkable trading-house owner named Madam Gaut will, for a price, refit the Ballahoo into a different ship entirely. Pale blue hull. Yellow sails. New name on the stern. The flag of an Alexandrian merchant house she has no right to fly. And in the dark belly of the ship, the cleverest disguise of all: thirteen chests of gold, broken down and packed in canvas sacks, hidden in plain sight among the ordinary ballast stones, where no thief in any port will think to look.
The plan is brilliant. The plan is patient. The plan would have worked.
Until the morning Roop comes up on deck for his watch and sees a great low-bodied galley, two hundred armored men along her catwalks, anchored across the only way out of a hidden bay no chart holds.
The galley flies no flag. Her captain has not fired. He is waiting.
Roop is going to row out and ask why.
What you'll find inside:- Ten chapters of slow-burn maritime intrigue, in the same plainspoken voice and locked format as Books One and Two
- A first-mate's perspective as Roop ages into the work the Captain has been preparing him for
- An entire foreign port fully realized - the harbor of Butan, with its terraced streets, its cunning monkeys, and the Headman of the rooftops
- Madam Gaut, a trading-house owner who was almost the Captain's wife twenty years ago, now signing his most important papers
- A small girl named Taz with a monkey on her shoulder, who reminds Roop of someone, and a stowaway thread that runs through the whole voyage
- A strange dagger of a metal that does not rust, found in the sand of a wrecked dhow on a forgotten beach
- Captain Ty's tale of the Widow of Surabaya - a sea-story about a single guilder paid twenty-three years ago, and what came of it
- The cleverest cargo trick yet - the gold disguised as ballast in the dark hull of the ship, where no honest man looks and no thief in a hurry will find it
- A cliffhanger ending that opens the door to an entirely new culture and a new captain in the next book
- Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island
- Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels
- Avi's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
- Classic seafaring adventure with a fantasy edge
Read Books One and Two, The Ballahoo and the Isle of Thunder and Escape from the Isle of Thunder, for the full voyage from the Jungle Port to the lagoon of giants and back to the Kili harbor with thirteen chests of king's gold.
Ages 12 and up. Adventure / Historical Fantasy / Coming of Age.
Roop is fifteen years old. He has a fortune in the bilge of his ship. He has stowaways in his cabin and a mystery galley at the door of his bay. He is, for the first time in his life, the man at the rail being asked the question.
The long road has only just begun.
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