Originally from England, the ancestors of Matt Lowe and Miss Ruby voyaged to The Bahamas with Bermudian adventurers and whalers in the late 1640’s - and they stayed. Ultimately, the stories of Matt Lowe and Miss Ruby illuminate two fiercely independent people struggling to live - and to love - through the crises of their times.

Matt Lowe’s family’s survival depended on the sea: fishing, turtling, whaling and wrecking. During the early 1700’s, when The Bahamas was a haven for pirates, these indomitable few held onto their small farms and fishing sloops. In the face of an enemy attack and at the risk of imprisonment, Bahamians traded with the Spanish at Cuba and with the French at Hispaniola. Bahamian fishing grounds in Abaco and the Florida Keys were visited by pirates seeking either safe harbours to careen their vessels or Spanish treasure fleets to plunder. With pirate captain Benjamin Hornigold (Blackbeard’s tutor), Matt dives for Spanish gold in the Gulf of Florida. The play by Sandra Riley finds Matt marooned on the Isle of Pines, Cuba reflecting his life and confessing his love.

Miss Ruby recalls her childhood growing up on Green Turtle Cay in the 1880’s, a time when the island thrived as part of a trade network that included Cuba, Key West and New York City. Wrecking was big business. Bahamians had been fishing and wrecking along the coast of Florida since the days of Matt Lowe. Several men left Green Turtle to live and work in Key West; John Barthum, ship builder, and William Curry, ship chandler, were among them.  Ruby’s story as told by Sandra Riley, is also set in Key West where she attends college in the 1890’s and meets an officer on the battleship USS Maine.