[1] Dona, Lady St. Columb, makes a sudden visit with her children to Navron, her husband's remote estate in Cornwall, in a fit of disgust with her shallow life in London court society.

Dona finds that the pirate, Jean-Benoit Aubéry, is not a desperate character at all, but rather a more educated and cultured man than her own doltish husband, and they fall in love.

Dona dresses as a boy and joins the pirate crew on an expedition to cut out and capture a richly laden merchant ship (the Merry Fortune) belonging to one of her neighbours.

The 1944 film Frenchman's Creek starring Joan Fontaine, Arturo de Córdova and Basil Rathbone (as Rockingham)[2] is a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel.

A television film of 1998 starred Tara Fitzgerald as Dona, James Fleet as her husband, Tim Dutton as Rockingham and Anthony Delon as the Frenchman.