The novel, consisting of three novels, refers to the time of the economic depression of the 1930s. Florida fisherman Harry Morgan from Key West makes a living by giving his motorboat to various rich people who came here to fish. They hire a boat together with the owner – he knows well where the biting is best and what kind of fish a lure is needed for. Harry prefers to be on good terms with the law and has made it a rule not to contact smugglers and not to engage in illegal fishing at all. But one day everything changes. The chartered boat for three weeks, an American with whom Harry was fishing off the coast of Cuba, deceives the fisherman and, after spoiling it with a tackle, calmly flies away without paying back and paying damages.
Morgan expected to receive about six hundred dollars, he needs to buy gasoline to return to the States, we need money for life: his family has a wife and three daughter-schoolgirls.
Harry has to go on an illegal deal: for a thousand
dollars, he agrees to illegally take out from Cuba a few Chinese. The mediator makes it clear that the Chinese do not need to be delivered to the mainland, but simply slap on the road. Morgan prefers to kill the most rascal mediator, and puts the Chinese on the Cuban coast, not far from where he took them aboard. The Chinese, not realizing that they were saved from certain death, are unhappy that they were cheated, but they do not openly murmur. Down and Out trouble started. Harry, who needs to feed his family, becomes a smuggler – he transports whiskey from Cuba to Key West. One day, when Harry and a Negro-mate make a private flight with a load of whiskey, they are caught up by a naval police cutter. They are ordered to stop. When the guards of the order see that on the motor-boat they do not think to obey the order, they open fire and hurt Harry and the Negro. Those, however, manage to get away from the pursuit, but the Negro is completely limp, and Harry is hard at anchoring in the waters near Key West. The storm. Harry is afraid that mediators will not come for a dangerous load.
With a boat passing by, whose
owner, Willie, Harry’s friend, observes that something is wrong on Morgan’s boat. The passengers of the boat are representatives of the law, they realize that the wounded man on the boat is a bootlegger, and they demand that Willie come closer to the boat, but he flatly refuses. Moreover, he yells to Harry that if he has something superfluous on board, he would get rid of it and let him know: Willie did not see him in the face and will show it even before the trial. He says to his passengers that he will not go to the witnesses, and in general, if he comes to the proceedings, he will swear that he knows nothing and did not see the boat in his eyes.
