Captain Kettle is a most engaging scoundrel. Small, truculent, with a little red beard, he has a code of honour which causes him to stick at nothing in his employer's interests, and is always pulling him up when he is on the point of making his own fortune. Ashore he goes regularly to chapel, loves Mrs. Kettle, and fears God. At sea he swears horribly, fears nothing, and is surprisingly handy with a revolver. Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne was a novelist perhaps best remembered for The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis and his Captain Kettle series which was based on a South Shields sea captain, Davey Proffit.