When the English girl Ben saved from a shipwreck recovers her memory and speech and reveals to him that two chests full of silver went down with the ship, Ben and his friends try to recover them without arousing suspicions.

In this first novel of a trilogy, eleven-year-old Ben rescues an English girl from a shipwreck off the Outer Banks of North Carolina; and, though she becomes part of his family, she never speaks.

Ordered to practice his writing skills in the blank book his mother gave him, fourteen-year-old Johnny would rather go fishing near his home on North Carolina's Outer Banks and cannot think of anything important to write until two "dingbatters" from Ohioarrive in 1900 and try to build a flying machine.