The Cay is a teen novel written by Theodore Taylor. It was published in 1969. Taylor took only three weeks to write The Cay, having contemplated the story for over a decade after reading about an 11-year-old who was aboard the Dutch ship Hato, when it was torpedoed in 1942, and who was last seen by other stranded survivors as he drifted away on a liferaft. The novel was published in 1969 and dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr.