Many of the events in Walker's Key were inspired by actual events, though names of characters were changed, relationships were rearranged, and new characters from my imagination were added. The character of Captain Kenelm Walker is very loosely based on facts I discovered about my great-great-grandfather, Captain Henry M. Walker. Henry's father's cousin, Jonathan Walker, really was known as "the man with the branded hand" after he was caught trying to rescue slaves from a Pensacola plantation in the 1844. Henry's own cousin, Alonzo Tripp, really did get into some trouble for fabricating a part of a letter to prove that a schooner owned by their grandfather, Jeremiah Walker, was captured and destroyed by a French privateer in 1798. Their grandfather, Jeremiah, was seriously chastised by a judge for his reprehensible behavior when the case of the recapture of the Dove, an American ship captured by the British in 1814, went to trial. Later, around 1829, he and some other property owners really did get together to try to convert Salt Water Pond into a harbor. That venture fell apart in 1832, when Theophilus Burgess, a cousin of Henry's mother, harpooned a small whale on a trip to Russia and was pulled overboard to his death. Following are some of the items I discovered while doing the research for the book.