The next whitecap battered me sideways and one of my hands was torn from the rope. Mr. Darwin’s feet crashed into my shoulder and then my other hand was slipping, slipping, and even when I gritted my teeth and crushed my fist tight, I couldn’t keep hold. The sea wrenched the line from my hand, and I was tumbled deep.

I spun until my lungs burned, in an airless world of churning froth, and when I finally surfaced, gasping, neither Mr. Darwin, the rope, the rowboat, nor the Beagle were anywhere in sight.

The rain was like Noah’s flood all over again; the sky matched the brutal slate gray of the sea and flickered as though the clouds were giant flints clashing against one another. I was sure every new swell would be the one to finish me off as I tumbled underwater over and over, unable to tell up from down. Memories flashed … taking me back where my mind hadn’t been in years … to the day after they buried young Kitty Jenkins, who’d drowned in the Old River Bedford. Da had made me go down to the pond with him.

Brown water in my eyes, in my mouth, sucking me down. I flailed, panicked, sinking, hearing nothing but the roar of the bubbles until Da’s voice cut through, muffled and distant.

“Kick, Syms! Kick hard!”

I booted the water with all my might and burst free, coughing and sobbing. Strong hands grasped both of my upper arms.

“Now you can swim, boy. And that’s what you do—you swim, and you never give up.”

I smashed through the surface, heaving in coughing breaths, and hoped my da was looking down and feeling awful pleased that his son had legs that knew how to kick back.

How I wished I could catch a glimpse of the rowboat—for all I knew, it had been overturned and all on board lost … No. I didn’t even know if Mr. Darwin could swim, but many of the sailors could not. I had to trust, I had to believe, that my master had kept hold of the rope, that Robbins had hauled him in.

Over and over, I made it back to the surface like a bleeding boxer who didn’t know when to quit. At last, at long last, the waters began to churn from below as well as above, and I felt jagged rocks beneath me. I fought to stay upright in the bubbling foam and could just see land ahead of me. Through my blurry salt-stung eyes, it seemed no more than a great looming lump of black rock, but it might have been heaven itself I was that pleased to see it.

I hauled myself up onto the rocks, out of the hungry sea, then scuffed my knees and hands as I dodged iguanas—the sea lizards that sprawled over the rocks on every Galapagos island like wet rags on washday. One lifted its head and snorted out water from the nostrils in its craggy snub face, but the others gave me barely a glance. The Beagle’s commander, Captain Fitzroy, had called them “imps of darkness,” but they weren’t in the least impish in their nature.