The captain hunted on his chart for a similar rock near Newport, but couldn’t find one, and for a good reason. The rock was Boon Island, which lies north-northeast of the Isles of Shoals, not far from Arundel. Since this showed the captain to be a hundred and thirty-six miles off his course, he was not only willing but eager to have me take the wheel and run the Beau Soleil for a port I knew well—that of Old York in Maine: a snug harbor with a narrow curving entrance, as if specially created for pirates and smugglers.

It was off York that the war, which, for all we had seen of it, might have been on another planet, suddenly came close.

We were running in fast on a southwest breeze when we sighted a longboat wallowing toward shore. An oar was upended in it for a mast; and on the mast was a sail made from two jackets, the oar being pushed through the sleeves. We ran past her, and saw she held nine men, five of them flat on the bottom and in no condition to take an interest in us. Of the other four, three were bailing weakly, using their shirts as sponges.

The helmsman was a man with arms that were all over the boat, like the feelers of an octopus—clutching a steering-oar, trimming his makeshift sail, pulling the faces of his half-dead crew from the bilge-water. They were badly off from thirst, their lips black and the tongues of two so swollen that they protruded. The helmsman seemed hardly to notice us as I brought the Beau Soleil into the wind to leeward of him and backed her fore-topsail—though I found this to be his habit: to pay small attention, seemingly, to his immediate surroundings because of his interest in the sky, which he watched unceasingly.

Since the men in the boat were unable to move, Nathaniel went down and fastened ropes to them, and we pulled them aboard.

Their cheeks were cracked from exposure to the sun and the salt water, and their voices like the croaks of crows.

We greased their faces and gave them wet cloths to suck. The helmsman was David Hawley, a Connecticut privateer captain from Bridgeport, who had been captured in March by the British frigate Bellona and carried to Halifax and imprisoned. He had escaped with eight members of his crew and had been a week at sea, in which time he estimated they had rowed and sailed five hundred miles.