“What the hell are we doing, hanging around here with all these piazza-chair loafers,” Nathaniel declared, suddenly.

A blackbacked gull, swooping through the rigging, passed so close they could see the vermilion ring around its eye, the orange spot on its beak.

“Go. That’s what I would do, if I were in your spot.” Will’s whole countenance, losing its usual expression of bored worldliness, shone with enthusiasm. “If you don’t, ten, twenty years from now, you’ll be slaving away and you’ll look back on this chance and you’ll say, ‘I wish I’d done that,’ and I think those are the saddest words in the English language. Lord, go. Go.”

“But where?”

They debated the merits and demerits of possible destinations and directions. North had the prevailing winds to recommend it, but Nathaniel wasn’t inclined to revisit the Canadian maritimes, which were too much like Maine. Will spoke of Bermuda or the Azores—names to quicken the wanderer’s blood. Southward lay the West Indies, the Florida Keys, the Tropic of Cancer, also names that beckoned, particularly to Nathaniel. But to sail south would be to beat all the way, and, in the Florida Straits, they would have the Gulf Stream, as well as the wind, on their nose.

“Unless you tuck in close to the Florida reef,” he said, sliding one hand past the other. “There’s a southwesterly counter-current that hugs the reef. Ships use it when they’re westering to the Gulf of Mexico. That’s what my father told me. It’s one of the reasons there’s so many wrecks down there. Ships get into that current, and then something goes wrong. Bang! On the rocks.”

“Bowditch mentions that current, I think,” Will said.

“Hey! You lads! Guided tour is over! Lower yourselves away, ’cause we’re to start loadin’ soon!”

It was their host, the chief mate, calling from the foot of the mainmast and pointing at the quay, where the stevedores were hooking a bundle of lumber to the crane of a steam derrick.