Sing fare ye well my bonny young girls,

For we’re bound to the Rio Grande.

Vinalhaven slipped past their starboard quarter, and they gained on tiny Matinicus, lying low in the distance, passed it, and reached for the open Gulf of Maine. The mainland heights fell farther and farther away, until they could see no land anywhere, nor beacons either, only the great unbroken circle of the sea. Sparkling with spray, the bowsprit pointed bravely southward. Will grinned like a thief who’s made off with the diamonds.

“Looks like we are really doing it, Natters.”

“Sure are,” said Nathaniel, and, glancing astern, was pleased to note the straightness of the glittering furrow Double Eagle ploughed across the blue-green plain.

10

THEY HAD LEFT at half past noon, and when the sun set nine hours later, the log was still reading seven and a quarter knots. Will reckoned the distance and plotted their position: a little north of forty-three degrees north latitude, on about the same parallel as Kittery. They could not see Kittery; it lay farther west of Double Eagle than she was south of Isle Au Haut, about seventy nautical miles. This fact was announced by Drew, who was honing his navigational skills under Will’s tutelage. He then declared a corollary fact, much as a character in a fairy tale would declare entrance into the domain of an ogre: “We’ve never been this far off shore,” he said, meaning himself and his brothers. “We were never more than fifty miles out when we were coming back from Nova Scotia.”