On the dogwatch, with Will steering, the schooner was able to hold her course in the channel that led through the Nantucket shoals. But the wind crept forward, forcing her close to the island. Several times in the next half hour, he tried to coax Double Eagle to windward, but she would have none of it, and little by little, she was headed out of the channel into the ground swells that heaved over the shoals. This was one time that Drew was not comforted by proximity to land. Buttoned up in his oilers, rain dripping from his sou’wester’s bill, he watched the tide rips, leaping in standing waves peaked as witches’ hats, and imagined the submerged hazards passing under the keel. And not very far under, either, said Will. Three fathoms was the average depth on the shoals, and in places it was only two at low tide, and the tide was now getting right close to dead low, and with the schooner drawing seven feet, things could get interesting. Stomping the deck three times, he summoned Nathaniel from his dry slumbers. When he appeared, his oilskin jacket draped over his shoulders like a cape, Will recommended that they come about, run back up the channel, and go around the other side of Nantucket, through Nantucket Sound. The waters there were tricky, Will said, but he knew them pretty well, and the seas were bound to be quieter in Nantucket’s lee. Maybe by the time they rounded the island, the wind would have turned more favorable, and they could get back on course.

And so they tacked and reached westward across the Sound, then beat through Muskeget Channel between Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and by the following noon, under a sky still dreary and with a Force 6 wind still blowing on their nose, they were forty miles closer to the mainland but not much further south from where they had started. To make any southing at all, Double Eagle had to be tacked and tacked again, her course a series of zigzags over a sea the color of pea soup. Wearied by the constant back and forth, they surrendered to the wind and went eastward on a reach, into the open sea, but the waves out there ran very high and Drew got sick, and so they changed direction, heading inshore, where they sailed into a thick, a very thick thick. It was as if Double Eagle were inside a cloud of clammy gray wool. They could see only a few yards, except in the moments when the cloud thinned, offering a slightly longer view of, say, fifty yards. The view was always of the same thing: waves surging like liquid granite.

“Wind hasn’t quit”—Nathaniel, narrowing his eyes, craning his neck, as if he could see through the mist by sheer muscular effort. “Can’t ever understand how you can have high wind and fog at the same time. You’d think …”