They dropped the hook and stayed the night, because they didn’t want to tackle the Gate in darkness, and were under way again a little after sunrise. The Sound began to narrow and finally reduced itself to the East River. The tide was already on the ebb, spilling westward with concentrated force through the necks and around islands toward New York Bay; it was as if the great city, still unseen by Double Eagle’s crew, were drawing all that water into itself. Borne by the current, they sailed past the farms and villages of the Bronx, following the waterway in its sharp hook southward. The river contracted, the current accelerated, and, ripping between lumber yards and low ranges of coal mountains rising over banks solid with iron barges moored end to end, carried the schooner by Wards Island and into Hell Gate—a confusion of cross currents, eddies, and back eddies that Nathaniel could not make sense of. Shunted this way and that by buildings—buildings that looked welded together—the wind had become as chaotic as the current, and it failed altogether when Double Eagle was about halfway through the Gate. She lost steerageway, was embraced by an eddy, and waltzed around, narrowly missing a fishmonger’s boat steaming upriver. Nathaniel spun the wheel to counteract the turning motion, but then a back eddy, aided by a fluky gust, twirled her in the opposite direction and toward the eastern bank. “Fend off!” he hollered. “For Christ’s sake …” He did not finish, as the bow struck a barge tied to a wharf. There was a sound like a starter’s pistol, and he was sure the jibboom had cracked; but it was only a boathook, which had split in two when Will piked it against the barge to fend off. Now Double Eagle careened downriver, stern-first, at the speed of the current, about four knots. Fighting to wrench her head round, feeling four or five separate forces tearing at her rudder simultaneously, he remembered a story Lockwood had told about their father—how in Nova Scotia he had docked, docked, a vessel three times as big in a current stronger than this. He was sure that the bargemen were laughing or shaking their heads in disgust at his display of contemptible seamanship. Then his crew did a fine, smart thing: Running forward, they freed the sheets to jib and jib topsail and muscled both sails to the opposite side. Backwinded, the sails forced the schooner’s bow around; and as she arced through the wind’s eye, Nathaniel brought the helm down hard and she sailed smartly out of the Gate, a vessel again and not some piece of flotsam, plaything of a capricious river.

“Reckon we just learned how Hell Gate got its name,” said Eliot, skipping aft, one hand clutching the lifeline.