Looking out again, past the easy lift and dip of the jibboom, Nathaniel projected onto the real ocean the one represented on the charts, and he came to a conclusion: Mike Downey had wanted to beat him up because he didn’t believe he was a real captain, and he didn’t believe me, thought Nathaniel, because I haven’t taken charge. I don’t act like a skipper, don’t sound like one. So when Will and Drew tumbled out to stand their trick, he declared to his crew, in a tone that left no room for argument, “We aren’t making any more detours, everyone got that? We’re going to drive straight to Key West fast as we can push this boat.”

And then the ancient ritual of watch-change was observed. Eliot, keeping hands on the helm, stepped aside to give his relief room to pass.

“South by a quarter east,” he said.

“South by a quarter east. All mine,” Will replied, and took the wheel.

AND WATCH followed watch, the days divided not by intervals of light and darkness but by four-hour increments of time. They were sailors again, as attuned to moonrise and moonset as to dawn and dusk, accustomed to being sound asleep at noon and fully awake while night skies wheeled above them. The wind swung from southwest to southeast and back to southwest, and for the better part of their second day out of New York, it headed them inshore, close enough to give them a glimpse of the land around Chesapeake Bay, wreathed in bluish mist. There was no wind all the following day, Double Eagle lying nearly dead in water that, creased by errant zephyrs or subsurface currents, resembled the hide of a great blue beast, vast as all the world. She lay becalmed that night. Will and Drew listened to the slat of sails, watched shooting stars, and, at ten o’clock, saw something red on the horizon. The port sidelight of a ship, Drew ventured, but changed his mind when the red glow grew larger: It looked as though the ship were on fire. The light rose, bigger and bigger, a blazing balloon that he and Will finally recognized as the moon.

In the morning, the tender was lowered away, a towline bent to the samson post. As the strongest of the four, Nathaniel tried to row the schooner out of the doldrums, but she was a heavy craft and the tender’s oars too short to give any leverage. His sore hands aching, he quit after twenty minutes, having moved Double Eagle barely a hundred yards.