Gulf Stream! The mighty river in the ocean. Nathaniel knew, from reading the positions recorded daily in the logbook, that Double Eagle was now approaching the 35th parallel and the Hatteras Banks; but to see evidence of their southing in the ocean’s tint, to feel it in the ever-warming air, thrilled him more than any number in a logbook possibly could.

They had little wind the last two days of June, and Diamond Shoals lay flat and serene, with only the masts and stacks of wrecked ships to testify that they were among the most dangerous waters on the East Coast.

A full sail easterly came on July 1. Viewing himself, like most adolescents, as the center of the universe, and believing in a deity that took a personal interest in him, whether to aid or hinder him, Nathaniel was convinced that the favorable wind was a reward for his enduring the extremes of line squalls and dead calms. On a beam reach, her canvas without a wrinkle in it, Double Eagle logged one hundred and eighty-two miles from midnight of the first to midnight of the second, the farthest she had ever gone in one day. The next twenty-four hours saw her better that by four miles, and her crew celebrated the record and the beginning of Independence Day by firing four shots from the L. C. Smith twelve-gauge. Eliot marched around the ship, tooting “Stars and Stripes Forever” through a rolled-up magazine. The dead reckoning was checked against Will’s star fix, which put them at a latitude and longitude about one hundred and twenty miles east of Savannah, Georgia. The wind holding, they would be off Jacksonville by noon; the wind still holding, they would sight the Florida shore by the following midnight. None of them dared say this, but they all thought it, and the thought was sufficient for the sea gods to punish them. Within an hour, the wind dropped to five knots; by dawn, it turned south and fell to under five, and Double Eagle, with topsails set, loafed along at two.

Nathaniel was dozing on the cabintop when Will’s cry from below—“Port the helm!”—startled him awake. He was down the companion-way in two steps, and found Will trying to shove his head through a porthole, yelling, “Breakers dead ahead! Port the helm!” From above, Eliot shouted, “What the hell’s he talking about? There’s no breakers inside of a hundred miles!”

“He’s sleepwalking again,” Nathaniel called back, and shook Will into consciousness.

“Bad dream, sorry for the false alarm, Natters,” he said, when his head cleared.

“What are we going to have to do? Tie you to your bunk when you’re off watch?”

Nathaniel felt strangely overstrung and irritable, which he ascribed to the uncommon heat. The air had a thickness suggesting an imminent change of state from gaseous to gelatinous. Trajan, who had dozed for a good part of the trip, paced nervously.