Everything went wrong at once. The halyard fouled. They were five minutes clearing it. Then a rogue sea, six feet higher than its brothers, thundered into Double Eagle, raised her up and dropped her down at a sickening, steep angle, and the sea following broke over her, burying her to the cabin tops. Nathaniel and Eliot disappeared momentarily underwater, arms locked around the foot of the foremast for dear life, truly, truly for dear life, the rushing flumes tugging at their arms and hands, trying to break their grips. The preventer stay parted, with a crack like a shotgun blast, and the fore boom swung to leeward, thudded at the end of its swing, swung back, and then forward again. The schooner heeled sharply; boom, gaff, and furled sail were thrust into the water and driven forward by the lunge of the boat. The boom split from the mast with a tremendous crash, the gaff broke an instant later, and both went overboard with the sail. Eliot tossed the sea anchor, but the vessel did not turn into the wind. From the helm, Will shouted, but Nathaniel and Eliot could not hear him. He waved and pointed, and they saw what the trouble was: The broken rig was still attached to the boat by the foresail sheet, which had ingeniously wrapped itself around a shroud. The shredded foresail was dragging through the water, pulling the bow to leeward and causing the ship to careen on her lee side. Drawing their sheath knives, the Braithwaites hacked and sawed at the fouled sheet. When it parted, boom and gaff—solid spars broken like straws—were carried away, and Double Eagle began to point up. Rolling into a gully, she angled up the face of a wave, swung through an arc, and finally settled down with her nose into the seas. She had taken a beating, but she had not been knocked down; now, recovering her wits, she squared off to face her adversary.

The wheel was made fast with the turk’s head dead-centered. That done, the three joined Drew below, bolted the hatch, and took shelter in the cabin, huddling there like soldiers in a dugout during a siege.

The gale blew relentlessly, the sea scend pushing Double Eagle north by a little west. Hour after hour, she drifted, losing with each hour miles of the ground gained during her record run. How many miles it was difficult to tell. The boys sat or lay on the floorboards, while from outside came the ceaseless moan of high wind, and the thump of waves beating the decks. Inactivity was so opposed to Nathaniel’s nature that he could barely stand the helpless waiting. He kept thinking there was some action that he ought to take; once, his restlessness drove him out into the wet howl to dump storm oil over the bow. Beyond that, there was nothing he could do, and doing nothing, he discovered, was an art unto itself.