“Would like to hear about it, but we’d best not jaw too long. I’m here to tell y’all that if you don’t pull your hook right quick and foller me into the channel, you’re gone to stay in the fine state of South Car’lina till the Savior comes again. Tide’s fixin’ to turn, and when it does, it’ll run outta here fifty mile an hour, and that fine-lookin’ boat get herself stuck in a gumbo goes clear through to China. Gettin’ her afloat will be harder’n hemmin’ a hog, so foller me.”

The boys, wondering what it meant to hem a hog, lost no time. Will and Drew hauled the kedge up by hand. Nathaniel and Eliot set the levers in the windlass drum and weighed the main anchor. With the jib out to port, the main to starboard, Double Eagle ran wing on wing behind the sloop down the channel—an ambitious name for a serpentine gutter that had nothing to mark its winding course except the flagged stakes planted on the bordering oyster bars. The tide did not fall as fast as Talmadge had claimed, but it moved right along, and by the time the two vessels passed through the mouth of St. Helene Sound, shoals and mud banks submerged ten minutes ago were glistening in the sunlight. Unwilling to entrust his vessel entirely to the piloting of a stranger, Nathaniel climbed the main ratlines to the top, the better to see the color of the water and so track the channel’s meanderings. In all directions, rivers and estuaries spread like an immense vascular system around islands and peninsulas, through oak and pine woods and marshlands rippling in the breeze. As they approached a quaint settlement—unpainted shacks, some ashore, some on stilts at water’s edge, their drabness relieved by a fleet of oyster boats lateen-rigged and rakishly sparred—he saw a few stunted, scrubby trees growing near the shore.

“Palms!” he called down. “Over there to port. Palms!”

Eliot and Drew ran up to stand beneath him and behold the sight. At the wheel, Will shrugged and concentrated on his steering, for he had seen the majestic royals of Bermuda, compared to which the Carolina palmettos were hardly more than shrubs. All the same, they were palm trees, the first the Braithwaites had ever seen—exotic, foreign, green emblems of how far they had come.

Double Eagle was anchored in deep water some hundred yards from the settlement (only someone given to hyperbole could have called it a town). Talmadge rounded up and brought his sloop alongside and invited the boys to supper. They said nothing, flummoxed by such impetuous hospitality; in Boston, you had to know someone practically five years before you got invited for a meal.

“Well?” asked Talmadge. “Y’all hungry, ain’t you?”