And for four full days, measuring their progress by the lighthouses they passed—St. Augustine Light and Ponce de León and Cape Florida—they watched the Florida coast reel past the starboard rail. A coast drearier than the one expected: mile upon deserted mile of white sand fringing pine and palmetto barrens and swampy savannahs monotonous as midwestern prairies, the lush desolation relieved once by Daytona Beach, on whose strand they saw bathers and carriages and sun umbrellas, as if some little piece of Atlantic City had been floated twelve hundred miles south. Double Eagle bucked head winds all the way, yet it was the kind of sailing Drew liked: gentle breezes over benign seas, and with deep water lying close to shore, land was always visible by day, while in the unfailingly clear nights burned the signal lamps that he now knew by heart—the Summer Triangle, Libra’s faint diamond, and Scorpius with Antares glowing near its head, its tail curved as if poised to sting The Archer, just beside it to the east.

The ice had melted in the icebox, and they had put into a shabby little town called Fort Pierce to buy fresh blocks, but by then their bacon had gone bad and the fresh vegetables bought in Beaufort had rotted. Low on cash, they decided not to buy groceries but to live off whatever the sea gave them. The rancid bacon was gobbed onto hooks and trolled with the rod and reel behind the log, the rod butt lashed to a taffrail post with a spare jackrope. The only fish hooked between Fort Pierce and Miami was a barracuda, to which they lost Little Israel when the fish chomped down on the small metal torpedo and its keen teeth sliced the log line in two.

Cape Florida Light on Key Biscayne marked the edge of the sea frontier. Beyond it lay the most treacherous waters on the southern Atlantic coast: another country where in earlier times pirate cannons thundered and Seminole raiders slipped out of the Everglades in long war canoes to torch island towns.