Saturn rose shortly before the sun and aligned itself with Jupiter. Nathaniel wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad omen, or no omen at all; at any rate, the squall swept over the Florida Straits toward Cuba, the southeast breeze sprang up, and Double Eagle was away again on a reach. With the current on her stern, she clipped along swiftly enough to overtake a fruit-company steamer, lumbering toward the Gulf of Mexico and some distant banana republic. Following custom, the boys mastheaded a mop, and a ship’s officer on the bridgewing jovially shook his fist to signal that he grasped the insult.

Flying fish launched themselves from out of the tide rips at the current’s edge, and lines of sargassum miles long, and in places ten or twenty yards across, formed golden highways on the surface of the sea. A hook baited with bacon and a strip of white cloth to give it flash skipped in the wake. A Spanish mackerel struck, and then another, followed by a bonito. The mackerel were split on a cutting board and salted and stowed in the ice box for later consumption, the bonito chunked into bait. The red meat lured a big dolphin out from under a weedline. A flash of bright color in the rolling wake, and then the stout bamboo rod bowed, the 24-thread linen line hissing off the reel. The dolphin streaked away with astonishing speed and made several wild leaps, showing a butter-colored belly and flanks of iridescent green before it ran again. When Eliot pressed the leather thumb guard to apply drag, a sliver of smoke rose from the friction, and he could feel the heat in his fingers through the leather. With pressure on the line and the schooner towing it, the fish surrendered, its body tumbling in the wake as Eliot pumped it in—a big bull dolphin, flat-headed, twenty-five or thirty pounds. Nathaniel, swinging out over the gunwale, gaffed it on the first try and heaved the fish on deck, where it thrashed violently, spattering blood. Will clubbed it three times with a belaying pin and that scuppered it, and there was something tragic about the way its vibrant colors faded almost instantly. A quarter of an hour later, a thick fillet doused in lime juice was frying in lard and onions, and they all four ate it with fried ship’s bread and agreed it was the sweetest fish they had ever tasted.