Reading what she has written so far, Sybil wonders if she’s gotten the character of her great-uncle down right. There is a disparity between the Nathaniel who made that tidy, indeed anal, record of dry facts, and the restless romantic she has woven out of strands collected from Myles and Nathaniel’s memorabilia (chiefly a scrapbook containing, among other things, Tennyson’s Ulysses, which he had copied out by hand, clippings of his favorite Frank Merriwell stories, a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt in his Rough Rider costume, and an Andover essay, written in his freshman year, in which he confessed to his envy of his suntanned, sea-roving half brother). He and his crew had accomplished no small feat; he must have felt triumphant, but you would never know it from reading the logbook, Sybil remarks to me. Maybe he didn’t have the vocabulary for his emotions; more likely, he intended to show the log to his father, and wrote it in a manner sure to win approval from that most unsentimental man.

She cannot find anything to say about what her grandfather and his brothers did during their first few days in Key West. She assumes they must have looked for Artemis Lowe, the Bahamian diver partially blinded while salvaging the Annisquam, or for someone who could tell them about the sunken ship; otherwise, those days are a blank. Her imagination is silent because the log is silent. For all its dull literalness, she seems to need it to open a window on to the past; needs to see Nathaniel’s handwriting in the thin brown ink and to touch the mildew-spotted pages, as though his memories are embedded there, waiting for her to absorb them transdermaliy.

HIGH NOON and a white sun in an empyrean sky, cloudless overhead but with thunderheads walling the northern horizon, where the Gulf of Mexico seemed to end. Lightning sparked in the clouds’ anvil tops, as though some smithy were hammering hot iron in the heavens, and the muted rumbling that would have made the boys apprehensive at sea cheered them now with its promise of deliverance from the heat. Simonton Street, its marl bed paved with crushed coral and seashells and a pellet-sized gravel called pea-rock, was whiter than the light it reflected back into their faces; faces that a week in the subtropics had seared to the color of nutmeg. Nathaniel’s was the darkest of the three, and with his chocolate-brown eyes and wavy black hair, he had been mistaken for a Cuban just this morning by another Cuban, who had accosted him on the street, speaking in a rapid Spanish.