“Right yourself!” Nathaniel bellowed. “Goddammit, come right!” Turning to see what Will was doing at the helm, he was pelted in the side of the face by what felt like gravel blasted from a cannon: rain, driving at sixty miles an hour. A high wave, every foot of twelve and the color of gun metal, charged Double Eagle. Her stern lifted to it as the schooner laid off another point. Too much. For several seconds, she rode the face of the wave at an angle to the trough, her stern high, bow low; then a breaker caught her mercilessly and rolled her past forty degrees. The bowsprit knifed into the back of a sea, the tips of the booms sliced through spray and froth, and four hearts banged against the back of four sets of teeth, as the boys waited for the booms or the bowsprit to crack, or the ship to broach to. Then Nathaniel felt the ship lurch. Or had he imagined it? Confounded hope with fact? No. He was standing straighter now. In a moment, the lee deck reappeared, water streaming off it, and then the rail burst to the surface.

“She’s doing it! Oh, she is!” he shouted exultantly.

Looking amidships, he saw Eliot’s and Drew’s mouths open—dark cavities beneath the hollows of their eyes—and heard their cries flying away on the wind. “She’s coming right! She rights herself!”

Forward, the staysail held.

They pounded Will’s back and punched his shoulder and yelled gleefully that she was an Essex-built schooner, tough, buoyant, and brave, and nothing could knock her down.

“Don’t go passing out any medals yet, this is just the beginning,” Will warned, and carefully brought Double Eagle’s nose to windward, steering her back on course. All the rigging hummed, and he looked anxiously at the staysail, deeply concave. “Can’t see the fort, can’t see the lighthouse, can’t say exactly where we are. We’ll never be able to negotiate that harbor channel in this mess. Any ideas?”

No one spoke, in part because the ferocity of the hurricane induced silence, in part because they weren’t sure what was the best strategy. Each had its advantages, each its dreadful liabilities. They could drop both hooks immediately and try to ride things out, but they were in the middle of the basin, almost as exposed as they would be in the open sea, and in ten fathoms of water, with high waves pushing the boat, the anchors might drag or the cables break; then they would scend to leeward, and to leeward lay the middle of the big crescent reef. They could lash the wheel and heave to under a shortened foresail, but in a seaway such as this, the rudder would be subjected to unnatural stresses; they could lose it, or the foresail sheet could chafe and part, and then the vessel would go scudding off toward the rocks.