“Well, if nobody else has got one, I do!” Nathaniel spoke through gritted teeth. He was beginning to feel in command again, of himself and the ship. “Change course. Head more west of south, toward Loggerhead Key.… Get as close into the lee of the island as ever we can.… Anchor up and ride it out there.”

Will objected: The altered course would bring the ship closer to the wind; the strain on the rigging would be tremendous. And when the back side of the hurricane blew in, the wind would reverse course, forcing them to up anchor and get away from Loggerhead.

“Ain’t time for debates!” Nathaniel interrupted. “Drew, Eliot, lay for’ard and sheet in the stays’l! Stay there! Tie yourselves to the foremast if you have to! Lots of shoals between us and Loggerhead! Need lookouts!”

They staggered toward the foredeck, with the ponderous steps of men pushing a block of stone. They took the turns off the staysail sheet, hauled together, made fast. As they lashed themselves to the mast with the foresail sheet, the ship crept up, until the wind was just forward of the beam. It slashed their faces, and they thought the driving rain would put their eyes out.

“Lookouts!” Eliot hollered. “Goddammed joke! Can’t see a thing!”

At the wheel, Will said he could not hold her on course by himself. Nathaniel wedged in beside him and seized two spokes. Immediately, he felt the pressure on the rudder and the strain on his forearms, and was amazed that Will had held her alone for this long.

Ahead, slate-colored waves surged and broke, flinging back glints of the eerie, yellow light that pierced the clouds, racing overhead like shredded rags. The rigging sang—a single note, high and piercing—and the wind changed tone, from a shriek to a deep, operatic moan.

A hail of rain and sea froth scourged Drew’s face. He bowed his head. Sinners in the hands of an angry God, he thought. Mr. Hayworth, his Sunday school teacher, reading from Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon. But neither Mr. Hayworth nor Jonathan Edwards himself had the slightest idea of what it was like to be a sinner in the hands of an angry God. This is what it’s like, thought Andrew Braithwaite, and yet, he felt a strange exultation, inseparable from terror. I am a sinner in the hands of an angry God.… But he must not think of the storm that way. It was a hurricane, not a punishment. It was a natural phenomenon, without mercy or cruelty, without a heart or mind: a cyclonic weather system caused by the Coriolis force—the effect of the earth’s rotation on air currents over warm ocean waters. So said the Practical Navigator. That’s all this is, Drew muttered to himself. Weather.