The wind accelerated to twenty knots and the black seas rose and breakers charged in serried ranks over Loggerhead Reef. Drew went above, filled two buckets with seawater, then returned below, opened a hatch in the floorboards, and emptied one bucket into the bilges. Eliot, bowing over the midships pump, pushed and pulled the plunger. The water went out with a sucking noise. They went to the forward pump with the second bucket and repeated the procedure. Both pumps were drawing well.

Four o’clock. Will said he’d never seen a barometer fall so fast, and they all knew, as they got into their oilers, that they were in for it. Will took the helm, Nathaniel beside him in case the wheel needed two pairs of hands. Eliot and Drew winched up the anchor, then stood ready to tend the sheets, hunching their shoulders against a wind already keening at gale force. The eastern sky had taken on a gray luster, like the inside of an oyster shell. To the west towered a mountain range in motion, wild, menacing, with smoky plumes flying off its ragged crest. The storm was barreling toward them, and the most rational meterologist, had he seen it as the boys did, from the deck of a forty-six-foot schooner, would have forgotten everything he’d learned from books about heavy weather and felt himself one with the Carib Indians, the first men who had quaked before that wrath and given it a name—huru-can, demon wind.

Double Eagle tore southwestward under morning stars winking out one by one, her deck slanted thirty degrees. To her weather side, waves broke over the patch reefs in the Northwest Channel—the wide breach between Loggerhead Reef and Pulaski Shoal—reformed their ranks, and advanced to batter the schooner abeam. She rolled and banged in the crowded, eight-foot seas.

“At this rate, we’ll be in the harbor in less than half an hour,” said Will, standing, as they all were, at a thirty-degree angle. “It’ll be easier once we’re in the lee of Loggerhead. That reef will take some of the starch out of these waves.”