Only minutes later, the storm forced Will to go back on his promises. Though it seemed to the boys’ minds to do so with evil purpose, though it seemed a conscious being, it had no more concern for the promises, the plans, the paltry hopes and dreams of those four adolescents than its ancestor storms had had for the grand schemes of empire and the lust for riches dwelling in the minds and hearts of Spaniards homeward bound from the New World in galleons ballasted with bars of looted silver, their sea chests filled with emeralds and gold plundered from mines where Aztec and Inca labored under the Spanish whip, and all—ships, chests, coins, jewels—driven onto the reefs, smashed, and sunk, the Sevillean and Valencian lords and ladies crying out futile Aves as the waters closed around them and the great wind tore the prayers from their lips and shredded the words before they reached the ear of heaven; no more concern than one of this storm’s big sisters had shown for the souls of Galveston only the summer before, September 8, 1900, when it roared into that city and in a few hours left it looking as if it had undergone a monthlong naval bombardment, the corpses of six thousand of its citizens bloating amid the ruins of their civic pride. Six thousand lives or four, Spanish galleon or Yankee schooner, conquistador or ordinary American boy—it was all the same to huru-can, a true egalitarian in its administration of destruction.

Double Eagle had crossed a mile of Northwest Channel and was within half a mile of the lee when the first of the storm’s flailing bands struck her. The sky vanished, and in the roiling murk, Loggerhead beacon was extinguished like a fragile illusion in the face of an implacable reality. The rain did not fall but swept across the fractured sea horizontally, goaded by a wind that did not rise but leapt almost instantaneously from thirty-five to fifty-five knots. The ship went over on her beam ends, and was driven headlong, white water slashing past the cabin portholes. Nathaniel, Eliot, and Drew tumbled to the lee side, grabbed stanchions and lifelines to save themselves, and lay in a heap with a torrent rushing over their prone bodies; it was as if they had fallen into a salty mountain rapids. Will, with his legs clamped around the wheelbox, had managed to keep his footing and his grip on the spokes. He was shouting, but the three brothers could not hear him over the wind and the vibrato of shrouds and stays strung to the limit of tolerance. Getting to their hands and knees, they crawled up toward him, an effort as difficult as crawling up a steeply pitched roof in a rainstorm.

“Fall off!” Will cried as Nathaniel embraced the wheelbox and Eliot and Drew clung to the weather rail.