By quarter turns, they nudged her away from the wind, until she was poised between a broad reach and a dead run. Nathaniel was about to go forward to douse the foresail, but a sudden gust did the work for him. The sail exploded in a shower of canvas shards. The brand-new sail sewn by Frenchy Geslin and paid for by Aunt Judith. Letting the helm go, Will pulled the stopper on a keg of storm oil and dropped it off the weather quarter to do what little it could to smooth the waters. The sea anchor, which had been rolling across the afterdeck when it wasn’t flying like a tethered balloon, was tossed off the port quarter. The wind picked it up and flung it forward. It struck the water as the schooner surfed down a wave, and the coiled cable flew off the deck and came tight. The anchor, theoretically anyway, would help the ship maintain her track and slow her wild journeys down the seas.

Will stood again to his side of the wheel, the port side, but kept looking astern, to watch for rogue waves. Nathaniel did the same on his side, and felt his heart shrink as he looked directly into the steep face of an oncoming wave, shattering into white at its top. Double Eagle climbed, her after sections first. Instead of making headway, she seemed to be going backward. The crest frothed around her, the wave pushed on with relentless drive, and the bow rushed into a trough so broad that for a moment the schooner appeared to be sailing in a narrow lake between two high ridges. Then she scaled the next sea and plunged again. Thus, she ran into the Florida Straits to live or die amid the wandering peaks of a vast and roaring gloom.