A hundred yards off, a sea mounted to an astonishing altitude, perhaps fifty feet. As it approached, Nathaniel could hear the crash of its breaking crest. He wanted to run, as from a charging lion, but of course there was nowhere to run to. The sea chased the ship down with implacable malice—so it seemed to him—and lofted her toward the invisible sky. Nathaniel stood paralyzed with awe, for here was an almost sheer wall of blue-black water, streaked with foam and spume and spindrift. The schooner reached the summit, where, with white water churning all around her, she seemed to be riding through surf or a tide rip. It took all his strength, and all of Will’s, to hold the helm steady against the eddies, currents, and countercurrents crisscrossing the crest. Double Eagle was poised briefly there, offering the boys a dispiriting gull’s-eye view of a seascape that might have been painted by a madman: a heaving, tossing wilderness that had no end. The ship rocketed down the wave, yawing in the confused water, and buried her nose. For an instant, she seemed intent on plunging straight for the bottom, but she rose valiantly, her head breaching. An immense volume of sea flushed backward, drowning the cabin tops and sweeping Will and Nathaniel off their feet. As they fought to rise and the water tumbled through and over the taffrail, the helmless ship slewed to windward, rolled, and went over, her masts pointing straight down at the nearest land, five hundred fathoms below, her keel slicing through the air.

Inside, as the hull turned turtle with a tremendous thud, Eliot and Drew were flung against the side of the cabin, tumbled with Trajan, tin cans, charts, instruments, and a hundred other things from the floor to the ceiling, which became the floor. The cat screeched and ran in circles. Drew crashed into the skylight, shattering the glass and cutting himself. If the storm hatches had not been battened down, he would have fallen through into the sea. The hatches were designed to shield the skylight from breaking waves, not for submersion, and saltwater was forcing its way through the spaces between the storm hatches and the skylight frame, creating a pond in the middle of the boat. More seeped through cracks between the main cabin hatch and the bulkhead. The battened hatch, if it did not hold, would be an open door to the ocean. And still more water was bubbling through the stove, which hung above them by its floor bolts, the stovepipe forming a hole in the new bottom.