Drenched, chilled by the wind, he shivered uncontrollably. In a few minutes, a dreamy lassitude came over him again. All he wanted was rest, to fall down and go to sleep. Once more Double Eagle scaled a gigantic wave, once more he and Will surveyed the crazed painter’s panorama. A moment before the plunge, they glimpsed a dark cloud stretched all across the windward horizon. Was it the eye wall again? Were they merely spinning aimlessly around the eye, condemned to be drawn into it again and again, until the storm blew out or the schooner foundered? As the ship rose on the next wave, they saw that the cloud had reared higher; it was drawing toward them rather than they toward it: an immense, oncoming shadow, with white curling from its top. “Ah,” Nathaniel said to himself. “Ah.” The boat skidded into another trough, and his spirit fell with her. Until this day, the sea had been as kind and generous toward him as life in general. It had never shown him what it was capable of when roused to the fullness of its passion, had never visited upon him that wrath which cannot be appeased or placated but only endured. Now it was making up for that deficiency in his education by presenting him with the greatest sea he had ever beheld, a sea the likes of which an ocean liner might not encounter in her lifetime; and he knew he could not endure it. Nor could Double Eagle. She was too small and fragile to survive the monster charging her with a momentum as unstoppable as the rush of time itself and with a vindicative purpose that nothing could turn aside. She would not live, and so, neither would he, his brothers, and Will.

The idea of watching the end come was intolerable. He would sooner stare into the jaws of an enraged grizzly bear. Letting go the helm, he loosened the bowline around his waist, slipped out of his safety line, and gave Will a pat on the shoulder before he pulled the hatch open and tumbled below. His confidence that the world was arranged for his benefit had collapsed entirely, and with the loss of that faith, he had lost faith in himself and the conviction that there was nothing he could not do. It had been shouldered aside by a feeling that he was a puny thing, incapable of any meaningful action.

“It’s all up,” he said to Eliot and Drew, then flopped on the wet cabin sole. His voice was level, his face wore a calm expression that was something of a mask; he wasn’t calm inside so much as filled with the resigned despair that is, in battles on land and in storms at sea, sometimes mistaken for stoic courage. “Not a cloud … It’s a sea. It’s all up,” he repeated, and closed his eyes.