The sea reached her in seconds. She ascended swiftly, voyaging almost vertically, fighting to keep herself upright on the face. Just before she reached the summit, she was canted so steeply that Will and Drew would have fallen to the bow if it had not been for their safety lines. Then, suddenly, she was level. The top of the wave, exposed entirely to the wind, had been blown almost flat. It looked as wide and wild as the salmon rivers in Maine, an asylum of hurling froth. Drew tried to follow Will’s movements as he deftly nudged the helm to one side or the other to hold course. They could feel the rudder vibrating through the wheel. The whole hull was vibrating. At that moment, a part of the crest made a freakish leap and became peaked. The body of the wave trembled, as the earth trembles in a quake, and the peak collapsed over the ship in a thunderous Niagara. The impact almost hove her under, and she thrilled in every timber. Will and Drew were knocked breathless and driven backward, the force causing the safety lines to burn into their flesh through their oilskin jackets. As the great sea passed under them, rolling away into infinity, a howl of wind tore through the rigging, weakened by the capsizing. There was a loud crack and then another, and then a terrific bang. The foremast had been carried away. When it fell, the triatic stay between it and the main toppled the maintop and part of the mainmast, which stove in the storm hatches over the forward cabin skylight. Now, the two-masted schooner had been reduced to a half-masted schooner, twenty feet of broken mainmast standing like the stump of a lightning-struck tree above a deck littered with a wreckage of shrouds and rope. The foremast was dragging along to starboard, held by the shrouds and stays. It was the Carolina gale all over again. The whole rig was dragging—the mast, the new boom and gaff crafted by Ray Sykes in Snead’s Landing. The spars battered the hull, threatening to hole the ship.

“Get rid of it!” Will bellowed.