Drew flew below to summon Eliot and Nathaniel, but only Eliot responded. Armed with a hacksaw and a hatchet, Drew and he worked their way through the web of fallen lines to the foredeck. The wind began to moderate somewhat—over the past several hours they had become as attuned as anemometers to its rhythms—and the seas appeared to be falling to thirty feet or less, a mere chop compared to the monster that had joined forces with the wind to dismast the ship. Safety lines bent to the windlass, the two boys chopped and sawed the godawful mess of cordage for twenty minutes, Drew vomiting because the ship, with her masts gone, no longer rolled but rocked side to side with the twitchy motion of a toy boat. Finally, the rig floated away on the scend of the sea, either to sink and add its little bit to all the other wreckage lying on the bottom, or to drift onto an unknown shore, where it might or might not be picked up by a beachcomber, who might or might not ponder what fate had befallen the vessel it had belonged to.

23

THE LATE AFTERNOON sun illuminated a green-hulled schooner grounded in a vast, muddy bay, her decks looking as if she had been used as a practice target for small-caliber guns. She was heeled far over on her port side far enough to show a rudder cracked in two and the upper portion of a damaged keel. Islands speckled the bay like green patches sewn onto clay-brown cloth, the archipelago reaching eastward as far as eye could see. To the south, girt by a narrow beach, low mangrove jungles steamed in the brilliant heat.