Eliot, Will, and Drew, sitting on the high side of the afterdeck, under a jury-rigged dodger, delighted in the calm as survivors of a blizzard delight in a roaring fire. But they had been delivered from the storm into a new predicament: They were stranded in some tropical middle of nowhere, with food and water to last them a week at the longest. The hurricane had cast them here, somewhere off the north coast of Cuba, in a final tantrum of wind. Rollers had swept Double Eagle over a broken reef that materialized out of nothing. In what had seemed like seconds—certainly it hadn’t taken more than a few minutes—she was tossed from the abyss of the Florida Straits into water that wasn’t ten feet deep. Drew remembered, with a shudder, the huge shadows that had suddenly appeared through the surge and Will hollering, “Rocks! Those are rocks!” just before the ship struck the first time, with a thud that shivered her throughout. The tension went out of the wheel instantly, and they knew they’d lost their rudder. A breaker lifted the schooner and flung her forward, and she struck again, this time with a shriek of rending planks and timbers. In moments, her bilges filling, she began to settle. Holed beneath the waterline, rudderless, mastless, she was without defenses. Drew and Will, their hands still on the useless helm, were all but certain that she would swing broadside to the surf, broach to, and sink; but she continued to run with the wind, defiantly, miraculously, until she ploughed into a sand shoal that stopped her wild career as suddenly as a stone wall. The wind slid rapidly down the scale, from gale force to strong breeze to gentle breeze, ragged windows of blue opened in the clouds. The high storm tide rushed out, the water falling from six to three feet. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and Will, slumped on the deck, cradling his left side in both hands, said that by his reckoning, they had been driven one hundred miles across the Straits in about nine hours. That did not amaze Drew as much as the time of the day. The storm has lasted a little under twelve hours, but with its unearthly roar still echoing in his ears, it had seemed like a week. He sensed even then that those twelve hours had separated him from his childhood forever.