When he and Will went below to inspect the damage, they found Nat lying in the after stateroom, uninjured but looking as if he’d been clubbed. Eliot was in the main cabin, which was flooded on the port side. He too appeared dazed as he waded knee-deep in the muddy water, sifting through a thousand floating articles. “Aw, damn!” he said, dipping down and coming up with Trajan’s corpse. Realizing it was no time for sentimentality, Drew took the small body by the scruff and went outside and tossed it overboard. “You were a good old cat,” he murmured, then returned below to help Will and Eliot salvage whatever could be.

Their principal concern was for food and water. The copper tank forward was empty; the fallen mainmast had speared through the floorboards, severing a hose pipe, and all fifty gallons had drained into the bilges. The tank aft was half full. Thinking they would be in the Tortugas for the three days at the longest, the boys had neglected to top it off before leaving Key West. A box of canned goods and a few loose tins of salt pork and beef were retrieved from the drowned galley. Everything else—sugar and salt, coffee, tea, beans, rice, onions—had been rendered unfit and was cast into the sea.

Drew had felt a need, an obsession, really, to impose order on the chaos of wreckage and went into a frenzied cleanup campaign, jettisoning whatever had been destroyed or was not of immediate practical use, like Eliot’s water-logged guitar. A whole chanderly of items that had once seemed indispensible either went to the bottom, or drifted off on the tide. He spared the logbook, which had survived the storm; he wanted to keep it as a memento. The mirrors on Will’s sextant had been shattered, but the Plath, protected by its sturdy teakwood case, was still in working order. The Almanac and the Reduction Tables were drenched clear through, and he set them on deck to dry. The chart of Cuba was also soaked, almost to a pulpy transparency, but he carefully spread it out on the cabin top and weighted its corners and hoped the sun would restore it. When all that was done, he helped Will and Eliot drag the jib out of the sail locker and rig it as a dodger against that same ferocious sun.

Now, clustered in its shade, they surveyed the surrounding waters for a sign of human life. About a mile away, between them and the mainland, white birds lofted from a small island in such numbers as to resemble smoke. Closer to the stricken schooner, flamingos waded a sandy flat on long, twiglike legs. That was all they saw—birds, thousands of birds, and deserted keys and a coast as wild, they imagined, as when it was first charted by Spanish navigators four hundred years ago.