There wasn’t a sailing vessel that he did not love. One might be so beautiful that it made your heart swell and another might be uglier than murder, but so long as a vessel drew its power from God’s own wind, it bore the same relation to steamships as man did to the great apes (if Mr. Darwin was right—and his biology teacher had declared Mr. Darwin to be right, inspiring the Reverend Harwood, school chaplain, to deliver several sermons in rebuttal). With ships, however, evolution was reversed, the inferior species coming after the superior; for the grandest liners launched by White Star and Cunard, belching smoke like locomotives, were never anything more than agglomerations of steel, rivets, and brass: feats of engineering testifying to human cleverness. But a barque or four-master, or a common sloop for that matter, testified to something higher in the human spirit, to skill and craftsmanship, and beyond skill and craftsmanship, to that love of beauty which produces art. And, in the very finest ships and yachts, there was more even than art. Between the laying of such a vessel’s keel and the moment she slipped down a launching ramp to receive her baptism, she was transubstantiated from man-made to living thing. It was as if the men who designed and built her somehow endowed her with aspects of themselves, their various traits seeping with their sweat into her ribs and knees and bowels, uniting there to form a single temperament, a single character that was hers alone. There was no way to scientifically explain the phenomenon, just like there was no way to scientifically prove that he, or any human being, had a soul; yet he knew that he had one, and the faculty that told him so was the same that told him that sailing ships were living beings, while steamers, no matter how impressive in size or might, could never be anything other than as dead as the iron they were made of.

Drew hopped onto the cabin top and sat with one arm crooked around the Charley Noble, as if it were an old friend. He was gazing westward at the green land, and beginning to look a little green himself.

“How about you take the helm?” Nathaniel said to him. Andrew liked to steer. When his own hands were on the wheel, he was less prone to seasickness. “I’ve got to go below and look at the charts. South by half west.”

“South by half west, all mine,” Drew said. “Wouldn’t it be simpler just to say two hundred and twenty-five degrees?”

“Yeah. But it’s more nautical to box the compass, and now that I’m skipper, I’ve got to sound damned nautical.”