Nathaniel nodded, and Eliot went to the galley and scooped coals into the stove, adding a few strips of cedar wood to sweeten the acrid smell of the coals. He lit a fire while Nathaniel sat staring at the chart, which he had folded in half to conceal the buff-colored parts and the crowded numbers and fathom lines near shore. Before him now was a swath of white, a vacant dreamscape. He fiddled with the rule, twirled the dividers, pretending he was a clipper captain laying a course for Hong Kong or Shanghai, like Dad’s uncle Silas, who had rounded the Horn, carrying forty-niners to the California goldfields before he sailed on to China.

“I figure we’re a little under twenty miles from North Haven,” he said.

Eliot dumped two cans of corned beef hash into the skillet with the eggs and stirred them together, the smell causing Nathaniel’s appetite to wake up with a growl.

“We’ll be a little bit in the lee when we go through the thorofares, so we’ll lose some wind and speed. But if we can average five knots, we’ll get there before dark. Maybe on time for supper.”

“We can start mooching.”

“All right, if you’ve got to call it that …” Nathaniel did not finish the sentence, his glance falling onto the chart again, roving over the white expanses that bled off to the edges of the page. “I was thinking, I’ve been thinking,” he began, and then hesitated, because he wasn’t sure what he was thinking or, rather, how to express it.

Eliot dipped the water tank, opened the top plate to the stove, and doused the fire. Leaving the skillet with Drew’s portion on the stove, he filled two blue enamel plates with the rest and set them on the table. He and Nathaniel ate as adolescent boys eat when out from under parental supervision, that is, with all the decorum of lions on a fresh kill, their heads bowed over the plates as though their mother’s frequent admonishments at the dinner table—Food to mouth, boys, not mouth to food … Boys?… Boys!—had been as seed sown upon rock. Trajan, the closest thing there was on board to a lion, showed better manners, rubbing first Nathaniel’s, then Eliot’s legs to gain their attention, and then waiting politely on his haunches for them to give him a couple of spoonfuls.

“So what were you thinking?” asked Eliot after the meal—its consumption took no more than three or four minutes.

“Remember when we were little and Father taught us to swim?”

“I get cold thinking about it. But I sure wouldn’t call it teaching. Told us to strip to our drawers and threw us in. Maine water in early June, and he threw us in and told us to swim.”

“Right. And we did, didn’t we?”