This year, she sparkled as perhaps she hadn’t since her launching. At the end of May, with the boys out of school and the family settled into the Maine house for the summer, Cyrus decreed that Double Eagle was to be overhauled, stem to stern, topmasts to keel. He set Nathaniel and his brothers to work in Potter’s boatyard in Blue Hill harbor, where the schooner had been hauled for the winter. They scraped, sanded, and repainted her bottom with two coats of red copper. They recaulked her seams, their ears plugged with cotton against the mallets’ thuds, because they didn’t want their hearing damaged, like the professional caulkers down in the Essex yards—men who could not answer to their own names except when shouted to from a yard or two away. When the caulking was done, the brothers examined the standing rigging and the running gear, and long-spliced new line into worn spots in the main and main-peak halyards, burned Irish pennants off the jib and staysail sheets, and coated whipping thread in candlewax and finished the sheets’ bitter ends with sailmaker’s whips. They found too much white powder on the anchor cable, bought a new one at Potter’s chandlery, charging it off to their father’s account, and then shackled it to the chain. They spread the sails on the ground—all seven plus a spare jib—and inspected each for mildew and frayed stitching, ever mindful of the admonition Cyrus had driven home to them over and over: “A sailor can no more hide his sins from the sea than a killer can hide the stain of murder from God. You cut corners, leave something done halfway to right, say to yourselves, ‘Ah, that’s good enough,’ and the sea will find you out, boys, and she’ll be a different god from the God of our fathers, because she’ll show no mercy, nor forgiveness either.”

Each day’s work began about an hour after breakfast, when Tom Dailey dropped them off at the yard with their lunch buckets, and ended around four in the afternoon, when Dailey returned with the wagon to drive them back to Mingulay in time to wash up for dinner, promptly, unfailingly served at six. Their father had given them a list of tasks, written in his crabbed hand on three ruled sheets of paper, and they checked off each item methodically. Was the rudder sound? The steering cables? Were there signs of rot above or below decks? They did not find any and hadn’t expected to: Double Eagle had been framed in white oak and her hull planked in Dade County pine, brought all the way up from Florida—a wood as rot-resistant as steel and almost as hard, so hard it sometimes bent nails and broke drill bits.