“My God! Did they live?”

“Grandpa used to say he never saw such battered bodies as were taken from that ship. The men had lashed themselves to the mast to keep from being swept overboard by the waves when they grounded. The waves were tremendous.”

“I remember. Even at Thanksgiving, it was wild. That gray huge ocean—nothing like the Mediterranean. I love stories. All history should be told as people’s stories, like your grandfather’s. Now, start from the beginning.”

“Well, Grandpa always called her ‘the bark Castagna’—for that’s what a small, three-masted sailing vessel is; it’s not a ship. My grandfather always used to say one should be precise in things. I liked the term anyway; it made her seem more ancient and vulnerable. Anyway, she was seventy-three days out of Montevideo with a cargo of guano (that’s bird shit), heading for Weymouth where there’s a big fertilizer plant, when she got into bad weather after the Tropic of Cancer—and we all know what that is, thanks to Henry Miller.”

“Come on, Jason, I’m interested in this! That’s not how your grandfather would have told it. Tell it straight!”

“Yes, sir! She carried a crew of thirteen—and here my grandfather would pause and say in a suspenseful way, ‘Now, I’m not a superstitious man, but one might almost take that for an omen.’ And, in fact, later it was learned that one of the crew had to be left behind in Montevideo after he broke his leg in a fall from the rigging. There was some muttering among the men about the number, but the captain persuaded them and on they went. They got into the trades and had fine sailing until they passed the Tropic of Cancer, when they had nothing but wind and rain and snowstorms and were driven here, there, and everywhere. They had been plagued this way almost continuously until they got a brief spell of good weather, when the captain made sightings for Massachusetts Bay. They were almost in when a fierce storm broke over them and they lost their direction to Boston Light.

“Early in the morning the wind broke on them from the northwest in a regular blizzard, and they hauled to until they heard the roar of waves breaking on the shore and knew they had headed blindly in the wrong direction. It was too late to turn about and they struck the outer bar, bounded over it, struck the inner bar and the foremast snapped, and the sea swept over the vessel carrying off the forecastle and flooding the boat.