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our boat.
    I admired Hardie from the start. He had a square jaw and a jutting chin and might have been handsome if not for the toll a life at sea had taken on his features and bearing. His sharp eyes didn’t look shifty or dishonest as one might expect the eyes of a seaman to look. Even within the confines of the boat, he was rarely still. He did not seem frightened by the sea: he respected it, and he alone among us accepted our position. Everyone else fought against it. Mary Ann kept imploring anyone who would listen, “Why us? Why us, dear God? Why us?” while Maria wondered the same thing in her Castilian dialect. The deacon attempted earnest answers to their questions, but Mr. Hardie had little patience with that sort of conversation. “Ye’re born, ye suffer, and ye die. What made ye think ye deserved different?” he wondered aloud when the deacon’s gentle answers failed to quiet them. Colonel Marsh was apt to mutter after each of Hardie’s harsh pronouncements: “He’d never get away with that in the regiment,” as if we might as easily be somewhere else—on land, perhaps, or on horseback, with the Colonel himself leading the charge.
    Hardie’s assertions tended to be filled with specifics, whereas those of the Colonel and the deacon and especially of Mrs. Grant were more general and philosophical. Hardie said, “If we’re careful, we have enough food for five days, maybe six,” and I can see now that it was his willingness to quantify our situation, to pin us exactly between the forty-third and forty-fourth parallels, along with the fact that he was absolutely incapable of introspection, that was the source of his power. By contrast, Mrs. Grant uttered vague and meaningless words of comfort. Even so, I liked it when she turned to one or the other of the women and said, “How is your shoulder coming on?” or “Close your eyes for a bit and think nice thoughts.” The deacon had taken it upon himself to search his store of instructive Bible verses and share them with the rest of us. I found it irritating, but Isabelle Harris, a serious woman who had been traveling with her ailing mother, kept turning to him and saying things like “Isn’t there something in Deuteronomy?” and the deacon would oblige by quoting: “Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours: from the wilderness even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be.”
    That morning, a feeling of camaraderie pervaded the boat. We had seen what a boat without Mr. Hardie in it was like, and we counted our blessings that we had been vouchsafed a leader who knew about wind direction and weather patterns. He wore a knife in a greasy sheath that hung down from his belt. He had salvaged the floating barrels, which I had considered such an extravagance at the time. Who else of us had thought of anything on that first disastrous day but saving ourselves for the next ten minutes? Only the deacon and Anya Robeson had any matching claim to selflessness. The deacon had spoken up on behalf of the child, and Anya’s little Charlie was hidden under her coat, and we all knew she would willingly die a thousand deaths for him. Perhaps Mrs. Grant was selfless too, for she was always stretching a hand out for someone to hold or turning her unsmiling face, with its fixed look of deep compassion and concern, toward one or another of the women.
    As I said, the shock had worn off, or was, more accurately, suppressed. We used up precious breath singing and laughing and talking about whatever came into our heads. Mr. Hardie started off a round of stories by saying, “Do any of ye know how the Empress Alexandra came to be named?” He proceeded to tell us that the ship had been christened on the day Nicholas and Alexandra were crowned as emperor and empress of all of Russia. Mr. Sinclair added that the match had been forbidden by Nicholas’s father, but the father died and the couple quickly wed. “The coronation, however, was delayed