Darryl dresses in men's clothes before hiding aboard the schooner Eleanor Mooreland. Soon after leaving port she is discovered and the captain makes her the ship's boy. This is the beginning of Darryl's life at sea. She sails across the Southern Ocean and she learns how to read a chart and how to use a sextant, and later she learns how to cope with the sea's capacity for loss: for castaways, shipwrecks, and mutinies.