Laura Mills-Bender

Shipwreck in the Sand Laura Mills-Bender

All Nate could imagine was he had sailed clear to Cape Cod. However, by the time the storm had passed, and the tide shifted, he had unknowingly drifted instead very far out to sea. It mattered not that he had been knocked unconscious. That storm, he felt, could have landed him on the moon. The young Bender boy used all his sailing knowledge to navigate westward, but there was very little wind. During the night, though, a good sea breeze made sailing west at a rapid clip much easier. Like millions of sailing men before him, Nate navigated by the light of Polaris, the North Star. The exhausted youth must have traveled west 200 miles or more when he finally saw land. But this land was more of an isolated island in a vast sea. And it was an enormous island, with tall cliffs and several river estuaries. With all the learning Nate possessed from maps and books, having seen no land for all this time disoriented him like nothing else. The poor alone mid-teen Nathanael Bender gave his best guess for years to come. He had impossibly and improbably sailed as far as the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Christopher Merriweather couldn't have as skillfully achieved this spot in Canada, single handedly, and given the identical challenge. -L. Bender-1887 "My most beautiful novel all-time. The only book in one hundred that I would hope to be nominated for the Newbery Award one day." -Author