Crane spent thirty hours in a dinghy after a shipwreck in 1897 and wrote this story immediately afterward. Four men row toward a shore they cannot reach, watched by an indifferent sea. The prose is precise, almost journalistic, yet achieves an intensity that feels biblical. The famous line about the correspondent who did not know the color of the sky captures something essential about crisis: how perception narrows, how the universe shrinks to the immediate problem of staying alive. It is one of the finest short stories in American literature.