'Usual drill, Mr Forester.' Poulter's tone was abstracted as he concentrated on closing the cutter.

'Aye, aye, sir.' The Vestal's mate shipped the telescope on its rack. Casting a final look at the boat ahead, he dropped smartly down the port ladder to the main deck to muster the men at the boat falls and supervise her recovery.

Drinkwater saw Vestal swing and head towards them. Here was a real facility, he thought admiringly, the quick response of the steam propulsion to the will of the vessel's commander; a minimum of effort, hardly a hand disturbed in the process, and while his hypothetical brig could as easily have swung and run downwind, it could not have been accomplished without the co-ordinated presence of at least a score of men. Drinkwater, who had hitherto considered the newfangled steam engine best left to young men, felt a faint, inquiring interest in the thing. Perhaps, he thought, he ought to have a proper look round the engine-room. There was a Mr Jones on board who rejoiced in the rank of 'first engineer' and who was to be infrequently glimpsed on deck in his overalls, like an old-fashioned gunner in a man-of-war whose felt slippers and pallid complexion betrayed his normal habitat far below in the powder magazine.

Captain Poulter watched the boat breast a wave and dive into the trough where he lost sight of it for a moment. Vestal was running before the wind, her paddles thrashing as her hull scended to the succession of seas passing under her, yawing slightly in her course.

'Watch your helm now, Quartermaster,' he said, and Potts mumbled the automatic 'Aye, aye' as he struggled to hold the ship steady on her course.

Poulter stood watching the boat and the sea, gauging the shortening distance. In a few moments he would turn Vestal smartly to starboard, reversing the starboard paddle and bringing the ship round to a heading of south-south-east, off the wind but not quite across it, to reduce the rolling effect of the seas. He was aware that as the ship moved closer inshore, the state of the sea worsened, for the cumulative effect of the presence of the land, throwing back the advancing waves which met their inward-bound successors, created a nasty chop.