Once it had seemed as if the refit, the work and delays would never end. Then in the last few weeks she had returned to the waiting sea, her rigging had been set up, her seventy-four guns replaced, the deep-bellied hull filled with stores, provisions, powder and shot. And men.

Bolitho straightened his back. Six months was a long while to be away from her natural element. This time she would not be returning with the seasoned, well-disciplined company he had taken command of sixteen months ago, most of whom had been aboard for four years. In that time you could expect even the dullest landsman to find his place in things. But those men had been paid off. Not to a well-earned rest, but scattered to t11e demands of an ever-growing fleet, leaving him with only a few of the senior ones who were needed to deal with the ship's more intimate repairs.

For weeks his new company had been gathered from every available source. From other ships, the port admiral, and even the local Assizes. At his own expense, but with little hope, Bolitho had sent handbills and two recruiting parties in the search for new men, and had been astonished when some forty Cornishmen had arrived on board. Most were landsmen, from farms or the mines, but all were volunteers.

The lieutenant who had brought them aboard had been full of compliments and something like awe, for it was rare indeed to volunteer to leave the land for the harsh discipline and hazards of life in a King's ship.

Bolitho could still not believe that these men actually wanted to serve with him, a fellow Cornishman, one whose name was well known and admired throughout their native county. He was completely baffled by it and not a little moved.

Now that was all in the past. Crammed within the onehundred-and-eighty-foot hull his new company was waiting for him. The man who, next to God, would control their lives. Whose judgement and skill, whose bravery or otherwise would decide whether they lived or died. Hyperion was still some fifty short of her six hundred complement, but that was little enough in these hard times. Her real weakness lay in the immediate future, the days when he would have to drive every man in order to weld them all into one trained community.