The barge's motion became heavier as it plunged clear of the shore, and Bolitho settled down to watch his ship as she grew slowly out of the haze of spray and drizzle until the towering masts and yards and the neatly furled sails seemed to fill the horizon. It was a normal illusion but one which never failed to impress him. Once, when a mere child, he had gone to join his first ship, of similar size to Hyperion, but in those tender years she had seemed even larger and more than a little frightening. As this ship must now seem to the newly gathered men, he thought, both the volunteers and those pressed from safer lives ashore.

Allday swung the tiller and guided the barge past the high bows so that the gilt figurehead of Hyperion the Sun God seemed to reach with his trident right above their heads.

Bolitho could hear the twitter of pipes carried on the wind, and saw the scarlet-coated marines already mustered by the entry port, the blue and white of the officers and the anonymous press of figures beyond.

He wondered what Inch, his first lieutenant, would be thinking about this moment of departure. He wondered, too, what had made him retain the young lieutenant when plenty of senior ones had been ready to take such a coveted appointment. Next in line to a ship's captain there was always the chance, even the hope that promotion would come by that captain's sudden death or advancement to flag rank.

When he had taken command of the old seventy-four Bolitho had found Inch as the fifth and junior lieutenant. Service away from the land and often far from the fleet had guided the young officer's feet up the ladder of promotion as one officer after the other had died. When the first lieutenant had taken his own life Bolitho's friend Thomas Herrick had been on hand to take over, but now even he had left the ship with a captain's rank and a ship of his own. And so, Lieutenant Francis Inch, gangling, horse-faced and ever-eager, had got his chance. For some reason, not really understood by Bolitho himself, he was being allowed to keep it. But the thought of taking the ship to sea as second-in-command for the very first time might make him view his new status with misgivings and no little anxiety.