“So I have heard. But what does he want with this ship?”

“It is all open and above board, apparently. After the war, Boney’s Old Guard formed an organisation for mutual aid. In 1816 they decided to become colonists—Your Lordship must have heard something about the project?”

“Hardly anything.”

“They came out and seized an area of land on the coast of Texas, the province of Mexico adjacent to this State of Louisiana.”

“I have heard about it, but that is the extent of my knowledge.”

“It was easy enough to start, with Mexico in the throes of her revolt against Spain. There was no opposition to them, as you understand, My Lord. But it was not so easy to continue. I cannot imagine that soldiers of the Old Guard would ever make good agriculturists. And on that pestilential coast—It is a series of dreary lagoons, with hardly an inhabitant.”

“The scheme failed?”

“As Your Lordship might expect. Half of them died of malaria and yellow fever, and half of the rest simply starved. Cambronne has come out from France to carry the survivors home, five hundred of them. The Government of the United States never liked the project, as Your Lordship can imagine, and now the insurgent government is strong enough to take exception to the presence on the shores of Mexico of a large body of trained soldiers, however peaceable their intentions. Your Lordship can see Cambronne’s story could be perfectly true.”

“Yes.”

An eight-hundred-ton ship, equipped as a slaver, could pack five hundred soldiers on board and feed them during a long passage.

“Cambronne is stocking her largely with rice and water—slave rations, My Lord, but the best adapted to the purpose for that very reason.”

The slave trade had had long experience of how to keep alive a close-packed body of men.

“If Cambronne is going to take them back to France I should do nothing to hinder him,” said Hornblower. “Rather on the contrary.”