HMS Sutherland of two decks and seventyfour guns, Captain Horatio Hornblower, was on her way north from Gibraltar to her rendezvous in the Western Mediterranean. To port lay the coast of Spain; to starboard, and barely in sight, just peeping over the horizon, lay the hilltops of one of the Balearic Islands, Ibiza. Spain was now an ally of England, and it was no business of the Sutherland’s to intercept Spanish trade or fight Spanish ships of war. Only the French were now enemies, and the French conquest of Spain had not progressed as far south yet as Valencia. It was to take a hand in the struggle in Catalonia that the Sutherland–at least so Hornblower suspected—was being sent north. Meanwhile he had little enough to worry him; a full crew, a wellfound ship, and nothing special to do until he reached his rendezvous. It was a period of transition, from one duty to another, and Hornblower revelled in the feeling of suspended animation and freedom. The Sutherland was laying over her ponderous bulk as she stood to the north closehauled to a fine easterly wind, and Hornblower paced his deck breathing deep of the crisp air and the healing sunshine.

It was the lookout at the foretop masthead who broke into the happy neutrality of his mood.

“Deck, there! If you please, sir, there’s something adrift right ahead; might just be wreckage, sir—can’t rightly tell yet.”

“Right ahead?”

“Aye aye, sir. We’re coming right up to it. Might be a raft, sir—think I can see a man—two men, perhaps, sir.”

There was an obvious explanation of the presence of a raft with men on it at sea in wartime—they might be the survivors of a battle to the death, here where the struggle for the mastery of the sea was being fought out. The Sutherland could run down to investigate without fear; there was a curious shifting sensation in Hornblower’s skull when he thought of the numerous inventors who were putting forward suggestions by which small boats could explode by charges of gunpowder against the side of a ship of the line.