He put his hand to his ear and made a gesture to indicate that he could not hear. The Spaniard repeated himself, bawling and raving and dancing on his deck until Hornblower almost came to hope that he would burst a bloodvessel. It was only a schoolboy trick, but it raised a laugh among the officers and men of the Sutherland, and that was what Hornblower was after. In these dreary times of war and at moments of tension between allies, a laugh was worth a great deal.

And then he turned back towards routine. But a new wave of depressed realization flooded over him. The relief of Cabrera had cost his ship hundreds of fathoms of line and hundreds of fathoms of cable, a score of beef casks and a whole day’s time. What oppressed Hornblower was the prospect or having to account for all this. There would be at least a dozen letters and reports to write upon the subject, and that would be only the beginning, because My Lords of the Admiralty, when the letters reached them, would certainly demand further explanations, and explanations beyond those, and further explanations still—Hornblower could see those letters stretching to the crack of doom.

Then he caught sight of his two French prisoners down on the maindeck. They were clothed and shaved and looked new men, but Hornblower found no pleasure in the sight of them. To him they represented another whole series of letters and reports which he would have to write, and he groaned at the prospect. For a moment he almost wished that the Sutherland had never sighted them, that they had drifted on to meet their death in the desolate Mediterranean. He realized at once that this was not true, and groaned at his hardheartedness while he paced the deck and breathed free air. But all the same, this work of charity was going to cost him a devil of a lot of trouble.