But men volunteer for perceived goals and these resented being taken advantage of even more than the pressed men. The latter were made up of the victims of the Impress Service, the Quota-men and the Lord Mayor's men, the dregs of debtors' prisons and the hedge-sleeping vagrants that armed parties of officers and seamen had discovered in sweeps made along the ague-plagued coast of Essex, whence Drinkwater had sent his boats. In successive waves these men had made up the deficiencies in number that death and an increase in tonnage had made necessary to man the enlarged complements of Drinkwater's successive ships. What to those eager volunteers had been thought of as a single commission, an Arctic voyage with a bounty at its conclusion, had not yet ended.

The people were divided, the one-time volunteers forming a slowly contracting minority, apt to regard itself as an elite, and suffering from the poor conditions of a Royal Navy on a wartime footing. Earlier that year in the Baltic their mood had become ugly. Lieutenant Quilhampton had suppressed an incipient mutiny by the force of his personality alone, but the news of it had made all the officers wary, heightening the tensions in the ship and drawing again those sharp social distinctions that blurred easily in a happy ship. Inconsequential things assumed new importance. The rivalry between seamen and marines coalesced into something less friendly, more suspicious; and the twinkle of the marines' bayonets lost its ceremonial glitter, fencing the vulnerable minority of the officers from the murmurs of the berth-deck.

For his own part Drinkwater had, that summer, been driven to supplementing the men's pay by a bounty of his own, a circumstance which had imperilled his domestic finances, leaving his wife and dependants at a disadvantage and a prey to the fiscal inroads of inflation and income tax.

Drinkwater scraped his face, nicking his cheek as Patrician staggered into another heavy sea.