The stiff offshore wind, which had backed slightly to the northwest during the day, swept across New York 's naval anchorage, bringing no release from the chilling cold and the threat of more snow.

Tugging heavily at her anchor cables, His Britannic Majesty's Ship Trojan of eighty guns might appear to a landsman's unpractised eye as indifferent to both wind and water. But to the men who continued with their work about her decks, or high above them on the slippery yards and rigging, her swaying motion made her anything but that.

It was March 1777, but to Lieutenant Richard Bolitho, officer of the afternoon watch, it felt like midwinter. It will be dark early, he thought, and the ship's boats would have to be checked, their moorings doubly secured before night closed in completely.

He shivered, not so much because of the cold, but because he knew there would be little relief from it once he was allowed to go below. For despite her massive size and armament, the Trojan, a two-decked ship of the line, whose complement of six hundred and fifty officers, seamen and marines lived out their lives within her fat hull, had no more than the galley fires and bodywarmth to sustain them, no matter what the elements might do.

Bolitho raised his telescope and trained it towards the fading waterfront. As the lens passed over other anchored ships of the line, frigates and the general clutter of small supporting craft he found time to wonder at the change. It had been just last summer when Trojan, in company with a great fleet of one hundred and thirty ships, had anchored here, off Staten Island. After the shock of the actual revolution within the American colonies, the occupation of New York and Philadelphia with such a show of force had seemed to those involved as a start on the way back, a compromise.