So, Thermopylae still cruised through the rest of October and well into November, her stores slowly diminishing, and the North Sea, ever a beast, growing colder and windier, and the winter winds howling over the many wide and shallow banks to stir up truly immense seas in bilious grey-green rollers, white-decked and shattering alongside in icy sheets of spray.

They've forgotten we're here, Lewrie glumly thought one afternoon as his crewmen struggled to strike top-masts and reef in, gasket and lower upper yards almost to "bare poles"; or, that bastard Nepean does know, and means t'punish me past Epiphany!

"Drogue is ready, sir," Lt. Farley reported, looking half like a drowned rat in his sodden tarpaulins.

"See to its deploying, Mister Farley," Lewrie ordered, even more of a drowned rat in a camphor-and-rotting-hide reek of his own, for it was so chilly he'd had to dig out some of his furs from the solo dash into the Baltic weeks before the Battle of Copenhagen.

The frigate had thrashed out fifteen miles to seaward from the shoals of the Dutch coast before the gale had turned into a shrieking Nor'westerly storm, against which Thermopylae could make no progress. Their only choice was to lie-to under try-sails and a thrice-reefed main tops'l, letting out a canvas sea-anchor to check her inexorable drift sternward towards those sand and mud shoals 'til the storm blew itself out… and pray that it did before they were run aground and wrecked. Pray most earnestly!

"The bare yards will act like sails," Lt. Farley hopefully said, peering upward. "'Gainst a wind like this, well… "

"Quite so, Mister Farley," Lewrie replied, though still wondering if Sir Evan Nepean, the long-time First Secretary to Admiralty (no fan of his) who had served the former First Lord, the Earl Spencer, and now served Admiral Lord St. Vincent, "Old Jarvy," might not wish that he come a