cropper; Nepean had despised him more than cold, boiled mutton for years, and Lewrie's acquittal at King's Bench for the crime of stealing a dozen Black Jamaican field slaves to man his old ship must have set Nepean's teeth grinding in frustration. Could Nepean be that petty? Lewrie asked himself; for damned sure, I certainly could be!

"Full 'trick' for the Quartermasters on the helm, sir," Lewrie snapped as the buoyed sea-anchor was paid out over the bows. "Trouble always seems t'come with inattention… when fresh hands take over."

"Very good, sir."

The sea-anchor was a modern one, a large canvas cone held open with an iron barrel hoop worthy of the largest water butt, weighted to keep it under the surface with a light iron boat anchor, at the end of an hundred-fathom cable of four-inch manila. As the cable was let out it felt ineffective for the longest time, 'til the painted buoy bobbed up about one hundred yards ahead of the bows, and the cable went taut, hauling Thermopylae's bows closer to windward.

"Brace yards close-hauled to weather on the larboard tack, Mister Farley," Lewrie ordered, his left hand shoved into the pocket of his fur parka… with his fingers secretly crossed. He had never in his naval career been reduced to using bare yards as substitutes for proper sails, so it was an experiment to him-a life-or-death experiment! Pray God my sham doesn't catch up with me… with us! Lewrie silently wished, for he had never been one of those gladsome sailors who revelled in heavy weather, had never become so thoroughly salted as a tarry-handed "tarpaulin man" a fearful crew should look to as their sure and certain hope of salvation. In 1793, when the war with France had begun, after four idle years ashore playing an equal sham of being a farmer, his first daunting sight of HMS Cockerel's intricate rigging had made Lewrie quail and had left him gawping and grasping for even the proper terms to call them, and many hours off-watch in his little dog's-box cabin poring in secret over his tattered copy of Falconer's Marine Dictionary and other beginners' guides, to keep from being revealed as an utter fraud, and a cack-handed, cunny-thumbed dangerous lubber!