With her topsails shivering to the regular crash of her eleven-gun salute to the commodore, His Britannic Majesty’s frigate Tempest continued slowly across the harbour. The glare on the surface was so fierce that it was painful to look much beyond the rigging or gangways.

Richard Bolitho stood aft at the quarterdeck rail, his hands locked loosely behind his back, trying to appear relaxed despite all the usual tensions of entering an unfamiliar anchorage.

How still it was. He glanced along his ship, wondering how she would appear to the commodore. He had taken command of Tempest in Bombay when she had been commissioned for the Navy, just two years ago.

The thought of the actual date made him smile, changing his grave expression to one of youthfulness. For it had been his birthday, as it was today. On this, the 7th of October, 1789, after making one more in a countless line of forgotten landfalls, Richard Bolitho of Falmouth in the County of Cornwall was thirty-three years old.

He glanced quickly to the other side of the deck where Thomas Herrick, the first lieutenant, and his best friend, was peering beneath the shade of one hand while he studied the set of the braced yards and the shortened shapes of the bare-backed topmen. He wondered if Herrick had remembered. Bolitho hoped not. In these waters, with week following week of disagreeable climate and persistent calms, you were all too conscious of the passing of time.

“ ’Bout five minutes now, sir.”

“Very well, Mr Lakey.”

Bolitho did not have to look round. In the two years of his command in Tempest he knew the voice and temperament of all those who had served with him for most of the period. Tobias Lakey was the lean, taciturn sailing master. Born and raised in the spartan reality of the Scilly Isles off the tip of Bolitho’s own Cornwall, he had gone to sea at the age of eight. He was about forty now. In all those years, in every sort of vessel from fishing boat to a ship of the line, there was little of the sea’s ways he had still to learn.