His older brother, Hugh, was senior midshipman in a frigate in the Mediterranean. The house had seemed quiet and very still after a ship of the line. His new appointment had been delivered on his sixteenth birthday. To proceed with all despatch to His Britannic Majesty's Ship Gorgon at Spithead, which under the command of Captain Beves Conway was re-commissioning for duty in the King's name. His mother had tried to hide her dismay. His sisters had laughed and cried as the fancy took them. When he had made his way to board the Falmouth coach he had seen the farm workers nod to him as he had passed. But no show of surprise. For many, many years Bolithos had left the grey house to join one ship or another. Some of them had never returned. And now it was all beginning again for Richard Bolitho. He had vowed that there were mistakes he would never repeat, some lessons he would remember above all else. A midshipman was neither fish nor fowl. He stood between the lieutenants and the true backbone of any vessel, the warrant officers.

At one end of the ship, aloof and unreachable like some sort of god, was the captain. Above, around and beyond the overcrowded midshipmen's berth were the ship's company. Seamen and marines, volunteers and pressed men alike, packed together between decks, yet at all times separated by status and experience. Harsh discipline was the rule rather than the exception, danger and death from working the ship in all weathers were too commonplace to mention. When landsmen saw a King's ship working clear of the shore, her yards alive with sailors and freshly set sails, when they heard the bang of gun-salutes, the lusty voices of those at the capstan joining in a well-tried shanty, they knew nothing of that other world within the deep hull. Which was probably just as well. 'Anyone sitting here?' Bolitho came out of his thoughts and looked up. Another midshipman, fair-haired and blue-eyed, was smiling at him.