Gonzalo: I have great comfort from this fellow. Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his Complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging! Make the rope of his destiny Our cable, for our own doth little advantage.

If he be not born to be hanged, our case Is miserable.

– The Tempest, Act I, Scene 1

William Shakespeare

Hoy, the boat!" Mr. Midshipman Larkin cried his challenge to the approaching civilian cutter, though he had known who its passengers were as soon as they had stepped down into it on the distant quay ten minutes earlier; had been awaiting those passengers' return for at least the last two hours past.

"Proteus!" the Mulatto bow man shouted back, seated on the very tip of the cutter's bows, legs dangling to either side with a brass-fitted gaff staff across his lap with which to hook onto the chains. He shot one hand in the air for a moment, showing four fingers, proving that a captain was aboard.

"Come alongside, aye!" Mr. Larkin shouted back, then paced over to join the others of the side-party assembled to salute that officer's arrival back aboard. Larkin was a thatch-haired, ill-featured lout of a lad, all out at elbows and knees in his secondhand uniform, and that didn't even take into consideration the growing he'd done since signing ship's articles over a year before. Though it was a useless endeavour, he twitched and tugged his coat, waist-coat, and neck-stock into better order, shifted the hang of his shoddy dirk, and took a second to remove his battered, cocked hat and swipe his unruly hair with a "Welsh comb," that is to say, with his fingers.