He saw the first hint of light on the crests, the spray leaping away on either quarter as the dawn began to roll down from the horizon.

Bolitho stood up and leaned his hands on the sill to stare more closely at the sea's face.

He recalled as if it were yesterday an admiral breaking the painful truth to him, when he had protested about the only appointment he could beg from the Admiralty after recovering from his terrible fever.

"You were a frigate captain, Bolitho…" Twelve years ago, maybe more.

Eventually he had been given the old Hyperion, and then probably only because of the bloody revolution in France and the war which had followed it, and which had raged almost without respite until this very day.

And yet Hyperion was the one ship which was to change his life. Many had doubted his judgment when he had pleaded for the old seventy-four as his last flagship. From captain to viceadmiral; it had seemed the right choice. The only choice.

She had gone down last October, leading Bolitho's squadron in the Mediterranean against a much more powerful force of Spanish ships under the command of an old enemy, Almirante Don Alberto Casares. It had been a desperate battle by any standards, and the outcome had never been certain from the first broadsides.

And yet, impossibly, they had beaten the Dons, and had even taken some prizes back to Gibraltar.

But the old Hyperion had given everything she had, and could offer no further resistance. She was thirty-three years old when the great ninety-gun San Mateo had poured the last broadside into her. Apart from a short period as a mastless stores hulk, she had sailed and fought in every sea where the flag was challenged. Some rot in her frames and timbers, deep down in her worn hull, undiscovered by any dockyard, had finally betrayed her.

In spite of everything Bolitho had witnessed and endured during a lifetime at sea, it was still too hard to accept that she was gone.