‘Down helm, as close as she’ll lie, Poulden,’ Kydd cracked out. Teazer surged nobly up to the wind. The frigate, taken by surprise, was forced to conform also. They’d established a precious lead on the larger ship.

It was taking them in a hard beat back out into the Atlantic but it couldn’t be helped. Kydd bit his lip. If they were overcome, Napoleon’s newspapers would make much of one of Britain’s famed men-o’-war humbled, captured in glorious combat on the high seas and paraded into port for all to see, with no account taken of the odds. The frigate’s captain would be well rewarded by his new emperor.

The frigate, trailing by barely a couple of hundred yards, had only to make up the distance and the guns would speak once more. At the moment the gap stayed. And the privateer had not fled: it had curved around and was beating resolutely after them. Then Kydd realised they were working together.

Straining every nerve his little ship thrashed away over the miles, out into the wastes of ocean, in a desperate race for life. Speed was being dissipated with the loss of wind through the rents in the sails but it would be suicide to pause to bend on new.

Slowly the privateer overhauled Teazer and took position on her defenceless quarter, confident she could not break off to deal with it.

Meanwhile Purchet, watching the frigate, said in a low voice, ‘She’s fore-reaching on us.’ Out in the open seas the broad combers that rode on the lazy swell were meeting Teazer’s bow in solid explosions of white, each one a tiny brake on their progress, while the larger frigate was throwing them aside with ease.

Kydd felt the creeping chill of doubt. The privateer was easing closer under their lee, the masses of men it carried clearly visible. It had few guns – but on a slide on its foredeck there was a twelve-pounder, double the size of Teazer’s biggest carriage gun. Suddenly this crashed out with a heavy ball low over her quarterdeck. The vicious wind of its passage made Kydd stagger.