With an impressive clatter of wheels the stage-coach shivered to a halt beside the inn's courtyard and its handful of weary passengers gave a sigh of relief. It was early December, the year 1773, and Falmouth, like most of Cornwall, was covered in a blanket of snow and slush. Standing in the dull afternoon light, with its four horses steaming from their hard drive, the coach seemed to have no colour, as it was coated with mud from axles to roof.

Midshipman Richard Bolitho jumped down and stood for a few moments just staring at the old, familiar inn and the weathered buildings beyond. It had been a painful ride. Only fifty-five miles from Plymouth to here, but it had taken two days. The coach had gone inland, almost into Bodmin Moor, to avoid flooding from the River Fowey, and the coachman had firmly refused to move at night because of the treacherous roads. Bolitho suspected he was more afraid of highwaymen than weather. Those gentlemen found it much easier to prey on coaches bogged down on muddy, rutted tracks than to match shots with an eagle-eyed guard on the King's highway.

He forgot the journey, the bustling ostlers who were releasing the horses from their harness, also the other passengers as they hurried toward the inn's inviting warmth, and favoured the moment.

It had been a year and two months since he had left Falmouth to join the seventy-four-gun ship of the line Gorgon at Spithead. Now she lay at Plymouth for a much-needed refit and overhaul, and he, Richard Bolitho, had come home for a well-earned leave.

Bolitho held out his hand to steady his travelling companion as he climbed down to join him in the bitter wind. Midshipman Martyn Dancer had joined Gorgon on the same day as himself, and like Bolitho was seventeen years old.

`Well, Martyn, we have arrived.'