'Well, Mr Hill,' Drinkwater straightened from his sextant, 'what do we make it?' Drinkwater saw Hill bending over his quadrant, his lips muttering. A frown puckered his forehead, something seemed to be wrong with the master's instrument.

To avoid causing Hill embarrassment Drinkwater turned to the senior of the midshipmen: 'Mr Walmsley?'

Midshipman Lord Walmsley cast a sideways look at the master, swallowed and answered. 'Er, thirty-nine degrees, twenty-six minutes, sir.'

'Poppy cock, Mr Walmsley. Mr Frey?'

'Thirty-nine degrees six minutes, sir.' Drinkwater grunted. That was within a minute of his own observation.

'Mr Q?'

'And a half, sir.'

The two master's mates and Midshipman the Honourable Alexander Glencross agreed within a couple of minutes. Drinkwater turned to Mr Hill: 'Well, Mr Hill?'

Hill was frowning. 'I have the same as Lord Walmsley, sir.' His voice was puzzled and Drinkwater looked quickly at his lordship who had already moved his index arm and was lowering his instrument back into the box between his feet. It suddenly occurred to Drinkwater what had happened. Hill habitually muttered his altitude as he read it off the scale and Walmsley had persistently overheard and copied him. Yesterday, without Quilhampton and Drinkwater, Hill would have believed his own observation, apparently corroborated by Walmsley, and dismissed those of his juniors as inaccurate.

Drinkwater made a quick calculation. By adding the sum of the corrections for parallax, the sun's semi-diameter and refraction, then taking the result from a right angle to produce the true zenith distance, he was very close to their latitude. They were almost upon the equinox so the effect of the sun's declination was not very large and there would be a discrepancy in their latitudes of some twenty miles. Hill's altitude would put them twenty miles south, where they had thought they were yesterday.