Force, based on Deception Island, five hundred miles south of the southernmost tip of South America, had been to guard the sea passage between the Pacific Ocean and the South

Atlantic-the Drake Passage. It was the favourite route for German-armed merchant raiders, U-boats and Japanese submarines. They chose it because its fog-bound waters, continually lashed by gales, made it impossible to find a ship, even if you were within five miles of it. I knew the Drake Passage -only too well. The name sang in my mind like a gale through the futtock shrouds of an old clipper. It was maybe fifteen years since I had last seen its wild waters from the bridge of my small destroyer, but its screaming hell-fiends of wind and ice still bit into my memory. Sailhardy's tenseness this quiet, sunny afternoon on the fringes of the wild ocean we had once guarded was a living memory, too, of the inborn sea-vigilance of a Tristan islander. Man against the sea. In these Southern waters we both knew that the cards were stacked against the man.

I assumed my captain's voice. " Leading Torpedoman Sailhardy.. ." I couldn't help myself. I grinned at him again. His eyes were as far away as the horizon. " Relax," I said: " You look as if you were trying to see all the way to the South Pole."

" I wish I could," he said. " Then I'd know what sort of a gale is due to hit us."

I gestured towards the quiet scene. The big island lay some miles astern of the boat, and two smaller ones were visible above the horizon ahead. They made a triangle with unequal sides roughly ten and twenty miles long. The big island was closest to us.

" Nothing is going to hit us," I said lazily. " Nothing at all." Sailhardy glanced back at the big island, his home, as if to take strength from its sombre cliffs.