Liam Desmond on his uillean lap-pipes, the ship's fiddler, and a Marine fifer began to play a semi-lively old hymn. Unfortunately for Lewrie's already-fretful nerves, he recognised the title as "I Want a Principle." Damned if he didn't, though he might have left it a tad late!

He pursed his lips, frowned heavily, and headed below and aft. Aspinall was still tending to those in need of his coffee-pot; Lewrie tossed off his own boat cloak, hat, and undid his coat, then sat down at his desk and dug his personal log out of the centre drawer, dipped one of his precious steel-nibbed (captured) French pens in the ink, and noted the time and date of Soundings, of shaping a new course; catching up on what the half-a-gale had carried away, what sails had split, and had to be replaced, which Mr. Rayne, their Sailmaker, thought he could repair, and what the cost in materials would be when the time came to pay Proteus off in a home dockyard, the war with France ended…

"… that saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

'twas blind, but now, I see!"

Mister Winwood has a sense of humour? Lewrie was forced to gawp. Two years or more, and the Sailing Master couldn't seem to catch even the broadest jape… now this waggish witticism? For the suggestion for a thanksgiving hymn surely had been his. Lewrie knew the words as a poem written by a former Liverpool slave-ship captain, John Newton, who had been shipwrecked and enslaved himself on the African coast; the tune, though, sounded suspiciously close to "Nottingham Ale," not a ditty he'd think popular with the fervently religious.*

Apt, though, he decided; now we know where we are. He could understand British tars singing so lustily, this close to home, but his "Free Black volunteers," too?

The root of his troubles, those "volunteers," a round dozen of them, who'd really been encouraged to meet his ship's boats one night in Portland Bight on