His vivid imagination and absurd sensitiveness between them perhaps exaggerated part of the men’s hardships. The thought of the promiscuity of life below decks, where a man was allotted eighteen inches’ width in which to swing his hammock, while his wife was allowed eighteen inches next to him, all in a long row, husbands, wives, and single men, appalled him. So did the thought of women having to live on the revolting lower deck food. Possibly he made insufficient allowance for the hardening effect of long habit.

He emerged through the fore hatchway on to the maindeck a little unexpectedly. Thompson, one of the captains of the forecastle, was dealing with the new hands.

“P’raps we’ll make sailors of you,” he was saying, “and p’raps we won’t. Overside with a shot at your feet, more likely, before we sight Ushant And a waste o’ good shot, too. Come on wi’ that pump, there. Let’s see the colour o’ your hides, gaol-birds. When the cat gets at you we’ll see the colour o’ your backbones, too, you—”

“Enough of that, Thompson,” roared Hornblower, furious.

In accordance with his standing orders the new hands were being treated to rid them of vermin. Naked and shivering, they were grouped about the deck. Two of them were having their heads shorn down to the bare skin; a dozen of them, who had already submitted to this treatment (and looking strangely sickly and out of place with the prison pallor still on them) were being herded by Thompson towards the wash-deck pump which a couple of grinning hands were working. Fright was making them shiver as much as cold—not one of them, probably, had ever had a bath before, and what with the prospect, and Thompson’s bloodcurdling remarks and the strange surroundings, they were pitiful to see.