“That’s nothing to do with it,” snapped Hornblower. “They’re enlisted in the King’s service now. And I’ll have no man in irons in my ship unless he’s given me cause to order it.”

Hornblower kept his gaze from wavering towards the new hands, and steadily addressed his declamation to Price—it was more effective delivered that way, he knew, even while he despised himself for using rhetorical tricks.

“I never want to see new hands in charge of the master-at-arms again,” he continued, hotly. “They are recruits in an honourable service, with an honourable future before them. I’ll thank you to see to it another time. Now find one of the purser’s mates and see that each of these men is properly dressed in accordance with my orders.”

Normally it might be harmful to discipline to rate a subordinate officer in front of the men, but in the case of the master-at-arms Hornblower knew that little damage was being done. The men would come to hate the master-at-arms any way sooner or later—his privileges of rank and pay were given him so that he might be a whipping boy for the crew’s discontent. Hornblower could drop the rasp in his voice and address the hands directly, now.

“A man who does his duty as best he can,” he said, kindly, “has nothing to fear in this ship, and everything to hope for. Now I want to see how smart you can look in your new clothes, and with the dirt of the place you have come from washed off you. Dismiss.”

He had won over some of the poor fools, at least, he told himself. Some of the faces which had been sullen with despair were shining with hope now, after this experience of being treated as men and not as brutes—for the first time for months, if not the first time in their lives. He watched them off the gangway. Poor devils; in Hornblower’s opinion they had made a bad bargain in exchanging the gaol for the navy. But at least they represented thirty out of the two hundred and fifty additional human bodies which he needed to drag at ropes and to heave at capstan bars so as to take this old Sutherland out to sea.