Drinkwater knew it was pointless to resist. At the mention of his name he had risen unsteadily to his feet. He looked dumbly round at the indicated sea chest, his legs shaking but refusing to move. Then a cruel fate made Cyclops lurch and the tableau dissolved, Drinkwater was thrown across the chest by the forces of nature. With an unnatural eagerness Morris flung himself on Drinkwater, threw aside the blue cloth coat-tails and, inserting his fingers in the waistband of Drinkwater's trousers, bared his victim's buttocks to an accompaniment of tearing calico. It was this act more than the six brutal stripes that Morris laid on his posterior that burnt itself into Drinkwater's memory. For his mother had laboured on those trousers, her arthritic fingers carefully passing the needle, the tears filling her eyes at the prospect of parting with her elder son. Somehow, with the resilience of youth, Drinkwater survived that passage to Spithead. Despite the pain in his buttocks he had been forced to learn much about the details of handling a ship under sail, for the westerly gale compelled the frigate to wear and wear again in a hard, ruthless fight to windward and it was the second week in October 1779 before she brought to her anchor in St Helen's Roads under the lee of Bembridge.

Hardly had Cyclops gathered sternway, her main topsail aback, and the cable gone rumbling through the hawse than the third lieutenant was calling away the captain's gig. Morris acted as the gig's coxswain. He ordered Drinkwater to the bow where a grinning seaman handed the youth a boat-hook. The gig bobbed alongside the wooden wales of the frigate's side, the hook lodged in the mainchains. Above him, but unseen, Drinkwater could hear the thumping of the marines' boots as they fell in at the entry port. Then came the twittering of the pipes. He looked up. At the entry port, fingers to his hat, stood Captain Hope.