Chapter threeI, Dray Prescot, First Lieutenant of His Britannic Majesty’s seventy-four gun ship Roscommon stared in utter amazement at the file of Royal Marines as they answered the summons of ‘Clear for Action!’ ‘Beat to Quarters!’
The drums roared and throbbed through the ship. Men were fitting chain slings to the yards and preventer stays, rigging nets. The powder monkeys were sloshing water over the decks and strewing sand. The guns were being readied, loaded and run out, twelve pounders on the upper deck, twenty-fours on the gundeck, for Roscommon was a leaky old tub of a vessel and well past her prime. All the ordered confusion of a line of battle ship sailing into action pulsed around me; but I gawped at the red coated Marines.
Barefoot! All the Marines were barefoot just like ord
