Chapter twoI, Dray Prescot, First Lieutenant of his Britannic Majesty’s seventy-four gun ship Rockingham glared with malignant helpless fury upon the destruction of my ship. Rockingham was doomed. Immense seas, darkly green bearded with foam, crashed upon her, all her masts were gone by the board, her hull was breaking up and the scraps of humanity aboard were being tossed about, with the cruel inhumanity of an indifferent fate.
Down off our lee the coast of West Africa waited menacingly.
Sheets of water cascaded inboard, hurling the detritus of battle into the scuppers. The sheer prodigious volume of noise numbed a man’s senses. Up and down we went and around and around, the darkness of hell’s gates gathered above us and the end could not be far off.
The action we had just fought — and
