'Preparative's coming down, sir!' called Jackson.

'Very well.'

Ramage knew for the next minutes there'd be something of a free-for-all as the fifteen ships in two columns manoeuvred to form a single line, each captain determined to get as near as possible to the head of it, using the excuse that the position conformed with the admiral's signal as being 'most convenient'.

For all the polite but determined jostling the Fleet might be manoeuvring at a Royal Review at Spithead: a topsail backed here, lower yards braced sharp up there, a jib let fly for a minute or two, and quickly the two columns of ships merged into a single line nearly two miles long. The Captain was so close to the Namur that her jibboom almost overhung the taffrail, and Ramage could imagine how the Commodore had been urging on Captain Miller, who commanded the Captain, and guess what Captain Whitshed was thinking as he looked anxiously astern from the Namur's quarterdeck.

'The Culloden's done it!' Southwick exclaimed. 'Trust Captain Troubridge!'

The Culloden had managed to lead the line, the Victory was seventh, followed by Vice-Admiral Waldegrave in the Barfleur, with Vice-Admiral Thompson and the Britannia eleventh. The Captain - hmm, thought Ramage, the Commodore's the thirteenth in the line - would it be his unlucky day? The fifteenth and last - 'the whipper-in', as Southwick called her - was the Excellent, commanded by Captain Collingwood.

Neither Ramage nor Southwick made any attempt to hide their excitement at the sight of the fifteen great ships in line of battle. Each knew he was watching one of the greatest sights of his lifetime; yet each saw it differently.

Southwick's professional eye noted whether each ship was the correct distance astern of her next ahead and that all her sails were drawing. The banks of haze into which they sailed from time to time were to him only simple problems in station keeping not, as Ramage saw them, delicate veils softening the ships' lines, giving them the same air of mystery and enigmatic beauty that real veils gave to an otherwise naked woman.

Nor would Southwick ever understand a thought passing through Ramage's mind - that the great two- and three-deckers were magnificent monuments to the muddled world in which they lived. The largest wooden objects ever made by man, and designed solely to fight the elements and kill the enemy, they were, nevertheless, among man's most beautiful creations.

A ship like the Captain was built of a couple of thousand oak trees grown in the clay soil of Sussex (from acorns, Ramage calculated, which would have been sprouting at the time Cromwell won bis victory over the King at Worcester). She'd be fastened with about thirty tons of copper nails and bolts, and ten thousand or so treenails. Such a ship's lower masts probably came from America, from the forests of Maine or New Hampshire, where pine trees of the necessary diameter were still abundant, while the topmasts and yards were shaped from trees that grew on the shores of the Baltic.

The seams of her decks and hull would be caulked and payed with ten tons of oakum and four of pitch; even the paint would weigh a couple of tons. Ten thousand yards of material would have gone into her sails. (It was ironic to think the entire weight of the Kathleen was a lot less than that of the men in the Captain's ship's company and their gear, and the standing and running rigging and blocks.)

Yet the beauty of these great ships was similar to the beauty of a woman: there was no single thing that made them beautiful: it was the total effect of many, like the tiny individual marble chips that made up a mosaic. And the beauty of even a particular part was hard to define - the curves of a woman's lips might differ only slightly from her sister's, while the sweep of one ship's sheer varied only a fraction from another's. And yet, although the tiny differences defied description or explanation, one woman's mouth had the beauty her sister's lacked; one ship had a pleasing sheer and the other had not.

Each ship sat in the water with the same elegant yet solid, four-square sense of belonging to the sea as an Elizabethan mansion house belonged on a gently sloping hill cradled among beech trees. Each hull had the symmetry of Grecian statuary - nowhere did the eye catch a straight line or harsh curve: from the end of the jibboom one's glance travelled quite naturally down to the fo'c'sle and on to the waist and then up again to the taffrail, carried along easily by the sweeping sheer. The bow was bluff - yet the cutwater and the elegant beakhead and figurehead made it comely, not plump; although the stern was square the transom itself raked aft with the studied elegance of a cavalry officer's shako.

From this distance the stout masts, too, seemed slim and rakish, and it was hard to believe a mainmast was three feet in diameter at the step, and from the waterline to the main-topgallant truck was more than 180 feet. The forty or so tons of rope for the rigging made an ugly pile of coils in the dockyard, but when fitted aloft to the masts and yards it took on the tracery of Flanders lace.

Yet however beautiful and powerful were the ships, they could fight only as well as the men in them. In that case, he thought, glancing along the line, the onus was now on the men because most of the ships had long since proved themselves in battle.

The Culloden, leading the line, had been with Howe at the Glorious First of June three years ago, when six French sail of the line had been captured and a seventh sunk. The third in the line, the Prince George, was with Admiral Keppel in 1778 when he fought Comte d'Orvilliers' fleet off Ushant, and with Rodney off the Saints in 1782, when five French sail of the line were captured. The Orion, fourth in the line, fought with Howe on the Glorious First of June. The sixth was also one of the newest as far as Ramage could remember - the Colossus had been launched within the past three years, while her next astern, the Victory, was well over thirty years old and had been Keppel's flagship at Ushant. The Barfleur was Admiral's Hood's flagship in Rodney's action, while the Egmont had been with Keppel at Ushant and in Admiral Hotham's action off Genoa a couple of years ago, when Captain Nelson in the Agamemnon had played a leading part in the capture of the Ça Ira and Censeur.

She was followed by the Britannia, Hotham's flagship at the time, while the Namur had been with Rodney. The Captain had been badly cut up in Hotham's action and was followed by the Diadem, which had been with her. And the little Kathleen, Ramage thought wryly - well, she'd ventured a lot in the past few weeks, even if she hadn't achieved much ...

Fifteen ships. Yet with the French Fleet at Brest probably waiting for the Spanish to join them for an attempt at invasion, the whole safety of England depended not only on the fighting ability of each of those ships but on the tactical ability of one man, Sir John Jervis. If he made one bad mistake this afternoon he might lose the war; one bad mistake leading to his defeat would leave the Channel an open highway for a Franco-Spanish armada, for the Admiralty wouldn't be able to concentrate enough ships in time to do more than harry them.

One man, one mistake: it was a heavy responsibility. Yet he wondered if it bothered Sir John. The old man was this very moment making the first moves in his task of destroying Cordoba's fleet simply because it was a duty for which a lifetime's training had prepared him. Ramage remembered his own father would want to hear about every move made in the battle and, knowing he would not be able to trust his memory, sent a man below to fetch a pad and pencil. Just as he sketched in the positions of the two Fleets Southwick asked: 'What d'you make of the Dons, sir?'