'What name?'

'Can't rightly pronounce it, sir, but summat like Newstra lady of Antigua. I know it was "Antigua" 'cos I thought of English Harbour.'

"Was it Nuestra Senora de Antigua!' The tone of Ramage's voice and his correct pronunciation made the seaman stare at him. 'Cor, sir - then this is the privateer what murdered all them in the Tranquil!' Ramage nodded. A French privateer with a Spanish name and probably commanded by Adolphe Brune, who had described himself as 'chief of the privateers' in the letter to van Someren demanding Amsterdam's surrender. If Brune survives mis affair in Curacao, Ramage vowed, hell end up dangling on a noose from one of the gibbets on the Palisades at Port Royal.

By five o'clock that evening the gig, launch and pinnace were back alongside the Calypso, secured to the boat boom. More than sixty French prisoners from the ten privateers - more than ten times the number Ramage had expected - had been ferried on shore and locked up in the town jail. Because Amsterdam was a large port and accustomed to acting as the forcible host to crowds of drunken and rioting seamen, the jail was a large stone building, and the Governor assured Ramage that the jailers were quite capable of dealing with up to a hundred prisoners without the cells seeming crowded.

The capture of the rest of the privateers without a shot being fired had been luck: Ramage realized that none of the Frenchmen in the remaining eight had seen the shot smashing the cutter to pieces; the whole action had been hidden by the sheer bulk of Brune's schooner and the ketch. They had heard a carronade and a 6 - pounder each fire once, apparently without effect on the British, and the nearest of them had heard a single pistol shot, and then the French flag had come down at the run on board the Nuestra Senora. That had been enough to make each of them surrender immediately one of the Calypso's boats came alongside.

Now the ten privateers were still at anchor in Amsterdam, but on board each one were two Dutch soldiers who had simple orders: if any French came into sight on the quays and looked as though they might board, they were to light the slow matches leading.to the magazines and escape in the rowing boats which had been commandeered from local fishermen. The fishermen had made no protest at losing their boats temporarily; they had lost their appetite for fishing.

Bowen was still busy patching up the wounded. Three of the cutter's crew had been badly cut and bruised by splinters but were in no danger; two were missing and obviously killed and one man, with no mark on him, was just cold and trembling, unable to walk or talk. Kenton was once again his lively self but swearing he would always wear shoes, not knee - length boots, on any further boat operations. If he had to swim again, he declared, he could kick off shoes, but his boots had acted like ballast An otherwise sympathetic Aitken had agreed with the problem of boots but warned Kenton against kicking off the shoes, pointing out that: 'Ye never know but y' might have to walk a long way back to the ship.' His Scots accent made 'ship' sound like 'sheep', and Kenton had gone off muttering that he was a sailor, not a shepherd.

Southwick and Aitken had watched the action through their telescopes and seen Ramage momentarily draped over the muzzle of the carronade and knew it must be on the verge of firing. The master hid his feelings with the comment to Ramage that Then I remembered you were wearing your oldest uniform and had left behind the new sword the Marchesa gave you, so only the pistols would be lost' For a moment Aitken had been shocked, then he had seen Ramage's grin and had joined in with: 'Aye, I thought for a minute or two I'd be moving up a deck. I find my present cabin both small and hot in this weather .. .'

Then, with Southwick's assurance that he had no wish to spend the evening on shore and Bowen declaring he would not leave his patients, Ramage and his officers went below to prepare themselves for dinner with the Governor. Ramage was worn out, but he could think of no possible excuse to avoid at least an hour or two at Government House. After going below to chat with the wounded men - and finding them cheerful but chagrined, complaining bitterly that before they could 'get a swing' at the French they found themselves swimming - he went to his cabin, let Silkin pull off his boots (Kenton's vow about shoes made sense: apart from anything else the hot decks and walking had swollen his feet so much that pulling off his boots needed as much effort - or so it seemed - as pulling off his feet), and then sat back for ten minutes, trying to relax.

Relaxing, everyone told him, was a very fine thing. Relax for ten minutes, banish all worrisome thoughts from your head, and at the end of it you were as refreshed as a flower garden after a summer shower. It probably worked for some people but it depended on relaxing in the first place. If you could not relax, then you felt (and probably looked) like a flower garden after a long drought His feet throbbed as though someone was pounding them with dubs; his eyes were sore from the day's scorching sun; his hands were not visibly trembling but like his knees they gave that impression. If he tried to rest his mind for a moment - the first stage, as it were, to relaxing - he felt the muzzle of that carronade pressing against his belly, the iron barrel warm to his hands from the heat of the sun, and hunched there, unbalanced and frightened, he could smell the garlic, the Stockholm tar, the bilges and the sheer stink of unwashed French seamen. Then once again he heard, almost felt, mat sharp metallic click of the gun's second captain cocking the lock, and he could see the gun captain's eyes staring at him, startled and momentarily paralysed by his sudden appearance at the port. The bloodshot eyes were close together, and seemed slightly out of focus, and afterwards he had noticed that the corpse reeked of wine. Drink had slowed the Frenchman's reactions by - well, perhaps only a couple of seconds, but just long enough for Ramage to cock and fire his pistol; one of the two pistols given him by Gianna and which she had thought plain, preferring a far more ornate pair.

Well, he had not been blown in half by an enemy carronade; young Kenton had not had his head knocked off by the 6 - pounder shot that smashed up the cutter. There was, therefore, no more point in thinking about it. Think instead of - well, the privateers were captured, which would please old Foxey - Foote. The Admiral's orders did not actually say the privateers in Curacao were to be captured; from memory the orders were in fact rather vague about what was to be done. Anyway, all ten of them were captured and could be sunk, burned1'or blown up if necessary in minutes.

The French prisoners had sworn that those ten were the only ones using the Dutch islands of Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire as a temporary base, so any new arrivals would be ships that came in by chance. Ramage had been interested to discover that they had not been expecting La Perle, so her captain's story was probably true.

Suddenly he sat upright in the chair, then stood up and went over to his desk, unlocking a drawer and taking out his orders from Admiral Foxe-Foote. Yes, they were vague about exactly what he was to do about the privateers based on Curacao, but they were quite clear on one point which had just occurred to him with the suddenness of a sword thrust: as soon as he had dealt with them he was to return to Port Royal. So, if Foxey - Foote was liverish when the Calypso finally returned, he could sermonize and wax wrathful because Ramage had paused to take the surrender of an island. Islands, after all, yielded no prize money, nothing from which a commander-in-chief could take his eighths. Ten privateers, on the other hand, undamaged and requiring only the sails hoisting up from below and bending on ...