He wrote the final row of figures, 20° 01' 50". And that, he knew without looking it up, was within thirty miles of the latitude of Trinidade.

A cast of the log half an hour ago had given just over six knots and they were able to lay the course. By five o'clock they might be there; it should be in sight at the latest in an hour or two - if it was as high as reported and the chronometer was anywhere near passing for correct.

Southwick walked across the quarterdeck and reported to Ramage, who grimaced and nodded ahead. 'A thousand or fifteen hundred feet high? We should be seeing it by now.'

'It's hazier than it looks, sir,' Southwick said confidently. 'Had you given any thought about who might ...'

'All right, all right, pass the word through the bosun. Though why I should always pay up a guinea to the first man to sight such a place, I don't know!'

'It's the trickiest landfall we've ever made, sir. The Atlantic is 2,500 miles wide here, from Trinidade to the nearest tip of West Africa, and we're looking for somewhere two or three miles long.'

'That's a fine argument to impress old ladies,' Ramage said unsympathetically, 'and it'd impress me if I thought Trinidade could lie anywhere along that gap of 2,500 miles. But you have a quadrant, almanac, tables and a chronometer that allow you to be rather more precise.'

'Well, yes sir,' Southwick agreed and added with a grin, 'but I can't make it seem too easy!'

He walked back to the binnacle to inspect the calculations made by the two young lieutenants and midshipman.

He looked first at Orsini's slate and his brow furrowed. 'I can assure you, Mr Orsini, that the Calypso is about seven hundred and fifty miles from Rio de Janeiro; in other words, about four-fifths of the way across the South Atlantic between the Cape of Good Hope and South America, not far from the tropic of Capricorn. But you, Mr Orsini, seem to be not only north of the Equator, almost on the far side of the Torrid Zone, but close to the Cape Verde Islands, which the rest of us left thousands of miles away some weeks ago...'

Orsini, his face crimson, hurriedly rubbed out some writing on his slate and corrected it. 'The latitude is north, not south. I'm sorry, I mean, I should have named it south, not north.'

Southwick grumbled and picked up Martin's slate. He put it down again. 'Lieutenant Martin has made a mathematical discovery of note: three and two make four. Well, the rest of us will continue to struggle along with five. And Mr Kenton? Ah, the method of calculation is correct, but the original altitude is wrong. Check your sextant, Mr Kenton; I suspect you have knocked it and it now has an error.'

Ramage had listened to this daily routine for weeks and it varied little: Orsini made some enormous mistake that was due to lack of interest in mathematics; Martin made some silly mistake; and Kenton worked out the sight correctly but had been careless with his sextant. It was almost new, and one of the few sextants on board: Southwick and Aitken used quadrants.

Yet Southwick was right to keep nagging these young officers. One of them might be in command of a prize one day when war broke out again and responsible for navigating her thousands of miles to port, or even to a rendezvous at a place like Trinidade . . .

The lookout's hail came at exactly three o'clock in the afternoon; his shout was partly drowned as six bells was being struck.

There was, he called, what might be only a cloud on the horizon but it was a different shape from the trade wind clouds and seemed to be lying athwart their course.

An excited Orsini asked 'May I, sir?' and, when Ramage nodded, grabbed a telescope and raced up the shrouds, climbing the ratlines as fast as any topman.

He braced himself beside the lookout and glanced ahead as he pulled open the telescope. Low on the horizon there was something the colour of a fading bruise.

He held up the telescope, balancing against the Calypso's roll and focused his eye in the circle of glass. It was land. As the lookout had said, it was athwart the Calypso's course, probably lying northwest and southeast. Low at each end and rising towards the middle. There were some peaks in the centre of the island - he counted four which seemed the same height and a fifth quite a bit lower. It sounded like Trinidade, but where was Martin Vaz Rocks?

'Deck there!' he hailed. 'It's land lying across our course and I can distinguish five peaks in the centre part of the island.'

'How far?' Aitken shouted.

'Difficult to say, sir; there's nothing to use as a scale. Fifteen miles, I reckon; I think haze must have been hiding it, then the wind cleared it away.'

Paolo felt like saying that even at this distance it looked like an island off Tuscany; cliffs with rounded hills just inland. Mr Ramage would understand - but so many islands in the West Indies looked like Tuscany, too, and neither of them wanted to be reminded that it would be months before they were back in England and receiving news of Aunt Gianna.

Down on deck Aitken and Ramage, using the only two other telescopes, sighted the island at the same moment.

'I don't know what happened to Martin Vaz,' Ramage said, 'but that must be Trinidade. We'll pass round the southern end to the lee side, so that we can run down the west coast.'

'Supposing we don't find an anchorage, sir?'

'Then we'll be wasting our time, because the whole reason for taking the island will be gone.'

What Ramage did not say was that he had been thinking a great deal about that very point, which was not covered by his orders. He knew that the Admiralty's only interest in Trinidade was as a base, and a base meant a safe bay in which ships could anchor, and with fresh water available on shore, from a river or wells. It had not occurred to their Lordships that there might be neither, although, to be fair, many ships had visited the island in the last hundred years. Presumably if they had found neither anchorage nor water they would have reported the fact: no one looked for either at Martin Vaz.

But supposing . . . Well, he could do one of two things: first he could say: 'This island is no use to anyone' (after having put landing parties on shore to be certain about water) and return to the United Kingdom, calling in at one of the South American ports for water before crossing the Doldrums again. That would mean the Calypso would stay less than a week.

The alternative was to do a survey of the island anyway, plant the vegetables on the basis that although there was no river there was sufficient rain, and make soundings so that their Lordships at least had a record of the island, even if it was no good to them. That would take a couple of months, perhaps longer, and he might return to England to find that their Lordships considered he had wasted their time and his own.

Although Aitken had just raised the point. Ramage had made up his mind three or four weeks ago, when he first thought of the possibilities: he would survey, sound and plant, even if the Calypso could not anchor and had to back and fill in the lee of the island for as long as it took. Two months backing and filling ... if he was more sure of the situation in Rio it would have been worth landing a survey and planting party on the island, leaving them with a couple of boats, and taking the Calypso on a visit to Rio - or even up to Bahia, which was nearer - where he could also provision and water.

As he looked over the quarterdeck rail Ramage saw the surveyors and draughtsmen standing on top of the hammock nettings, eager for a sight of the island that would comprise their world for several weeks. Indeed, the Calypso at the moment looked far removed from a ship of war.

There were ten or eleven of Wilkins's canvases lodged in various places on deck, to help the oil paints to dry, and his new easel was by the mainmast with a canvas clipped to it, so several square yards of deck looked like an artist's studio.