‘A gentle peppering,’ suggests Cutlip, ‘might clarify their senses, sir.’

‘Agreed, but,’ Penhaligon addresses the marines, ‘don’t kill them, men.’

‘Aye, sir,’ reply the marines, as they prepare their rifles.

Cutlip waits until the gap is closed to fifty yards. ‘Fire, lads!’

Splinters fly off the guard-boat’s stanchion; the sea shatters into spray.

One inspector crouches; his colleague dives into the deck-house. Two oarsmen jump to their positions and haul the boat out of the Phoebus’s path – and not before time. The prow affords a fine view of the soldiers: they stare up at the Europeans, unflinching and unafraid, but make no move to attack with arrows or spears or to give chase. Their boat lists clumsily in the Phoebus’s wake, and is lost astern in little time.

‘Steady-handed work, men,’ Penhaligon compliments the marines.

‘Load your next round, boys,’ says Cutlip. ‘Mind the rain doesn’t dampen your powder.’

Nagasaki, spilling down the mountainside, is growing closer.

The Phoebus’s bowsprit points eight or ten degrees east of Dejima: the Union Jack flies stiff as a board from the jackstaff.

Hovell rejoins the Captain’s intimates without a word.

Penhaligon glimpses a wretched hamlet shat out by a muddy creek.

‘You seem pensive, Lieutenant Hovell,’ says Wren. ‘Upset stomach?’

‘Your concern, Lieutenant Wren,’ Hovell stares ahead, ‘is un-warranted.’

Spring-heeled Malouf shimmies down the fish-davit. ‘About a hundred native troops are assembled, sir, in a plaza just ashore of Dejima.’

‘But no boats putting out to meet us?’

‘Not a one so far, Captain: Clovelly’s watching from the fore-top. The factory appears to be abandoned – even the trees have legged it.’

‘Excellent. I desire the Dutchmen to be seen to be cowards. Back aloft with you, Mr Malouf.’

Ledbetter’s soundings, relayed to Wetz, remain comfortable.

The drizzle is heavier, but the wind stays pushy and brisk.

After two or three terse minutes, Dejima’s urgent bell can be heard ringing.

Gunner Waldron shouts in the gun deck below: ‘Open starboard hatches, men!’

The gun-port hatches crack like bones against the bows.

‘Sir.’ Talbot has his telescope. ‘Two Europeans on the Watchtower.’

‘Oh?’ The Captain finds the pair through his own telescope and eight hundred yards of rainy air. The thinner of the two wears a wide-brimmed hat like a Spanish brigand’s. The other is bulkier, and appears to wave at the Phoebus with a stick as he leans on the railing. A monkey sits on the corner post. ‘Mr Talbot, rouse me out Daniel Snitker.’

‘They fancy,’ mocks Wren, ‘we shan’t fire so long as they stand there.’

‘Dejima is their ship,’ says Hovell. ‘They are on their quarterdeck.’

‘They’ll scurry away,’ predicts Cutlip, ‘when they know we’re in earnest.’

The Phoebus is seven hundred yards shy of the eastern bend of the bay. Wetz bellows, ‘Hard a-port!’ and the frigate rotates through eighty degrees, bringing her starboard bow running parallel to the shorefront, two rifle-shots away. They pass a rectangular compound of warehouses: on the roofs, huddling under umbrellas and straw cloaks, are men dressed like the Chinese merchants Penhaligon encountered at Macao.

‘Fischer spoke of a Chinese Dejima,’ recalls Wren. ‘That must be it.’

Gunner Waldron appears. ‘The starboard guns are to be primed now, sir?’

‘All twelve to fire in three or four minutes, Mr Waldron. Go to it.’

‘Aye, sir!’ Below, he shouts at his men, ‘Feed the fat boys!’

Talbot arrives with Snitker, who is unsure what attitude to strike.

‘Mr Hovell, lend Snitker your telescope. Bid him identify the men on the Watchtower.’ Snitker’s response, when it comes, contains the name de Zoet. ‘He says that the one with the stick is Marinus the physician, the one in the grotesque hat is Jacob de Zoet. The monkey is named William Pitt.’ Snitker, unprompted, says a few sentences to Hovell.

Penhaligon estimates the distance to be five hundred yards.

Hovell continues: ‘Mr Snitker asked me to say, Captain, that had you chosen him as your envoy, the outcome would have been very different, but that had he known you were a Vandal bent on destruction, he’d never have guided you into these waters.’

How useful, Hovell, thinks Penhaligon, to have Snitker utter what you dare not. ‘Ask Snitker how the Japanese would treat him were he to be thrown overboard here.’

Hovell translates, and Snitker withdraws like a whipped dog.

Penhaligon turns his attention back to the Dutchmen on the Watchtower.

At closer range Marinus, the scholar-physician, looks lumpen and uncouth.

De Zoet, by contrast, is younger and better turned out than expected.

Let’s pit your Dutch courage, Penhaligon thinks, against English munitions.

Waldron’s torso appears above the hatch. ‘Ready for your word, Captain.’

The Oriental rain is fine as lace on the sailors’ leathern faces.

‘Give it them, Mr Waldron, straight in the teeth…’

‘Aye, sir.’ Waldron announces the order below: ‘Starboard crews, fire!’

Major Cutlip, at his side, hums, ‘Three blind mice, three blind mice…’

Out of the gun-ports, over the bulwarks, fly the flintmen’s cries of Clear!

The Captain watches the Dutchmen staring down the mouths of his guns.

Lapwings fly over stone water: their wingtips kiss, drip and ripple.

Work for a soldier or madman, Penhaligon thinks, not a doctor and shopkeeper.

The first of the guns erupts with a skull-cracking ferocity; Penhaligon’s middle-aged heart pulsates as it did in his first fight with an American privateer a quarter-century ago; eleven guns follow, over seven or eight seconds.

One warehouse collapses; the seaward wall is smashed in two places; roof-tiles spray upwards and, most gratifyingly, the Captain is confident as he squints through the smoke and destruction, de Zoet and Marinus are scuttled to Earth with their tails firmly between their Netherlander shanks…

… she chopped off their tails, Cutlip hums, with a carving knife…

The wind blows the gun-smoke back over the deck, bathing the officers.

Talbot sees them first: ‘They’re still on the Watchtower, sir.’

Penhaligon hurries over to the waist-hatch, his foot howling for mercy and his stick striking the deck: damn you, damn you, damn you…

The lieutenants follow like nervous Spaniels, expecting him to topple.

‘Ready the guns for a second round,’ he bellows down the hatch to Waldron. ‘Ten guineas for the gun-crew who cut down the Watchtower!’

Waldron’s voice shouts back, ‘Aye aye, sir! You heard the Captain, crews!’

Furious, Penhaligon drags himself back to the quarterdeck; his officers follow.

‘Hold her steady, Mr Wetz,’ he tells the Sailing Master.

Wetz is engaged in an instinctive algebraic sum, involving wind speed, sail yardage and rudder angle. ‘Holding her steady, Captain.’

‘Captain,’ Cutlip is speaking, ‘at a hundred and twenty yards my lads could embroider that brassy duo with our Brown Besses.’

Tristram, the Captain was told by HMS Blenheim’s Captain Frederick, was minced by chain shot on the quarterdeck: he could have thrown himself against the deck and possibly lived, like his lesser warrant officers, but not Tristram, who never blinked at danger…

‘I’d not risk grounding us, Major. The day would not have a happy ending.’

Remember Charlie’s bulldog, Penhaligon sighs, and the cricket bat?

‘The smoke,’ the Captain blinks and mutters, ‘is wringing out my eyes.’

Cowards, like crows, he believes, consume the courageous dead.

‘This all brings to mind,’ Wren tells Talbot and the midshipmen, ‘my Mauritius campaign aboard the Swiftsure: three French frigates had the legs of us and, like a pack of baying fox-hounds…’

‘Sir,’ Hovell says quietly, ‘might I offer you my cape? The rain…’