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assessment is she will come up with us in the morning.’
    Next dawn, then, Nelson was on the quarterdeck with his spyglass in his hand, the outline of the cape having been discerned from a lookout on the main topmast head. As the morning rose the sun came clearer, but the expected ships of Lawrie did not heave into view.
    At the entrance to Wank’s River soundings were taken and the anchor dropped, and Colonel Polson rowed ashore in haste to make the rendezvous.
    He returned most chastened. He had met an officer, certainly – but it was a lieutenant of a regiment of foot camped in the area, not James Lawrie. Mr Lawrie, indeed, promiser of much, dreamer of a British conquest of the Spanish America itself, had provided neither guns, nor boats, nor men. As far as was known, he was many miles north, at the Black River settlement. And when a camp was made on land, apparently in good, healthy land for it – the mosquitoes made their presence known. In their millions.

 
    Eight
     
    The only good thing, from Tim Hastie’s point of view, was that Captain Nelson seemed reinvigored by the setbacks. More likely, Hastie thought, it was the cleaner and airier conditions on the ship now that the soldiers and other useless men were gone ashore. He’d also arranged for fires to be lighted down below (in closed-in iron pots for fear of conflagration) and sulphur burned, and vinegar splashed and scattered over everything. At nights, though, the air was still appalling with the buzz and whine of insects. There was not a man on board who wasn’t eaten half alive.
    Men did begin to die, mainly on shore but also on the ships. The first to go on Hinchinbrook was a marine, who had gone down with malaria but was thought to be recovering. Hastie had no hand in caring for him, but Dr Dancer insisted an increase in the supplies of wine and beer forced down his neck would ‘do the trick,’ and when the man soon died said it was merely a mortification brought on by lack of exercise.
    On land, the insects seemed to bite far worse, and there were truly more of them. But Dancer laughed at Timothy’s suggestion that they were the cause of sickness, blaming instead the vile airs that rose from the swamps nearby, well known for hundreds of years to be the bearers of the ills. He cited Surgeon General Moseley, who had even published a book about it, insisting that the mosquito bites were a nuisance, but only dangerous if scratched into ulceration. He also pointed out that the springs nearby were full of splendid ‘essences’ which would ‘carry off the bile.’
    Timothy countered as robustly as he dared that the Mosquito Indians protected themselves from the evening biting time by all manner of coverings, including burying themselves in sand. Which only led to laughter, and jests about him being but ‘a Liverpool apothecary’s apprentice.’
    Nelson, Polson and Despard engaged in almost nightly discussions – on ship not shore, at Nelson’s insistence – about the way forward. Time, as Governor Dalling had insisted, was truly a great factor, and if they stayed too long before they reached Greytown, the rains would be upon them, with all that that implied. It was Despard who suggested that the settlers Lawrie had hoped to recruit were probably more concerned with keeping their heads down and carrying on their smuggling with the Spanish traders, and Hastie who said the talk in camp was that the Indians feared they would be cheated and sold into slavery, a ‘damned slur’ that drove Polson to fury, and later turned out to be not far from the truth.
    Meanwhile the officers decided to build the pre-constructed gunboat brought from Port Royal, which at the very least would keep the soldiers occupied and take their minds off drinking and whoring with the native girls who could be bought. Dr Dancer had already announced that the incidence of pox was rocketing, and wondered why the others laughed at his po-face.
    Things had reached a pretty pass some