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turned and especially when it came to the change of watch, ordering the decks to be wetted in the heat, given the pitch sealing the joints in the planking, the devil in naval parlance, was prone to melting. Likewise the boats stayed in the water to protect their seams.
    Seven bells on the forenoon watch required that he beon desk with his sextant, in the company of the master, to shoot the noonday zenith by which they could establish their position in what was now nothing but an empty seascape. On each occasion, he sought also to discern any level of obvious dissatisfaction in each crew member, not he later had to admit to much avail. The only smiles he got, and they were given with some discretion, came from the trio he knew as his fellow Pelicans.
    He could not think on that tag without recalling how they had come to wear it and also, despite the circumstances in which it had been gained, the way it represented a rebellion against the kind of authority he now represented. How odd it was in this glaring sunshine and just past midday heat, to imagine himself once more in a smoky London tavern on a freezing winter night, to forget his present rank and station and recall that he had been a civilian on the run from the law.
    The thought that, Michael O’Hagan apart, he had fallen amongst thieves in the Pelican Tavern induced a slight smile; Charlie Taverner the street-hunting sharp, Rufus the runway apprentice, the wiser head, old Abel Scrivens, dead now, running from a ruinous debt. The last of the original Pelicans had been quiet, unlucky Ben Walker, thought to have been lost overboard but last seen as an emaciated slave, beyond rescue, toiling on the waterfront at Tangiers and also probably dead by now.
    All, again excepting Michael, had been on their uppers and without the price of a wet, each one avoiding a writ of some kind, none of the magnitude facing John Pearce. Where they had encountered each other had protected them, the Liberties of the Savoy, a stretch of the Thames riverside from which the bailiffs were banned due to ancientstatute. He had hoped that it would protect him too but fate had decreed that the hand that he felt on his collar, as well as those of his fellow Pelicans, was not a King’s Bench Sheriff but the clasp of a hard-bitten tar, one of the press gang employed by Captain Ralph Barclay.
    Right at that moment he felt the loneliness of being in command; he would have loved to talk to those he considered his friends at any time, more especially now, so as to find out how to counter what was troubling the crew. It was all very well sharing his cabin with Emily but she was not someone with whom he could discuss such matters and that was not the only subject best avoided.
    The whole area of her husband and their own relationship, if it was not out of bounds, was fraught with difficulty, so much so that Pearce had to consider what he was going to say before he said it, lest blurting out some unpleasant reminder of her predicament he drive her towards a resolution he was determined to avoid. It was like walking barefoot on broken glass.
    ‘Sail Ho!’
    ‘Where away?’ was the automatic reply and one that drew him from his melancholy reflections, to withdraw a telescope from the bulkhead rack by his side, freeing his arm from its sling at the same time, just as it seemed every man below, including those off watch, found a reason to be on deck.
    ‘Dead astern, caught a flash of topsail.’
    With some difficulty due to his constrained arm, he adjusted the glass and laid it across his splints in the required southerly direction. This was not carried out in any great hurry, given he had no great expectation of getting sight ofanything immediately; the man aloft could see things many miles further off than he.
    ‘Two sail, your honour,’ came as a near shriek.
    That produced a knot in the Pearce gut, it being the same call that had come before his recent battle, one that he was just as quick to dismiss as