He was thankful that he had managed to get rid of that cardsharping fifth lieutenant, Hicks. If he had stayed on, the wardroom would probably be in an uproar by now; Kenton, Martin and Hill were good men, but there was obviously a limit to what they could stand. However, the new man provided by Admiral Rossiter seemed to be proving satisfactory.

He watched as a Mother Carey's chicken - known to some as a stormy petrel - flew across the Dido's stern and turned to fly along her wake. Where did they sleep? There always seemed to be a few in sight. And soon they would be seeing - admittedly only occasionally - his favourite, the tropic bird. Slender and white with a very long forked tail, the tropic bird would fly steadily, never jinking, always in a straight line as though it knew exactly where it was going. But where was that? It was often 1,500 miles to the nearest land, yet the tropic bird flew on sturdily as though it was merely crossing the five miles between two neighbouring islands.

He heard shouting and knew one of the lookouts aloft was hailing the quarterdeck. What had he sighted, so far from land? It could be a particularly large waterspout to windward, so that the officer of the deck could luff up or bear away to avoid it. Although Ramage had never been in a ship hit by a waterspout he had heard many stories about their destructive force: they could rip out masts with the sails still attached, lift anything lying around the deck and suck it up, even take up boats on the booms and hurl them over the side.

Suddenly Aitken's head appeared at the taffrail and called down: 'Sir, the foremast lookout reports a sail fine on the starboard bow, and perhaps another one beyond it. Steering on an opposite course to us.'

'Very well, beat to quarters. I'll be with you in a moment.'

That was one of the important differences between a frigate and a ship of the line: a frigate could be at general quarters in five minutes, but even with a well-trained crew it took a seventy-four at least fifteen minutes, and that was no time at all with two ships approaching each other at five or six knots: they would cover two and a half or three miles in that time.

He reached the quarterdeck just as the two Marine drummers started clattering away, and the calls of bosun's mates were twittering below, followed by the raucous shouts of 'All hands to general quarters!'

'What can you see?' Ramage asked Aitken.

'Just the hint of a sail from down here, sir.'

'Send Orsini aloft with a bring-'em-near.'

A sail out here? Possibly - no, in this position it would not be a convoy, or even a frigate on her way to England. In fact it was hard to guess why any ship should venture here on an opposite course, in other words beating to windward against the Trade winds. On the same course, yes; they could be overhauling a slower ship on her way to the magic position, 25° North, 25°West, when one turned to begin one's westing. But a ship sailing north in this position?

'Hoist the private signal,' he told Aitken.

The private signal was a challenge-and-reply code, changed every three months and known only to the King's ships in a particular area. When two strange ships met, one or other flew the challenge and the other - if British - flew the reply, and this was followed by both ships hoisting their pendant numbers, so they could be identified from the signal book, which gave a list of all the ships in the Navy with their pendant numbers.

He saw Orsini scrambling up the lee shrouds of the mainmast: he went up as fast as a topman, even though he was carrying a telescope.

The Dido was now like a suddenly disturbed anthill: men were hurriedly rigging head pumps and sluicing water across the decks; others were scattering sand. The water prevented loose grains of gunpowder being ignited by, for example, the trucks of a recoiling gun carriage; the sand stopped the men slipping with their bare feet.

More men were casting off the lashings and securing the guns and running them back ready for loading; others rolled small tubs besides the guns and filled them with water, ready for swabbing out the barrels of the guns. Rammers, mops and wormers were put ready beside the guns.

And below, Ramage knew, the gunner had unlocked the magazine and even now was beginning to issue flintlocks, prickers and powder horns to the gun captains, while the powder monkeys were beginning to form up ready to carry cartridges up to the guns.

In his cabin men would be shifting his furniture below to the hold to leave room to handle the guns and reduce the chance of splinters. Bulkheads were being hinged up to the deckhead or taken down, again to avoid splinters from shot smashing through the hull. It was this sort of preparation - mercifully absent when the Calypso used to go into action - that used up the quarter of an hour it took to prepare the Dido for general quarters.

The bustle of war: to the untrained eye it seemed as though many men were running about aimlessly: to an eye trained in the ways of a ship of war, every man was moving fast to do his duty.

Southwick came up and said: 'An odd position to find someone steering north, sir.'

'That's what I was thinking.'

Southwick gave one of his expressive sniffs. 'All the gunnery exercise might come in useful sooner than we expected.'

'We'll soon know. I wish Orsini would hurry up and give us a hail - is this sail a privateer or a ship of the line?'

Southwick shrugged his shoulders. 'In this position it could be either. Of course, it could be someone who had been heading south, spotted us first, and hauled their wind to come north to investigate us.'

'If that's the case, I shall want to know why our lookouts were asleep.'

'No,' Southwick said, 'on second thoughts it doesn't seem very likely. Damnation, Orsini's taking his time!'

A minute or two later Orsini hailed that the sail was a frigate steering on an opposite course with everything set to the royals. 'There's another sail astern of her, though I can't make out if she's following or chasing.'

Two ships? Two ships in this position both steering north? 'Furl the courses, Mr Aitken,' Ramage said. If there was any fighting to be done, let it be under topsails. With the great courses furled, only the topgallants remained to be taken in.

The bosun's mates piped the order, and men ran up the shrouds to the yards while others stood by at buntlines and cluelines. Soon the billowing canvas was stifled, gaskets passed and the sails were rolled up on the yards, almost as neat as if they had been given a harbour stow.

Then Orsini hailed again. 'The second ship is also a frigate. I think I can make out the occasional flash of guns - the bowchasers of the second ship. She's too far away to see any smoke.'

'One frigate chasing another, eh?' commented Southwick.

And that meant the first frigate was probably British, steering for the Dido in the hope that she was British. A frigate running away from a frigate? Why did she not stand and fight? But a moment after Ramage puzzled over the question, Orsini hailed again.

'There's a third ship, her masts are just coming over the horizon.'

So the first frigate could be chased by two other frigates. That would explain why she was not standing and fighting: no one expected a single frigate to fight two others of equal or greater size.

'What do you make of it, sir?' asked Aitken.

'A British frigate being chased by a couple of French, and damned glad to see us ahead of her. They're praying we're British - they may have recognized us as British by the cut of our sails.'

Orsini hailed again. 'There's a fourth ship, bigger than the others. I think she's a ship of the line. She's following the frigates.'

One British frigate being chased by two French frigates and a ship of the line? The British ship was lucky to spot the Dido . . .