They went first through a tedious summation of events, and a reconcilement of the accounts: Chenery had set down ten days, for the flight which had carried them prisoner to the falls; Laurence had made it twelve, Catherine eleven; which difference consumed nearly an hour, and required several maps to be dug out by the secretaries, none of which precisely agreed with one another on the scale of the interior. “Sir, we would do better to apply to the dragons, for our facts,” Laurence said finally, raising his head from the fourth of these, when they had only been able to agree conclusively that there had been a desert somewhere in the middle, and it had not been less than nine-days’ flying. “I will vouch that Temeraire is well able to judge distances, in flight, and while they did not follow directly in our course, I am certain at least he can tell us where the borders of the desert are, which we crossed, and the larger of the rivers.”

“Hm,” Mulgrave said, not encouragingly, stirring the report before him with a forefinger. “Well, put it aside; let us move to the matter of insubordination. I understand correctly, I believe, that all three beasts disregarded Captain Sutton’s orders, to return to Capetown.”

“Why, if you like to call it insubordination,” Jane said. “It is a good deal more to the point, that all three of them listened at all; and that they did not go haring off wild into the interior at once, when they knew their captains stolen: remarkable discipline, I assure you, and more than I would have looked for under the circumstances.”

“Then I should like to know what else it is to be called,” Lord Palmerston said, from his seat further down. “A direct order disobeyed—”

“Oh—” Jane made half an impatient gesture with her hand, aborted. “A dragon of twenty tons is not to be called to account by any means other than persuasion, that I know of, and if they did not value their captains enough to disobey for them, they would not ever obey at all; so it is no use complaining. We might as well say that a ship is insubordinate, because it will not go forward when there is no wind: you can command the first as easily as the latter.”

Laurence looked down at the table. He had seen dragons enough in China, who without any captain or handler whatsoever behaved with perfect discipline, to know her defense was flawed. He did not know a better name for it than insubordination, himself, and was not inclined to dismiss it so lightly; it in some wise seemed to him more insulting than otherwise, to suggest that the dragons did not know better. That Temeraire had known where his duty lay, Laurence was quite certain; that Temeraire had disobeyed Sutton’s orders willfully, only because he did not like to follow them, was also certain. He as surely had considered that disobedience justified and natural, not even requiring of explanation, and would have been surprised to find anything else truly expected of him; but he would never have denied the responsibility.

To draw such a fine point, however, before a hostile audience, perhaps inducing them to demand an irrational punishment, Laurence did not deem prudent; even if he had been inclined to contradict Jane in such a setting. He was silent, while a brief wrestling over the question ensued; finished unresolved, when Jane had said, “I am quite willing to lecture them on the subject, if you should like it, my Lords; or put them to a court-martial, if that seems to you sensible; and the best use of our time at present.”

“For my part, gentlemen,” Nelson said, “I think it cannot come as a surprise to those here, when I say that victory is the best of all justifications, and to answer it with reproaches looks to me very ill. The success of the expedition proves its merit.”

“A very fine success,” Admiral Gambier said sourly, “which has left a crucial colony not merely lost but in ruins, and seen the destruction of every port along the coast of Africa; most notably meritorious.”

“No-one could have expected a company of seven dragons to hold the African continent against a plague of hundreds, under any circumstances,” Jane said, “and we had better be grateful to have, instead, what intelligence we have gained from the successful recovery of our officers.”

Gambier did not contradict her directly, but snorted and went on to inquire about another small discrepancy, in the reports; but as the session dragged on, it became gradually clear through his line of questioning, and Lord Palmerston’s, that they meant to suspect that the prisoners had provoked the invasion deliberately, and subsequently had colluded to conceal the act. How they had gone about it, was not to be specified; nor their motives, until at last Gambier added, in an ironical tone, “And of course, it is the slave trade to which they objected so violently; although as everyone knows, the natives of the continent have made a practice of it from time immemorial, long preceding the arrival of Europeans on their shore; or perhaps I should say, of course it is they, who objected to the trade. I believe, Captain Laurence, that you have strong views on the subject; I cannot be speaking out of turn to say so.”

Laurence said only, “No, sir; you are not.” He offered no further remark; he would not dignify the insinuation with a defense.

“Have we nothing more pressing,” Jane said, “that we must spend our time on the possibility, that a large company of officers arranged to have themselves abducted, and a dozen good men killed, so they could go and be offensive enough, among a foreign nation where they did not speak a word, to provoke them into assembling a dozen wings for immediate assault? Which, I suppose, should have been accomplished overnight, for Heaven knows there are no difficulties in providing support, to a hundred dragons.”

The questioning, with its grinding focus on minutiae, was sullenly given up in another hour, when it had not provoked confession. There were no official grounds for court-martial, as no dragon had been lost, and if their Lordships meant to seek a trial for the loss of the Cape, it would have to be General Grey who faced it, and there was certainly no public sympathy for such an inquest. There was nothing left for them but to be deeply dissatisfied; and nothing left for Laurence and his fellow-captains but to sit and listen to their complaints.

Several measures of recapturing the ports were proposed which had not the least chance of success, Jane forced to recall to their Lordships, with poorly concealed exasperation, the parade of failures which had been occasioned by all the attempts to establish colonies in the face of organized aerial hostilities: by Spain, in the New World; the total destruction of Roanoke; the disasters in Mysore. “You should need enough ships to throw twenty tons of metal, and six formations, to take the Cape long enough to secure the fort again, if they have not ripped it all down,” she said, “and when you were done, you should have to leave two of those formations behind with a first-rate’s worth of guns, and I hardly like to think how many soldiers; and somehow supply them monthly, if the enemy did not have the bright notion of attacking the supply-ships farther north.”

The proposals subsided. “My Lords, you are already aware, that I see no grounds to quarrel with Admiral Roland’s figures,” Nelson said, “if I am perhaps, not so pessimistic of our chances to succeed, where the attempts of a previous century had failed. But even half such a force cannot be easily mustered, and certainly not unobserved; nor could it be transported from any civilized port, to any province of Africa, without the knowledge of the Navy, and indeed without its complaisance in the matter: I will stand surety for it.

“If we cannot retake the Cape, therefore, or reestablish a foothold upon the continent, we may nevertheless satisfy ourselves that no other nation may do so. France, certainly, cannot aspire to it. I will not say that Napoleon may not conquer anyplace in the world from Calais to Peking, so long as he can walk to it; but if he must put to sea, he is at our mercy.