He went and stood with Appleby, who had just taken over from Southwick as officer of the watch. The young Master's mate was nervous and jumpy. Ramage talked to him for a few minutes and found he was not scared of the storm but slowly cracking up under the responsibility of handling the ship. In an emergency, Ramage realized, when a couple of seconds might make all the difference in avoiding disaster, it was unfair to leave the lives of the Tritons in Appleby's hands. On the pretext of making sure he had enough sleep for the coming day, Ramage sent the Master's mate below and took over his watch. From now on, until the hurricane blew itself out, he and Southwick would have to stand watch and watch about.

Dawn came slowly, as if reluctant to light up the terrifying scene. The surge of the seas was flinging the Triton around as if she was a chip of wood instead of a hundred-foot-long ship of war weighing almost three hundred tons. The wind and rain seemed solid, like an invisible maniac pushing with incredible strength, screaming with almost unbelievable shrillness, and making it hard to breathe.

As he clung on to the thick breeching of a carronade, Ramage wondered in the greyness, where the wind and spray and rain seemed one, how much of it the human mind could stand. His mind, anyway. Many men made of sterner stuff than he could probably endure a week of this; but he knew the prospect of another seven hours, let alone days, made him feel sick with anxiety.

If only the ship would stop this blind pitching and rolling for a minute. Any moment now one or both of the masts must go by the board; any moment one of these enormous great seas rolling up astern must smash down on the taffrail, pooping the ship, sweeping the deck clear of men, guns and hatch covers. She'd broach and then, lying over on her beam ends, she'd fill and founder, like a bucket tipped over in a village pond.

Water was pouring down Ramage's neck: the cloth he was wearing as a scarf was sodden and instead of preventing the spray on his face from trickling into his clothes, it seemed to be channelling it into torrents so that his clothes were soaked beneath the oilskins. He'd long since given up emptying his boots; he just squelched from one foot to the other. The Tropics, he thought viciously, are for pelicans and drunken planters. The former are adapted to the weather, and the latter can forget it in bottles of their own rum. And mocking-birds can just laugh it off and twitch their tails.

Suddenly he realized that the grey of dawn was spreading and he could make out the dark bulk of the wheel and the group of shadowy men standing up at it; the seas had grey caps and he could see more detail of their wild movements.

Southwick lurched over to him and he could see enough of his face to be shocked by its weariness. The Master seemed to have aged ten years overnight. The ends of his white hair hung out from under his sou'wester in spiky tails, giving him the appearance of an anxious porcupine, and the eyes and cheeks were sunken.

"Lookouts aloft, sir?"

"No," Ramage yelled back, "there'll be nothing in sight, and even if there was, we couldn't do anything except run before this weather."

"Aye, sir, that's my feeling."

But both men were wrong. Within twenty minutes, when they could see several hundred yards in the grey light, a lookout came scrambling back along the larboard side, clutching on to the main rope rigged fore and aft as though he was climbing.

"Larboard bow, sir," he gasped. "Ship, mebbe five hundred yards; a merchantman under bare poles I reckon, but I only saw her as we came up on the crest of a wave."

Ramage was leaning against the carronade in a daze caused partly by weariness and partly by the noise of the wind.

"Splendid," he said automatically. "You're keeping a good lookout."

As the man turned to go back Ramage beckoned to Jackson, whose eyes and nose could just be seen peering out from a glistening black cylinder. The American must have tarred his sou'wester and long oilskin coat very recently.

"Up aloft," Ramage shouted. "Larboard bow, five hundred yards, probably a merchantman. And have a good look round for anyone else. There's a glass in the binnacle box drawer - if you can use it."

In the five minutes Jackson was aloft it grew appreciably lighter, and the lighter it became the lower sank Ramage's spirits. He lurched to the taffrail, hollow-eyed and unshaven, grasped it with both hands and looked aft, forcing himself to stare at what frightened him.

The seas were so huge he knew he'd wronged many men in the past when they'd described such weather and he'd assumed - with smug superiority - that they were exaggerating. Even allowing for how cold and tired and hungry he was, and knowing this affected his judgment, he was certain that what he looked at was worse. Those men had been describing hurricanes, and he had to face up to the fact that the Triton was now in a hurricane. This was no brief tropical storm which seemed worse than it was because the preceding weeks of balmy weather had softened a man. Some time during the night, the storm had turned into a hurricane, just as earlier the gale had increased to a storm.

He stared at the waves, fascinated and yet fearful, like a rabbit facing a weasel. All his seagoing life he had dreaded this day. Here at last was what few sailors had experienced, and what fewer still had survived. In the Indian Ocean it was called a cyclone, in the Pacific it was a typhoon and in the Caribbean a hurricane. Like death, it went by different names in different languages, but was still the same thing.

The seas were so enormous he did not even try to guess their height, but he had to tilt his head back to be able to look up at the crests from under the brim of his sou'wester. They came up astern like great fast-moving mountain ranges, one steeply sloping forward edge threatening to scoop up the ship, the curling, breaking crest ready to sweep the decks clear of men and equipment. It was followed by another whose forward edge seemed almost vertical, like a cliff, and so sheer the Triton's stern could never lift in time to avoid it crashing down on the ship, crushing it to matchwood. But, in a series of miracles, her stern did lift, and the crests did pass under her, producing even more prodigious pitching.

On and on came the mountains of water, each one fearful because its power was in itself, its own enormous weight set in motion by the wind. He watched each crest, a curling, roaring, hissing jumble of bubbling white water. The Triton was making about four knots with not a stitch of canvas set and her wake showed on each wave's face as a double line of inward-spinning whorls, like the hair-springs of watches.

Every few minutes an odd and often small wave, instead of coming up dead astern and meeting the ship squarely, ran in from a slight angle and she lifted slowly and awkwardly, the crest slapping hard on the quarter and squirting water up the space round the rudder post.

The quarter was where the danger was: all of Southwick's efforts with the helmsmen were devoted to making sure the Triton drove off dead to leeward, so every wave arrived squarely at the transom. A heavy wave catching her on one quarter, instead of rushing beneath the ship and lifting her squarely, would push the stern with it, forcing the bow round the opposite way. In a second the ship would broach, to lie broadside and vulnerable to the seas.

These seas were big enough, much more than big enough, to lift her up and throw her flat, so that with her heavy masts and lower yards lying in the water and acting as a weight on one end of a seesaw, she would not come up without the masts being cut away. Come up that is, providing the pathetically small shell of a hull did not fill with water...

A moment's inattention on the part of the officer of the watch or quartermaster; a momentary mistake by the men at the wheel or one of them slipping on the streaming, sloping deck and hindering his mates as they spun the spokes one way or the other and the Triton would broach. Or the wheel ropes would part, so that the thick tiller would slam across and splinter as the waves shoved the rudder hard over.