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Strait, created an ugly current of at least six or seven knots, which was more than the ship could manage. The only land in sight was a low barren island, a dismal yellowish-brown, a cable’s length to starboard. A single black albatross, which had followed the vessel since early morning, was now gliding over the boulder-strewn beach, searching for food.
    As he stood by the helm, Hector glumly set aside any hope that this was where he and his friends might be able to leave the ship.
    ‘Not much of a place, is it?’ observed William Dampier morosely. As navigator, he was responsible for the landfall. Hector had always liked him. Long-faced and lugubrious, Dampier had sailed on the previous South Sea raid. He’d admitted to Hector that his real reason for voyaging with the buccaneers was not to win plunder, but to have the chance to observe and record the natural world. He kept notes of whatever caught his interest, whether plants or animals or local people and their customs, tides and the weather, and wrote his observations on scraps of paper, which he kept dry in a stoppered bamboo tube. Now he had a chart in his hand and was trying to identify exactly where they were.
    ‘It would help if we knew our latitude more accurately,’ he muttered.
    ‘Little chance of that. This overcast looks set,’ Hector observed.
    There was sharpness in the air, a chill that had been increasingly noticeable these past few days. Hector was wearing a thick jacket and a heavy scarf purchased from a shipmate. The sultry warmth of the Guinea coast was a distant memory. Behind them lay 4,000 sea miles from Africa, covered in little more than six weeks.
    ‘Our first snow,’ muttered Dampier, shaking the chart to dislodge a flake that had drifted down on it.
    ‘What do you think? Should we attempt the Strait?’ The question came from Cook, who had joined them by the helm.
    ‘We’ll be sailing into dirty weather,’ replied Dampier. Ahead of the ship, the sky was turning a menacing blue-black as if a great bruise was slowly spreading up from the horizon. Flickers of sheet lightning lit the underbelly of a cloud bank forming in the far distance. To emphasize Dampier’s warning, a sudden gust of wind made the vessel heel abruptly, causing all three men to stagger and lose their balance.
    ‘Are you confident this is the entrance to the Strait?’ Cook asked.
    ‘As sure as I can be, with such poor charts,’ answered Dampier.
    Cook chewed his lip. Hector had noticed the same habit when the captain had been thinking about stealing the Carlsborg .
    Away to the south an expanse of blue-grey water was already churning into white caps. Turning to Hector, Cook asked, ‘You’ve been the other route, around the Cape. What did you think of it?’
    ‘We were travelling in the opposite direction and were lucky. We had an uneventful passage.’
    ‘Nothing like the fierce storms we hear so much about?’
    ‘Fresh winds, no more than that.’
    ‘Our ship swims better than most.’
    Hector agreed. The Danish West India-Guinea Company would find it difficult to recognize their stolen vessel. After Cook and his men had turned their prisoners loose in the Revenge ’s longboat, the buccaneers had set to work with saws and axes and chisels. The Carlsborg ’s high poop deck had been ripped out. Next, the forecastle was dismantled. Anything that might slow the vessel in a chase or make her cranky in bad weather was discarded. Deckhouses were knocked down, topmasts shortened, twenty of her cannon lowered from the main deck and repositioned where once there had been a half-deck for stowing slaves. Gun ports were cut. Very soon the tall, stately merchant ship was transformed into a low, lean predator. When all was ready to receive them, the stores and supplies were shifted out of the Revenge , and the carpenters went back aboard their former home with their mauls and axes and smashed great holes in her lower strakes. The Revenge sank within an hour and left no