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company. Do you understand?’
    Jex’s jaw hung. In the preceeding minutes his expression had undergone several dramatic changes but the post of purser in even the meanest of His Britannic Majesty’s ships was sought after as a source of steady wealth and steadier opportunity. Drinkwater had not yet finished with the unfortunate man.
    ‘We have not, of course, mentioned the fee customarily paid to the captain of a warship for your post. Shall we say one hundred? Come now, what do you say to my terms?’
    ‘Ninety.’
    ‘Guineas, my last offer, Mr Jex.’
    Drinkwater watched the purser’s face twist slowly as he calculated. He knew he could never stop the corruption in the dockyards, nor in the matter of the purser’s eighth, but he might put the system to some advantage. There was a kind of rough justice in Drinkwater’s plan. Mrs Jex’s wealth came from the brief sexual excesses of a multitude of unfortunate seamen. It was time a little was returned in kind.
     
    Virago presented something of a more ordered state a day or two later. Both Matchett and Mason, despite their unprepossessing introduction a few days earlier, turned out to be diligent workers. With a third of Jex’s ninety guineas Drinkwater was able to ‘acquire’ a supply of paint, tar, turpentine, oakum, rosin and pitch to put the hull in good shape. He also acquired some gilt paint and had Rogers rig staging over the stern to revive the cracked-acanthus leaves that roved over the transom.
    While Drinkwater sat in his cloak in the cabin, the table littered with lists, orders, requisitions and indents, driving his pen and dispatching Mason daily to the dockyard or post-office on ship’s business, Rogers stormed about the upper deck or terrorised the dockyard foremen with torrents of foul-mouthed invective that forced reaction from even their stone-walling tactics. Storemen and clerks who complained about his bullying abuse usually obliged Drinkwater to make apologies for him. So he developed an ingratiating politeness that disguised his contempt for these jobbers. With a little greasing of palms he could often reverse the offended clerk’s mind and thus obtain whatever the ship required.
    Drinkwater made daily rounds of the ship. Forward of the officers’ accommodation under the low poop stretched one huge space. It was at once hold and berthing place for the hammocks of her crew. Gratings decked over the lower section into which the casks of pork, peas, flour, oatmeal, fish and water were stowed. Here too, like huge black snakes, lay the vessel’s four cables. Extending down from deck to keelson in the spaces between the two masts were two massive mortar beds. These vast structures were of heavy crossed timbers, bolted and squeezed together with shock-absorbent hemp poked between each beam. Drinkwater suspected he was supposed to dismantle them, but no one had given him a specific order to do so and he knew that the empty shells, or carcases, stowed in the gaps between the timbers. He would retain those shell rooms, and therefore the mortar beds, for without them, opportunity or not, Virago would be useless as anything but a cargo vessel. Store rooms, a carpenter’s workshop and cabin each for Matchett and Willerton were fitted under the fo’c’s’le whilst beneath the officers’ accommodation aft were the shot rooms, spirit room, fuse room and bread room. Beneath Drinkwater’s own cabin lay the magazine space, reached through a hatchway for which he had the only key.
    It was not long before Drinkwater had made arrangements to warp Virago alongside the Gun Wharf, but he was desperate for want of men to undertake the labour of hoisting and mounting the eight 24-pounder carronades and two 6-pounder long guns that would be Virago’s armament. They received a small draft from the Guardship at the Nore and another from the Impress service but still remained thirty men short of their complement. By dint of great effort, by the second week in