The Captain seemed to stiffen briefly and then relaxed and grinned.

“It is that, Peter, but if we don’t catch him before he gets around the Cape then we will loose him. This is the only place we can be sure of his position come the dawn.”

Fowler nodded and saw the strain on his young Captain’s face. Once again, he was thankful that he did not yet have his own command.

“Mister Flynn,” the second lieutenant’s shout found the midshipman ready and the fourteen year old turned to his crew and barked orders in a high pitched, yet authoritative, tone. The men immediately pulled at one of the twelve-pounder guns, manhandling the cannon backwards and then pushing the weapon along the deck to the entry port before tipping the gun over the edge.

Captain Thomas Butler watched the water displaced by the gun spray his men and wondered yet again if this was the best plan.

He had agonised over the decision for days now but he was in command and he could not ask anyone else to take the burden. Out here he was closest to God and to him fell all responsibility. He was playing a gamble; only this gamble bet, not just his own life or his crews, but possibly every soul in England.

He heard the splash of a second gun and wondered briefly what the Admiralty were going to say about him dumping their expensive weaponry over the side. “Dead Men walking indeed,” he imagined Sir John Powel’s deep baritone as he ridiculed the report his young Captain had just submitted. His very success, if he were indeed successful, would ensure that there would not be any proof of the abomination in the hold of the ship in front of him. If he failed then it would not matter.

He could very well loose his Captaincy but he had witnessed the impossible. He had seen the French prisoner die, and then get back up, with his own eyes. It hadn’t taken long, merely an hour or so after death. The prisoner had been confined to sick bay and was fading fast. He had been left to the side while the surgeon had attended the other wounded from the skirmish, that already seemed a lifetime ago. His wound was fatal and the doctor had pronounced him dead some time later when he had checked on him.

Three crewmen were called to throw the body overboard and it was while they struggled up onto the deck that Perkins had dropped the body with a scream of pain. His two shipmates laughed at him and other men teased him for his clumsiness. It wasn’t until they saw the blood pumping from Perkin’s arm that they stopped and went to help him.