GLOSSARY
The donkey engine coughed and clanked as the engineer, a small, wiry man, ran around it, reaching into its crevasses with a can of oil. “Should have been overhauled,” he muttered to himself, “last time we was in dock.” He put the oil can on the engine and pulled a rag from his pocket, using it to wipe his hands before he ran them through his thinning sandy hair. “Steam is up, sir,” he said at last.
“Very good, Mr Stevens,” said the Captain. Badger was moored in a small bay, with a line running out of her stern gallery to a ruined mole, and another running from her bow to an anchor near the middle of the bay. Chasseur lay between her and the far side of the small bay, with the brigs’ guns commanding the entire seaward approach. Sergeant Harris and his marines guarded the single landward approach to the spring, an overgrown path up some crumbling stone steps, found by the brigs’ boys as they explored the ruined buildings on the small beach. A high stone palisade ringed in the spring and its beach, and apart from the two brigs and their men, cursing and sweating with their barrels of water, the only sound was the cry of several birds, and the occasional ‘ploop’ of a fish breaking the water’s surface.
“On deck,” cried the mainmast lookout.
“Deck, here,” replied the captain.
“Sail in the offing, sir. Looks like a ship.”
“Who is the mainmast lookout?” Philip asked the Master.
“Higgins, sir, able.”
To an able seaman, ship meant a three-masted vessel, with her masts in threes: lower mast, topmast, and topgallant. Some merchentmen sailed ships, though most preferred other rigs, and chances were that the ship was a war ship. The question was, whose?
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GLOSSARY
