Command a King's Ship by Alexander Kent

For a while he strikes out bravely, swimming he knows not where, until he is too exhausted, too dazed to care. He is without authority or any sort of guidance. It is his turning point.
    Bolitho recognised all the signs well enough, and knew it was the same sort of challenge for him. Give in to his own under- standing and sympathy, listen too much to excuses from his hard-worked lieutenants and warrant officers, and he would never regain control, or be able to rally his company when the real pressure came.
    He knew that many cursed him behind his back, prayed for him to fall dead or vanish overboard in the night. He saw their glances, sensed their resentment as he pushed them through each day, each hour of every one of those days. Sail drill, and more drill against Herrick’s watch, while he himself made sure all engaged knew he was following their efforts. He made the men on Undine ’s three masts race each other in their struggle to shorten or make more sail, until finally he drove them even harder to work not in competition but as a gasping, silently cursing team.
    Now, as he sat with the mug in his hands he found some grudging satisfaction in what they had done. What they had achieved together, willingly or otherwise. When Undine dropped her anchor in the roads of Santa Cruz today, the watching Span- iards would see a semblance of order and discipline, of efficiency which they had come to know and fear in times of war.
    But if he had driven his company to the limit he had not spared himself either. And he was feeling it, despite the inviting rays of early sunshine which made reflections dance across the low deckhead. Barely a watch had passed without his going on deck to lend his presence. Lieutenant Davy had little experience of han- dling a ship in foul weather, but would learn, given time. Soames was too prone to lose patience when faced with a disaster on deck. He would knock some luckless seaman aside and leap into his place yelling, “You’re useless! I’d rather do it myself!” Only Herrick rode out the storm of Bolitho’s persistent demands, and Bolitho felt sorry that his friend had been made to carry the brunt of the work. It was too easy to punish men, when in fact it was an officer’s fault for losing his own head, or not being able to find the right words in the teeth of a raging gale. Herrick stood firmly between wardroom and lower deck, and twixt captain and company.
    There had even been two floggings, something which he had hoped to avoid. Each case had been within the private world of the lower deck. The first a simple one of stealing from another sailor’s small hoard of money. The second, far more serious, had been a savage knife-fight which had ended in a man having his face opened from ear to jaw. It was still not certain if he would live.
    A real grudge fight, a momentary spark of anger caused by fatigue and constant work, he did not really know. In a well- trained ship of war it was likely he would never have heard about either case. The justice of the lower deck was far more drastic and instant when their own world was threatened by a thief or one too fond of his knife.
    Bolitho despised captains who used authority without con- sideration for the misery it might entail, who meted out savage punishment without getting to the root of the trouble and thereby avoiding it. Herrick knew how he felt. When Bolitho had first met him he had been the junior lieutenant in his ship. A ship where the previous captain had been so severe, so unthink- ingly brutal with his punishments that the seeds of mutiny had been well and truly laid.
    Herrick knew better than most about such things, and yet he had intervened personally to persuade Bolitho to avoid the flog- gings. It was their first real disagreement, and Bolitho had hated to see the sudden hurt in Herrick’s eyes.
    Bolitho had said, “This is a new company. It takes time to weld people together so that each can rely