‘Floatin’ Sodoms,’ the man next to him said. ‘You’d best beware and never mind bendin’ down for the thing you dropped.’

Johannes Meyer tried not to breathe as the man leaned across and laughed into his ear.

The prisoners were assembled on the quarterdeck. The captain had come to watch while the guards went from man to man and collected money, rings, necklaces, bracelets, buttons, keepsakes, anything in their possession. They patted down pockets and checked the linings of coats and the hems of shirts and trousers. They grabbed jaws and squeezed them open and looked inside, sometimes ran a grimy finger under the tongue and around the gums. Men retched and spat on the deck.

‘It’s just for safekeeping, son,’ the guards would say, as they pulled a gold tooth with rusty pliers or a silver ring from the prisoner’s finger. ‘Don’t fret none. We’ll look after it for you.’

‘In the ship’s hold!’

‘In the Hulk Workers’ Benevolent Fund!’

‘Aye!’

Coats were confiscated too, decent pairs of shoes, any shirts or pants well tailored and of good material, all swapped for the ragged, filthy hulk uniform.

A tidy profit on the hulks, oh yes, split half to the captain and the rest distributed according to rank among the guards.

They finished gathering the haul. Leg irons dragged across the deck, just heavy enough to drown a man, should he think of jumping into the Thames. The prisoners were pushed and hustled below into the stifling decks, paired off into the berths. The timbers reeked, greasy and dark, the air was dead.

‘Hot as a whore’s arsehole!’

She’d been a French warship once, eighty guns in her glory, but the cannons had long been smelted into English rivets and nails. Just a rotten box now, chocked with three hundred souls, moored slack and iron-chained in a line of other former glories. The stench enough in each, they said, to almost keep the rats away.

Men came and went and died. Johannes Meyer waited, survived.

THE MAN WHO CAME OUT OF THE SEA

There were almost a dozen Portuguese officers pursuing Elisabeth von Hoffmann, offering sanctuary in the grand houses they’d requisitioned from the French in Cayenne.

It is not good for one so young to live alone, they said.

And, they said, I will honour you.

They sent large bouquets of tropical flowers to her room at the Hôtel de la République, and gifts of expensive perfumes and dresses, even pages of original verse. Elisabeth declined their invitations and kept everything but the poetry.