But Rennie eyed him evenly and said, “It is the right decision, sir!” He straightened his hat and said to his sergeant, “Right, Garwood, do you feel like a little walk?”

Bolitho stared at him. It was as if the marine had been reading his mind. He said, “The Cassius will support us.” He looked at the waiting marines. They crouched like animals, wild and beyond fear or even anger. “It’s us or them, lads!”

Then, as the men shouted and cheered he jumped on to the Ondine’s broken mast and began to claw his way across. Once he looked down at the water below him. It was littered with broken woodwork and sodden corpses, French and British alike.

As he reached the Ondine’s poop he felt the balls whining past him and heard screams at his back as men fell to join the waiting corpses below. Then as he reached the scarred bulwark he hacked away the remains of the French boarding nets and leapt down on to the deck. Dead and dying lay everywhere, but when he glanced quickly across the far side he felt a further sense of shock as he saw the Cassius. She was not alongside anymore, but drifting away in the smoke of her own wounds, a mastless hulk, battered beyond recognition. From every scupper he could see long, glistening streams of blood, which poured down the ship’s side to colour the water in one unbroken stain. It was as if the ship herself was bleeding to death. But from the stump of her mizzen the ensign, pitted and torn with shot holes, still flapped in defiance, and as Rennie’s marines swept across the Ondine’s poop there was a burst of cheering from the Cassius’s deck. It was not much of a cheer, for there could not be many left to raise it, but to Bolitho it acted like the stab of a spur.

He ran across the littered deck, cutting down two seamen with hardly a pause, propelled by the cheering and the battle-crazed men at his back. He could see his men on the Ondine’s forecastle, almost encircled by an overwhelming mass of French seamen, their stubborn resistance faltering as they were forced back towards the rail.

Bolitho yelled, “Hold on Phalaropes!” He saw the Frenchmen falter and turn to face this new threat. “To me, lads! Cut your way through ’em!”

More men were swarming from the frigate now, and he saw Herrick’s uniform through the smoke as he waved his men forward.

He turned as Okes slashed a path for himself in the press of figures, his sword gleaming red as he cut down a screaming midshipman and went on towards a man who was reloading a swivel gun beside the quarterdeck. Okes was bleeding from a dozen wounds, and as he reached the ladder the swivel gun exploded with a dull roar. The packed grapeshot lifted Okes like a rag doll and flung him lifeless into the fighting men below the ladder. The gunner fell a second later, cut down by a swinging cutlass.