Looking forward along the ship, he saw that she had been pierced by an enormous harpoon through her side, as if she was a whale. The end inside the ship had several curved barbs, which had been jerked back to bite into the wood. And when Laurence put his head out of the port-hole, he caught sight of the cable at the harpoon's other end swinging grandly up and up, into the air, where two enormous heavyweight dragons were holding on to it: a Grand Chevalier, and a Parnassian, middle-aged, likely traded to France during an earlier peacetime.

It was not the only harpoon: three more cable-lines dangled from their grip to the bow, and Laurence could see another two stretched from the stern. The dragons were too far aloft for him to note all of the details, with the ship's motion underneath him, but the cables were somehow laced into their harnesses. By flying together and pulling, they were pivoting the ship's head into the wind. The dragons were too far aloft for round-shot to reach them. One of them sneezed, from the action of the frantic pepper guns, but they had only to beat their wings to get away from the pepper, hauling the ship merrily along while they did it.

‘Axes, axes,’ the lieutenant was shouting; then the clattering of iron as the bosun's mates came spilling weapons across the floor: hand-axes, cutlasses, knives. The men snatched them up and began to reach out of the portholes to hack at the ropes, but the harpoon shafts were two feet long, and the ropes had enough slackness to prevent good purchase. Someone would have to climb out of a porthole to saw at them: open and exposed against the hull of the ship, with the frigate coming around again.

No one moved at first; then Laurence reached out and took a short cutlass, from the heap. The lieutenant looked into his face, and knew him, but said nothing. Turning to the opening Laurence worked his shoulders out, hands quickly beneath his feet to support him, and eeled out as the lieutenant started calling again. Shortly, a rope was flung down to him from the deck above, so he could brace himself against the hull. Many faces peered over anxiously, all strangers; then another man came sliding down over the rail, and another, to work on the other harpoons.

Making a bright target against the ship's paintwork, Laurence began the grim effort of sawing away at the cable, strands fraying one at a time. The rope was cable-laid: three hawsers of three strands, well wormed and thick as a man's wrist, parcelled in canvas.