Daniel pats his face dry, stoppers his ink-well, and goes out onto the quarter-deck, chucking his ink-caked quill overboard. Most of the sailors have already ascended into the rigging, and begun to drop vast white curtains as if to shield landlubber Daniel's eyes from the fleet of sloops and whaleboats that seems now to be converging on them from every cove and inlet on Plymouth Bay. Rocks and trees ashore are moving, with respect to fixed objects on Minerva, in a way that they shouldn't. 'We're moving – we are adrift!' he protests. Weighing anchor on a ship of Minerva 's bulk is a ludicrously complicated and lengthy procedure – a small army of chanting sailors pursuing one another round the giant capstan on the upperdeck, boys scrubbing slime off, and sprinkling sand onto, the wet anchor cable to afford a better purchase for the messenger cable – an infinite loop, passed three times round the capstan, that nimble-fingered riggers are continually lashing alongside the anchor cable in one place and unlashing in another. None of this has even begun to happen in the hour since the sun rose.