Trundling noises from the upperdeck, * and all of a sudden Minerva 's a different ship: heeling over quite a bit more than she was, but also rolling from side much more ponderously. Daniel infers that a momentous shifting of weights has occurred. Getting up, and going back out on the quarterdeck, he sees it's true: there are several short bulbous carronnades here – nothing more or less than multi-ton blunderbusses, with large-bore, short-range, miserable accuracy. But (not to put too fine a point on it) large bores, into which gunners are shoveling all manner of messy ironmongery: pairs of cannonballs chained together, nails, redundant crowbars, clusters of grapeshot piled on sabots and tied together with ostentatiously clever sailors' knots. Once loaded, the carronnades are being run out to the gunwales – hugely increasing the ship's moment of inertia, accounting for the change in the roll period –