For his part van Hoek, once he had sloshed ashore, stomped past the cannons without breaking stride, and did not even pause to light his pipe until he had encountered his three masts lying side-by-side in the middle of the town, out back of the Temple of Kali. He walked up and down the length of each one, stooping to inspect how they had been blocked up off the ground. He stood at their narrow ends and peered down them to check for undue curvature, and ambled up and down pounding on them with a pistol-butt and listening to the wood’s reverberations with a hand cupped to his ear. He frowned at cracks, as if he could weld these imperfections shut with his furious gaze, and rested his hand contemplatively on places that had been scarred by the sawing friction of hawsers, collisions with spars, and impacts of pistol-balls. At first van Hoek seemed in the grip of something that approached panic, such was his anxiety that the masts would be found wanting. Gradually this eased into the quotidian fretting and continual state of low-level annoyance that Jack knew to be the perpetual lot of all competent sea-captains.