I get some even tells me what type of sherry they likes. Not in them days, senor. If they drinks sherry then—just like beer. Halfpint glass!

"Great boxers in the Hood,” he said, coming back from serving another customer. "She had more men than the other ships, that’s true, but the Hood was always winning the fleet championships. All changed now. Sailors is different."’

"Nowadays it’s radar and rockets,*’ I said. "You don’t find the old type any more.”

"Different the days when I’m talking about—when I used to go over for the laundry. Another world.”

The Hood was always a great boxing ship, good at all sports come to that, but she had early made a reputation for producing some of the best boxers in the fleet. In September 1922, when she was visiting Rio de Janeiro, the British boxing contingent beat the United States by four bouts to three. Five of the fighters came from the Hood, and three of them won their matches.

In the early spring of 1921 the same dull plume of a levanter cloud hung over the Rock of Gibraltar. Down below, in the narrow streets, the gray drizzle leeched along the brick fronts and dampened the bar signs and the shops in Main Street. "The English,” as the Spaniards say, "take their own weather with them.*' The great ships were standing into harbor—the battle cruisers

Hood and Tiger, with their jinking, keen-bowed escort of destroyers taking the spray over their fo’c’s’les as they moved into position. The battle cruiser squadron had come south for a Mediterranean cruise.

In those days no crackling voice over the ship’s loud-speaker system roused the sailors from their hammocks in the morning. It was the birdlike trill of the bosun’s call, or the brass voice of the bugle, that cut through their sleep. Lying at anchor, with her decks steaming gently as the night dew lifted, a ship like the Hood came to life with an efficiency that required the planning and organizing ability of many brains. Before the hands had fallen in at their parts of the ship, for cleaning and shining their steel home, the cooks in the galleys were already busy preparing breakfast. With a plock and gurgle, steam heat was being turned on in vast caldrons to boil water for tea.

“Tanky and his men,” the supply department’s working parties, were busy rigging tackles and hoisting from holds and refrigerators the sugar, flour, carcasses of meat, and other supplies that would be required throughout the day. Aft in the admiral’s quarters, his senior steward was laying the tray with the admiral’s early morning tea. “This one,” he had to remember, “likes wafer-lhin brown bread and butter with it.” (The last had liked China tea with lemon and two biscuits.)

The tampions—those brass symbols of peace that fitted over the dark mouths of the 15-inch guns and bore the ship’s crest— were being polished. The hoses were splashing along the decks, while sailors with their bell bottoms rolled up were scrubbing down under the eyes of petty officers.

“You get any water on that bright work, and you’re in the rattle, Jackson!”

“Aye, aye, Chief! (Got a thick ’ead this morning, ain’t ’e?)”

"You’re in the rattle if you talks instead of works—and don’t forget it!”

It was early spring and the ship’s company were still in their

blue uniforms. The officer of the morning watch was seeing that the logbook had been filled in correctly by the gangway staff: the barometer reading, tie wet and dry air temperatures, and the note, “0600. Hands called.” There was a dispatch boat coming out from the long arm of the breakwater and he put his telescope on it, the brass rim striking fire out of the morning sunlight. Beyond the breakwater the bald limestone head of the Rock lifted against a lilac sky. The levanter that had been blowing when the ships came in the day before had died away. The wind had veered round to the south, hot off Africa across the Strait.

Captured by British and Dutch forces in 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Gibraltar had dominated the Strait for more than two hundred years—and in a way that it can never do again. This craggy outcrop at the foot of Spain, along with the point of Ceuta on the African coast, had been famed since classical times, when the two giant rocks guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean had been known as the Pillars of Hercules. Beyond them began that terrifying world of vast seas, of strange water movements that ebbed and flowed with the moon—the incomprehensible surge of tides and tidal races that was to bewilder the Romans in their later campaigns. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules even the Phoenicians, those master mariners of the ancient world, were never able to feel at home.

Out of the distant northern island, once the farthest dependency of the Roman Empire, had come these gray steel ships to patrol and dominate the tideless Mediterranean Sea. It was in May 1921, only a few weeks after Hood’s visit to Gibraltar, that Benito Mussolini and thirty-five other Fascist candidates were returned at die Italian elections.