Mouritzen, by now, was alternately bullying and cajoling the men. He reflected when, under each smashing onslaught of the sea, he had time to think, on his own inadequacy in coping with this kind of emergency, and on the fact that, in the twelve years of his life at sea, it was his first experience of it. With Herning dead and Carling living in some remote fantasy world, there was none of the crew on whom he could rely. He did not know them well enough. ‘When we get out of this,’ he promised himself, ‘I shall make a point of knowing every man to the absolute limit of such knowledge.’