Aboard Wyrmouth
Go from the quarterdeck to the stores. Find the people and working spaces inside the wooden hull.
Know the way below.
Select a numbered location or its name below.
Quarterdeck
Roake commands when Grey first comes aboard. Grey’s special-service duties do not replace Hales’s ordinary first-lieutenant responsibilities. The quarterdeck is where those separate duties become visible.
Book One, Chapter Two.
Meet the company →The guns
McKendrick is introduced as a gunner’s mate. A gun is not a solitary instrument: this part of the drawing directs attention to the people working together, rather than supplying a firing manual.
Book One, Chapter Two.
Find McKendrick →Purser’s store
The novel places the purser’s store abaft the main hold. Davy works among casks, biscuit tubs and papers. Our layout shows that relationship but does not claim a measured compartment plan.
Book One, Chapter Two.
Examine the stores account →Main hold
Use this space to orient yourself: below the working decks, forward of the purser’s store in the relationship described by the novel. Stored material is represented symbolically, not as an approved loading plan.
Book One, Chapter Two; schematic arrangement.
Compare paper with stores →Sail room
Roake assigns Asha a berth in the sail room beside the dispensary. Canvas, a trunk and working papers share the space. The placing here preserves that adjacency without inventing its dimensions.
Book One, Chapter Two.
Read Asha’s duties →Dispensary
The dispensary is the reference point for Asha’s neighbouring berth. Wren first attends Grey’s injuries in Grey’s own quarters: the story’s surgeon is not confined to one room.
Book One, Chapter Two.
Explore different kinds of record →Lower deck
Below decks, the novel makes room for hammocks, shared work and conversations that carry farther than their speakers expect. The later wooden-bird folio includes a Chapter Seven detail and opens only with permission.
Book One, Chapters Two and Seven.
Open the wooden-bird folio →Forecastle & fore hatch
This forward area helps locate references to the fore hatch and forecastle in the story. The diagram is a reading aid, not a historical survey of an actual Wyrmouth.
Book One shipboard scenes; illustrative placement.
Return to the chart room →Illustrative reconstruction, not to scale. Internal placement is schematic except where the novel specifies a relationship. Gunports are symbolic, not a count of the battery.
From manuscript to drawing
Book One introduces Wyrmouth as a thirty-two-gun ship. The store’s position abaft the main hold and the sail room beside the dispensary come from Chapter Two. Exact hull dimensions and a complete deck plan are not supplied; this illustration deliberately does not invent them.
For a period comparison, Royal Museums Greenwich catalogues a 1769 plan for the thirty-two-gun frigate Winchelsea, with its quarterdeck, forecastle, upper and lower decks and platforms. This is a comparison, not Wyrmouth’s plan. No museum image has been reproduced.
Royal Museums Greenwich · Winchelsea (1764), ZAZ3105 (opens in a new tab)