Captain Robert Pell

He lost the station and saved everyone in it, and the southern run has never quite decided which of the two it should remember.

Saint Merrow's lies near the far end of the southern run, the chain of havens and forts that thins as it goes out, and the southern speech says of it only that it was lost twice. The registry keeps a Siege of Saint Merrow Station in 4534, with two episodes, the Well Yard Sortie and the breaking of a boom, and names Captain Robert Pell and George-Alan Marr; the volumes describe none of it. This telling is new.

The station was the watering place and coal yard below the fort, with a wall, a well yard and a chain boom across its little harbour. Pell commanded its garrison of sixty and the families of the yard. The registry does not say who besieged it and Pell's own letters do not either, calling them only the people from inland. He held for seven weeks. In the sixth, with the well fouled, he led the sortie that took the well yard back for a night and filled every cask in the station. In the seventh, when the boom was broken and the harbour opened to the enemy's boats, he did not wait to be taken: he put the families aboard two coasters and the yard's lighters under George-Alan Marr, the station's master of boats, and brought the garrison off last, by night, without the loss of a person.

The station was not retaken for years, and when it was it was a different place. Pell was court-martialled for its loss and acquitted in a sitting, and served on the southern run until he was sixty. He was no kin of the salvage speculator Gideon Pell, and said so whenever he was asked, which was often. His daughter Joan kept the harbour at Brine Lantern Haven, and the run remembers them together.

In person

About forty at the siege, broad-shouldered and weather-darkened, with cropped black hair going grey at the temples, a heavy jaw and a sailor's narrowed eyes. A dark blue coat with red facings and plain brass buttons, white waistcoat and breeches, a black cocked hat worn athwart, a hanger at his hip and a speaking trumpet in his hand; he stands on a station wall above a harbour at night, boats below.