ON 9 JANUARY 1779, Thomas Trotter reported on board HMS Berwick at Portsmouth to take up his post as third surgeon's mate. It was a blustery day with a fresh north-easterly wind and a touch of frost in the air. Trotter's first sight of his new ship floating in the choppy waters of the navy's principal naval base can hardly have been inspiring. Berwick had just emerged from dry dock, where she had been one of the first vessels to have had her bottom sheathed in Charles Middleton's new copper plating, and was now a grubby mast-less hulk tied up at the jetty next to a receiving ship to which her crew had been transferred while the heavy work of preparing her for sea was completed. And heavy it was. Indeed, on the day of Trotter's arrival, using nothing more than musclepower and pulleys, the men loaded on board no less than thirty-one tons of shingle ballast, twelve cords of timber and a ton and a half of beef and bread. Two months later, Berwick had been transformed. Her stores were complete, her guns in place, her masts and yards in position and her rigging set up taut and seamanlike. Newly painted and ready for sea, she sailed out of Portsmouth Harbour to moor at Spithead in early March. With the ship's officers and men back on board, the nineteen-year-old Trotter began to get acquainted with his companions, and to master the daily routines of a man of war.