title: Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy (Oxford Historical Monographs)
author:  J. D. Davies 
description: <br />"Davies's excellent study for the first time lays bar the real complexity of the situation....Davies is the first safe and knowledgeable guide to these sources we have had, and <em>Gentlemen and Tarpaulins</em> is a work of real scope and originality, illuminating naval, social and political history. It should be absorbed by anyone who takes an interest in seventeenth-century England."--<em>Times Literary Supplement</em>
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  [Contents](074349914X_toc.htm)
  
  # **Interlude**  
   **A Sore Temptation for a**  
   **Formerly Honest**  
   **Former Sailor**  
   ** **
  
  > _The most useless things that the world has ever known are male teats,
  > women's tears, and a man who used to be a sailor._
  >
  > --Sir Simon Tremaine DuPuy
  
  He was holding onto the wheel, but he wasn't a sailor.
  
  Not anymore.
  
  Officially, of course, he had been placed on the Retired List at the pleasure
  and for the convenience of HM the king, and he doubted that it was accidental
  that the wording of his orders had been as little like those of a beached
  officer being put on the Inactive List and half pay as was possible. His
  Majesty was a kind man, when he could be, after all.
  
  But the truth was that DuPuy wasn't a sailor anymore. The best thing to do
  would have been to let the damned steersman do his own job--which, at the
  moment, would have probably been locking the wheel down, rather than holdin