Several UK press reviewers were also impressed. The "Sunday Mirror" said "Nothing is glamourised. The press gangings, the squalor are all here...The battle scenes are tremendous...This is not secondhand Forester, but a really fine piece of writing", while Benedict Nightingale writing in "The Observer" called the book "Dashing, well-timbered, pickled in the period, and with strong human tensions and cross-currents". According to Tom Pocock in The Evening Standard "It is as though, under Mr O'Brian's touch, those great sea-paintings at Greenwich had stirred and come alive".