At the time of the author’s death in 2000, the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend and chief of surgery, Dr. Stephen Maturin, stretched through 20 volumes (O’Brian left a three-chapter manuscript of a 21st volume unfinished at his death) and sprawled across the entire navigable world.
Set during the Age of Sail from about 1800 to 1820 and exploiting the political environment engendered by Napoleon, the series brings the entire British world to life and has been called the greatest example of historical fiction ever written. The books appeal equally well to men and women: even though the stories are heavily laced with swashbuckling adventures and bloody battles, O’Brian is equally skilled in the development of the characters’ personal lives, including romances and family relations, and the effects of career ambitions on these aspects of life.
The early volumes in the series caught the attention of writers such as Iris Murdoch and were read primarily by a coterie audience of writers, scholars, and nautical enthusiasts; however, the readership expanded extensively when an editor at W. W. Norton became enthralled by his first reading of an Aubrey-Maturin novel and decided to print the entire series in the United States.
The books in the series have several dependably recurring features. First and foremost, of course, is the nautical element. Sailing ships of many designs and nationalities are featured, and over the course of many voyages readers become familiar with virtually every sail and rope on a typical frigate. The daily routine of activities aboard a sailing ship of the Royal Navy comes vividly to life: the proper use of navigational instruments, how to measure the ship’s speed and position, accurately plotting a course, steering and tacking into the wind, dropping and raising the anchor, and managing the ship’s stores—all these contribute details to the texture of the story.
Patrick O’Brian
Food and wine feature prominently, with the preparation, serving, and relishing of meals described under every condition, from near-famine on wormy biscuits to fine French cuisine to the discovery of human ears and fingers in a Polynesian stew on the fictional island of Moahu. Music, too, is a constant presence, since the sailors entertain themselves with hornpipes and jigs on the forecastle, while in the captain’s quarters Jack Aubrey plays the violin accompanied by Stephen Maturin on the cello.
Then there is the mission they pursue, providing the framework of a sailing route and a plot for each story. Over the 20 volumes, the series visits every ocean and many seas and harbors around the world; the physical locations, topographical features, geographical orientation, and material resources of numerous ports and anchorages—as they might have appeared at the time of the novel’s events—come to life on the page.
These missions frequently involve battles and the wounds that result from them, so the medical conditions aboard ship—appalling by contemporary standards—are faithfully chronicled. The many exotic locations provide Stephen Maturin, a natural scientist as well as a surgeon, with the perfect opportunity to collect plant and animal specimens and to conduct research for the Royal Society, and all are described in specific and precise detail. References to the scientific names of plants and animals are common, along with detailed descriptions of the ecosystems that support the life forms observed and cataloged.
But the natural world is also a backdrop for the complexity of human life that is the motivation for every voyage: each journey is undertaken to achieve human goals, whether political, diplomatic, financial, military, or commercial in purpose. Aubrey and Maturin meet people of numerous cultures and nationalities on nearly every continent in the world in the course of completing their missions, and O’Brian depicts these human interactions with as much detail, insight, and subtlety as he does the nautical, gustatory, musical, and scientific aspects of his stories.
The series opens with Master and Commander (1970), in which a youthful Jack Aubrey is still striving to win his first command, while also risking his chances of promotion through his reckless affairs with the wives of his superiors at Port Mahon on Minorca. He meets Stephen Maturin there at a concert at about the time he gets his first command, the tiny Sophie, and he persuades his new acquaintance to become his ship’s surgeon. He gradually becomes vaguely aware that his friend is a spy for the British government as well as a physician and a skilled linguist.
Jack’s stunning victory in the western Mediterranean Sea over a larger and better-armed Spanish ship, the Cacafuego (modeled on a historical sea battle won by Thomas Cochrane), leads to his promotion. Commissioned to command warships, in Post Captain (1972), he is assigned to an ungainly experimental boat, the Polychrest, in an action along the eastern French coast, and although the experimental design is nearly worthless in battle, Jack still manages to bring off a victory.
He is awarded the temporary command of the Lively and sent with a small squadron to intercept Spanish treasure ships sailing from South America, another event modeled on a historical battle. He acquires command of his dream ship, a small, fast, well-armed frigate, in The H.M.S. Surprise (1973); Stephen Maturin eventually purchases this sturdy vessel for Jack to sail through many of the later stories. For this first mission in the Surprise, Jack carries an ambassador to the East Indies and engages a French squadron preying on British merchant ships bound from China.
Aubrey and Maturin embark on another political mission in The Mauritius Command (1977), sailing the Boadicea through the Indian Ocean; their charge is to install a British governor there as soon as they can liberate the island from the French.
In these early novels, Jack and Stephen are also occasionally in England, where they pursue courtships and endure financial woes. These adventures on land are as fully realized as those at sea, with detailed descriptions of inns, taverns, London districts, country houses, debtors’ prisons, gentlemen’s clubs, Parliament (where Jack eventually wins a post representing a pocket borough), and various seats of naval governance.
Jack succeeds in his courtship of Sophie Williams, eventually marrying her and settling her on an estate not too far inland from the English Channel; they have three children in spite of Jack’s frequent and prolonged absences from England. Stephen’s pursuit of the beautiful and volatile Diana Villiers takes many detours, but he eventually marries her after a tempestuous courtship, and they have a daughter, Brigid. When they are in England, Jack and Stephen frequently meet with Sir Joseph Blaine, Stephen’s spymaster, who is also a keen naturalist eager for news of the exotic plant and animal species encountered in the world’s lesser-known quarters.
One of the most thrilling adventures in the series occurs in Desolation Island (1978), when Jack commands the Leopard. En route to Australia, he sinks a Dutch ship, the Waakzaamheid, after being hounded by it into the icy waters of the Southern Ocean. In a gripping account of the deadly combat waged amid 50-foot rollers, Jack nearly cripples his own ship in the process of sinking his enemy, and when his damaged ship later strikes an iceberg, the crew must take refuge at the first landfall they can reach in order to rebuild her.
In The Fortune of War (1979), Jack and Stephen bring the restored Leopard to the Malay Peninsula and are bound home as passengers when their ship is captured by the American frigate USS Constitution (“Old Ironsides”) in an action modeled on a historical battle from the War of 1812. They spend some time in Boston as prisoners of war before escaping and joining the Shannon in time to witness another historical battle, this time with the USS Chesapeake.
For The Surgeon’s Mate (1981), the story moves to the Baltic Sea, where Maturin conducts negotiations to undermine allegiances there to Napoleon Bonaparte. On the way home, adverse winds and currents drive them aground in France, and they once again become prisoners of war, this time in Paris, before escaping home to England. Some of the best food writing occurs in this volume when Jack and Stephen compete with their captors in displaying the sophistication of their palates as they sample a variety of French cuisine.
An action in the eastern Mediterranean extends across both The Ionian Mission (1981) and Treason’s Harbor (1983) as Jack and Stephen engage in various actions among the islands off the west side of Greece and along the North African coast, first in the warship Worcester and later in the Surprise. Although Jack’s mission is not a complete success, in The Far Side of the World (1984) he is awarded one further exploit with the Surprise before it is to be “sold out of the service”: he is to stop an American warship, the Norfolk, from harassing British trade in the Pacific.
With many mishaps, the voyage takes them to the Galápagos Islands before the Surprise finally catches up to the Norfolk and defeats the Americans. The voyage home continues through the first third of The Reverse of the Medal (1986), but the rest of the book relates how Jack is brought up on charges in London and publicly humiliated before evidence can be produced that exonerates him. In spite of this evidence, he loses his commission in the Royal Navy.
The Surprise is indeed sold upon its return to England—to Stephen Maturin, who commissions Jack to sail her in The Letter of Marque (1990). Jack is awarded a kind of license as a privateer (the “letter of marque” of the title), and wins a fortune taking prize ships from British enemies. He uses some of this wealth to bring the Surprise up to his standards as a fighting ship, hoping to win reinstatement into the Royal Navy through some daring exploit—a goal he achieves, much to his satisfaction. He begins this task by “cutting out” the French warship Diane from its mooring in an armed harbor, another especially thrilling episode of adventure and intrigue.
The Thirteen Gun Salute (1991) begins a four-book exploit that takes the Surprise on a circumnavigation of the globe. Aubrey and Maturin sail aboard the Diane on a crucial diplomatic mission, intending to rendezvous afterward with the Surprise in the East Indies. The mission is a success, but Jack runs aground on an uncharted reef.
The Nutmeg of Consolation (1991) opens with the crew surviving as castaways on an island near the reef. They capture the proa (a ship of native design) of a band of Malay pirates who attack them unsuccessfully; afterward, they sail this craft to Batavia, where they meet Governor Raffles, a historical figure, and receive a Dutch commercial ship from him that Jack renames the Nutmeg of Consolation. After engaging the French frigate Cornélie, Jack and Stephen reboard the Surprise, sending the Nutmeg to escort some captured prize ships to market. They sail for Australia without allowing Stephen to stop and collect specimens of rare animals along their little-traveled route. Once on that recently settled continent, however, he has the thrill of capturing a male platypus and discovering firsthand how it uses its previously unknown poisonous spur; he barely survives this encounter.
In The Truelove (1992; published in England as Clarissa Oakes), the Surprise sails eastward from Australia, bound for Peru, but first Jack must settle the situation on the island of Moahu (imagined as part of or near the Hawaiian archipelago). He must figure out which of the warring factions is most sympathetic to British interests and then help that side achieve victory. Having succeeded in this exploit and attended an exotic feast with these new allies, the Surprise continues on toward the Peruvian coast in The Wine-Dark Sea (1993), pursuing the American frigate Franklin along the way. Maturin spends much of his time on land while Jack pursues his opportunities at sea, but the diplomatic mission fails when Maturin is recognized as an English agent. He rejoins the Surprise after a perilous two-month journey over the Altiplano. Jack’s plan is to return to England after first capturing some American merchant ships at Cape Horn, but when the rudder of the Surprise breaks in heavy seas, he must let the wind take him where it will until his good fortune brings another British ship to his aid.
After fretting some time onshore, Jack and Stephen set sail on a double mission in The Commodore (1995); Jack, commanding a small fleet in the rank of commodore, is to use a raiding mission against the slave trade along the western coast of Africa as a cover for a covert mission to prevent the French from assisting an Irish uprising. The circumstances of the slave trade are vividly described, and Stephen’s activities onshore bring the urban environment of an African colonial slave-trading city to life. By this point in the story, Jack is at a perilous point in his naval career, too senior to continue commanding single vessels, and yet in danger of being passed over, or “yellowed,” for promotion to the rank of admiral.
For the first third of The Yellow Admiral (1996), Jack is at home without a commission and facing both political and financial ruin. When he is finally at sea again, he is limited to the dreary blockade of the French coast. Eventually, he agrees to join Stephen for another visit to South America under the guise of a hydrographical survey in the Surprise, but before they can depart, Jack is summoned to command a fleet in the western Mediterranean to undermine the buildup of naval forces and allies sympathetic to Bonaparte, who has escaped from Elba.
This episode continues in The Hundred Days (1998); Jack harasses trade and naval resources, while Stephen enlists allies to burn several yards building ships for the supporters of Napoleon. The action even shifts to North Africa, where Stephen collects intelligence about the allegiance of various Muslim factions and their plans to undermine the land campaign that ultimately culminates in the Battle of Waterloo. In the course of this story, several longtime characters die, including Stephen’s wife, Diana Villiers, and Barrett Bonden, Jack’s most able sailor. With the passing of these key minor players, O’Brian seems to be winding down the support apparatus of the series.
In Blue at the Mizzen (1999), Jack and Stephen travel to Chile in the Surprise to assist in preserving that country’s independence. Jack is to develop the naval abilities of the country; many of the exploits he performs in the novel were accomplished in history by the famed British naval officer Thomas Cochrane. Jack captures a well-supplied seaport controlled by loyalists to Spain and then cuts out the much bigger frigate Esmerelda from her home port, leading the hand-to-hand combat to take the vessel and thereby essentially terminating naval opposition from Peru and Spanish loyalists. The mission is a success in terms of preserving Chilean independence, but the sailors are deprived of their prize money by the very faction they protected. In the end, Jack receives word of his promotion to the rank of admiral in the blue squadron and hoists his flag at the mizzenmast at last.
O’Brian constructs this series with careful attention to historical detail, drawing on naval records from the period he is writing about, mixing real people in among his fictional characters, and basing many of the complex battles he describes on actual events. Sometimes Jack Aubrey’s ship substitutes for the historical vessel, and sometimes Jack and Stephen are onlookers to some momentous historical event. But history is the supporting player to the fiction O’Brian crafts.
His characters grow and develop in response to the situations they face, but their personalities take precedence over historical detail. For example, when Stephen Maturin restocks his depleted medical supplies, his precision, fastidiousness in his work, and scientific erudition provide a pretext for a discussion of early 19th-century medicine; the substances he stocks later reappear as prescriptions for various ailments, wounds, and accidents that befall the sailors in the course of daily life at sea. Every novel is replete with these kinds of specific details (the best rope for rigging, suitable methods of maintaining the captain’s silver tea service, dining customs aboard ship, sailors’ rights and duties, and many others), and yet none of them seem expendable or merely tangential. Instead, in O’Brian’s series, historical fact and imaginative fiction are inseparably united.
Bibliography
Grossman, Anne Chotzinoff, and Lisa Grossman Thomas. Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It’s a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey-Maturin Novels. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Kemp, Peter, ed. The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
King, Dean, with John B. Hattendorf. Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels of Patrick O’Brian. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.
King, Dean, with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes. A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O’Brian. 3rd ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
Price, Anthony. The Eyes of the Fleet: A Popular History of Frigates and Frigate Captains 1793–1815. London: Hutchinson, 1990.
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