Pirates, Rats, Coca, and Purgatory (Australia)

The 14th Aubrey Maturin Age of Sail book begins with our bosom buddies Post-Captain Jack Aubrey and naturalist-surgeon-spy Stephen Maturin and the survivors of their wrecked frigate the Diane running out of food on an uninhabited island in the South China Sea. To raise the men’s morale Jack sets the sailors against the marines in a hotly contested cricket match. Stephen, having no interest in cricket but being the designated hunter of the mission (because he’s so hopelessly useless in the vital task of fashioning a schooner from the wreckage of the frigate), goes off on his own looking for increasingly scarce wild pigs or monkeys.

Through Stephen’s point of view, Patrick O’Brian concisely reminds us of what happened in the 13th novel: ambassador Fox winning a coup (thanks to Stephen’s vital but resented assistance) by getting the Sultan of a piratical Malay state to sign a treaty with the British instead of with the enemy French, and then prematurely sailing off in a pinnace to announce his triumph only to drown with all hands during the typhoon that wrecked the Diane. Jack is hoping to finish the makeshift schooner and sail off to Dutch-held Batavia when some pirates (led by a bare-breasted young lady with filed incisors and a sharp kris) pay a call.

The novel features about the usual limited but vivid amount of action for an O’Brian book, a ferocious land battle, a suspenseful sea chase, and a small-pox ravaged island, and then settles in for a long stretch in the then new colony at New South Wales, Australia, and Sydney Cove, as Jack tries to get his ship repaired and outfitted while dealing with hostile and corrupt local officials and foolish and wild sailors, and Stephen sojourns around the Australian outback, observing the exotic flora and fauna (including kangaroos, platypuses, and “the small, flat, gray animal that sleeps high up in a gum tree and claims absurdly to be a bear”). Stephen also wants to do something to help the convict Padeen, his former ship’s surgeon’s assistant who in an earlier book in the series accidentally became addicted to opium, got arrested for breaking into an apothecary’s shop, and then got transported to Sydney, where he’s just received 200 lashes for trying to escape.

The scenes describing the new British colony (“an utterly inhuman place” set in a “dismal plains of purgatory” outback) are fascinating: gangs of chained convicts doing slave labor and getting brutally flogged, British officers land-grabbing the best land and importing sheep into it, corruption rife at every level, and everywhere the cruelty attendant upon “absolute power and the absence of public opinion.” The book respects the aborigines while showing the pernicious effect British rum has on them. Add to all that the harsh wilderness, and Stephen can’t help but wonder why it was ever thought a good idea to make a colony there!

As in the other books in the series, I love the moments when Jack and Stephen express their friendship for each other (e.g., “Why there you are, Steven, how glad I am to see you.”)

And I enjoy the all too human characters, like, of course, Jack and Stephen, but also minor ones like fractious, nasal Killick.

Like the other books, this one has plenty of humor, like when the frigate rats start acting strangely tame because, it turns out, they’ve gotten into Stephen’s supply of coca leaves and eaten all of them, which provokes in Stephen a bad mood to match that of the rats when they finally realize there’s no more coca. “He was not the first sailor to be deceived by a rat.”

Lots of witty lines, like “Stephen was convinced that moral advantage was a great enemy to marriage” and “What are the three things that cannot be concealed? Love, sorrow, and wealth… and intelligence-work comes a very close fourth.”

Lots of savory period vocabulary and expressions, like “What joy!” or “’God's blood—hell and death, so I have” Or “made their staggering crapulous way to the strand...”

Lots of details on what it was like to be aboard a ship of the line in the age of sail, from Jack's favorite suet pudding, “boiled baby,” to the tons of fetid fluid in a man of war, deriving not only from the sailors who sometimes, especially during storms, relieve themselves wherever they get a chance, but also from the cables that conduct into the ship the refuse and sewage and slaughterhouse run off from the ports they call at.

Lots of O’Brian’s sublime descriptions of the sea and sky seen from a sailing ship, like:

“She reeled off her twelve and even thirteen knots throughout the sunlit hours and even seven or eight by night, with the topgallantsails taken in and in spite of her foul bottom; and all this through a hugely rolling sea that varied from the deepest indigo to pale aquamarine but that always (apart from the broken water) remained glass-clear, as though it had been created yesterday.”

In addition to such features, audiobook reader Ric Jerrom is so ideally suited to O'Brian's work that I always feel good to read another Aubrey-Maturin novel, so I’m looking forward to the 15th in the series.

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1 person found this helpful

Aubrey Maturin at its finest

From indies to Australia in this volume. The flow of the series is at its best in the repeating year of 1813. All the characters and places seem so very real.

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Wonderful

This is one of the best books in the series , though they are all great.
The insight of early Australia is particularly good.
Best narrator I have heard.

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