About the author
Patrick O’Brian wrote the Aubrey-Maturin tales and was the biographer of Joseph Banks and Picasso. He also translated many works from French into English. In 1995 he was the first recipient of the Heywood Hill Prize and in the same year he was appointed CBE. He died in January 2000. Master and Commander was made into a film three years later, starring Russell Crowe.
About the book
Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and his ship’s surgeon, Stephen Maturin, and contains all the action and excitement that you could wish for in a historical novel. It also displays the qualities that have put O’Brian ahead of his competitors: his mastery of the details of life aboard a Nelsonian man-of-war, of weapons, food, conversation and ambience of the landscape and the sea.
Extract
“The drum rolled and thundered at the Sophie’s hatchway. Feet came racing up from below, a desperate rushing sound that made even the tense drum-beat seem more urgent. But apart from the landmen’s in the new draft, the men’s faces were calm; for this was beating to quarters, an afternoon ritual that many of the crew had performed some two or three thousand times, each running to a particular place by one alloted gun or to a given set of ropes that he knew by heart.
No one could have called this a creditable performace, however. Much had been changed in the Sophie’s comfortable old routine; the manning of the guns was different; a score of worried, sheep-like landmen had to be pushed and pulled into something like the right place; and since most of the newcomers could not yet be allowed to do anything more than heave under guidance, the sloop’s waist was so crowded that men trampled upon one another’s toes.
Ten minutes passed while the Sophie’s people seethed about her upper deck and her fighting tops: Jack stood watching placidly abaft the wheel while Dillon barked orders about, aware of their captain’s gaze and conscious that their anxiety was not improving anything at all. Jack had expected something of a shambles, though not anything quite so unholy as this; but his native good humour and the delight of feeling even the inept stirring of this machine under his control overcame all other, more righteous, emotions. - ‘Why do they do this?’ asked Stephen, at his elbow. ‘Why do they run about so earnestly?’
‘The idea is that every man shall know exactly where to go in action — in an emergency,’ said Jack. ‘It would never do if they had to stand pondering.’ ”