A Woman Aboard the Surprise?!?

Ah, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin sailing aboard the Surprise again—what could be better!? As the fifteenth book in Patrick O’Brian’s age of sail Aubrey-Maturin series begins, the odd couple bosom buddies should be feeling good about finally having been able to leave the hellish Australian penal colony, with Stephen recovering from his severe duckbill platypus poisoning (he is an inveterate and at times reckless naturalist), but Jack is feeling unusually tetchy (even ship-surgeon Stephen’s usual emetics and bleeding don’t seem to help), because he had some amorous hopes rudely dashed back in Australia, because Stephen has forced him to accept aging (pulling a hank of Jack’s long hair before his eyes to show him it’s grayer than blond now), and because the crew of the Surprise has been behaving oddly, leering and smirking at him in unsailorly fashion.

Jack soon discovers to his righteous indignation that Midshipman Oakes has smuggled aboard the Surprise a transported female convict dressed as a boy! And Jack believes that a woman aboard only brings bad luck and dissension. To try to secure the situation, he has the couple formally married, and all seems well at first. But the crew soon dangerously divides into factions, as the newly wed wife seems to be having sex with multiple officers, such that they become bitter rivals whose men hate each other. Needless to say, this is no state for a British ship to be in during the War of 1812 with both American and French enemy ships about.

And the old Surprise (a 500-ton frigate privately owned now by Jack who loves its sailing character even though its guns are too light to suit contemporary naval ships) has been given a delicate mission to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), where Jack is to assess a civil war between a southern queen and a northern upstart and help whichever side seems more likely to welcome an alliance with England. As the northern upstart is being supported by the Franklin, an American privateer crewed by the French, Jack determines to help the queen. But will his ship’s crew disintegrate into civil war before they can reach the Sandwich Islands? Will Clarissa Oakes continue entertaining any officer who comes to her for “help”? Will Stephen be able to improve Jack’s health? Will he ever get to land on an island to explore its flora and fauna?

Meanwhile, letters from home reveal that all is not well with Stephen’s wife Diana, who, no maternal role model, seems to have become alienated from their infant daughter and from Jack’s wife Sophie.

The novel is full of all the virtues of the others in the series: appealing characters, stimulating conversation, vivid descriptions, and sudden and sparing violent action scenes. (If you like nautical warfare, you might be disappointed by how little there is, but the rare moments when it does break out are quite gripping and suspenseful.)

Clarissa Oakes is a compelling new character. Intelligent and unaffected, her childhood and youth were such that she views sexual intercourse as of no more importance than a kiss on the cheek and derives no pleasure from either: “I'm not a monster incapable of affection... Only I cannot connect it with that toiling, striving, grasping... with anything of a carnal nature. They seem to me poles apart.” She also happens to have some information that Stephen in his capacity as intelligence agent finds most interesting and useful. The novel is the only one in the twenty-book series named after a female character…

And yes the novel is full of great writing, descriptions, and lines, like:

“… a mildly rotten sea, unvarying Prussian blue almost to the horizon under a pure, pale sky, the sun just clear of the eastern ocean, the moon sinking into it on the other hand, and on the starboard bow, a low domed island of some size, far off, but already as green as a good emerald in the slanting light.”

“Ten knots… All hands loved to feel their ship running fast with this urgent heave and thrust and the water bubbling along her side, the bow wave hollowing out midships to show her copper.”

“A turmoil of squids pursuing pelagic crabs... and two or three fathoms below these... some schools of fishes crossing and recrossing, all of the same mackerel shaped kind, all flashing as they turned and all feeding upon a host of fry so numerous that they made a globular haze in the clear green water. The boobies preyed on both, either making a slight skimming dive to snatch up a squid just under the surface, or plunging from a height like so many mortar bombs to reach the depth where the fishes cruised.”

There is an unconvincing Captain Kirk-like one-night-stand, and the only violent action occurs ashore near the end of the novel, but the character of Clarissa Oakes and the suspense as to how the Surprise will work out her presence are absorbing. Fans of the series should read this book, but readers interested in O’Brian and Jack and Stephen should of course start with the first one, Master and Commander.

Ric Jerrom continues to be the ideal reader for the audiobooks. It’s a pleasure to hear him read lines between Jack and Stephen like,

“Do you suffer, brother?”
“I suffer, brother, but moderately.”

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