Book Review: Master and Commander
Jan. 30th, 2026 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhen we first began to discuss Year of Sail, littlerhymes and I knew we wanted to give the Aubrey-Maturin series a try. But we approached it with some trepidation, as we have each separately attempted Aubrey-Maturin before and bombed out.
I don’t know the details oflittlerhymes’ first attempt, but I first tried it in the early 2000s, when I was a young teenager, after I read sartorias’s post about the series. I struggled through chapter three, in which Stephen Maturin receives an incredibly technical tour of the ship’s* rigging, and then he and Jack Aubrey discuss the case of a seaman who is supposed to be court-martialed for committing sodomy on a goat (!). The combination defeated me utterly.
*The ship is not in fact a ship but actually a brig, another point that agonized my tiny teenage brain. “Aren’t they all boats?” I wailed, thus sending all seamen within hearing distance into a state of apoplexy.
I am happy to report that this time we made it past chapter three! Made it all the way to the end of the book, and indeed enjoyed it enough to plan to read the next one! I still have no idea what’s going on with the brig’s rigging or why there’s a type of boat called a snow, but as an older and wiser reader I simply drift past these technical details. Possibly over time it will all fall into place. By the end of Year of Sail I might be talking about topgallants with the best of them.
In the meantime, let me introduce our protagonists.
Jack Aubrey, master and commander of the brig Sophie, which is like being a captain but also, technically, not a captain. The anti-Hornblower. Where Hornblower is cool, logical, awkward, and good at math, Jack Aubrey is warm, loud, emotional, terrible at math, and actually also kind of awkward but in a way where he is almost always completely unaware of it. Witness the scene where he complains to Lieutenant Dillon that lots of new sailors of Irish Papists, remembers that Dillon is Irish and realizes with horror that Dillon might take this as an insult to the Irish, so tries to cover himself by doubling down on how much he hates Papists. JACK.
Stephen Maturin, who becomes the Sophie’s surgeon, even though technically he’s a physician which is WAY better than a surgeon. “We call this thing by a thing that is not its name” is a definite theme here. Part Irish, part Catalan, all naturalist. Loves birds, beasts, medicine, music, and Jack. “He’s so stupid (affectionate),” he explains to Lieutenant Dillon, whom he knew previously when they were both members of the United Irishmen, a non-revolutionary party that perhaps became revolutionary? I’m unclear about the details. Anyway, now quite a dangerous association to have in one’s past.
James Dillon, lieutenant of the Sophie. Not over Jack’s attempt to apologize for the Irish thing by emphasizing that it’s PAPISTS he has a problem with. All but accuses Jack of cowardice, which is almost as wrong-headed as accusing Stephen of not loving insects enough. Realizes Jack is not a coward, briefly likes Jack, then hates Jack again for reasons that are in fact unrelated to Jack.
Given the set-up with Jack Aubrey and James Dillon, I was comfortably expecting the book to end with a duel. But no! In the end, James Dillon dies a few chapters before the end, when the Sophies board and defeat a much larger ship! Always impressed when an author can blindside me with an unexpected development.
Queeney. A childhood friend of Jack’s who helps him get his appointment as captain of the Sophie. Not a protagonist, but I had to include her because I was so proud of recognizing her as a real life person: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter! Evidence: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter was called Queeney. Hester Thrale was a great friend of Samuel Johnson’s, and Queeney mentions the family friendship with Samuel Johnson. Jack goes on about how Queeney’s mom married a PAPIST, and indeed after Hester Thrale’s first husband died, she married an Italian Catholic music master named Piozzi, to the horror of Queeney and everyone else in England. (They were so horrified that she’s still usually referred to as Hester Thrale even though actually she should probably be called Hester Piozzi, since that’s the name she published under and the husband she actually loved.)
Both Queeney and the subplot about the United Irishmen are good examples of Patrick O’Brian’s total mastery of his period, as of course is literally everything he says about the rigging. Just casually tosses in Hester Thrale Piozzi’s daughter! A bit of tragic Irish backstory just for fun! Sometimes I do yearn for him to slow down just a bit and explain, but of course that would make the story far less immersive. We are perhaps getting a small taste of the landlubber’s experience of finding oneself at sea and having no idea what the heck is going on.
And so we sail onward. For now the plan is to bop back and forth between Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin, but over time one series may win out. We shall see!
littlerhymes and I knew we wanted to give the Aubrey-Maturin series a try. But we approached it with some trepidation, as we have each separately attempted Aubrey-Maturin before and bombed out. I don’t know the details of
littlerhymes’ first attempt, but I first tried it in the early 2000s, when I was a young teenager, after I read sartorias’s post about the series. I struggled through chapter three, in which Stephen Maturin receives an incredibly technical tour of the ship’s* rigging, and then he and Jack Aubrey discuss the case of a seaman who is supposed to be court-martialed for committing sodomy on a goat (!). The combination defeated me utterly. *The ship is not in fact a ship but actually a brig, another point that agonized my tiny teenage brain. “Aren’t they all boats?” I wailed, thus sending all seamen within hearing distance into a state of apoplexy.
I am happy to report that this time we made it past chapter three! Made it all the way to the end of the book, and indeed enjoyed it enough to plan to read the next one! I still have no idea what’s going on with the brig’s rigging or why there’s a type of boat called a snow, but as an older and wiser reader I simply drift past these technical details. Possibly over time it will all fall into place. By the end of Year of Sail I might be talking about topgallants with the best of them.
In the meantime, let me introduce our protagonists.
Jack Aubrey, master and commander of the brig Sophie, which is like being a captain but also, technically, not a captain. The anti-Hornblower. Where Hornblower is cool, logical, awkward, and good at math, Jack Aubrey is warm, loud, emotional, terrible at math, and actually also kind of awkward but in a way where he is almost always completely unaware of it. Witness the scene where he complains to Lieutenant Dillon that lots of new sailors of Irish Papists, remembers that Dillon is Irish and realizes with horror that Dillon might take this as an insult to the Irish, so tries to cover himself by doubling down on how much he hates Papists. JACK.
Stephen Maturin, who becomes the Sophie’s surgeon, even though technically he’s a physician which is WAY better than a surgeon. “We call this thing by a thing that is not its name” is a definite theme here. Part Irish, part Catalan, all naturalist. Loves birds, beasts, medicine, music, and Jack. “He’s so stupid (affectionate),” he explains to Lieutenant Dillon, whom he knew previously when they were both members of the United Irishmen, a non-revolutionary party that perhaps became revolutionary? I’m unclear about the details. Anyway, now quite a dangerous association to have in one’s past.
James Dillon, lieutenant of the Sophie. Not over Jack’s attempt to apologize for the Irish thing by emphasizing that it’s PAPISTS he has a problem with. All but accuses Jack of cowardice, which is almost as wrong-headed as accusing Stephen of not loving insects enough. Realizes Jack is not a coward, briefly likes Jack, then hates Jack again for reasons that are in fact unrelated to Jack.
Given the set-up with Jack Aubrey and James Dillon, I was comfortably expecting the book to end with a duel. But no! In the end, James Dillon dies a few chapters before the end, when the Sophies board and defeat a much larger ship! Always impressed when an author can blindside me with an unexpected development.
Queeney. A childhood friend of Jack’s who helps him get his appointment as captain of the Sophie. Not a protagonist, but I had to include her because I was so proud of recognizing her as a real life person: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter! Evidence: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter was called Queeney. Hester Thrale was a great friend of Samuel Johnson’s, and Queeney mentions the family friendship with Samuel Johnson. Jack goes on about how Queeney’s mom married a PAPIST, and indeed after Hester Thrale’s first husband died, she married an Italian Catholic music master named Piozzi, to the horror of Queeney and everyone else in England. (They were so horrified that she’s still usually referred to as Hester Thrale even though actually she should probably be called Hester Piozzi, since that’s the name she published under and the husband she actually loved.)
Both Queeney and the subplot about the United Irishmen are good examples of Patrick O’Brian’s total mastery of his period, as of course is literally everything he says about the rigging. Just casually tosses in Hester Thrale Piozzi’s daughter! A bit of tragic Irish backstory just for fun! Sometimes I do yearn for him to slow down just a bit and explain, but of course that would make the story far less immersive. We are perhaps getting a small taste of the landlubber’s experience of finding oneself at sea and having no idea what the heck is going on.
And so we sail onward. For now the plan is to bop back and forth between Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin, but over time one series may win out. We shall see!
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Date: 2026-01-30 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-30 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-30 01:58 pm (UTC)The naval detail is of course elaborate and accurate, but you definitely can just ignore it and get the gist from context.
Wikipedia suggests what I suspected, which is that "snow" is a corruption of something else ("snauw", which is, as it looks, Dutch! and meant "beak")
That's cool about Queeney! I didn't know her.
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Date: 2026-01-30 07:47 pm (UTC)I only recognized Queeney because I had just read a book with a chapter about Hester Thrale Piozzi, which talked a bit about her relationship to her eldest daughter, and I was so thrilled to recognize her here. Did O'Brian sneak in other real-life cameos? TBH if he did I probably won't recognize them, but I'll keep my eyes open just in case.
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Date: 2026-01-30 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2026-01-30 03:16 pm (UTC)Last time in my youth I think dropped off around book 4 or 5 - I just kind of lost interest. We will see how far we get this time!
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Date: 2026-01-30 06:19 pm (UTC)I am hoping we can reach book 10 because that's apparently the one they drew on most heavily for the movie, but we shall simply sail along and see.
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Date: 2026-01-31 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2026-01-30 04:08 pm (UTC)And I love how the metaphor of being at sea with something is concretized by this literally being a book about being at sea.
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Date: 2026-01-30 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-30 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 09:31 am (UTC)I am in the former camp, due to making a deal with my father when I was about 14: I'd read 'Master and Commander' if he'd read 'Nine Princes in Amber'. We were both pleased! I do love the books and intend to reread ... some day.
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Date: 2026-01-30 04:26 pm (UTC)When I re-read the book a couple of years ago, my revised opinion was that the whole bit with explaining the rigging was high comedy and thigh-slappingly funny. Unfortunately, it's not the sort of thing you can actually share with the person reading in bed with you and have them think it's funny, too...
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Date: 2026-01-30 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-30 07:47 pm (UTC)But if anything was a primer for me, it was the annotated edition of Captains Courageous that I had as a kid. It won't help with rigging (the We're Here is a sloop instead of a ship*), but it absolutely taught me the word "gunwale" and how to say it: gunnel. ("A Children's Classic Book", copyright 1969 Classic Press and 1979 Ottenheimer Publishers. The illustrations, btw, are fire.)
THAT SAID. There IS a primer for the Aubreyad, and it's called A Sea of Words, and it's a glossary for all the specialized vocabulary of the Aubreyad. With diagrams and sometimes discussion. It is often enthusiastically recommended to people who find themselves lost with all the maritime stuff. (I was, as mentioned before, not lost with the maritime stuff, but found it an enjoyable read just for nerdiness reasons. I don't own a copy, put probably should.)
There's also a tie-in recipe book for the food in the Aubreyad: Lobscouse and Spotted Dog.
--
*Sloop vs. Ship: There are two basic kinds of sail layouts.
1. Fore-and-aft rigging, in which the sails are mostly triangles and their neutral position is in line with the centerline of the boat (i.e., the sails run along a line drawn between the fore and aft). If you imagine the America's Cup sailboat races or sailing pleasure yachts, you're probably imagining a fore-and-aft rigged boat. A sloop** is one of the many kinds of fore-and-aft rigged boats. Fore-and-aft rigged boats tend to be smaller than ships***, because as the boat gets bigger, those tall triangular sails get very tall and very heavy, and eventually too heavy for humans to manage.
2. Square rigging, in which the sails are mostly rectangles (actually trapezoids), and their neutral position is at right angles to the ship's centerline (i.e., set square to the keel). Usually there's a bunch of these going up the mast, one above another. "Ship-rigged" is another name for square-rigged -- and the reasons ships (bigger than boats) use square rigging is because as the ship gets bigger you can just add more humans-can-manage-it-sized sails above the current ones. Your classic pirate ship is square-rigged.
This is complicated a bit by the existence of hybrid rigs, and of course square-rigged ships have a whole set of staysails that are really fore-and-aft sails... But that's the basic breakdown.
**That is, a fishing sloop is fore-and-aft rigged. In Hornblower and the Hotspur you'll learn that the Hotspur is a sloop -- but she's a Royal Navy sloop, and naval sloops were ship-rigged, i.e. square sails.
***Boats smaller than ships: The usual rule I hear is that ships are big enough to carry boats. Which doesn't clarify anything, because there are plenty of boats that carry dinghies, which are also a kind of boat, just at the smallest end of the range. But while non-maritime people call everything that floats a boat, maritime people -- especially maritime people aboard ships! -- will get very shirty if you call their ship a boat. Please use this knowledge wisely, either to be polite or to yank someone's chain, your choice.
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Date: 2026-01-31 07:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-30 05:02 pm (UTC)I confess I have always approached this series' technical details in the same way as, like, sci-fi technobabble, which is to say vaguely nodded and moved on. On the other hand, I once met someone who was reading the series by plotting out the ship's course on a map as he went...
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Date: 2026-01-30 08:27 pm (UTC)I once met someone who was reading the series by plotting out the ship's course on a map as he went...
WOW I love that. It's 100% beyond my capacities but I love that someone else did it!
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Date: 2026-01-30 06:29 pm (UTC)Also, if you read Naomi Novick's Temaire series, it will seem startlingly familiar.
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Date: 2026-01-30 07:14 pm (UTC)I read a bunch of these in the early 2000s and really enjoyed them, although from what I recall I got up to somewhere around 10-12 and petered out from a case of Too Much O'Brian (apparently there are only so many topgallants and brigs that a person can take). However, I did have a really good time for however far I got.
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Date: 2026-01-30 08:25 pm (UTC)Yes, I think we may have been wise to switch back and forth between Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin. I could see either series getting wearisome if you mainlined too many at a time.
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Date: 2026-01-30 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2026-01-30 09:54 pm (UTC)My high school library had the Hornblower books, so I read them then, some multiple times; my personal copies, originally used, are very yellow and crisp, so I think I would have to re-read in ebook. When that tv adaptation happened, I was like, "No, he isn't hot!" but then I realized, we have no idea, we only get Hornblower's own opinion of himself focusing on his skinny calves, and he does seem to attract women....
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