Sailing

THC has written on numerous occasions about his love for the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian, along with his admiration for the movie Master And Commander.  First reading the twenty volume series between 1990 and 2000, completing a second voyage during 2020, and planning a third cruise for 2030, I recently ran across an engaging series of essays on the books by Joshua Corey.  This one perfectly captures their essence and what has attracted me.

Corey hooked me with his opening:

Language is a writer’s preoccupation, but the language of Patrick O’Brian preoccupies his readers to an uncommon degree. Every would-be Aubrey-Maturin fan must quickly decide what their relationship is going to be to passages like this one:

“Helm’s a-lee,” he remarked—the cry usually echoed from one horizon to the other. Then “Off tacks and sheets.” He heard the bare feet hurrying and the staysail sheets rasping over the stays: he waited, waited, until the wind was one point on her weather bow, and then a little louder, “Mainsail haul!” She was in stays: and now she was paying off fast. The wind was well round on his other cheek. “Let go and haul,” he said, “and the half-seen waisters hauled on the starboard braces like veteran forecastlemen. The weather bowlines tightened: the Sophie gathered way.

I’ll be damned if I could paraphrase, even loosely, what’s going on, except on the most brute and obvious level: the sloop and crew under Jack Aubrey’s command is doing what he asked them to do, and they’re doing it well, and the sloop is moving. Some readers set themselves up with secondary sources or Google assiduously until they understand the distinction between sheets and stays, halyards and braces. More readers, I suspect, let the music of the sea-jargon wash over them, in the same way in which one can enjoy a Bach fugue without knowing the first thing about counterpoint. Still other potential readers find the sea-terms an insurmountable barrier to their enjoyment, and they put the book down—or, intimidated by the books’ reputation, never pick them up in the first place. 

I fall into the camp of those who let the sea-jargon wash over them. 

And I agree with this assessment:

The friendship between Jack and Stephen is the core, the beating heart, of a series of novels with much else to recommend them: derring-do, dry humor, Thoreauvian natural history, a bit of romance, and a level of nautical, military, and historical detail that achieves a degree of apparent authenticity surpassing the effect created by any other historical or fantasy novel that I have ever read. It is an unlikely friendship, a friendship of opposites, and on that opposition rests its appeal: the fantasy of harmonizing body and mind, social care and solitary inwardness, intuition and erudition, openness and secrecy.

If Jack Aubrey is the ego ideal of many men—honest, decisive, a natural leader, consistently courageous in the face of danger and hardship, and tactically brilliant (at sea, anyway; his best qualities tend to desert Jack ashore)—then Stephen Maturin is something closer to the reality—a writer’s reality, anyway. Jack is a man of action, a man of intensely physical life, touchingly ingenuous in many respects, true to his mentor Nelson’s oft-repeated remark, “Never mind maneuvers; just go straight at ‘em!” Stephen, on the other hand, is contemplative, withdrawn, sometimes staggeringly awkward, self-conscious, and complex.

If you haven't read the novels, but enjoy Corey's essay, you will undoubtedly appreciate the O'Brian novels and should enlist for a voyage. 

Uprising

On this date in 1943, several hundred Jewish prisoners at Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in Poland, rose in revolt and attempted escape.  About three hundred avoided the gunfire from camp guards and made it to the surrounding woods.  Somewhere between 50 and 70 were still alive at the end of the war in May 1945.

Treblinka was one of three major death camps, the others being Sobibor and Belzec, along with some smaller sites, built by the Nazis for the extermination of Jews living in the Government General of Poland, the area of that former country not absorbed into the Reich.  

Unlike concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald, where prisoners were housed under horrible conditions, starved, used as forced labor, and subject to arbitrary violence, dying at terrible rates, the death camps were designed to receive and quickly kill as many people as possible, keeping alive only the bare minimum to help keep the camp running.  In most cases, those arriving by train transport were dead within one to two hours of arriving.  During just over a year in operation, approximately 800-850,000 were murdered at Treblinka, 450,000 at Belzec (with only two known survivors), and 170,000 at Sobibor (which had several dozen survivors after an uprising in September 1943).

Auschwitz was a mixed camp with an industrial side using forced labor, opened in 1940, as well as an area constructed in 1942 for the the murder of Jews. About 1.1 million Jews died at Auschwitz, along with more than 100,000 Poles, Gypsies, and Russian prisoners of war.

At Treblinka, in addition to Polish Jews, about 8,000 Jews from the former Czechoslovakia and 11,000 from Thrace and Macedonia, along with 2,000 Romani were also killed. 

In addition to the German commanders and German and East European guards, each death camp also had a contingent of Jewish prisoners who were spared immediate death in order to keep the camp running.  At Treblinka this amounted to between 600 and 1,000 men divided into three groups.  The first to manage the unloading of those arriving on the train transports, including the undressing process before they were herded into the "showers".  The second sorted through belongings left behind so they could be collected and sent to Germany for civilian use.  The final group removed the dead from the gas chambers, burying them, and later, in 1943, digging up the corpses so they could be incinerated.  Every few weeks those in the three groups, with a few exceptions needed for continuity, would be murdered and replaced by new prisoners.

In 1943 as the number of arrivals dwindled and the digging up and incineration of the dead accelerated the workers were aware that the day of their termination was approaching, leading to the planning for the breakout.  They were also inspired by the news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April.  Under very difficult circumstances planning proceeded and a key to the German arsenal was forged, allowing the group to access guns and grenades. 

During the August 2 breakout, several guards were killed and the main gate and fences destroyed allowing about 300 to cross the antitank obstacles and ditches to reach the forest.  Though many were hunted down by the Germans or died under other circumstances a few dozen were to survive and bear witness.

Fire set during the breakout. Photo by railway worker.

 

Treblinka was finally closed in September 1943.

Names of Some of the Survivors 

Samuel Rajzman

Yankiel Weirnik 

Abraham Kolski

Richard Glazar

Chaim Sztajer

Dov Freiburg

Kalman Teigman 

Samuel Willenberg (the last survivor, died in 2016)

 

Grants from the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute, the Capital City of Warsaw and Wolf & Dora Rajcher Memorial Found have enabled a Book of Names database to be assembled of those who perished at Treblinka, many of whom had no surviving family to remember them.  The database currently has 130,859 names. 

Sound Advice

From Russell Crowe, answering a question about which of his films young men should watch.  His responses; Gladiator, Master and Commander, and Cinderella Man.  Each one cited for specific reasons.

Gladiator has a pretty ridiculous plot but a very good film and the finest part is Crowe's embodiment of the stoic mentality. For more on the reality behind the movie read The Real Maximus.  In Master and Commander he's the real Jack Aubrey.  Cinderella Man is the tale of underdog James Braddock's, a down on his luck fighter, as he seeks the heavyweight title.

Crowe has a very positive, good-natured twitter feed. 

 

Without a doubt, the most wholesome thing I’ve seen all month is @russellcrowe answering which of his films young men should watch.

It is such an earnest, thoughtful answer, framed around timeless virtues like honor, loyalty, family, and perseverance. pic.twitter.com/O0ndy7k3Xu

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) July 27, 2026

On Second Thought

By the end of the 1920s, however, the Party was in a position to enforce ideological conformity…the new technological intellectuals were willing to be told, were willing to believe, that the task of speaking truth to power was now redundant, because truth was in power.

From Red Plenty by Francis Spufford 

Red Plenty tells of the failure of economic development planning in the post-Stalin Soviet Union.  The finest book on the twenty years after Stalin's death, described in the Sunday Times (UK) as "so weird and yet so wonderful". 

I'd Rather Go Blind

Etta James is probably best known for At Last, but as good as she is on that record released in 1960, this live 1975 performance of I'd Rather Go Blind is peak.  Her raspy voice and performance delivers an emotional wallop.

History

Herodotus: "I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go along of small cities no less than great. Most of those which were great once are small today; and those which in my lifetime have grown to greatness were small enough in the old days. It makes no difference… pic.twitter.com/80WSHvzbyt

— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) July 21, 2026

I'm slowly making my way through an annotated version of Herodotus.