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.