The Books: “The Mauritius Command” (Patrick O’Brian)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

The Mauritius Command, by Patrick O’Brian

The fourth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series. While all of the books could be called historical fiction – this one is based on actual events (or so says O’Brian’s preface). Captain Jack Aubrey is ordered to sail to the Cape of Good Hope – and from there try to take the two islands Mauritius and La Reunion, held by the French. It’s a daunting mission – the French are well-entrenched, and Aubrey also has his hands full with his captains on the ship – many of whom are, well, nightmares. Or emotional vampires. Or too competitive. Whatever the case may be. They have their own psychological things they are trying to work out (subconsciously) and it makes them tiresome companions and not very good captains. O’Brian, like I said before, is just so awesome in this realm – the best, really: when breaking down a man’s personality, when observing what it is that makes him tick (even if he can’t see it himself) – observing him in different situations, which is usually very revealing … you know, the whole warp and weft of humanity thing. No man is just one thing. Not even Jack Aubrey. He’s not just a good commander, and great at manning a ship. He’s also a kind of exhausted husband, he’s a bit touchy when it comes to questioning of authority (and of course he is – that’s the rules of the game – but Stephen Maturin is always there to make some comment about how authority corrupts everyone … so it gives him pause) – he’s a generous and open friend, he’s good with the young kids on the ship, showing them the ropes – he sometimes always wants it HIS way – even when he is NOT in the position of ultimate authority, and he is also prone to fits of sentimentality which Stephen, as an Irishman, finds incredibly boring. Jack Aubrey is made up of a million different impulses and pieces – just like all of us. O’Brian gives us everyone – pretty much every character – in a three-dimensional guise. I love his analysis of personality. He’s a psychologist of the highest order.

That’s what the excerpt is today.

EXCERPT FROM The Mauritius Command, by Patrick O’Brian

This ‘time out’, this happy interval with a straightforward and agreeable task in hand, sailing through warm seas with winds that, though often languid, were rarely downright contrary, sailing southwards in a comfortable ship with an excellent cook, ample stores and good company, had its less delightful sides, however.

His telescope was a disappointment. It was not that he could not see Jupiter: the planet gleamed in his eyepiece like a banded gold pea. But because of the ship’s motion he could not keep it there long enough or steadily enough to fix the local time of its moons’ eclipses and thus find his longitude. Neither the theory (which was by no means new) nor the telescope was at fault: it was the cleverly weighted cradle slung from the maintopgallantmast stay that he had designed to compensate for the pitch and roll that did not answer, in spite of all his alterations: and night after night he swung there cursing and swearing, surrounded by midshipmen armed with clean swabs, whose duty it was to enhance the compensation by thrusting him gently at the word of command.

The young gentlemen: he led them a hard life, insisting upon a very high degree of promptitude and activity; but apart from these sessions with the telescope, which they loathed entirely, and from their navigation classes, they thoroughly approved of their captain and of the splendid breakfasts and dinners to which he often invited them, although on due occasion he beat them with frightful strength on the bare breech in his cabin, usually for such crimes as stealing the gunroom’s food or repeatedly walking about with their hands in their pockets. For his part he found them an engaging set of young fellows, though given to lying long in their hammocks, to consulting their ease, and to greed; and in one of them, Mr Richardson, generally known as Spotted Dick, because of his pimples, he detected a mathematician of uncommon promise. Jack taught them navigation himself, the Boadicea‘s schoolmaster being incapable of maintaining discipline; and it soon became apparent to him that he should have to keep his wits as sharp as his razor not to be outstripped by his pupil in the finer points of spherical trigonometry, to say nothing of the stars.

Then there was Mr Farquhar. Jack esteemed him as an intelligent, capable, gentlemanlike man with remarkable powers of conversation, excellent company for the space of a dinner, although he drank no wine, or even for a week; but Mr Farquhar had been bred to the law, and perhaps because of this a little too much of his conversation took the form of questioning, so that Jack sometimes felt that he was being examined at his own table. Furthermore, Mr Farquhar often used Latin expressions that made Jack uneasy, and referred to authors Jack had never read. Stephen had always done the same (indeed, it would have been difficult to refer to any author with whom Jack was acquainted apart from those who wrote on fox-hunting, naval tactics, or astronomy), but with Stephen it was entirely different. Jack loved him, and had not the least objection to granting him all the erudition in the world, while remaining inwardly convinced that in all practical matters other than physic and surgery Stephen should never be allowed out alone. Mr Farquhar, however, seemed to assume that a deep knowledge of the law and of the public business embraced the whole field of useful human endeavour.

Yet Mr Farquhar’s vastly superior knowledge of politics and even for his more galling superiority at chess would have been as nothing if he had had some ear for music: he had none. It was their love of music that had brought Jack and Stephen together in the first place: the one played the fiddle and the other the ‘cello, neither brilliantly, yet both well enough to take deep pleasure in their evening concerts after retreat; they had played throughout every voyage they had made together, never interrupted by anything but the requirements of the service, the utmost extremity of foul weather, or by the enemy. But now Mr Farquhar was sharing the great cabin, and he was as indifferent to Haydn as he was to Mozart; as he observed, he would not give a farthing candle for either of them, or for Handel. The rustling of his book as they played, the way he tapped his snuffbox and blew his nose, took away from their pleasure; and in any case, Jack, brought up in the tradition of naval hospitality, felt bound to do all he could to make his guest comfortable, even to the extent of giving up his fiddle in favor of whist, which he did not care for, and of calling in the senior Marine lieutenant as the fourth, a man he did not much care for either.

Their guest was not always with them, however, for during the frequent calms Jack often took the jolly-boat and rowed away to swim, to inspect the frigate’s trim from a distance, and to talk with Stephen in private. ‘You cannot possibly dislike him,’ he said, skimming over the swell towards a patch of drifting weed where Stephen thought it possible they might find a southern variety of sea-horse or a pelagic crab related to those he had discovered under the line, ‘but I shall not be altogether sorry to set him down on shore.’

‘I can and do dislike him intensely when he pins my king and a rook with his lurking knight,’ said Stephen, ‘At most other times I find him a valuable companion, an eager, searching, perspicacious intelligence. To be sure, he has no ear at all, but he is not without a tincture of poetry: he has an interesting theory on the mystic role of kings, founded upon his study of tenures in petty serjeanty.’

Jack’s concern with petty serjeanty was so slight that he carried straight on, ‘I dare say I have been in command too long. When I was a lieutenant, messing with the rest, I used to put up with people far, far more trying than Farquhar. There was a surgeon in the Agamemnon that used to play ‘Greensleeves’ on his flute every evening, and every evening he broke down at exactly the same place. Harry Turnbull, our premier – he was killed at the Nile – used to turn pale as he came nearer and nearer to it. That was in the West Indies, and tempers were uncommon short but no one said anything except Clonfert. It don’t sound much, ‘Greensleeves’, but it was a pretty good example of that give and take there has to be, when you are all crammed up together for a long commission: for if you start falling out, why, there’s an end to all comfort, as you know very well, Stephen. I wish I may not have lost the way of it, what with age and the luxury of being post – the luxury of solitude.’