Product Description: Captain Jack Aubrey accepts a commission to convey a British ambassador to the East Indies. The voyage takes him and his friend Stephen Maturin to the strange sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and through the spice islands where the French have a near-overwhelming local superiority.
Amazon.com Review: The stakes are high as HMS Surprise opens, and actor Robert Hardy's sterling reading never lets you forget them. Hardy makes Patrick O'Brian's third novel of high-seas adventure--written in 1973 and set mainly in 1805 on the waters surrounding India and the Orient--seem as immediate as an overdrawn checking account. Money plays a big role, and Captain Jack Aubrey stands to make a lot of it. All he has to do is find Napoleon's fleet--and take their gold away from them. (Running time: three hours, two cassettes) --Lou Schuler
HMS Surpise I was in heaven from the first page, shipboard lingo, characters that you can almost see Patrick O'brian is the author I have longed for all of my life. I have an Admiral in my family tree and feel it is where I get my love for sea stories. This is a novel that every boy should read and I will again with pleasure. I can't wait to indulge myself with all the others. Cheers J.HMS Surprise
O'Brian paints a world that shrinks to the deck and rigging of a ridiculously small ship on a vast deserted ocean Third in the series, with Cap'n Jack Aubrey captaining his own ship to the Far East, planning his wedding with Sophie, and rescuing his friend Maturin. Good action is trumped by a better vision of non-action, as O'Brian portrays the long shipbound trip to the East.
The inclusion of a diagram of the masts and sails of a sailing ship, but not of a map of the travels of the Surprise is no mere coincidence--O'Brian paints a world that shrinks to the deck and rigging of a ridiculously small ship on a vast deserted ocean.
The relationship between the two men grows deeper and more mature, as indeed the men themselves seem to mature and take on more responsibility.
Fourth in the series: The Mauritius Command
Good Solid Addition to the Series Picks up where Post Captain left off. jack and Stephen are back in England. Jack needs cash to marry his sweetheart Sophie. Stephen is unsure which he loves more, Science or Sophies Cousin Diana.
Jack is given command of HMS Surprise and is to deliver an ambassadore to an Indonesian Sultanate on the other side of the world. They have many stops and adventures on the way.
Finally they land in Mumbai. Stephen finds that Diana is there and gets in an affair of honor with Diana's benefactor Mr. Canning. Things escalate and the pair leave India quickly. They gain fame by defending East India Company Ships from a French Fleet.
Jack is rewarded by Canning. Stephen has a duel with Canning and things get tied up nicely in the end between each man and his love though some would say its not for the better of either of them.
I anxiously await reading the Mauritious Command.
One of the best of the series This book, third in the wonderful series, is the first that makes one think that perhaps some of the usual descriptions are missing something.
If you read the story and reflect upon it, do you possibly come to think that perhaps, in reality, the story of Jack Aubrey's career is mostly a peg on which to hang the complex life-story of Stephen Maturin?
So instead of the sea-captain being the central figure, and Maturin his interesting companion, the books are about a wonderfully rich and complex individual who happened to spend much of his life at sea in the Navy of the early 1800's.
Consider: we are made privy to far more of Stephen's inner thoughts than Jack's: we usually see Jack from outside, but we look over Stephen's shoulder as he pens his diary. We are fully in touch with Stephen's emotions, in all the key points in his relationship with Diane, the terrible sadness over the child Dil - whereas when Jack receives a srong emotional blow, for instance in "Master and Commander," where he comes back from finding Molly Harte together with Colonel Pitt, "He was very pale, and in the strong moonlight he looked deathly - black hole for a mouth, hollows for his eyes." All right, we understand his feelings, but by outside observation, not by entering into Jack's thoughts.
By contrast, in HMS Surprise we have the heart-wrenching drama of Stephen and Diana: surely the moment when he feels through the envelope, the ring returned to him, that he had given with such hopes, is one of the most touching in literature. And what are we to think of Diana? Are moral judgments relevant? Surely we can understand her wish to escape the worlds of both India and England, which have both given her nothing but cruelty. Yet if only Jack Aubrey had agreed to take her home in Surprise, what a different outcome there might have been, being with Stephen for the whole voyage. But Jack was stern and unwilling, partly because he felt she would only hurt Stephen, partly to assuage his own guilt for his past wooing of her.
Yet with all the emotional drama, we do not lack for naval action, or marvelous scenes, or humor. The descriptions of India surely can be compared to none but Kipling's of nearly 100 years later. We get the thunderous action where Jack saves the India merchant fleet from the French navy. And we have Stephen's three-toed sloth, brought aboard from the jungles of Brazil, a favorite with the ship's company: but it doesn't like Jack Aubrey until one day Jack gives it a little cake soaked in rum - ah-hah! "Some minutes later he felt a touch on his knee: the sloth had silently climbed down and it was standing there, its beady eyes looking up into his face, bright with expectation. More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem." After a few days of this, Stephen notes its condition - he "looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried "Jack, you have debauched my sloth." Quite a row ensues, to the entertainment of those overhearing it...
Patrick O'Brian Fan... I will need to have the whole series of Aubrey/Maturin adventures to listen to as I work. Nothing like vacuming, cleaning the house, watering the plants etc, etc and listening to these stories.
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