Patrick O'Brian's naval mastery

Patrick O'Brian's naval mastery

The Royal Navy stumbled badly on the outbreak of war against America in 1812. In August, the USS Constitution sank the HMS Guerriere. In October, the USS United States captured the HMS Macedonian, and in December the Constitution sank the HMS Java off the coast of Brazil. The tiny American navy--six frigates were all the capital ships it mustered on the outbreak of war--was managing what the much larger and more experienced fleets of Napoleonic France, Spain, and Holland had failed to do: beat the British in a straight fight.

When the eighteen-gun brig USS Hornet sank the equal-sized HMS Peacock in under fifteen minutes in February 1813, the navy of Nelson seemed to have lost its aura of victory. But, honor was restored on June 1 when Captain Philip Broke and HMS Shannon captured the USS Chesapeake, one of the U.S. Navy's frigates, in a short violent ship-to-ship action just outside of Boston harbor. Shannon's disciplined gunnery killed so many of the Chesapeake's officers and crew that the British were able to board and easily capture a ship that carried many more men.

It has never been established why the American captain, James Lawrence, took his ship out of safe harbor and into action that June day. He may have wanted to test his youthful crew and take them away from the temptations of port or perhaps he simply underestimated the professionalism of the Royal Navy after the string of U.S. victories.

While history doesn't answer the question, fiction can. In his novel The Fortune of War--the sixth in the Aubrey/Maturin series--Patrick O'Brian created impetus for Lawrence's impetuousness. He goes into battle to recapture Dr. Stephen Maturin who has escaped from Boston with papers that describe the whole of the French-American intelligence operations in England and Europe. Lawrence's failure becomes, in O'Brian, a double victory for the British--in the naval and the clandestine war.

The Fortune of War brings the War of 1812 to life. In the course of simply trying to get his two heroes home to England from India, O'Brian managed to include them in the Java's defeat by the Constitution, to describe the life of captured British officers as they await exchange, and then the action of the Shannon. Captain Broke is presented as the cousin of O'Brian's Jack Aubrey, with full details of how Broke's father used to cane them for their youthful misdeeds. We learn that British naval officers opposed a war with the United States, which they saw as a distraction from fighting Napoleon; how Britain was overstretching its military resources; about the debate over whether the crews of the volunteer U.S. navy would prove better than impressed ones; how Captain Broke burned all his captured prizes--discarding a large fortune--to keep his ship at perfect readiness to fight the Chesapeake.

There has been no end of novelists chronicling the Age of Nelson, from first large-scale wooden ship action, the Battle of Quiberon Bay in 1758--the year before Nelson was born--to the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The shelves sag under the weight of the naval fiction of C. S. Forester, Alexander Kent, Dudley Pope, James Nelson, Richard Woodman, and many more. These writers are all good at getting the varied sails before the wind and beating to quarters as the ship comes up against the enemy. But they are mostly very basic genre fiction, putting history to service in a sequence of commonly plotted entertainments.

In every genre, there are one or two writers whose excellence of craft raises the form to art. Patrick O'Brian, who died in January 2000 at 86, so honed his craft that the Aubrey/Maturin novels are peer to the great sagas of the nineteenth century. O'Brian's twenty novels (plus an unfinished twenty-first) about the Nelsonian navy have now been bound into a beautiful five-volume edition. (1) These are the story of two men: Jack Aubrey, naval officer, and Stephen Maturin, naturalist, physician, and occasional spy. They meet in early 1800 on the island of Minorca at Port Mahon. Aubrey has just been promoted to Master and Commander, allowing him to captain the smallest ships of the British Navy, and has gained his first command, the sixteen-gun brig Sophie. He asks Maturin to serve as surgeon on the ship. The latter agrees and sets in motion a great friendship fostered first by a love of music. The two spend their evenings together aboard ship playing chamber music: Aubrey on his violin, Maturin slightly more adeptly on the cello.

I don't wish to spoil the plots of these wonderful novels, but I've enjoyed deducing the heroes' backgrounds from offhand remarks throughout the series. Aubrey is thirty when the novels begin, and it seems that he became a lieutenant in 1792, served variously on HMS Agamemnon, Arethusa, Colossus, Orion, and Ardent. He was present at the victories of Cape St. Vincent (February 1797) and Camperdown (October 1797). He was then second lieutenant of the fifty-gun Leander at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798.