Master and Commander Summary: Inside Patrick O'Brian's First Aubrey-Maturin Novel
What it is about
Master and Commander is a nautical historical novel by the English writer Patrick O'Brian, published in the United States in 1969 and in the United Kingdom in 1970. It opens in April 1800, in the Royal Navy port of Mahon in Minorca, and it introduces two men who would go on to carry a twenty-novel series. O'Brian kept working on that series until his death in 2000.
Jack Aubrey is a lieutenant without a ship, going slowly to seed on shore. Stephen Maturin is a penniless Irish-Catalan physician and natural philosopher. They meet at a concert at the Governor's Mansion, where Aubrey is beating time half a beat ahead of the music and Maturin elbows him to stop. Both men are at a low point, both take the matter as one of honour, and they part expecting to fight a duel.
That night Aubrey learns he has been promoted to the rank of commander and given HMS Sophie, a 14-gun sloop-of-war. The promotion is where the title comes from: master and commander, effectively a captain. His joy wipes out the quarrel. He meets Maturin in the street the next day, invites him to dine, discovers a shared love of music (Aubrey plays the violin, Maturin the cello), and on learning his profession asks him to come aboard as surgeon. Maturin is in fact far better qualified than a naval surgeon needs to be. He accepts anyway.
From there the book becomes the record of a single commission. Sophie escorts a convoy of merchant ships in the Mediterranean while Aubrey knocks his crew into a fighting unit. Then Admiral Lord Keith allows him to cruise independently, hunting French and Spanish merchant vessels for prize money. He is very good at it. The naval action draws closely on the real exploits of Lord Cochrane, including a battle modelled on Cochrane's victory in the brig HMS Speedy over the far larger Spanish frigate El Gamo.
The main characters
Jack Aubrey is all appetite and instinct: a fighting captain, generous, impulsive, careless about consequences on land. His affair with the wife of Captain Harte, his superior at Mahon, costs him more than he reckons.
Stephen Maturin is his opposite. He has never set foot on a man-of-war, cannot follow the nautical customs, and is treated by the crew as a landsman, though without unkindness. The sailors explain terminology and the workings of prize money to him, and so to the reader. As a naturalist he is delighted by the chance to study rare birds and fish. His intelligence is cool where Aubrey's is hot.
James Dillon, the first lieutenant, is a wealthy and aristocratic Irishman. He and Maturin recognise each other at once: they had met before as members of the United Irishmen, a society working for Irish home rule and Catholic emancipation. Neither mentions it. When Dillon is ordered to intercept an American ship thought to be sheltering Irish rebels, he works quietly to help them escape, and the conflict between his oath and his conscience sits under everything he does.
The themes
Friendship is the engine. The Aubrey and Maturin partnership begins in a near-duel and settles into something that survives temperament, politics and secrets. Music is its common ground, and one of the few places where the two men meet as equals.
Ambition runs alongside it. Aubrey wants prizes, promotion and reputation, and the novel is exact about how the Navy's reward system actually worked, and how easily a jealous superior could withhold what was earned.
Divided loyalty is the darker thread, carried by Dillon and Maturin. A war fought for Britain is not a war every man aboard believes in on the same terms.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the book fresh. Sophie meets and defeats the Cacafuego, a Spanish 32-gun xebec-frigate far larger and better armed than she is. The action is bloody and Dillon is among the dead. A victory against those odds would normally bring recognition, promotion and serious money, but Harte blocks all three. What he cannot block is Aubrey's growing name in the service as one of its great young fighting captains. Later, on escort duty, Sophie is taken by a squadron of four large French warships. The French Captain Christy-Pallière is courteous, feeds Aubrey well and talks about his cousins in Bath. While the prisoners are held, the French come under British attack in what becomes the First Battle of Algeciras. The officers are paroled to Gibraltar days later and watch the second battle from a distance. Aubrey is court-martialled for the loss of his ship and acquitted.
Why it still matters
The first reviews were mixed. UK sales were good enough for O'Brian to carry on, but the book did not take in America. In Britain and Ireland the praise gradually won out, for its sense of period and for O'Brian's command of the philosophical, political, sensual and social temper of the age, covering everything from Royal Navy practice under sail to the state of science and medicine. In 1990 the US publisher W. W. Norton reissued the book and its sequels. That edition took off almost at once and brought O'Brian a large new readership. His biographer places this novel at the start of the author's magnum opus, and the Aubrey-Maturin books are now often called the best-loved series of the twentieth century. It suits readers who want period detail taken seriously and a friendship worth twenty volumes.
