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Random question, but are you familiar with the Lubber’s Hole podcast? I’ve really been enjoying it and would recommend it if you haven’t heard about it, if you like podcasts!

YES I’ve listened to a few eps! It’s alright but I’m kinda jealous because I would like to start an Aubrey/Maturin podcast of my own one day (a classical millennial dream) and they already took the gayest sounding name.

#every couple weeks on twitter i annoy everyone by making a bunch of dumb lubber’s hole jokes #literally that wojak meme of the guy in the corner at the party like #‘they will never understand the deep important personal significance of the lubber’s hole #ask tag

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The Wine-Dark Sea

As I referred to last time, this novel begins with a volcanic eruption in the middle of the ocean. It’s fucking cool, and also scary. But what the book is about is an even scarier natural phenomenon than that: growing apart gradually from someone you used to be close with.  That’s what happens to Stephen and his erstwhile pal Nathaniel Martin. This book is about FAKE FRIENDS. Don't you hate fake friends? Boy I sure do.

Because of the structure of these books I tend to take awhile to warm up to secondary characters. Not because I don’t like them but with Jack and Stephen sharing protagonist duties they kind of take up all the air in the room, so to speak, so that even I, a certified Minor Character Investor who has dreamt for years of being a Metal Gear Solid miniboss, tend to take awhile to warm up to the secondary and tertiary characters. Sometimes it takes a couple novels but then after that I’m like. I would die for you, Tom Pullings. He is 100% my fucking girlfriend. He’s everyone’s girlfriend. God we love Tom Pullings. 

One character I did warm up to right away when he was introduced, though, was Nathaniel Martin, who appeared for the first time back in The Ionian Mission. He starts as a chaplain and then when Jack starts privateering becomes the assistant surgeon to Stephen in the Surprise.

If I could once more compare our characters here to cartoons I watched in the 90s/early 00s: if Jack Aubrey is Bart Simpson (daring, occasionally foolish, troublemaker, bad boy) and Stephen is his BFF Milhouse Van Houten (nerd with deep seated psychological issues) then Nathaniel Martin is their Martin Prince: he exists to be a nerd AND a square, to give Stephen someone to talk to but also to stand near Stephen and make Stephen look cooler in comparison. Stephen is a nerd, of course, but he’s down with gay people, his views on women are more progressive than typical men of his time period, and he loves to get high; all of this contrasted with Martin, who’s a bit of a fuddy duddy with more traditional views on those sort of things. (Though, in his defense, he is sort of right to question Stephen on some things. Like the "loves to get high" stuff, for example.)

Like Stephen, he is a naturalist and he has one eye because he was observing an owl’s nest and the bird attacked him and gouged his eye out. Honestly, fuck all these soldiers and sailors with their battle scars, talk about an actual honorable wound in the line of duty. I’m also monocular and I like birds so this biographic detail was what endeared me to Martin from the very start.

Another thing I like about him is how his friendship with Stephen is contrasted with Stephen’s friendship with Jack. The thing is, Jack is sort of low-key loathes Martin a little bit?? They don’t outright hate each other, of course, but Jack finds him grating because of Jack’s habitual discomfort around clergymen, the fact that Martin’s a pretty poor musician whenever he tries to play with Stephen and Jack, and, most petty of all, the fact that Martin and Stephen get on so well. Jack is conscious that his dislike is unjust and at least partially fueled by jealousy; he’s aware that Stephen and Martin have a lot more in common than Jack and Stephen do. It’s a very middle school “my friend has another friend she likes more than me but GOD I hate her!!” type of dislike. A humanizing bit of frailty on Jack’s part.

Another thing about Martin that I like is that he does tend to call Stephen out on some of his shit, in a way Jack can’t or won’t. Martin is, I think, the only character we see who confronts Stephen about his laudanum use before the disaster in The Letter of Marque. Of course, a lot of good that does, since obviously Stephen was too self-deluded to actually listen to anyone at that point but, you know, it was nice that someone was there to stand in the background and be like uh. That’s a lot of laudanum dude. 

Honestly, Stephen could use that now! “Hey, that’s a lot of coca leaves, dude,” was literally my commentary through the entire second half of this novel, when Stephen gets to Peru and replenishes his stash finally. He sort of reminds me when an alcoholic quits drinking but they start smoking a lot instead. Call it harm reduction, I guess?? Friendship ended with DOWNERS, now UPPERS are my new best friend. Christ almighty.

Before the coca leaf binge, though, Martin is ejected from the book due to illness, just as the Surprise finally reaches Peru. It’s a very abrupt end to the character, if not to his friendship with Stephen; he’s not dead, but something about his exit has a very nail in the coffin feel to it. I’m of two minds about it; I’m somewhat disappointed that a character who has been around for so long, and was so important to Stephen, was just booted out of the novel with not much mention or ceremony afterwards. But I do like the realism how gradually the two of them drifted apart; Stephen starts to see that their interests and passions in life have diverged, but even in the previous novel, I think there was a clue that Martin wasn’t cut out for the seafaring life much longer:

“[Stephen said,] ‘Yet on the other hand I do not find that the turmoil of a ship prevents me reading: with a good clear candle in my lantern and balls of wax in my ears, I read with the utmost delight. The confinement of my cabin, the motion of my hanging cot, the distantly-heard orders and replies, the working of the ship – all these enhance my enjoyment.’

‘I have tried your wax balls,’ said Martin, ‘but they make me apprehensive. I am afraid that there will be the cry “She sinks, she sinks! All is lost. She cannot swim,” and I shall not hear.’

‘You were always rather apprehensive, Nathaniel,’ said Paulton, taking off his spectacles and looking at him kindly with his myopic gaze.” - 14-The Nutmeg of Consolation, ch.9, paragraph 94 

It’s funny; like Stephen, Martin is also constantly described by most of the sailors as a hopeless lubber, but Martin lacks Stephen’s occasionally troubling “if I die I die lmao” outlook on life that makes him weirdly suited to the naval life. Again: Martin’s a bit of a fuddy duddy. He’s no 100% perfect ride or die girlfriend like Tom Pullings. But then, who is?

Personal Ranking

The Far Side of the World (10) > HMS Surprise (3) > Desolation Island (5) > The Reverse of the Medal (11) > The Nutmeg of Consolation (14) > The Ionian Mission (8) > The Fortune of War (6) > The Wine-Dark Sea (16) > Clarissa Oakes/The Truelove (15) > Master & Commander (1) > The Surgeon’s Mate (7) > Treason's Harbour (9) > The Letter of Marque (12) > The Thirteen-Gun Salute (13) > Post Captain (2) > The Mauritius Command (4)

#recap post #aubreyad #stephen maturin #jack aubrey #nathaniel martin #love the title on this one #so romantic! #the wine-dark sea

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jack getting command of HMS Polychrest in Post Captain.

#remember when she sank and jack was like. thank fucking christ #i was sad tho #i coulda fixed her #jack aubrey #post captain #aubreyad

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Can’t let go of this theme...

#im both looking forward to and dreading rereading post captain #dreading bc its such a shitshow (/affectionate) #looking forward to bc i remember reading abt the polychrest for the first time and being like hmm #i get this is fucked up but i dont quite see why #but i think now #16 books later #i get it. i can visualize it now. #[serenely] the hms polychrest is two trucks having sex

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Whimsical, chancy, female, lunar: yaoi and yuri in the Aubrey/Maturin series

the inherent yuri of the sea and the inherent yaoi of the sailor is the most ancient queer solidarity

- twitter user caranthirs. I would link to the tweet, but their account appears to be suspended (RIP)

This essay was born from a discussion prompt asking about the relationship between yaoi and reality. In answering I was reminded of the above tweet. Tongue in cheek as it no doubt is, it’s always really resonated with me and my own personal experience with yaoi, yuri, and queerness, such as it is.

First of all, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that there’s something kind of fruity about the ocean. A great deal of boat media, which is a term that I’m using to encompass everything from Moby Dick to One Piece, from Muppet Treasure Island to the Titan submersible implosion incident of 2023, is intimately concerned with this. One thing I’ve always been intrigued by with boat media is the inherent constraint, the inherent loss of control; even in our modern day, the ocean is an unpredictable element, and to this day it has depths that are literally unfathomable to science. There’s a certain powerlessness one has to give oneself over to to board a boat, and of course there’s timeless romance, endless stories and art and music associated with the sea.

I’ve been to the ocean maybe four times in my whole life, and I’ve always lived in an area of the United States that’s about as inland as it’s possible to be on the planet Earth, but I’ve long been fascinated with boat media, though I was not always conscious why I was drawn to it. When I was growing up I had a persistent autoimmune disorder that destroyed the vision in my right eye and from a very young age I was forced to sit still for various eye exams, procedures, surgeries. Because I was so young when all this started, I never exactly rebelled against it; if I was a fish, then this near-constant constraint placed on me was the water that I swam in. I was a kid who lived in my head a lot, and my head was filled with fantasies of escape. I used to make up stories and tell them to myself before bed, a kind of self-soothing ritual that saw me off to sleep. In more difficult times in my life, especially as an adolescent, this quite literally got me through the day; I would look forward to my little bedtime story, and sometimes not.

The stories differ greatly, but the one thing they’ve all had in common is they’re always about at least two characters who are trapped together, undergoing some kind of external trauma or abuse or privation, and together are trying to escape, but they never succeed. The reason for that is that the stories have no ending, by design; the “end” comes when I fall asleep. Sometimes there are self-inserts, but usually they’re about other characters, usually male characters. For a long time I didn’t exactly understand or think much about why I identified so strongly with these stories, which were sometimes original and sometimes elaborate works of fanfiction, sometimes erotic and sometimes not.

I was something of a late in life yaoi adopter; I was immersed in Western media fandom spaces and I viewed a lot of slash fandom initially with contempt, but based on what I’ve described above it’s maybe not greatly surprising that I became a big yaoi fan when I was around 19 or 20. I found it both enticing and alienating at once; I was a cis girl but I felt like I was a failure as a woman, and reading about or trying to identify with women didn’t always do it for me. There was something about viewing male as the default that was attractive; I remember as a kid, pre-internet, I would consciously look for books about male protagonists, though as an avowed feminist I felt obscurely ashamed of this.

Shame was an essential component of all of this, by the way. Both eroticized shame and the more down to earth, un-fun kind. There was always the question in the back of my mind: did I wish I was the man, or did I desire the man? There were similar questions about my attraction to women, which were even more disquieting in what they did or did not say about me: did I desire a beautiful woman, or did I want to be a beautiful woman? Shame was inextricable, and constant; shame about my nascent queerness, shame over how poorly I performed my own gender, and shame about being into all this yaoi shit in the first place. I had internet friends by this time, but I didn’t tell any of my real life friends about my online activities. I had an absolute horror of being seen as the type of straight girl (or bi girl, as I identified at the time) who fetishizes real life queer men.

Currently, I’m in the middle of reading Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series. I fucking love it, and something about it has helped me square some of the circles involved here; discussing these books, with other fans online and with unwilling victims loving friends and family members has led me to reflect on some of the above in ways I never have before. It feels freeing in a way I never even knew I was constrained. To bring it back to the quote from the beginning, and also add a passage from the eighth novel in O’Brian’s series:

“‘With the wind as it lies, I believe we may look for them the day after tomorrow,’ said Jack. ‘But tell me, Professor, is not this a most prodigious wearisome ride you are undertaking?[...]’

'No doubt,’ said Graham, ‘but the sea is an uncertain chancy whimsical female lunar element: you advance one mile upon its surface and at the same time the whole body of water has retired a league. I prefer the honest earth, where my advance is absolute, however arduous…” - The Ionian Mission, ch.11, paragraph 50

This character, a haughty diplomat our protagonists are forced to deal with while battling it out with the French in a Grecian port, is not very important in and of himself. Unlike the two principals of the Aubrey/Maturin series, he is no seaman and has no affinity for shipboard life, and his uneasiness while onboard the ship is tinged with a misogynist mistrust of the Mediterranean itself. I prefer to take a horse, like a man, he seems to say, but you and Maturin, feel free to stay here in your gay little boat. 

(Sidenote/fun fact about Jack Aubrey: he has pretensions of being a horseman whenever he’s on land for any length of time, but he is in fact really bad with them and while riding is frequently unseated nearly but not quite as often as Stephen falls out of the fucking boat.)

That is one and this is another of the many, many ways Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin get kinda fruity with it; our two main characters are differentiated from landsmen (lubbers!) in this way throughout the series. The sea is dangerous, of course; Jack and Stephen, who face naval battles, sickness and disease, shipwrecks, storms, and volcanic eruptions on their voyages throughout the series, know this better than anyone.  As different as Jack and Stephen are, as different as two men can possibly be, what unites them is a niggling, persistent discomfort with life on land and this, coupled with their very great affection for each other, is why they choose to sail with each other over and over again. Though they came to it by different means, each of them finds that their true homes are on the sea, and with each other. 

The essential yaoi of the seaman, the essential chancy, lunar, yuri element of the sea…. There’s something about it that makes me smile. Yeah…the ocean. She’s a little gay with it. Who isn’t?

#jack aubrey #stephen maturin #aubreyad #the ionian mission #Thoughts On Yaoi #this is something a little different than normal #more of a personal essay vibe to this one #thanks for reading if you do. would love to hear what you think :3

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the sole swaggy things about Stephen Maturin:

1. his addictive personality coupled with his blithe certainty that he can overcome opium dependence with the power of mind.

2. his steadfast committment to our National No Snitching Policy.

#self reblob #old post but important #needs to go here #stephen maturin

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'Sir,' cried George, intercepting him in the garden, 'Papa says would you like to take a quick glance at the squadron while there is still some light on the sea.’ 'I should like it of all things,' said Stephen. 'George, here is a three-shilling piece for thee.' ‘Oh thank you, sir. Thank you very much. We never got our fourpence, but now Amos is just going down to Hampton and I shall go with him and fairly gorge . . .' His words were lost in the distance.

- The Commodore, ch. 3, paragraph 94

lmao

#stephen maturin #george aubrey #the commodore #liveblog tag #he's good #aubreyad

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We’re always laughing about the time Jack got Stephen’s sloth irresponsibly drunk in HMS Surprise (Debauchgate) but we don’t talk enough about the time Stephen accidentally got the entirety of the ship’s rat population coked up in The Nutmeg of Consolation.

#stephen maturin #aubreyad #jack aubrey #the nutmeg of consolation #hms surprise #he drops a leaf while going into his massive stash and the rats become Obsessed and chew a hole thru the chest where he stores it #and we know its a massive stash bc in a previous novel he goes to an apothecary and pulls a ron swanson while theyre in sweden #‘good day. i require all the coca leaves you have.’ #‘wait. i fear what you just heard was ‘give me a lot of coca leaves.’ what i said was ‘give me all the coca leaves you have.’ is that clear #everyone in stockholm was straight edge for a whole month bc of dr. stephen maturin #god bless him #he does good everywhere he goes

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Having basically finished Master and Commander, a fun thing I really loved, craft wise, was that for no apparent reason except that he could, O'Brian has all three of his POV characters, on their first full day on the Sophie, begin their day with the exact same line – but with variations which nonetheless tell you something about their character:

(Perhaps even funnier: that the specific way he chooses to do this makes James Dillon out to seem the most well adjusted of the three.)

Another really cool parallel that struck me, though I'm not sure it was intentional (but it's O'Brian, so I'm inclined to think it was), is in the scene where Jack reads the Sophie's log and muster list:

Of all the men whose names he skims through, all are either Run or Discharged, save only one Discharged Dead: she's lost her Lieutenant, killed in action against the French.

Patrick O'Brian: [slooowly sliding Chekov's gun onto the table while making direct eye contact, then leaving it there for 270 pages]

#jack aubrey #stephen maturin #james dillon #‘christ. another day.’ tag urself #that ones me

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Come one come all and take a Very Silly Quiz!

https://uquiz.com/skyc1v

#i got jack aubrey but thats bc i test well #testing well is a stephen maturin ass trait

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Surprise! HMS Surprise sketchdump

#obsessed with her

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Clarissa Oakes/The Truelove

This book begins with Jack still smarting from the events of the previous book, utterly peevish and miserable; he starts by enumerating all the ways he's been hard done by the crew, even Stephen. He resents being "manipulated" into bringing Padeen onto the crew, which...I can't quite call it inaccurate but it is a very funny way to describe your best friend narrowly escaping death, yet again, while fully dressed in clown makeup, yet again. I wouldn't call Stephen's brand of getting what he wants manipulation, it's more like an extremely unlucky type of laughing chance. "If the accident will," as Kurt Vonnegut said, and the accident surely did will Padeen on board the ship again.

It all boils down to sexual jealousy; everyone's been off sucking and fucking and Jack meanwhile was getting jerked around by Amanda Smith part deux. Nothing less than he deserves, of course, but it does explain a lot. There's an awkwardness between him and Stephen that persists especially in the beginning of this book. They tiptoe around each other in the aftermath of their argument, with each of them trying to be tactful but still managing to get on the other’s nerves. For a relationship that was quite literally founded on the promise of future violence, they're always so reluctant to cause each other the slightest pain. I suppose that’s the reason they so easily fall into this pattern of deferred conflict; even when they come to blows (figuratively, in this case) they can never actually make themselves pull the trigger or push the blade in when it comes to the fateful moment. Their affection is always too strong and the conflict is always put off as far in the future as possible.

I just can’t get over this scene where Stephen is examining Jack (due to his “peccant liver”) and it’s a good example both of how much they care for each other and also how they can’t stop annoying each other. From page 8:

"Stephen, surely you would not call me middle-aged, would you?"

"Navigators are notoriously short-lived, and for them middle-age comes sooner than for quiet abstemious country gentlemen. Jack, you have led as unhealthy a life as can well be imagined, perpetually exposed to the falling damps, often wet to the skin, called up at all hours of the night by that infernal bell. You have been wounded the Dear knows how many times, and you have been cruelly overworked. No wonder your hair is grey."

"My hair is not grey. It is a very becoming buttercup-yellow."

Jack wore his hair long, clubbed and tied with a broad black bow. Stephen plucked the bow loose and brought the far end of the plait round before his eyes.

"Well I'm damned," said Jack, looking right at it in the sunlight. "Well I'm damned; you are quite right. There are several grey hairs...scores of grey hairs. It is positively grizzled, like a badger-pie. I had never noticed."

Six bells.

"Will I tell you something more cheerful?" asked Stephen.

"Please do," said Jack, looking up from his queue with that singularly sweet smile Stephen had known from their earliest acquaintance.

I read that passage to a friend of mine after I made him watch the movie with me and he was like "what the FUCK." I like to expose other people, unversed in the Aubrey/Maturin series, and watch them utterly boggle at what we are witnessing, like exposing someone with no tolerance to a deadly poison. “Singularly sweet smile.” Good christ. You've never mentioned thinking that Jack has a sweet smile before, Stephen, I simply had to infer that you thought so from your every word and action for the past 10 years and 15 books.

Anyway. Jack's bad mood doesn’t survive an encounter with the stowaway title character, who I feel remiss in not mentioning till 700 odd words into this review. CLARISSA OAKES, a woman who is hard done by the world, both in-fiction and metatextually since the cowardly dogs who put out the US edition removed her name from the title. I’m starting to think misogyny is real and maybe is still with us to this day….

To be honest, I was really leery of Clarissa’s whole plotline when I read descriptions of it in other reviews of this book. She was sexually abused by her guardian as a child and later becomes a sex worker at a brothel in London, and in telling Stephen about one of her clients she puts him onto a break in his big case. The naval intelligence connection and the entire escapade on Moahu end up feeling incidental; the real attraction of this book for me is Clarissa, both watching the deterioration of all her shipboard relations and the real warmth and affection that springs up between her and Stephen. I think Stephen describes her at one point as combining worldliness with a certain naivete; she's both attractive and likable and yet for all that her viciousness and remoteness are what alienate her from others. She reminds me a lot of Stephen himself, to be honest. 

I knew it was coming but the scene where she reveals the abuse she suffered as a child is surprising because it feels so spontaneous and perfectly natural. O'Brian captures that fleeting feeling where you can suddenly find yourself telling someone you barely know things you've never spoken of to anyone else in your life. She's drawn to Stephen for one of the qualities I've always admired about him: his steadfast commitment to our National (International??) No Snitching Policy. They’re united in their hatred of impertinent questions! “You should be addicted to shutting the fuck up.” They embody this beautifully, and it leads to a very lovely friendship.

I mentioned last time that, for all the joy in The Nutmeg of Consolation, there was a real sense of dread or foreboding which is even more prominent here. I kept bracing myself for something awful to happen to Clarissa for the whole book. I think in a more traditional narrative something more character arc-y might have happened with her; maybe her promiscuousness would have had consequences and things would have come to a head.

I suppose you could call it another example of deferred conflict: nothing awful happens to her. She sails away in the end. Her marriage is mostly joyless, but she is certainly better off than she was before, and has the possibility of a future and maybe real happiness, and it’s almost certain that we haven't seen the last of her.

Deferral of conflict doesn't have to mean deferral of catharsis. It's like a Cinderella story, right down to the pivotal scene of getting Clarissa a new dress. She doesn't grow or change, really, but there is a real satisfaction in her defiant ability to just live and survive. The affection between her and Stephen is what sells it I think—the scene where he's running late for dinner (again) and she helps him dress is so charming—and the book ends with their bittersweet parting.

And that's that! Don't really have much to add about the little colonial adventure on Moahu here, other than to say that the ad copy, if the not the text of the books themselves, is always playing up the "head-hunting cannibals" aspect of the Pacific Islanders in a way that is exoticizing at the very least and downright racist at worst, and yet no Polynesian character we've ever met in these novel has been even close to as unpleasant as any of the white people we met in Boston when Jack and Stephen were POWs there in The Fortune of War. Give me the man soup any day before sending me back to Beantown again, I beg you!

NEXT TIME: Homeric seas. Literal islands forming from fiery volcanoes in front of our eyes. And an even scarier natural phenomenon than that: gradually drifting apart from a friend you used to be close with. 🙀 See you then!

PERSONAL RANKING

The Far Side of the World (10) > HMS Surprise (3) > Desolation Island (5) > The Reverse of the Medal (11) > The Nutmeg of Consolation (14) > The Ionian Mission (8) > The Fortune of War (6) > Clarissa Oakes/The Truelove (15) > Master & Commander (1) > The Surgeon’s Mate (7) > Treason's Harbour (9) > The Letter of Marque (12) > The Thirteen-Gun Salute (13) > Post Captain (2) > The Mauritius Command (4)

#recap post #aubreyad #jack aubrey #stephen maturin #clarissa oakes #the truelove

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I haven’t posted a pic of Snoopy in awhile. The people here need to see him too. Snoop!!

#a rare off-topic post #a rare personal post #this is my cat #the ship's cat of this blog #u could say :3

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i actually like it when one half of a ship kills the other half. that’s like texture

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i can see myself in this picture…i am the stern lantern, its me

saw a heron earlier this week and it reminded me of someone…

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The Nutmeg of Consolation

I was talking on twitter how I have an nonspecific affection for all the boats in this series, so I suppose I was destined to love this one regardless. This book is both sweet and nutty to me, just like the ship of its namesake. It’s sentimental, but its sentimentality is shot through with a tinge of unease; enjoy these good times while they last, it seems to be saying (I have learned to always do this, in these books.) There's a sense of foreboding or oncoming disaster—which isn't new; both The Ionian Mission and Treason’s Harbour were suffused with dread—but it’s also planting the seeds of upcoming discord, both among the crew and between Jack and Stephen themselves, which is somewhat novel. 

Jo Walton said in her review this book lacked a clear shape and could have been split up and added to books before and after it but I very much disagree. Joy is the keynote of this book; unconstrained, pure joy is a part of this book in a way that is not present in either the preceding or succeeding novels, a joy that's made more vivid by its contrast with some very dark moments--an island in Melanesia that has been decimated by smallpox but for two small children, or the Botany Bay penal colony where we catch up with poor Padeen.

The strength of this book is Stephen’s character arc. It forces him to step up and take responsibility, for those two little girls I mentioned, and for Padeen, and these sort of messy demands for emotional attachment and connection are something that a Stephen from earlier in the series might have shied away from, especially when he’s under stress. He’s worried about Diana, he’s worried about their baby, he’s worried about his financial situation. It’s hard not to feel a little proud of him for how he handles everything (no laudanum this time!) and of course it’s impossible not to feel extremely happy for him when he finally learns that he has a daughter.

“Why, Doctor,” [Tom] said, his face brightening, “how happy I am to see you back. You look as gay as a popinjay, as cheerful as if you had found a five pound note. I hope you brought the poor old barky some good luck at last. God love us, what a week!”

Perfect Girlfriend Tom Pullings reacting to Stephen’s face after he gets the news, confirming what I have always known about Stephen: that he is cute, despite his constant insistence that he’s the ugliest girl in school.

We start on the beach with the erstwhile Dianes (RIP Diane!!!) shipwrecked in the South China Sea. After a rough start and a pirate attack, they are rescued and their fortunes turn around when the governor of Batavia gives them a new ship, The Nutmeg of Consolation. What a name! She is my new best friend in all the world.

It'd be hard to dislike this book, even if I wanted to. Joy is its keynote, as I said, starting with the fortuitous reunion early on with Surprise and culminating with Stephen finally receiving the word that his daughter has been born back at Ashgrove Cottage. Between this and the reunion with Padeen in the hospital in Botany Bay, the climax of this book sees Stephen at maybe the most emotional we've ever seen him, and the highest pitch of his spirits coincides with a nearly fatal rupture with Jack.

Their disagreement is over Padeen, whose imprisonment in the penal colony Stephen feels responsible for, for the reason that he kind of is. He feels guilty enough about it that he almost doesn't want to see Padeen at all, just wants to arrange Padeen to have a less abusive work environment from afar, but of course after a very touching reunion with a flogged and emaciated Padeen, he promises to help Padeen escape and is then shocked when he learns that Jack has no intention of allowing any convict, even Padeen, to escape on the Surprise. After wrestling with himself all night (and remembering, "Hey, I became insanely wealthy five books ago,") Stephen resolves to leave the ship rather than abandon Padeen, as he sees no use in reasoning with Jack.

"Middle-age has come upon Jack Aubrey at last, the creature. I never thought it would."

MEOW. God both Stephen and Jack so bad at being mean to each other, even at their most pissed off.

The break-up is narrowly avoided same as it always is: by some absolutely goof-ass near-fatal cataclysm that befalls Stephen, rendering him utterly adorable and winning him his point assuming he doesn’t succumb to his injuries, which of course he doesn’t. This time the cataclysm is a platypus sting, last time it was nearly OD'ing on opium and falling off a tower, and the time before that it was falling out the stern window into the fucking ocean. Stephen is near-death but he wins the argument with Jack in absentia; Padeen carries him back to Surprise, Jack is in no state to object, and the other Surprises naturally don't even think it's a question; of course Padeen is coming with them.

Is this cheap? Am I sick of conflict being obviated each time by Stephen nearly dying? Honestly...your Honor, his bisexual airs and swagless haplessness have bewitched me body and soul. He can fall off as many towers and get poisoned by as many monotremes as he wants as long as it keeps being so fucking funny, and as long as it keeps reminding Jack not to be an asshole and to remember the power of friendship and camaraderie and all that gay shit. Usually when Stephen and Jack are fighting about whatever I don't feel compelled to take sides but in this case it's Padeen all the way, baby. I don't fuck around, Jack can eat it.

My advice to Jack: maybe fix your liver, balance your humors, get fat and happy again?? Maybe experience the redemptive power of love and you'll calm down??? Spoilers: that is basically what happens (the book ends with him and Stephen literally holding hands) but he's still smarting from the disagreement at the beginning of the next book, with my new NEW best friend Clarissa Oakes, who for once is an actual woman and not a boat like I assumed she would be when I first saw the title of the book in the UK. I don't hold her not being a boat against her, though, and neither should you. See you next time!

Personal Ranking

The Far Side of the World (10) > HMS Surprise (3) > Desolation Island (5) > The Nutmeg of Consolation (14) > The Reverse of the Medal (11) > The Ionian Mission (8) > The Fortune of War (6) > Master & Commander (1) > The Surgeon’s Mate (7) > Treason's Harbour (9) > The Letter of Marque (12) > The Thirteen-Gun Salute (13) > Post Captain (2) > The Mauritius Command (4)

#the nutmeg of consolation #stephen maturin #jack aubrey #aubreyad #recap post

[the-dog-watch]

more of those new aubreyad covers by Matthew Benedict

#this is my first time seeing the cover for nutmeg of consolation for these editions and omg #thats my favorite of thewhole set i think??? #my local library has mostly from this edition but the copy of NoC i got has the older covers #which are fine no shade to them but dang #love the intimacy of that scene on NoC?? damn damn damn #the nutmeg of consolation