Tag Archives: Jack Aubrey

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‘Bonden,’ cried Stephen, ‘take pen and ink, and write –’

‘Write, sir?’ cried Bonden.

‘Yes. Sit square to your paper, and write: Landsdowne Crescent – Barret Bonden, are you brought by the lee?’

‘Why, yes, sir; that I am – fair broached-to. Though I can read pretty quick, if in broad print; I can make out a watch-bill.’

‘Never mind. I shall show you the way of it when we are at sea, however: it is no great matter – look at the fools who write all day long – but it is useful, by land. You can ride a horse, sure?’

‘Which I have rid a horse, sir; and three or four times, too, when ashore.’

‘Well. Be so good as to step – to jump – round to the Paragon and let Miss Williams know that if her afternoon walk should chance to lead her by Landsdowne Crescent, she would oblige me infinitely; then to the Saracen’s Head – my compliments to Mr Pullings, and I should be very glad to see him as soon as he has a moment.’

‘Paragon it is, sir, and Saracen’s Head: to proceed to Landsdowne Crescent at once.’

‘You may run, Bonden, if you choose. There is not a moment to be lost.’

The front door banged; feet tearing away left-handed down the crescent, and a long, long pause.

HMS Surprise – Patrick O’Brian

Oscar Snub – Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

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This post is a part of the “Oscars Snubs Blogathon” hosted by Silver Scenes and The Midnite Drive-In. 

If you were going to vent about the Oscar snub that bothers you the most, there are plenty of popular options from which to choose. You might still get riled up thinking about how Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for best picture, that Forrest Gump won out over Pulp Fiction, or that Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash. Perhaps you’re indignant that Peter O’Toole never won an Oscar, or that Leonardo DiCaprio is still waiting for his. You could have a particular category that always manages to disappoint you, like Best Original Song does for me. Or maybe you’re just baffled that films like Around the World in 80 Days or Oliver! could have been marked among the best films of all time while something as influential as Star Wars was passed over. But given 88 years of Academy Awards history, you probably would not choose to object to the victory of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, arguably the most popular film to ever with the Oscar for Best Picture. But to me, the best film of 2003 was a different long-titled film adaptation of a popular book series about men at war: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

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‘As soon as I can, I mean to go down to Bath, to wallow in the warm and sulphurous –’

‘Just what I was about to observe!’ cried Sir Joseph. ‘I am delighted to hear it. It was the very thing I should have recommended if’ – if you had not looked so savage, explosive, obstinate and cantankerous, he thought; but said ‘if it had been my place to advise you.’

HMS Surprise – Patrick O’Brian

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‘No stores?’ thought Jack in the top, frowning. ‘Damn this.’ He put a leg over the side, feeling for the futtock-shrouds: but someone had seen a familiar purple bag handing up through the cutter’s main-hatch, and there was a cry of ‘Post’. At this word Jack leant out for the backstay and shot down on deck like a midshipman, forgetting his dignity and laddering his fine white stockings. He stood within a yard of the quartermasters and the mate of the watch as the two bags came jerking across the water. ‘Bear a hand, bear a hand there,’ he called out; and when at last the bags were inboard he had to make a strong effort to control his impatience while the midshipman passed them solemnly to Mr Randall, and while Mr Randall brought them across the quarterdeck, took off his hat, and said, ‘Weasel from the flag, sir, if you please.’

‘Thank you, Mr Randall,’ said Jack, carrying them with a fair show of deliberation into his cabin. Here he raped the seals of the post-bag with furious haste, whipped off the cord and riffed through the letters. 

HMS Surprise – Patrick O’Brian

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I particularly wished to serve my friend Aubrey. His agent absconded with all his prize-money; the court of appeal reversed the condemnation of two neutral vessels, leaving him £11,000 in debt. This happened when he was on the point of becoming engaged to a most amiable young woman. They are deeply attached to one another; but since her mother, a widow with considerable property under her own control, is a deeply stupid, griping, illiberal, avid, tenacious, pinchfist lickpenny, a sordid lickpenny and a shrew, there is no hope of marriage without his estate is cleared and he can make at least some kind of settlement upon her.

HMS Surprise – Patrick O’Brian

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‘He would not do anything rash?’

‘Never in life. It’s true, you know; quite true,’ he added, seeing that Sophia was not wholly persuaded that Jack at sea and Jack ashore were two different persons. 

HMS Surprise — Patrick O’Brian

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‘Pray, Sir Joseph,’ he said after a moment, ‘who is this Dr Maturin?’

‘He is the gentleman about whom I sent your Lordship a minute last week,’ said Sir Joseph. ‘A minute in a yellow cover,’ added with a very slight emphasis — an emphasis that would been the equivalent of flinging his ink-well at the First Lord’s head in Melville’s time. 

HMS Surprise – Patrick O’Brian

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‘I have your plates,’ he said, holding out a green-baize parcel. 

‘Oh, thank you, thank you, Stephen. What a good fellow you are. Here’s elegance, damn my eyes. How they shine! Oh, oh,’ his face fell. ‘Stephen, I do not like to seem ungrateful, but I did say hawser-laid, you know. The border was to be hawser-laid.’

‘Well, and did I not say, “Let there be a hawser about the periphery” and did he not say, the shopman, God’s curse upon him, the thief, “Here, sir, is as pretty a hawser as Lord Viscount Nelson himself could desire”?’

‘And so it is. A capital hawser. But surely my dear Stephen, you must be aware, after all this time at sea, that a hawser is cable-laid, not hawser-laid?’

‘I am not. And I absolutely decline to hear more of the matter. A hawser not hawser-laid — what stuff. I badger the silversmith early and late, and we are to be told that hawsers are not hawser-laid. No, no. The wine is drawn, it must be drunk. The frog has neither feathers nor wool, and yet she sings. You will have to sail up to the Downs, eating the bread of affliction off your cable-laid baubles, and wetting it with the tears if misery; and I may tell you, sir, that you will eat it without me.’

Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian

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The lines seemed to crackle with life and happiness, but still the swam. ‘Wish me joy!’ Well, so I do, too. ‘You will never guess the news I have to tell you!’ Oh yes I shall, brother: pray do not use so many points of admiration. ‘I have the best part of a wife!! viz, her heart!!’ Stephen sniffed again. An intolerably tedious description of Miss Williams, whom Stephen knew a good deal better than Captain Aubrey — her appearance, virtues. ‘So direct — straightforward — nothing hole in the corner, if you understand me — no damned purser’s tricks — must not swear, however, — like a 32 lber.’ Could he really have likened Sophie to a thirty-two pounder? It was quite possible. How the lines did swim. ‘He must not speak disrespectfully of his putative mother-in-law, but . . . ‘ What did Jack imagine putative to mean?

Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian

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‘Jack,’ said he, walking into the cabin, ‘what are you at?’

‘I am trying to get this God-damned plant to stand upright. Do what I may, they keep wilting. I water them before breakfast and again in the last dog-watch, and still they wilt. Upon my word, it is too bad.’

‘What do you water them with?’

‘The best water, straight from the scuttle-butt.’

‘If you anoint them with the vile concoction we drink and wash in, of course they will wilt. You must send ashore for some rain-water; and at that rate of watering, some aquatic plants.’

‘What an admirable notion, Stephen. I shall do so at once. Thank you. But apart from these poxed vegetables, don’t you think it looks tolerably well? Comfortable? Homelike? The gunner’s wife said she had never seen the like: all she could suggest was somewhere to hang their clothes, and a pincushion.’

The cabin resembled a cross between a brothel and an undertaker’s parlour, but Stephen only said that he agreed with Mrs Armstrong and suggested that it might be a little less like a state funeral if the tubs were not quite so rigidly arranged about each cot. 

Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian