‘But in any case you will never be flogged — no, no; you shall not be flogged,’ he added, gazing with pure affection, and with something like awe, at so magnificent a prodigy, at an ignorance so very far beyond anything that even his wide-ranging mind had yet conceived.
Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian
‘It is just the kind of thing Nelson might have done — prompt — straight at ’em.’
‘You know Lord Nelson, sir?’
‘I had the honour of serving under him at the Nile,’ said Jack, ‘and of dining in his company twice.’ His face broke into a smile at the recollection.
‘May I beg you to tell me what kind of man he is?’
‘Oh, you would take to him directly, I am sure. He is very slight — frail — I could pick him up (I mean no disrespect) with one hand. But you know he is a very great man directly. There is something in philosophy called an electrical particle, is there not? A charged atom, if you follow me. He spoke to me one each occasion. The first time it was to say, “May I trouble you for the salt, sir?” — I have always said it as close as I can to his way ever since — you may have noticed it. But the second time I was trying to make my neighbour, a soldier, understand our naval tactics — weather-gage, breaking the line, and so on — and in a pause he leant over with such a smile and said, “Never mind manoeuvres, always go at them.” I shall never forget it: never mind manoeuvres — always go at ’em. And at that same dinner he was telling us all how someone had offered him a boat-cloak on a cold night and he had said no, he was quite warm — his zeal for his King and country kept him warm. It sounds absurd, as I tell it, does it not? And was it another man, any other man, you would cry out “oh, what pitiful stuff” and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm; but with him you feel your bosom glow.’
Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian
He was not afraid for his skin, not afraid for himself: but presently his climbing body, now half-way up the shrouds, let him know that for its own part it was in a state of rapidly increasing terror. Forty feet is no very great height, but it seems far more lofty, aerial and precarious when there is nothing but an insubstantial yielding ladder of moving ropes underfoot; and when Stephen was three parts of the way up cries of ‘Belay’ on deck showed that the staysails were set and their sheets hauled aft. They filled, and the Sophie heeled over another strake or two; this coincided with her leeward roll, and the rail passed slowly under Stephen’s downward gaze, to be followed by the sea — a wide expanse of glittering water, very far below, and directly underneath. His grip on the ratlines tightened with cataleptic strength and his upward progress ceased: he remained there spreadeagled, while the varying forces of gravity, centrifugal motion, irrational panic and reasonable dread acted upon his motionless, tight-cramped person, now pressing him forward so that the checkered pattern of the shrouds and their crossing ratlines were imprinted on his front, and now plucking him backwards so that he bellied out like a shirt hung out to dry.
Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian
‘I said, “Did you bump your head, sir?” ‘
‘Yes,’ said Stephen, looking at his hand: astonishingly it was not covered with blood — there was not even so much as a smear.
‘It’s these old beams, sir’ — in the unusually distinct, didactic voice used at sea for the landsmen and on land for half-wits — ‘You want to take care of them; for — they — are — very — low.’ Stephen’s look of pure malevolence recalled the steward to a sense of his message and he said, ‘Could you fancy a chop or two for breakfast, sir?’
Master and Commander – J.K. Rowling
‘Come, sir, cannot I prevail upon you to go to sea? A man-of-war is the very thing for a philosopher, above all in the Mediterranean: there are the birds, the fishes — I could promise you some monstrous strange fishes — the natural phenomena, the meteors, the chance of prize-money. For even Aristotle would have been moved by prize-money. Doubloons, sir: they lie in soft leather sacks, you know, about so big, and they are wonderfully heavy in your hand. Two is all a man can carry.’
Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian
By the Right Honourable Lord Keith, Knight of the Bath, Admirable of the Blue and Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels employed and to be employed in the Mediterranean, etc., etc., etc.
Whereas Captain Samuel Allen of His Majesty’s Sloop Sophie is removed to the Pallas, Captain James Bradby deceased —
You are hereby required and directed to proceed on board the Sophie and take upon you the Charge and Command of Commander of her; willing and requiring all the Officers and Company belonging to the said Sloop to behave themselves in their several Employments with all due Respect and Obedience to you their Commander; and you likewise to observe as well the General Printed Instructions as what Orders and Directions you may from time to time receive from any your superior Officer for His Majesty’s Service. Hereof nor you nor any of you may fail as you will answer the contrary at your Peril.
And for so doing this shall be your Order.
Given on board the Foudroyant
at sea, 1st April, 1800.To John Aubrey, Esqr,
hereby appointed Commander of
His Majesty’s Sloop Sophie
By command of the Admiral Thos Walker
Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian
Jack Aubrey and his neighbour in the rusty black coat stood up at the same time, and they looked at one another: Jack let his face return to its expression of cold dislike — the dying remnants of his artificial rapture were peculiarly disagreeable, as they faded — and in a low voice he said, ‘My name is Aubrey, sir: I am staying at the Crown.’
‘Mine, sir, is Maturin. I am to be found any morning at Joselito’s coffee-house. May I beg you to stand aside?’
For a moment Jack felt the strongest inclination to snatch up his little gilt chair and beat the white-faced man down with it; but he gave way with a tolerable show of civility.
Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
When one is writing about the Royal Navy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it is difficult to avoid understatement; it is difficult to do full justice to one’s subject; for so very often the improbable reality outruns fiction. Even an uncommonly warm and industrious imagination could scarcely produce the frail shape of Commodore Nelson leaping from his battered seventy-four-gun Captain through the quarter-gallery window of the eighty-gun San Nicolas, taking her, and hurrying across her deck to board the towering San Josef of a hundred and twelve guns, so that ‘on the deck of a Spanish first-rate, extravagant as the story may seem, did I receive the swords of the vanquished Spaniards; which, as I received, I gave to William Fearney, one of my bargemen, who put them, with the greatest sang-froid, under his arm’.
Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian
The Love Pirate 