This is book 1 of the "Aubrey-Maturin" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

 

Well, not exactly a quick reread; I'm savoring it. But I've read it enough before (despite only one previous booknote; apparently only once in the last 10years) that I'm not expecting to find that much new stuff to write about. I guess we'll see.

There's really an amazing amount in this book; the meeting of the main characters and their starting to form a friendhship, two cruises, The whole sequence with Dillon, the battle with the Cacafuego, being captured by the French, the big battle at Gibralter, and the court martial for losing the Sophie. It's big for a 1970 book, but not that big; not big by more recent standards.

Music, the Navy, food, and women are established as Aubrey's passions; birds, medicine, and introspection as Maturin's. There's a foretaste of his functioning as an intelligence againt, and a foretaste of his thinking an informer the lowest of the low (Irish heritage there!). General Aubrey is mentioned off-stage as being an unreliable ally.