The Mauritius Command is the fourth naval historical novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1977.
Aubrey is married and the father of twin girls, owner of a cottage with a fine observatory he built. He is more than ready to be back at sea. He and Stephen Maturin join a convoy charged with taking two strategic islands in the Indian Ocean from the French. The mission provides scope for each man to advance in his specialty.
A review written at first publication found the novel to be written in "language deep with detail and the poetry of fact", appreciating the period detail. A later review, written at the reissue, finds the author a graceful writer but sees a difficulty with the novel's structure, building to climaxes that do not occur. Others writing at that time saw the novel more as part of the longer series, with humour, erudition and "impeccable period detail".
Contents
Plot summary
Four years after the events of HMS Surprise, Jack Aubrey and Sophia Williams are married and the parents of twin girls. They live at Ashgrove Cottage on his half-pay, which is not enough to support fellow navy men in the household. Sophia's mother has lost her money, including Sophia's portion, and now lives with them, along with Sophia's niece Cecelia.
When Stephen Maturin comes to call, Jack admits to him that as much as he loves his family he is eager to return to sea again. Stephen mentions that he has recommended Jack to lead a new secret commission being planned by the Admiralty. Moments later, a courier delivers Aubrey's orders from the port Admiral. Jack is given command of the 38-gun frigate HMS Boadicea and requested to depart immediately for Plymouth, where he picks up Mr R T Farquhar, a diplomat, and receives further orders to sail to the British station at Cape Town, where the ships of a convoy destined for the Indian Ocean will meet. Not long after embarking, they meet the French ship Hébé escorting a captured merchant ship. The Boadicea captures both ships, and Jack sends the prizes to Gibraltar. The timely capture gives Boadicea the opportunity to send letters home, and the ship gains a French cook and the Hébé's English prisoners, all able seamen. The long journey south through the Atlantic gives Jack time to bring the crew of the Boadicea up to his standards of efficiency in gunnery and gives Maturin and Farquhar time to develop their political strategies.
At Cape Town, Aubrey meets Admiral Bertie, who confirms Aubrey's elevation to Commodore and authorises him to hoist his broad pendant ('broad pennant' in some editions) as commander of a small fleet with formal orders to disrupt French interests in the Indian Ocean and ultimately to capture the French-held islands of Mauritius and La Réunion. British stations in the region are short of ships and men, leaving the expedition poorly matched against the local French forces. Jack's subordinate captains include Lord Clonfert of the Otter, an insecure Englishman with an Irish title; Captain Corbett of the Néréide, whose reputation for excessive flogging has left his ship severely undermanned; and Captain Pym of the Sirius. Jack learns that his loyal coxswain Bonden and steward Killick sailed from the West Indies under Corbett, so he trades men with Néréide to bring them aboard Boadicea. Bertie advises Aubrey that none of his captains are on good terms with each other.
For the first 2,000 miles of the voyage to the islands, Jack switches his pendant to the elderly 64-gun ship of the line HMS Raisonnable. The Caroline is taken and renamed HMS Bourbonnaise, and Corbett sails her with despatches to Cape Town and England. The rest of the convoy returns to Cape Town. Jack shifts back to Boadicea and sails again upon hearing that more merchant ships have been taken by the French. The convoy is caught in a major tropical cyclone, whence it sails back to Cape Town for repairs, receiving the first mail in many months; Sophia's letters are water-damaged, and Jack tries to make sense of them.
Characters
In England
Jack Aubrey: Captain in the Royal Navy. Given command of HMS Boadicea, he is appointed commodore of a fleet intended to capture Mauritius and La Réunion during the story.
Stephen Maturin: Ship's surgeon, natural philosopher, intelligence agent, and friend to Jack.
Sophia Aubrey: Jack's wife, his true love, and the mother of his children.
Charlotte and Fanny: Jack and Sophie's twin infant daughters, perhaps six months old at the beginning of the story.
Baby boy Aubrey: Son born to Sophia while Jack is on assignment, news which is reported in the Naval Gazette.
Cecelia: Young daughter of Mrs William's middle daughter, and niece of Sophie and Jack, living with them at Ashgrove Cottage.
Mrs Williams: Jack Aubrey's mother-in-law, now bankrupt and living with her daughter at Ashgrove Cottage.
Bessie: Cook at Ashgrove Cottage until Mrs Williams abruptly dismisses her without a good word, for touching the mushrooms carefully collected as a gift to the Aubreys by Maturin, a man unknown to her.
Lady Clonfert: Wife of Captain Lord Clonfert, seeking passage to join him at the Cape.
At the Cape
Robert Townsend Farquhar, Esquire: Temporary governor of La Réunion, trained in the law, skilled in politics, no ear for music, good chess player. He is R T Farquhar when picked up at Plymouth, but oddly William Farquhar, Governor-designate, in Admiral Bertie's orders to Aubrey.
Ships
* N.B. were real ships during the period depicted.
Major themes
The novel gives further scope to Maturin's role as both a secret agent (in which he uses propaganda effectively to support the British campaign) and as a naturalist (in which he is seen collecting relics of the extinct dodo and solitaire), while Aubrey for the first time experiences naval battles as the "looker-on" while others are directly in the fight. Aubrey makes strategic decisions and knows the timing of when to act, but must learn how to manage other captains, not only the crew directly reporting to him. One theme is the contrast between Aubrey's development in his career and acceptance of what comes, to the insecurity of Clonfert, also a skilled seaman, who had been with him in the West Indies when neither had been "given his step" to commander or captain.
Walton comments that "The most interesting thing about this volume is Lord Clonfert, an Irish peer who feels the need to outdo everyone—his surgeon says at one point that if Jack is the dashing frigate captain, Clonfert has to be the dashing frigate captain to the power of ten. He’s ridiculous, he lies, but he is brave and does know the waters. And for once we hear Stephen and Jack discuss him, because he’s not a shipmate so Stephen doesn’t feel like an informer talking about him. He’s a psychological curiosity without any doubt, and O’Brian does him very well. There’s also the flogging Captain Corbett—so among his little fleet there’s one dandy and one tartar, and Jack has to try to manage them diplomatically."
Allusions to history
The military actions of the novel are very closely based upon the real-life Mauritius campaign of 1809–1811, carried out by the Royal Navy under Commodore Josias Rowley with the assistance of army forces under Harry Keating. O'Brian notes this in the preface. Réunion (known to the French as Île Bourbon or Île Buonaparte) was taken completely in July 1810, and Mauritius (known as Île de France, earlier called Mauritius by the Dutch) was formally captured on 3 December 1810. Many of the historical figures involved in the campaign are characters in the novel.
O'Brian used literary license in making Aubrey a Commodore while still a relatively junior captain, which puts him equal in rank to the man who actually led the squadron in history, Commodore Rowley. In the novel, Aubrey is appointed directly by the Admiralty thanks to Maturin's persuasion, as Maturin had been at work on the intelligence side of the project. There are other differences from the historical events, one being that the French captain of the Vénus, Jacques Félix Emmanuel Hamelin, was not killed in action and actually survived the encounter, surrendering to the British and going on to honor in France. In contrast, Captain Corbett's reputation and death aboard ship match that of Robert Corbet, who was captain of Néréide and then given the Africaine when he brought the captured Caroline to England. Corbet was killed under controversial circumstances during the action of 13 September 1810, which is depicted accurately in the novel.
Lord Clonfert is fictional, in place of Nesbit Willoughby, who was captain of the actual HMS Néréide; though Willoughby had a spotty career and took many wounds, he survived the battle and lived unmarried. Lord Clonfert takes the same splinter wound to the eye as Willoughby received during the Battle of Grand Port in August 1810. In the historical battle, Samuel Pym of the Sirius was taken prisoner by the French and released only when a later squadron from Cape Town re-took Île de la Passe in December 1810, freeing Pym and others taken prisoner. For the loss of his ship, Pym faced the usual court-martial but was exonerated of blame. In the novel, it is Captain Lord Clonfert who is left a prisoner in the action, seriously wounded, under the care of his own and French physicians until the squadron arrives under Admiral Bertie to accept the island's capitulation, though Clonfert does not live to face a court-martial.
The ending of the novel, with Admiral Bertie sailing in and taking credit, also matches the historical event, as Bertie did in fact lead the victorious squadron in December 1810. Some historians have viewed the defeat at Grand Port as the most serious to the Royal Navy in all of the Napoleonic Wars; the interim defeat and very real loss of ships were overshadowed, however, by the conquest of the islands just a few months later. The French mark this victory on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the only naval action noted there. Though Aubrey expects no baronetcy for his accomplishments in the novel, in history, both Admiral Bertie and Commodore Rowley received a baronetcy in recognition of their success in a popular military campaign.
Allusions to literature
The story contains numerous allusions to the ideas and thinking of others. At one point Aubrey is recorded "adding, not without pride, Ex Africa surgit semper aliquid novo, – novi, eh?" ("Always something new coming out of Africa".) This is the popular version of a quotation from Pliny the Elder, "unde etiam vulgare Graeciae dictum semper aliquid novi Africam adferre". Later, Maturin quotes the Earl of Rochester, "Every man would be a coward if he durst" (which he would have seen in Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets). Throughout the novel there are many other allusions and quotes, including some credited to Alexander Pope, Pliny the Elder, Samuel Johnson, Horace, Lewis Carroll, and from King Lear by Shakespeare.
Literary significance and criticism
"Taken together, the novels are a brilliant achievement. They display staggering erudition on almost all aspects of early nineteenth century life, with impeccable period detail....[Compared to Forester's characters] Aubrey and Maturin are subtler, richer items; in addition Patrick O'Brian has a gift for the comic which Forester lacks.
"Jack's assignment: to capture the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius from the French. That campaign forms the narrative thread of this rollicking sea saga. But its substance is more beguiling still..." —Elizabeth Peer, Newsweek
Kirkus Reviews found the language of the novel to be "shot through with unobtrusive culture and period texture that flows like a serenade". The characters are drawn well, with "a crazy inner skip to their hearts", summing up the writing as having "the poetry of fact on blue-water currents under the trades."
Reviews published at the re-issue in 1991 were favorable and detailed. Publishers Weekly found O'Brian to be "a graceful writer, and the book is full of wonderful period details". The novel's "peculiar narrative structure" suggests climaxes that do not happen. Richard Snow wrote in 1991 that he had read the novels from Master and Commander to Desolation Island from American publishers twenty years earlier. He enjoyed the happy ending of Master and Commander and was grateful for more, including "a complex and fascinating successor [which] appeared -- The Mauritius Command." O'Brian's "portrayal of life aboard a sailing ship is vivid and authoritative" and O'Brian presented "the lost arcana of that hard-pressed, cruel, courageous world with an immediacy that makes its workings both comprehensible and fascinating." He noted too that "behind the humor, behind the storms and the broadside duels . . . loomed something larger: the shape and texture of a whole era." As strong as the historical detail was, Snow remarked that "in the end it is the serious exploration of human character that gives the books their greatest power", and he also referred to the poetry of the writing, saying that O'Brian "manages to express, with the grace and economy of poetry, familiar things that somehow never get written down, as when he carefully details the rueful steps by which Stephen Maturin falls out of love." At this time of the re-issues of the novels by W W Norton in the US, Snow recommended that a reader start with the first and keep reading to the last one, then "You will have read what I continue to believe are the best historical novels ever written."
Adaptations
From 3 April 2011 the BBC broadcast Roger Danes' dramatization of the book, in three one-hour parts, in the Classic Serial strand on BBC Radio 4. Produced and directed by Bruce Young, its cast was:
Captain Jack Aubrey – David Robb
Doctor Stephen Maturin – Richard Dillane
Governor Farquhar – David Rintoul
Lt-Col Keating – Thomas Arnold
Lord Clonfert – Sam Dale
Captain Corbett – Christian Rodska
Lt Seymour – Max Dowler
Midshipman George Johnson – Nyasha Hatendi
Dr McAdam/Admiral Bertie – Sean Baker
Captain Pym – Brian Bowles
Mrs Williams – Joanna Monro
Sophie – Sally Orrock
Publication history
1977, UK, Collins Publishers Hardcover First edition ISBN 0-00-222383-X
1978, May UK, Fontana Paperback ISBN 0-00-615348-8
1978, May USA, Stein & Day Hardcover edition ISBN 0-8128-2476-8
1989, February UK, Fontana Paperback ISBN 0-00-616574-5
1991, May USA, W. W. Norton & Company Paperback Reprint edition ISBN 0-393-30762-X
1992, December USA, William A. Thomas Braille Bookstore Hardcover edition ISBN 1-56956-071-4
1993, April UK, ISIS Audio Books Audio book Patrick Tull (Narrator) ISBN 1-85089-871-5
1994, USA, W. W. Norton & Company Hardcover Reprint edition ISBN 0-393-03704-5
1996, September UK, HarperCollins Paperback ISBN 0-00-649918-X
1997, January UK, HarperCollins Audio book Robert Hardy (Narrator) ISBN 0-00-105295-0
2000, November USA, Thorndike Press Hardcover ISBN 0-7862-1935-1
2001, March UK, Chivers Hardcover Large-print edition ISBN 0-7540-1519-X)
2001, November UK, Recorded Books Unabridged Patrick Tull (Narrator) ISBN 1-4025-0223-0
2001, December UK, Chivers Paperback Large-print edition ISBN 0-7540-2398-2