The Unknown Shore
Nov. 17th, 2004 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlI've been in a rather naval mood with my reading lately (blame it on whoever decide to publish omnibus editions of the Hornblower novels), and have been working my way through Patrick O'Brian. I didn't used to like the Aubrey/Maturin books, but I think I was rather too young for them then. Incidentally, few people seem to like both Hornblower and POB, but then I've always been odd.
I just finished The Unknown Shore, which I borrowed from the library.It's one of his early books, before he wrote the Aubrey/Maturin series, and it tells the story of the Wager, part of Anson's squadron on his voyage around the world. The main characters are Jack Byron, a midshipman, and his friend Tobias who is a surgeon's mate with a taste for natural history. These two are a sort of proto-version of Aubrey and Maturin, and their unlikely friendship. For example, Jack's comment to Toby: "The last time it came on to blow the squids got mixed up with the spare blankets—most unpleasant." An echo of Aubrey's half-amused half-exasperated tolerance of Maturin's creatures (I seem to remember a swarm of bees in the quarter-gallery once).
The book has more laugh-out-loud passages than the Aubrey/Maturin series, although these come mostly in the seaborne parts; the chapters towards the end, after the Wager is wrecked on the coast of Chile and Jack and Toby are starving on a diet of barnacles and seaweed, are rather dismal. But both the characters and the narrative perk up once they have been rescued. Take this description of the behaviour of convoys:
Ships that behave perfectly well alone become over-excited in a crowd: the merchant captains lose their seamanship, the seamen forget that there is quite a difference between port and starboard and the vessels fall aboard each other in the most stupefying manner [Pause to observe that this effect extends even to a fleet of dingies on a quiet lake.]
At one time...there were no less than eight all together in the morning, some with their bowsprits through the others' shrouds, some with their yardarms entangles, some apparently lashed together for mutual support, while the men-of-war fumed with impatience and fired whole broadsides to enforce the signal to make sail.
At this point I rolled out of bed with laughter, but fortunately my camp-bed is low to the floor.
So it was a very enjoyable little book, different to the Aubrey/Maturin series but well worth reading. Now I want to get The Golden Ocean, which some pest has borrowed from the library before I could get hold of it.
I just finished The Unknown Shore, which I borrowed from the library.It's one of his early books, before he wrote the Aubrey/Maturin series, and it tells the story of the Wager, part of Anson's squadron on his voyage around the world. The main characters are Jack Byron, a midshipman, and his friend Tobias who is a surgeon's mate with a taste for natural history. These two are a sort of proto-version of Aubrey and Maturin, and their unlikely friendship. For example, Jack's comment to Toby: "The last time it came on to blow the squids got mixed up with the spare blankets—most unpleasant." An echo of Aubrey's half-amused half-exasperated tolerance of Maturin's creatures (I seem to remember a swarm of bees in the quarter-gallery once).
The book has more laugh-out-loud passages than the Aubrey/Maturin series, although these come mostly in the seaborne parts; the chapters towards the end, after the Wager is wrecked on the coast of Chile and Jack and Toby are starving on a diet of barnacles and seaweed, are rather dismal. But both the characters and the narrative perk up once they have been rescued. Take this description of the behaviour of convoys:
Ships that behave perfectly well alone become over-excited in a crowd: the merchant captains lose their seamanship, the seamen forget that there is quite a difference between port and starboard and the vessels fall aboard each other in the most stupefying manner [Pause to observe that this effect extends even to a fleet of dingies on a quiet lake.]
At one time...there were no less than eight all together in the morning, some with their bowsprits through the others' shrouds, some with their yardarms entangles, some apparently lashed together for mutual support, while the men-of-war fumed with impatience and fired whole broadsides to enforce the signal to make sail.
At this point I rolled out of bed with laughter, but fortunately my camp-bed is low to the floor.
So it was a very enjoyable little book, different to the Aubrey/Maturin series but well worth reading. Now I want to get The Golden Ocean, which some pest has borrowed from the library before I could get hold of it.
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Date: 2004-11-17 06:50 pm (UTC)[driveby friendsfriends]
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