The Nutmeg of Consolation

This is by my count the 14th of 20 completed novels by Mr. O’Brian about his popular Napoleonic War characters, naval officer Jack Aubrey and physician/spy Dr. Stephen Maturin. These novels, while many people consider them literature, could also be looked on as genre fiction, worthy successors to Horatio Hornblower with a somewhat similar plot: British naval crews administer severe drubbings to the lubberly French, or sometimes to their allies. They are good entertainment and also teach you a lot about the period.

However, the Aubrey/Maturin novels differ significantly in concept from earlier entries in the genre. Mr. O’Brian says in the forewords to each of the books that he has used ships’ logs, official reports, and contemporary newspaper articles as the sources of his plots. Like Shakespeare, he has not invented any actions, although he must have filled in subplots and minor characters, about which official sources would be silent. This is both good and bad: good for authenticity, but bad in that it gives the books an episodic character. They are a “slice of life” rather than dominated by considerations of theme, although we could readily invent themes to suit a world war that raged for 22 years with two minor pauses, devastating much of Europe and accounting for hundreds of thousands of deaths — a war where both sides laid claim to the moral high ground.

These novels are also rich in period detail, and not only of ships and seamanship. Mr. O’Brian has absorbed the seamanship of the time, providing us with solid examples of heaving the log, tacking ship, reefing topsails, and handling of the big guns, but he is also an expert in the entire world of the period. (Readers who have visited some of the places featured in the novels will scarcely recognize them). He knows what people ate, how they dressed, what plants and animals lived in various parts of the world (necessary to the stories because Dr. Maturin is an amateur naturalist and member of the Royal Society), and of course a great deal about how doctors treated illnesses and injuries at the time. He knows about the lives of famous people who lived in the period and has his principals meet a number of them; in this book, Mr. Raffles, for whom the present-day Raffles Hotel in Singapore is named, appears as a character. O’Brian knows the slang current among both seamen and the general public, and uses it extensively so that it gradually assumes a familiar flavor to readers. On top of that, he has a wry, British sense of humor; for example, when Raffles asks Capt. Aubrey how he feels about corruption (in view of the dockyard’s slow progress getting his ship ready for sea, hinting that perhaps a well placed bribe would help), he replies, “I love the word…I have corrupted [anyone]… who could help get my ship to sea a little quicker and in slightly better fighting trim.”

As a result, the novels are sprawling, complex reads that can’t be finished in a handful of sittings, having a stately pace like a 74 in a light breeze. My acquaintances among the nautically literate divide about equally among those who love them profoundly and those who feel they are cumbersome and pokey compared to the simpler Hornblower stories. It’s a question of personal taste. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to appreciate Mr. O’Brian more and more, and now think he is the leader of the nautical history genre.

In this one, the action starts with the crew of Aubrey’s last ship cast away on an uninhabited island. As they are realizing that the island’s resources are inadequate to keep them all fed for very long, they are visited by Dyak pirates, and there is a bloody battle before they repulse the attackers. I looked up “Dyak” in Wikipedia and discovered that there really is such an ethnic group; they live on the island of Borneo, and were famous as headhunters in the period of this book. The British are later rescued by a Chinese crew that comes to harvest bird’s nests from a cave on the island to make the delicacy of bird’s nest soup with. They proceed to Batavia, where Mr. Raffles is the British governor — I’m aware that Batavia was a Dutch colony earlier in history and didn’t bother looking up when it changed hands, but I’m sure Mr. O’Brian is to be relied upon for these sorts of details. At Batavia, Raffles gives the Captain a Dutch 20-gun ship, which assumes the title name — it’s one of the royal titles of the king of Pulo Prabang, whom we’ve met in the previous book, “The Thirteen Gun Salute.” On board the Nutmeg, having fitted her out, they proceed to sea and try to intercept a French frigate that was their rival negotiator at Pulo Prabang; eventually they overtake her but she proves a deadly opponent, forcing Nutmeg to retreat in a night-long chase with both ships blazing away with their chase guns. Morning comes and the British frigate Surprise joins Nutmeg, reversing the odds; the French frigate tries to escape and because of damage sustained earlier, sinks, with the crew barely having time to take to the boats. About halfway through the book, the protagonists transfer to the Surprise and sail to Sydney, Australia. On the way they stop for fresh vegetables on an island whose inhabitants have been exterminated by an outbreak of smallpox, except for two little girls, whom Dr. Maturin takes on board; he names them Sarah and Emily. They speedily adjust to ship’s routine and learn that a different English is spoken by the officers than by the enlisted men, and they learn both varieties. At Sydney, Maturin tries to leave them at an orphanage and at 2 AM the night afterwards they come back screaming to the ship, climb up the foremast and declare they are not leaving it for any reason! It is such deftly handled details that make these books so entertaining.

As my mother warned me a long time ago, you shouldn’t learn history from a novel, however well researched it is. Even Patrick O’Brian makes an occasional mistake. In this book, he introduces a disease called the “marthambles”, which sounds much like appendicitis, but if you google the word you’ll find that it first appears in a novel published by another author in the 1970’s. It isn’t in the Oxford unabridged dictionary and seems to have been adopted by O’Brian from the other novel. Also, in this book, the ship’s doctors climb to the mizzen top and sit down on the furled studding sails. Studding sails were practically never used on the mizzen mast for a variety of reasons, as explained in “Seamanship in the Age of Sail” by John Harland. So, even in authenticity there is an occasional lapse, but they are very few and far between.

This book will keep your attention to the last sentence. You’ll forget who you are, where you are, and what you were supposed to be doing.

Sailing back from a diplomatic a diplomatic mission the ship grounds on uncarted reef, it shows how dangerous it was to be in little known waters at the time. The crew is attacked by savage murderous tribe from Borneo. By luck the crew is saved and lands in Batavia. The Governor can supply them with small frigate which is submerged to drown pestiferous matter.
They sail bound for Sidney and by coincidence HMS Surprise saves the Nutmeg from serious peril.
In Sidney there are learned description of condition in the colony and the reader can have speculative enlightenment why the famous sailor Capt. William Blight was fired as governor and sent to England shortly before HMS Surprise and Nutmeg arrived.

_The Nutmeg of Consolation_ continues Aubrey’s voyage into the southern hemisphere that began with _The Thirteen Gun Salute_, the Suprise sailing in and around Indonesia, eventually docking in Sydney. While I recommend reading the Aubrey/Maturin series in order, many of the books can be read out of sequence. In this instance, however, to do so would be to find oneself adrift.

Picking up immeadiately where _The Thirteen Gun Salute_ left off, the crew of the _Diane_, awaiting rescue, begins to build a skiff of their own. As is not uncommon in the South China Sea (then, as now), the crew is soon set upon, and after (typically) an adventure or two, are set to rights and find themselves back in port. The political climate that Maturin had left – the French out manovered politically – takes a more nautical turn as Aubrey, refitted, seeks to destroy the French ship before it reaches the Straits of Magellan, the ship and crew eventually making port in Australia – a penal colony at the time. (Forgive my broad summary – I want to avoid spoilers, the better for readers to enjoy O’Brian’s writing and structuring of the broader narrative.) His depiction of the fauna of the continent, as well as his description of the social climate is so detailed as to make me believe I am walking with Maturin on his journey; it is an utterly fantastic mental vacation.

The balance O’Brian strikes between nautical fiction – his brilliant and vivid depiction of life at sea and in combat – with his attention to historical detail politically and militarily, alternated with his close attention to natural history through Maturin, continues to impress, astound, and capture both imagination and attention. This book, as with the series, warrants the numerous five star reviews it has garnered. Highly recommended.

As with all the Aubrey/Maturin novels, they make most sense when read in sequence, although they were written so that they could be read in isolation. However, this book could be seen as the ‘bridge’ between Aubreys early life, going across the time of his disgrace and reinstatement, and on to the later novels where he largely leaves misfortune behind. Hence it is probably not the one to read in isolation as the plot very much leads on from the thirteen gun salute and into Clarissa Oakes. Others in the series stand alone with more definite plot lines and conclusions. Still a great book however.

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