Desolation Island is the fifth of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. It starts with a brief domestic interlude: Jack and Sophie are doing pretty well for the moment, but trouble looms on the horizon; and Stephen is not doing very well at all, poor thing. (One of the glimpses of the Aubreys’ domestic life establishes that their twin daughters have a former bosun’s mate as a nursemaid; I do wonder what growing up with sailors as staff would be like.) Then Jack and Stephen are off in the “horrible old Leopard” to rescue William Bligh, who some years after the Bounty mutiny has been made Governor of New South Wales (Australia) and now faces yet another mutiny. (O’Brian has moved the dates of this a bit, but apparently he also has 1813 happen about five times over, so in the grand scheme of things, not that big a deal.)
This book is something of a change of pace for the series. Before this one, I would say that the highs and lows of each book were of about equal magnitude; but in this book, the highs don’t seem as high to me: not so much victories as just getting by. This is not a bad thing—I think in the long run I will find it a welcome and realistic development—but since I get very emotionally involved with characters, it made for kind of a long listen.
A note on the text: Amazon sent me one of the line of new trade paperbacks of the series, slightly larger and less pastel. Unfortunately the text seems to contain a fair number of OCR errors, turning “I yearn for fur, a deep, deep bed of fur, and a fur nightgown too!” (chapter 9) into “tool!” and so forth. This is a real shame.
A note on the reading: Patrick Tull doesn’t give the American characters anything I would call a contemporary American accent, but since I don’t know what an American accent would sound like in 1811 or 1812, I can put up with this just fine.
As always, a spoiler post follows.
A note on the reading: Patrick Tull doesn’t give the American characters anything I would call a contemporary American accent, but since I don’t know what an American accent would sound like in 1811 or 1812, I can put up with this just fine.
It’s an interesting question, what an American of that time would sound like. There was enormous regional variation even then, but less class differentiation than in England. Apparently, the New England accent already had many of its stereotypical features by then — see e.g. the abstract here.
If you’re very interested, here’s a shockingly long bibliography of papers on the linguistic history of New England accents. A much more accessible (if less scholarly) source is the Old Sturbridge Village guide Sounding Yankee I.
The link above is a page dedicated to trying to explain the very complex system of naval ship ratings of the times of lucky jack aubrey and earlier..
Also I have a page about building a frigate from that era, possibly earlier. I am just reading Desolation Island at the moment and hope to chart the voyage of the novel and put it on my pages..
steve: Thanks for the links, and sorry that they got temporarily caught in my spam filter.
I believe that the location of Desolation Island is an ongoing matter of discussion among readers, so I’ll be interested to see what you come up with.