Patrick O'Brian

Captain Jack Aubrey finds his naval career threatened by Admiralty politics, a feud with his neighbor, a disintegrating marriage, and the peace of 1814, until Napoleon escapes from Elba

The Yellow Admiral (Vol. Book 18) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)

Gavin

'...Captain Aubrey, whose name is no doubt familiar.'
'Oh, certainly,' said Needham, who wished to make a good impression on this formidable figure, but whose talents did not really lie in that direction.


—

Vast space given over to Discourse on land enclosure (mostly to set up yet another gaffe and set of political enemies for Jack). It’s probably pretty hard for people outside the UK to understand Jack’s sentimental uneconomical Conservatism - or, since the One Nation Tories are dead and buried, even if you’re in the UK.

  'Jack,' said Stephen, 'I have been contemplating on your words about the nature of the majority, your strangely violent, radical, and even - forgive me - democratic words, which, with their treasonable implication of "one man, one vote", might be interpreted as an attack on the sacred rights of property; and I should like to know how you reconcile them with your support of a Tory ministry in the House.'

'Oh, as for that,' said Jack, 'I have no difficulty at all. It is entirely a matter of scale and circumstance. Everyone knows that on a large scale democracy is pernicious nonsense - a country or even a county cannot be run by a self-seeking parcel of tub-thumping politicians working on popular emotion, rousing the mob. Even at Brooks's, which is a hotbed of democracy, the place is in fact run by the managers and those that don't like it may either do the other thing or join Boodle's; while as for a man-of-war, it is either an autocracy or it is nothing, nothing at all - mere nonsense. You saw what happened to the poor French navy at the beginning of the Revolutionary War...'

'...while at the other end of the scale, although "one man, one vote" certainly smells of brimstone and the gallows, everyone has always accepted it in a jury trying a man for his life. An inclosure belongs to this scale: it too decides men's lives. I had not realized how thoroughly it does so until I came back from sea and found that Griffiths and some of his friends had persuaded my father to join with them in inclosing Woolcombe Common: he was desperate for money at the time. Woolcombe was never so glorious a place as Simmon's Lea, but I like it very well - surprising numbers of partridge and woodcock in the season - and when I saw it all cleared, flattened, drained, fenced and exploited to the last half-bushel of wheat, with many of the small encroachments ploughed up and the cottages destroyed, and the remaining commoners, with half of their living and all their joy quite gone, reduced to anxious cap-inhand casual labourers, it hurt my heart...’

‘...what they and the bigger farmers hate is the possibility of the labourers growing saucy, as they call it, asking for higher wages - for a wage that keeps up with the price of corn - refusing to work if they do not get it, and falling back on what they can wring from the common. No common, no sauciness'


i.e. Class war, but with peasants and aristos against the bourgeoisie. (Still the most popular class war? - witness the depiction of the middle class in ~any work of art of the last 60 years, where I take the new professional elite, including novelists and painters, to have replaced aristos.)

  Neither Harding nor Stephen had sentimental, misty views of rural poverty: they both knew too much about the squalor, dirt, idleness, petty thieving, cruelty, frequent drunkenness and not uncommon incest that could occur to have any idyllic notion of a poor person's life in the country. 'But,' said Harding, 'it is what we are used to; and with all its plagues it is better than being on the parish or having to go round to the farmer's back door begging for a day's work and being turned away. No, it ain't all beer and skittles but with the common a man is at least half his own man. And without the common he's the farmer's dog. That's why we are so main fond of Captain Jack.'


—


  Stephen took his disappointment philosophically. After all, he had himself reached nearly seven years of age before he paid really serious attention to voles.


—


  He felt no particular guilt [for cheating on his wife] except for this foolishness [in leaving evidence]: by his code a man who was directly challenged [seduced] must in honesty engage -anything else would be intolerably insulting. Yet had he known of this miserable old woman's prying and her malice he would certainly have played the scrub in Canada.


—


  He revered the sound if not the full implication of the Book of Common Prayer, the Lessons and the usual psalms and readings: the other rituals such as the inspection of the entire ship and every soul aboard her, clean, shaved, sober and toeing a given line or rather seam, soothed his mind; and although today he did not feel up to reading a sermon he and all his people were pei~ectly satisfied with the even more usual Articles of War, which, through immemorial use, had acquired ecclesiastical qualities of their own.


—

Diana: 

  ‘I have it on the best authority [her own] that Jack is no artist in these matters [sex]. He can board and carry an enemy frigate with guns roaring and drums beating in a couple of minutes; but that is no way to give a girl much pleasure. In better hands she would, I am sure, have been a very likely young woman; and oh so much happier.'
'Clearly, you know more about these things than I.’


—

The military-military complex:

  'War of course is a bad thing,' he went on. 'But it is our way of life - has been these twenty years and more - and for most of us it is our only hope of a ship, let alone of promotion: and I well remember how my heart sank in the year two, the year of the peace of Amiens. But let me offer this reflection by way of comfort: in the year two my spirits were so low that if I could have afforded a piece of rope I should have hanged myself. Well, as everyone knows that peace did not last, and in the year four I was made post, jobbing captain of Lively, and a lively time we had of it too. I throw this out, because if one peace with an untrustworthy enemy can be broke, another peace with the same fellow can be broke too; and our country will certainly need defending, above all by sea. So' - filling his glass again - 'let us drink to the paying-off, and may it be a peaceful, orderly and cheerful occasion, followed by a short, I repeat very short run ashore.'


—


  The Philosophers were not a particularly ascetic body of men: few of them had ever allowed philosophy to spoil their appetites - their president weighed over fifteen stone - and they now set about their dinner with the earnestness it deserved.

Hogne 

In the sequel to The Commodore, Captain Jack Aubrey finds his naval career threatened by Admiralty politics, a feud with his neighbor, a disintegrating marriage, and the peace of 1814, until Napoleon escapes from Elba.

The Yellow Admiral (Vol. Book 18) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)

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