[Aubrey & Maturin 20] • Patrick O'Brian

**The Barnes he begs the favor of a brief leave in Sierra Leone, in order to discuss Linnaean classification of avifauna with a beautiful widow, Christine Wood -- and, incidentally, to ask her hand in marriage.

Gently rebuffed, Maturin leaves Sierra Leone with a renewed dedication to his relationship with his "dear Mrs. Wood." One of the book's most memorable sections is his record of the ship's southern passage around the Horn, exquisitely depicted in a serial letter to his beloved Christine. In recounting this portion of the journey from Maturin's perspective, O'Brian captures both the sublime and the quotidian aspects of the endeavor with brilliant philosophical detachment. Constant damp, cold meals, frostbite, tedium, and physical exhaustion are contrasted with the more intellectual impressions of the voyage: the spiritual ache of depression, loneliness, and isolation; the awesome power and harsh beauty of nature's extremes.

Perhaps shocking to some modern moralists, Dr. Maturin does not deny himself the psychic balms available to a 19th-century man of science -- coca, tobacco, laudanum, alcohol -- though he does keep to a strict personal code of moderation in all things (except, perhaps, an immoderate fondness for coffee). But there is little he can do to alleviate his old friend's deepening depression. For Aubrey, this uncertain escapade represents the last hope of attaining his personal "blue at the mizzen" -- the pennant that signifies an admiral at the head of his squadron. The only prescription for such a malady is action, and where swift and decisive action is concerned, *Blue at the Mizzen* does not disappoint. Allied with the factious Chilean juntas under Director-general Bernardo O'Higgins and the renegade officer Sir David Lindsay (formerly of His Majesty's Royal Navy), Jack makes an audacious preemptive strike on the pride of the Spanish fleet -- a whirlwind engagement that will determine both Chile's fate and his own. *(Greg Marrs)*