""If Jane Austen had written rousing sea yarns, she would have produced something very close to the prose of Patrick O'Brian." -Time. It's 1802. The Treaty of Amiens has brought an end to the hostilities between Great Britain and France. Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, naval surgeon Stephen Maturin, are enjoying the respite in the English countryside, besotted with two beautiful cousins, Sophie Williams and Diana Villiers-until Aubrey loses his...

Shipwrecked on a remote island in the Dutch East Indies, Captain Aubrey, surgeon and secret intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, and the crew of the Diane fashion a schooner from the wreck. A vicious attack by Malay pirates is repulsed, but the makeshift vessel burns, and they are truly marooned. Their escape from this predicament is one that only the whimsy and ingenuity of Patrick O'Brian - or Stephen Maturin - could devise.

This first in the series introduces us to its two main characters: the ambitious and libidinous Jack Aubrey, anxious to have his own ship and make his fortune; and Stephen Maturin, an eccentric surgeon straight from the pages of Dickens.

All of Patrick O'Brian's strengths are on parade in this novel of action and intrigue, set partly in Malta, partly in the treacherous, pirate-infested waters of the Red Sea. While Captain Aubrey worries about repairs to his ship, Stephen Maturin assumes the center stage, for the stockyards and salons of Malta are alive with Napoleon's agents and the admiralty's intelligence networks is compromised. Maturin's cunning is the sole bulwark against sabotage...

"Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace brings with it both the desertion of nearly half of Captain Aubrey's crew and the sudden dimming of Aubrey's career prospects in a peacetime navy. When the Surprise is nearly sunk on her way to South America where Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are to help Chile assert her independence from Spain the delay occasioned by repairs reaps a harvest of strange consequences. The South American expedition...