The Far Side of the World

For the Jimmy Buffett album, see Far Side of the World (album). For the 2003 film, see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
The Far Side of the World

First edition
Author Patrick O'Brian
Cover artist Arthur Barbosa
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Series Aubrey-Maturin series
Genre Historical novel
Publisher Collins (UK)
Publication date
 1984
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) & Audio Book (Cassette, CD)
Pages 366 (paperback edition)
ISBN 000222711-8 first edition, hardback
OCLC 31704568
Preceded by Treason's Harbour
Followed by The Reverse of the Medal

The Far Side of the World is the tenth historical novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1984. The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812.

In Gibraltar, Captain Aubrey receives another mission, to sail HMS Surprise to protect British whalers in the Pacific Ocean from USS Norfolk. Dr Maturin had great success destroying the French intelligence network in Malta, but has not yet identified the high-level men who got away. Unaware, he sends the letter to his own wife explaining his protection of the Navy wife via that very villain. The Pacific Ocean is full of wonders, and prizes, once the Jonah is off the ship.

Plot summary

Aubrey meets Admiral Ives, now in Gibraltar, who is pleased with the last mission of HMS Surprise, despite Aubrey’s negative report. Mr Yarrow will rephrase the report to make the results clearer to the Admiralty. The admiral is now a peer, his deepest wish, and he is a happy man. Aubrey dines with Laura Fielding and her husband, Lieutenant Fielding, who is now completely satisfied that his wife is true to him and thanks Aubrey for his kindness to her in bringing her from Malta to Gibraltar (though it is Maturin who is responsible for her being on the ship, having saved her from two assassins and brought her aboard to escape). Maturin receives news from his intelligence-chief in London, Sir Joseph Blaine, confirming high level infiltration of British intelligence by the French. Maturin's wife Diana has heard rumours of the infidelity he pretended in Valletta, Malta, with Mrs Fielding for intelligence reasons. He sends her a letter via Andrew Wray, unsuspecting of Wray's role as a French agent. Maturin learns of his success in Malta, destroying the French intelligence network based there, all but André Lesueur taken.

Surprise is not yet to be broken up; Aubrey is sent by Admiral Ives on a mission to protect British whalers in the Pacific Ocean from the USS Norfolk, sailing on HMS Surprise. Aubrey makes all haste to prepare his ship with men and supplies. He recruits Mr Allen, a new master with an in-depth knowledge of whalers, takes on Mr Martin as schoolmaster to the midshipmen and Mr. Hollom, an aging midshipman. Aubrey wonders if his kindness takes aboard a Jonah with Hollom.

The Surprise sails to the farthest east point of Brazil, where the bowsprit is burnt by lightning. During the repairs, Pullings sees the USS Norfolk pass by. Mrs Horner, the gunner's wife, engages in an affair with Hollom, and gets pregnant. Maturin will not interfere with the pregnancy, so she turns to his assistant, Higgins, who leaves her near death. Maturin saves her life. Hollom was long considered a Jonah by the crew. Surprise rounds Cape Horn with some losses, and then reaches the Juan Fernández Islands to refit and recover. There, the gunner kills his wife and Hollom, and re-boards the ship. Off Chile, Horner learns that Higgins performed an abortion on his wife; Higgins disappears from the ship and Horner hangs himself in his cabin. Surprise retakes the packet Danaë, with Lieutenant Lawrence in command, and in the Pacific, retakes the valuable whaler Acapulco with Caleb Gill, nephew to the Norfolk's captain in command. Tom Pullings sails the packet ship back to England, after Maturin and Aubrey take possession of a hidden brass box, per instructions to Maturin. Mr Allen negotiates with the agent for the whaler in Valparaiso, where the American prisoners are left ashore. Taking the whaler restores the spirit to the crew.

Arrived at the Galapagos archipelago, Maturin and Martin are amazed at the new species they see on land, in the air and in the sea. Surprise picks up men from the whaler Intrepid Fox, now burnt by USS Norfolk. Knowing where the Norfolk is headed, Aubrey sails along the equator west toward the Marquesas. Maturin is disappointed and furious that the promise made to let him explore ashore is broken. Aubrey saves Maturin when he falls overboard one evening, but no one misses them until dawn. The two men are rescued by Polynesian women on a Pahi, who ultimately leave them on a small island with a fishing line. The launch from the Surprise finds them. Maturin is needed aboard Surprise, as the group sent to board the Pahi was cruelly beaten by the women.

After surviving the tail of a typhoon, the Surprise finds the Norfolk wrecked on a reef by the same typhoon and her survivors encamped on an island. Aubrey, Mr Martin and some of the crew take Maturin ashore for surgery; he is in a coma since hitting his head during the typhoon. Just as the surgeon from the Norfolk, Dr Butcher, prepares to operate, Maturin wakes from his coma. Before they can rejoin their ship, a heavy storm blows the Surprise away. Relations between the two marooned groups are tense, because some of the Norfolks were mutineers in 1797 aboard HMS Hermione; they will be hanged by the British. One admits this to Bonden. Aubrey tells the American Captain Palmer that he and his crew are prisoners of war. Both groups are eager to leave this island. Aubrey orders his carpenters to lengthen the launch so they can sail away, pushing the rest to collect food. He sees an American whaler on the horizon. The crew of the Norfolk spot the same whaler, cheer at the sight, and then kill their informer. The Norfolks fight with the Surprises. Their cheering stops when the whaler loses two masts and strikes her colours, because it is the Surprise that takes her in chase.

Characters

See also Recurring characters in the Aubrey–Maturin series

Ships

Series chronology

This novel references actual events with accurate historical detail, like all in this series. In respect to the internal chronology of the series, it is the fourth of eleven novels (beginning with The Surgeon's Mate) that might take five or six years to happen but are all pegged to an extended 1812, or as Patrick O'Brian says it, 1812a and 1812b (introduction to The Far Side of the World, the tenth novel in this series). The events of The Yellow Admiral again match up with the historical years of the Napoleonic wars in sequence, as the first six novels did.

Historical references

The marooned captain of the Norfolk reminds Aubrey of the Chesapeake–Leopard Affair as a way of protecting members of his crew, who are mutineers from the HMS Hermione in 1797.

The USS Chesapeake lay off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, and was under the command of Commodore James Barron. HMS Leopard, under the command of Salusbury Pryce Humphreys, hailed and requested to search the Chesapeake for suspected deserters from the Royal Navy; when the Chesapeake refused, the Leopard began to fire broadsides, killing three aboard the Chesapeake and injuring another 18 (one of whom, Robert Macdonald, later died from his wounds ashore). The Chesapeake, her decks cluttered with stores in preparation for a long cruise, managed to fire only a single gun in reply to the Leopard, and Barron quickly struck his colours and surrendered his ship; however, Humphreys refused the surrender, and simply sent a boarding party to search for the deserters.

HMS Leopard found four Royal Navy deserters among the Chesapeake crew: David Martin, John Strachan, and William Ware, run from HMS Melampus; and Jenkin Ratford, run from HMS Halifax. Of the four, only Ratford was British-born: Strachan was a white man born in the United States (though later serving in the Royal Navy), and Martin and Ware were African Americans (place of birth uncertain). Leopard carried the men to Halifax for trial: the British citizen, Ratford, was sentenced to death and hanged on the Halifax; the three Americans - as non-British nationals - were sentenced to 500 lashes each, but the sentence was later commuted, and the British government eventually offered to return them to the United States and pay reparations.

In the Author's Note, O'Brian says that the USS Norfolk recalls the historical expedition of the USS Essex. Essex sailed in South Atlantic waters and along the coast of Brazil until January 1813 when Captain David Porter undertook the decimation of English whale fisheries in the Pacific.[1] Although her crew suffered greatly from a shortage of provisions and heavy gales while rounding Cape Horn, she anchored safely at Valparaíso, Chile, on 14 March, having seized schooners Elizabeth and Nereyda along the way. The next five months brought Essex 13 prizes.

In January 1814, Essex sailed into neutral waters at Valparaiso, only to be trapped there for six weeks by the 36-gun British frigate, HMS Phoebe and the 18-gun sloop-of-war HMS Cherub. On 28 March 1814, Porter determined to gain the open sea, fearing the arrival of British reinforcements. Upon rounding the point, Essex lost her main top-mast to foul weather, forcing her return to the harbour. The British, disregarding the neutrality of the harbour, proceeded with the attack on the crippled ship. For 2½ hours, Essex, armed almost entirely with powerful but short range guns called carronades, resisted the enemy's superior fighting power and longer gun range. A fire erupted twice aboard the Essex, at which point about 50 men abandoned the ship and swam for shore; only half of them landing. Eventually, the hopeless situation forced the frigate to surrender. The Essex suffered 58 killed, 97 wounded, while the British casualties were 5 dead, 10 wounded.

Film adaptation

The novel provided part of the title and some of the plot-structure for the 2003 Peter Weir film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The fictional USS Norfolk morphed into the fictional American-built French privateer Acheron, and episodes also migrated from other books in the series, including Master and Commander and HMS Surprise. The design and size of the fictional Acheron reflect those of the USS Constitution.

In reviewing the film, Christopher Hitchens had comments relevant to the action scenes in this novel that were made part of the film. He finds "the summa of O'Brian's genius was the invention of Dr. Stephen Maturin. He is the ship's gifted surgeon, but he is also a scientist, an espionage agent for the Admiralty, a man of part Irish and part Catalan birth—and a revolutionary. He joins the British side, having earlier fought against it, because of his hatred for Bonaparte's betrayal of the principles of 1789—principles that are perfectly obscure to bluff Capt. Jack Aubrey. Any cinematic adaptation of O'Brian must stand or fall by its success in representing this figure. On this the film doesn't even fall, let alone stand. It skips the whole project." He finds the action scenes more inspirational: "In one respect the action lives up to its fictional and actual inspiration. This was the age of Bligh and Cook and of voyages of discovery as well as conquest, and when HMS Surprise makes landfall in the Galapagos Islands we get a beautifully filmed sequence about how the dawn of scientific enlightenment might have felt."[2]

Publication history

The books in this series by Patrick O'Brian were re-issued in the US by W. W. Norton & Co. in 1992, after a re-discovery of the author and this series by Norton, finding a new audience for the entire series. Norton issued The Far Side of the World eight years after its initial publication, as a paperback in 1992. Ironically, it was a US publisher, J. B. Lippincott & Co., who asked O'Brian to write the first book in the series, Master and Commander published in 1969. Collins picked it up in the UK in 1970, and continued to publish each novel as O'Brian completed another story. Beginning with The Nutmeg of Consolation in 1991, the novels were released at about the same time in the USA (by W. W. Norton) and the UK (by HarperCollins, the name of Collins after a merger).

Novels prior to 1992 were published rapidly in the US for that new market.[3] Following novels were released at the same time by the UK and US publishers. Collins asked Geoff Hunt in 1988 to do the cover art for the twelve books published by then, with The Letter of Marque being the first book to have Hunt's work on the first edition. He continued to paint the covers for future books; the covers were used on both USA and UK editions.[4][5] Reissues of earlier novels used the Geoff Hunt covers.[6][7]

References

  1. ↑ Norman Ingrey. "Diagram of Commodore David Porter's Exploits Against British in 1812-1814". The Vidette-Messenger Centennial Edition 1936. Porter County Indiana GenWeb project of 2008. Retrieved 3 July 2014.
  2. ↑ Christopher Hitchens (November 14, 2003). "Empire Falls - How Master and Commander gets Patrick O'Brian wrong.". Slate. Retrieved 24 April 2014.
  3. ↑ Ken Ringle (January 8, 2000). "Appreciation". Washington Post. Retrieved November 27, 2014.
  4. ↑ Bob Frost (1993). "The HistoryAccess.com Interview: Geoff Hunt". Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  5. ↑ Patrick O'Brian: A Life (paperback ed.). Henry Holt, Owl Edition. 2001. pp. 285, 306. ISBN 0-8050-5977-6. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  6. ↑ "HarperCollins Covers by Geoff Hunt". Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  7. ↑ Bruce Trinque. "Pagination of Various Aubrey-Maturin Novel Editions". Retrieved 28 November 2014. The first three Patrick O'Brian Aubrey-Maturin novels were published in the US by Lippincott and the next two by Stein & Day. US publication of the novels was not resumed until 1990 until W.W. Norton began a reissue of the series, at first in trade paperback format but later in hardcover. In the UK all the novels until Clarissa Oakes (The Truelove) were published by Collins until the publishing house, through a merger, became HarperCollins.

External sources


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