H.M.S. Surprise
The misadventures of Stephen Maturin, adventures in two Englishes, and a girl named Dil
1
H.M.S. Surprise is the first really characteristic Aubrey-Maturin novel, setting the tone and template for the other books in the series; if you are hesitating over taking the plunge this isn’t a bad place from which to begin. The plotting is episodic: one of the patterns the novel establishes is the completion of a particular mission or voyage within its covers, even as more extended plots and character arcs stretch out across multiple volumes. Jack’s pursuit of glory and prize money; Stephen’s intelligence work and career as a naturalist; the dual marriage plots; and the war with Bonaparte that provides the overall structure—all these will carry forward over many novels to come. The action is finely balanced between the two heroes, though for this reader at least it is Stephen’s plots that furnish the most interest. His bond with Jack, stretched to its breaking point in Post Captain, is re-established on a grapple-them-unto-thy-soul-with-hoops-of-steel basis in this volume. Yet the tension between Jack’s and Stephen’s characters can never be wholly assuaged; it is the mainspring on which these novels turn. As has been my object since I began writing these little essays, I will show this tension—and the moments in which it is relieved—as a function of O’Brian’s nigh-Shakespearean grasp of the English language.
While Jack Aubrey has his various missions to perform in his new ship, H.M.S. Surprise, the novel is really organized around Stephen’s various adventures, or misadventures. Throughout the book we see Stephen making one disastrous miscalculation after another, each with dire consequences from which Jack must rescue him—quite literally in the first case. Dr. Maturin’s character as an intelligence agent is exposed by the clumsy new First Lord of the Admiralty in an insufficiently secret meeting; in spite of this, Stephen risks a mission to Minorca, where the series began (the island reverted to a Spanish possession after the Peace of Amiens). He is captured and tortured by the French. In one of the series’ most brilliantly tense set pieces, Jack rescues him with the aid of a captured French gunboat (and its book of secret signals) and a crew of silent but deadly former pirates from the South China Sea. Back in England, Jack’s care for his friend leaves him vulnerable to the tipstaffs who succeed at last in arresting him for debt. Stephen and his friend the Admiralty spymaster Sir Joseph Blaine devise a remedy for the plight of both men: a mission to India carrying His Majesty’s new envoy to the Sultan of Kampong, a frail and elderly gentleman by the name of Stanhope. Aubrey will be afloat again, and Stephen—”I am a salamander”—believes the tropical heat will re-knit his damaged joints and sinews. Not incidentally, he will also see Diana, who has gone into keeping in Calcutta with a Mr. Richard Canning, a wealthy Jewish merchant.1 Damaged as he is, though slightly less poor than when we first met him, Stephen intends to ask her—a fallen woman by almost any standard of the age—to marry him. Jack meanwhile is engaged to Sophia, but while he remains in debt he cannot honorably take the ultimate step. Alas, there are no prizes to be had in the Indian Ocean—or so it appears.
The passage to India brings with it many trials—Stephen finds himself marooned on a rocky equatorial island for the better part of a week—and Bombay is full of perils as well as enticements. Two more disastrous decisions on the part of Maturin leave him morally and very nearly mortally wounded. Yet the novel climaxes more or less happily, with Jack’s successful defense of an East India Company convoy from a French squadron commanded by the wily Admiral Linois, the reward for which—provided by the obliging Richard Canning—will finally permit him to marry to Sophia and set them up in the “neat little cottage” of which Aubrey has been dreaming. Sophia surprises the Surprise by coming to meet her intended in his homeward-bound vessel, and in the novel’s last sentence Jack says, “Now I have to run Sophie and my treasure home, and the future is pure Paradise.”
2
When I reflect on the improbability of the friendship of Jack and Stephen, given their radical differences in temperament, history, mindset, and profession, I return to the question of their language. Stephen is a polyglot, a natural linguist, whereas Jack is clumsy in every language he attempts (English included), with the exception of his real native tongue, the language of the sea. The characters can always be immediately distinguishable by their dialogue. Here is Jack telling Stephen that the fortune he thought he’d earned capturing the Spanish treasure fleet at the end of Post Captain will not be forthcoming, though there will be a modest “ex gratia payment to Captain A”:
“It is not what you would call handsome,” said Jack laughing, “but a bird in the hand is worth any amount of beating about the busy, don’t you agree? And it pretty well clears me of debt: now all I need is a couple of moderate prizes, and then upon my word I cannot see what Mother Williams can possibly object to. To be sure, there is not a smell of a merchantman left this side of Batavia; not lawful prize, I mean, and God preserve me from sending in another neutral; but still, they have some privateers from the Isle of France, and a brush with one or two of them…” The old eager piratical gleam was in his eye; he looked five years younger.
Bluff, vernacular, with syntax that although not entirely uncomplicated (who uses semicolons in dialogue nowadays?) is still easy to follow, and suggestive of improvisation—a man thinking as he speaks and responsive to his listener’s reactions (“don’t you agree?”). He also drops a characteristic Aubreyism by mashing together two idioms, though at least in this case they make logical sense together: “beating about the bush” is a hunting metaphor derived from the action of trying to startle pheasants or other game birds out of hiding. That’s Jack all over—and he sounds in his speech much as he does in his letters to Sophia or in those moments the narration’s free indirect style presents us with his thoughts.
Stephen, too, speaks in a language identical to that which he thinks and writes. The effect is often comic, particularly when his more elaborate way of speaking rubs up against Jack’s vernacular. While he is exploring the population of birds nesting on St. Paul’s Rocks in the equatorial Atlantic, an enormous squall blows away his boat, the unfortunate lieutenant2 who rowed him there, and the Surprise itself, which nearly founders and is unable to come back and pick him up until the better part of a week has passed. After he’s been rescued and is recovering, Jack asks him what he could possibly have found to drink on such a barren island, and is startled by Stephen’s answer:
“Boiled shit.” Stephen was chaste in his speech, rarely an oath, never an obscene word, never any bawdy: his reply astonished Jack, who looked quickly at the tablecloth. Perhaps it was a learned term he had misunderstood. “Boiled shit,” he said again. Jack smiled in a worldly fashion, but he felt the blush rising. “Yes. There was one single pool of rainwater left in a hollow. The birds defecated in it, copiously. Not with set intent—the whole rock is normally deep in their droppings—but enough to foul it to the pitch of nausea. The next day was hotter, if possible, and with the reverberation the liquid rose to an extraordinary temperature. I drank it, however, until it ceased to be a liquid at all; then I turned to blood. Poor unsuspecting boobies’ blood, tempered with a little sea-water and the expressed juice of kelp. Blood… Jack, this Cape St Roque, of which you speak so anxiously, is in Brazil, is it not, the home of the vampire?”
The Canadian novelist Douglas Glover introduced me to the very useful concept of the “language overlay” in fiction, described in his wonderful essay “The Novel as a Poem” as “a discourse… that reflected my hero’s passion.” In other words, the idiom of one’s characters is shaped by their guiding passions, whatever they may be; not only does this help to distinguish characters in dialogue, but it can refract an entire sensibility on the level of point of view. Jack provides the dominant language overlay of the series: it is the nautical terminology coming hot and hot that dissuades some readers from giving the books their due, while for others it’s the richness and strangeness of the sea-terms that makes the novels so transporting. But we have two protagonists in the series, with rather different guiding passions, and thus two language overlays. It is the contention between these languages that drives the series forward.
The unlikely partnership, the hemi-demi-semi marriage of our two heroes, is not unlike the forced marriage at the root of English itself. The Anglo-Saxons of medieval Britain spoke, well, Anglo-Saxon, a Scandinavian tongue, the Old English of Beowulf and “The Seafarer.” English words with Anglo-Saxon roots tend to be visceral, earthy monosyllables of the kind one can imagine being spat out by Vikings on a raid: blood, sea, axe, boat, good, etc. Then William the Conquerer came along in 1066 and brought about a linguistic as well as a military conquest. Suddenly the language of power and authority—the Church, the nobility, and the law—was French, a polysyllabic Romance language somewhat inaccurately described as Latinate (Latinate words derive from Greek and even Hebrew as well as Latin). The division is alive in the language as we speak it today: the language of the street and of ordinary life is Anglo-Saxon, blunt, simple and direct; the language of educated people and of most institutions is Latinate, a highly specialized and bloodless jargon. I always think of a famous speech from Macbeth as the best illustration of how these two Englishes can be presented as united yet immiscible:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
Shakespeare mixes the two Englishes like a painter blending oil paints on a palette, so that one translates and repeats the other: the Latinate multitudinous and incarnadine cheek-by-jowl with their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, the green one and red. Shakespeare’s plays famously appealed both to the illiterate groundlings and to the the educated highborn; he was fluent in both Englishes. This doubling also functions a bit like hendiadys, a rhetorical figure that intensifies by doubling, as in another famous line from Macbeth: “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”
Jack Aubrey not only speaks Anglo-Saxon, he is Anglo-Saxon; it isn’t hard to picture his blond hair streaming out from under a Viking’s horned helmet or his six-foot frame wielding a battleaxe. His Englishness is such that he is practically a living symbol of it, as was his hero Nelson—to the point where Stephen must occasionally forgive him the mix of insensibility and sentimentality which he finds irremediably English. Most if not all of the sea-terms that Jack uses with such fluency are Anglo-Saxon in origin: bosun, futtock shrouds, scuttlebutt, sheets, stern, etc.
Jack is emphatically English; Stephen is as emphatically unEnglish—half-Celtic and half-Catalan. Catalan, a Romance language, is the nearest thing he has to a native tongue—as a very young child he spoke Irish—and as an adult he is at home in many languages from many different language families (in H.M.S. Surprise he becomes fluent in Urdu). His diction is characteristically Latinate. A brief exchange during a gale between the two heroes sums them up, linguistically:
“It is grandiose,” he said.
“Ain’t it?” said Jack. “I do love a blow.”
Notice a small but characteristic device of O’Brian’s here: the archaic syntax of his dialogue tags. Wherever dialogue is ascribed to a proper name, O’Brian puts the tag said in front, inverting the syntax usual to twentieth-century fiction (“Jack said”). (He doesn’t do this with pronouns; that would force the inversion and call too much attention to itself.) There’s something about the inverted “said Jack” that encapsulates the effect these novels generate of not simply being about the early 19th-century but of being somehow of that era, though we know that can’t possibly be true. Note also O’Brian’s curious and unusual choice to italicize grandiose, as though he wishes to underline that the language of Stephen’s heart (Jack is inviting him to appreciate the gale aesthetically) is a Latinate one.
By bestowing such precisely different language overlays on his heroes, O’Brian makes the tension between them live upon the reader’s nerves. The moments of catharsis, in which that tension is momentarily purged, are exquisite. They can be exquisitely comic, as in the episode of the sloth that Stephen brings aboard when the Surprise touches at Brazil. Jack is aggrieved to discover that “the most affectionate, discriminating sloth you can imagine” finds him abjectly terrifying. He only succeeds in winning the animal over by offering it grog. When Stephen discovers the fact, he is irate: “Jack, you have debauched my sloth!” What makes this one of the funniest and most characteristically comic lines in the entire series is the way it tucks Stephen’s Latinate debauched between a pair of Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic, Jack and sloth.
Sometimes that tension is broken in more dramatic, even tragic ways.
3
Jack’s abiding passion, the medium that shapes his language, is the sea. Stephen’s passions are manifold and more complex: his hatred of tyranny motivates his secret war against Bonaparte, while his hopeless pursuit of Diana reminds us that the root of passion is suffering. He is at his purest and most childlike when possessed by his passion for the natural world: Stephen is never happier than when he is in the company of a new species that he can observe, draw, collect, even dissect.3 The flip side of his naturalist’s passion for animals is a cool detachment from most human beings: he is an unflinching surgeon, capable of performing one gruesome amputation after another without turning a hair, and he analyzes the passions of his fellow men with the objectivity of an anthropologist—or a novelist.
Anglo-Saxon and Latinate have different emotional temperatures. Anglo-Saxon diction is decidedly warm-blooded; Latinate diction is cool, analytical, detached. (Aubrey would probably not have been as shocked if Stephen had described his beverage of choice while marooned as “boiled excrement,” for example.) As the example from Shakespeare shows, the combination of the two dictions can have the most startling emotional effects. But the lavish intoxicating brew of language that O’Brian mixes for his reader is never more moving than when it lapses into reticence, omission, and silence.
One such omission comes early in the novel, when Jack rescues Stephen from the clutches of his torturers and Stephen tells him that the chief torturer, a Capitaine Dutourd, must be forced to summon his chief before he is killed.
Maragall led Dutourd to the desk, put a pen in his hand. “He says he cannot,” he reported. “Says his honour as an officer—”
“His what?” cried Jack, looking at the thing from which he had unstrapped Stephen.
This is a rupture in language, in which the meaning of the word honour falls apart in the presence of the nameless thing upon which Stephen has been tortured. All of Jack’s certainties shudder and threaten to come apart in this moment, which among other unspoken things reveals the moral depths risked by Stephen, depths far beyond his dearest friend’s ken. After the rescue, there is surprisingly little discourse about either Stephen’s experience of torture or Jack’s experience rescuing him. Their respective traumas reside between the lines, just one of many threads resonating throughout the rest of the series, solidifying their friendship while underlining the deep but narrow chasm that persists between them.
Stephen too wanders out of his depth. When the Surprise comes into Bombay, battered and in need of refitting, Stephen is free to explore the city in a miasma of astonishment and delight. “I had expected wonders from Bombay,” he writes in his journal, “but my heated expectations, founded upon the Arabian Nights, a glimpse of the Moorish towns in Africa, and books of travel, were poor thin insubstantial things compared with the reality. He goes on:
This is here a striving, avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, this incessant buying and selling, make that self-evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease, “gross superstition” as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense of the humanity with which I am surrounded.
Another world can permeate the secular. Stephen’s unworldly air gets him mistaken for a holy man more than once, and he is adopted by a lively street urchin named Dil, an oprhaned Dalit who becomes his guide and companion. He marvels at “this tubular fearless creature that looks me directly in the face as though I were a not very intelligent tame animal, and that communicates her thoughts, views, the moment they are born as though I, too, were a child.” Stephen loves Dil in a nearly paternal way, worrying about her future, unable to imagine a future for her:
I am tempted to purchase her: above all I should wish to preserve her in this present state, not sexless, but unaware of her sex, free of her person and of all the gutters and bazaars of Bombay, wholly and immediately human: wise, too.” But only Joshua could halt the sun. In a year’s time or less she will be in a brothel. Would a European house be better? A servant, washed and confined? Could I keep her as a pet? For how long? Endow her? It is hard to think of her lively young spirit sinking, vanishing in the common lot. I shall advise with Diana: I have a groping notion of some unidentified common quality.
The role of white savior doesn’t fit him very well; in fact, it ends in disaster. Dil’s fondest wish is for a silver bangle to wear on her arm; Stephen gifts her with six, partly as a bribe to keep her busy while he courts Diana in the palace Canning has provided for her to live in. “‘I am extremely unwilling that Dil should accompany me,’ he reflected, ‘and myself dressed in European clothes.’” He does not wish to reveal to Dil that he is not, in fact, a child, much less a holy man; he is only another colonizer, only an ordinary man unwilling to be look foolish in his pursuit of a woman.
Dil joyfully accepts the bracelets; it is the last time he sees her alive. After an inconclusive interview with Diana, he is recalled to the Surprise, and stops off in the alley where Dil lives to “purchase the child for—.” The thought is never finished; Dil has been murdered for the sake of the bangles that he gave her, and the old woman with whom she lived lacks the few coins needed to pay for the wood with which the body can be cremated. Stephen is poleaxed with grief. What follows is one of the most moving passages in the entire series:
“Here is no one of her caste,” said the man next to Stephen; and other people murmured that that was the cruel pity of the thing—her own people would have seen to the fire. But with a famine coming, no man dared look beyond the caste he belonged to. “I am of her caste,” said Stephen to the man in front of him, touching his shoulder. “Tell the woman I will buy the child. Friend, tell the woman I will buy the child and take it down. I will attend to the fire.”
The man looked round at him. Stephen’s eyes were remote; his cheeks hollow, lined and dirty; his hair straggled over his face: he might well have been mad, or in another state—removed. The man glanced at his grave neighbours, felt their qualified approval, and called out, “Grandmother, here is a holy man of thy caste who from piety will buy the child and take it down: he will also provide the wood.”
I am of her caste. A suspicious reader might accuse Stephen of cultural appropriation in this moment, but not one who loves him. Stephen identifies, here, now, and forever with the “untouchables,” the lowest of the low, with a being whose pure flame of life moved him to love, as Diana’s flame does. Here is a holy man of thy caste. The chapter concludes with Stephen alone on the beach, speaking Latin before Dil’s pyre:
“…nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,” he repeated yet again, and felt the lap of water on his foot. He looked up. The people had gone; the pyre was no more than a dark patch with the sea hissing in its embers; and he was alone. The tide was rising fast.
Now and in the hour of our death. Stephen is no holy man, but he is a man of faith as well as of science—or it might be more accurate to say that he is a man who respects ritual, even as he might deplore its irrational basis. His Latin and his Urdu have brought him to this liminal space, on the sea’s edge, between his identity as a European and as someone or something “mad, or in another state—removed.” That is where Stephen lives, a lonely place, the very bridge of love.
4
One final disaster awaits Stephen—a dual disaster that begins with a duel between himself and Canning, the amiable yet ferocious keeper of Diana Villiers. Having learned something of Diana’s intolerable situation in Bombay—Canning, a married man, is insanely jealous, and Diana’s position in even the comparatively louche society of Anglo-Indians is precarious at best—Stephen proposes marriage just before Jack whisks him away to complete their voyage to Kampong with the envoy. Diana is not unmoved by Stephen’s proposal, but her pride is wounded; she knows, and he knows, that Stephen would not have dared to propose to her if her virtue had been uncompromised. Then Dil dies. The Surprise sails away, with a deeply depressed Stephen aboard; not too long after the envoy, Stanhope, whose health was never strong, comes down with a fever and dies. “We came on a fool’s errand,” remarks Jack grimly. But in the Bay of Bengal, the Surprise encounters a convoy of Indiamen in danger of being snapped up by the squadron of Linois; Jack, playing commodore, persuades the armed Indiamen to imitate Royal Navy men-of-war and leads a successful resistance against the French enemy. He brings his charges safely into Calcutta port, where the delighted Canning makes Jack an offer he can’t refuse: to carry freight—treasure—back home to England on the Surprise, for which Jack will earn a comfortable fee.
Meanwhile Stephen decides to make one last attempt on Diana’s heart. It’s another interesting moment of elision on O’Brian’s part:
“Why wait till now? Anyone would say I had brought myself so low that you could do something quixotic. Indeed, if I were not so fond of you—and I am fond of you, Maturin: you are a friend I love—I might call it a great impertinence. An affront. No woman of any spirit will put up with an affront. I have not degraded myself.” Her chin began to pucker; she mastered it and said, “I have not come down to…” But in spite of her pride the tears came running fast: she bowed her head on his shoulder, and they ran down his bloom-coloured coat. “In any case,” she said between her sobs, “you do not really wish to marry me. You told me yourself, long ago, the hunger does not want the fox.”
“What the devil are you about, sir?” cried Canning from the open door.
“What is that to you, sir?” said Stephen, turning sharp upon him.
“Mrs. Villiers is under my protection,” said Canning. He was pale with fury.
“I give no explanations to any man for kissing a woman, unless it is his wife.”
The kiss happens off-stage, as it were—it is implicit, like much of the sexual activity in these books—less old-fashioned reticence than O’Brian’s instinct for omitting certain actions so as to better focus upon their consequences. In this case the consequence is a duel between Stephen and Canning that results in Canning’s death and in a grave injury to Stephen, who performs surgery on himself to remove the bullet from where it’s lodged underneath his ribs.4 For moral reasons, he refuses all offers of assistance:
“No, sir. I do this with my own hand.” He looked at it critically, and said, more or less to himself, “If it could undertake the one task, it must undertake the other: that is but justice.”
Stephen survives his self-surgery, of course, and in recovery conveys a ring to Diana, who seems to accept him. But Jack has not ceased in his determination to rescue Stephen from his misadventures, though each rescue is a little less efficacious than the last. He saved Stephen from imprisonment and torture; he plucked him from the island on which he had been inadvertently marooned; he carried him away from Bombay after he was laid low by Diana’s initial refusal of his proposal and Dil’s death. When Diana asks to travel home with them on the Surprise, Jack refuses, hoping to protect his friend’s fragile health and heart. Stephen is to recover from his ordeal on the journey home to England; Diana must travel on the Lushington, an Indiaman; one of her fellow passengers, a Mr. Johnstone,5 happens to be an admirer of hers. When the Surprise reaches Madeira, the appointed meeting point, Diana is not waiting for Stephen, but the ring that he gave her is; she has flown to America with Mr. Johnstone. Stephen is bereft. But Sophia has made her way out to meet the Surprise, as referenced earlier, in spite of her mother’s objections—a move that we are given to understand is as heroic in its way as Jack’s defense of the China Fleet. There are no longer any obstacles to their marriage; the next novel will teach us whether or not the married state really amounts to “paradise.”
Stephen, meanwhile, is an isolated figure, reeling from the succession of traumas the novel has put him through: after being provisionally accepted he has been rejected by the woman he loves; he failed to protect the life of an innocent young girl; he was abandoned to the elements and the fear of death; he suffered grave injuries at the hands of his enemies. I lack the time or space to deal here with the question of the novels’ treatment of trauma, though I have many ideas on the subject, stimulated by Parul Seghal’s essay, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” in the latest issue of The New Yorker. But I will say briefly that I am much in sympathy with Seghal’s critique of the privileged treatment of trauma in narrative today, particularly for the ways in which it reduces the role of the reader’s imagination. O’Brian is not un-Freudian in his thinking—we’ll see this demonstrated in the next novel, The Mauritius Command—but he is above all committed to imagination, which means he refuses trauma as a kind of master-key with which to unlock his characters. Jack and Stephen prove to be astonishingly resilient in the face of many trials and horrors. Perhaps there’s something to be learned from that resilience.
Canning is a minor character who appears to have been devised to counter the anti-Semitic stereotypes that plagued the depiction of Jews in the period about which O’Brian writes. He is a kind of anti-Fagin: big, loyal, courageous, warm-blooded, appreciative of seamanship, and not particularly intellectual—a man after Captain Aubrey’s own heart. in Post Captain he offered Jack the captaincy of a brand-new privateer he is fitting out on his own shilling, which tempted Jack extremely; it was his discovery that Canning was seeing Diana that cooled Jack’s ardor toward her and his jealousy toward Stephen. Without Canning, in fact, it is very likely that the duel between Jack and Stephen would have taken place. He is another foil, and ultimately another sacrifice, to the series’ central friendship, as we shall see.
Lieutenant Nicolls is another of the series’ many memorable minor characters. Maturin sees him at first as “a typical sea-officer, somewhat reserved but good company, one of those who naturally combined good breeding with the necessary roughness of their profession, with a bulkhead between the two.” But they are not long embarked on their voyage before Stephen notices that Nicolls is suffering: “Scurvy was out of the question in this case: syphilis, worms?” It turns out that Nicolls is estranged from his wife, as revealed in a burst of confidence while the two men are rowing to the rocks: “Protestants often confessed to medical men and Stephen had heard this history before, always with the ritual plea for advice—the bitterly wounded wife, the wretched husband trying to atone, the civil imitation of a married life, the guarded words, politeness, restraint, resentment, the blank misery of nights and waking, the progressive decay of all friendship and communication—but he had never heard it expressed with such piercing desolate unhappiness.” Nicolls disappears with the squall, but his piercing if typical catalog of the woes that can be in marriage haunts the rest of the novel.
Though he is not untouched by romantic impulses, Stephen would never agree with his contemporary William Wordsworth that “Science and Art” are incompatible with “a heart / That watches and receives.”
Another of the series’ finer little scenes, and one adapted for the 2003 Peter Weir film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, which as its title suggests is something of a hodgepodge of set pieces taken from several of the novels. It’s worth a watch:
We will see more of this sinister American in The Fortune of War, one of my favorite novels in the series, under the name of Johnson—one of the little inconsistencies that keeps devoted readers guessing.