The Far Side of the World

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.

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."

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. 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. Reissues of earlier novels used the Geoff Hunt covers.