The Surgeon's Mate

Plot summary

Sailing into Halifax, the victorious HMS Shannon contends with her losses in officers and crew, with particular concern for Captain Broke, who lies unconscious from head wounds. The American Captain Lawrence dies en route from the battle, and is buried at Halifax. Once in port, as prisoners of war are taken ashore, and the British Navy deserters identified among them, the Shannons and her passengers, Captain Jack Aubrey, Dr Stephen Maturin, and Mrs Diana Villiers feel the full joy of the first naval victory in this war with America. Maturin communicates with Major Beck, an army counterpart in intelligence work. At the victory ball, Aubrey is pursued by Amanda Smith, known to Diana for her deceiving ways. Aubrey tires of her after a night, yet she persists. Aubrey receives his first letters from his wife Sophia since the Leopard was left in the Dutch East Indies, so long ago. Broke cannot write the report of his victory, so others do it, to speed the official news to England.

Captain Dalgleish on the mail packet Diligence carries the copy of the official report, and Aubrey, Maturin and Mrs Villiers as passengers. The American privateer Liberty chases Diligence on its northern route home. Diana is certain that the privateers are hired by Johnson, who wants his vengeance. The Liberty sails into ice and sinks, her crew taken aboard by her follower, and Diligence reaches the Channel in 17 days. News of the victory is well-received, while Aubrey is eager to get home. He sees his children, grown so much from when he last saw them, and his wife Sophia. Maturin visits Ireland for his uncle. He gives Johnson’s private papers to Sir Joseph Blaine, asks him for Diana's release, and gets Skinner as a lawyer for Aubrey to deal with the projector. Maturin goes to Paris, to present his scientific work at the Institut, taking Diana with him. He finds her a place to stay with Adhemar de la Mothe and an accoucheur as Diana is pregnant by Johnson. At the Institut presentation, Diana wears her diamonds. She dearly loves the diamonds, including the largest, called the Blue Peter. After Maturin speaks, he learns of Ponsich’s death near Pomerania. Maturin leaves immediately to take up this mission.

Letters from Miss Smith discomfit Aubrey. Maturin advises Aubrey that Miss Smith is lying. Maturin wants Aubrey as his captain to reach the heavily fortified Grimsholm Island in the Baltic and Aubrey is ready for sea. They are joined by Jagiello, a Lithuanian from the Swedish army to translate. Blaine tells Maturin that Ramon d’Ullastret is the leader in the fortress; Maturin knows him well. Aubrey is offered the sloop HMS Ariel, leaving on the next tide, with no time to stop home for his usual sea chest. Mr Pellworm, a Baltic pilot, is on board when Aubrey arrives at Ariel. Ariel passes Elsinore where shore guns fire but miss the ship. At Carlscrona, they meet with Admiral Saumarez to devise their plan. Aubrey takes the Minnie, the privateer carrying French officers to Grimsholm, using it to carry wine, tobacco and Maturin. When Maturin begins speaking in Catalan, he is accepted and no lives are lost as the British take the fortified island. Admiral Saumarez welcomes Colonel d’Ullastret and is pleased with their success. The Colonel boards the Ariel, while the Catalan garrison travels in troop transports to Spain with Aeolus as escort, again navigating the narrow channels past Denmark. Before Ushant, a crew member drops the only chronometer, so they sail not knowing their exact location. In heavy rains, Ariel meets one French ship, the Méduse, and one British. Aubrey tells the troop transports to part, as Ariel will aid HMS Jason against the fast-sailing Méduse.

Ariel crashes into a rock, trying for the safety of Douarnenez Bay on the French mainland. They are taken as French prisoners of war. Colonel d’Ullastret is given a Marine’s uniform and a false name, and he promptly escapes. Abruptly, Aubrey, Maturin and Jagiello are taken to Paris with Monsieur Duhamel and lodged in the Temple, being torn down around them. Aubrey works on a way out of the prison, with help from Jagiello. Maturin is questioned by competing French intelligence groups; from one he learns that Diana miscarried. Duhamel makes an offer from parties expecting the emperor’s defeat. From English newspapers, Aubrey learns that HMS Ajax took Méduse, making his efforts worthwhile, and that Miss Smith is married. In another session, newly arrived Johnson identifies Maturin as the killer of two French agents, after an interrogator says someone has paid "half Golconda" for his release. Maturin agrees to go with Duhamel, who takes them out of the Temple, picks up Diana, and remarks how Aubrey’s escape shaft will be the explanation for their disappearance. They board the packet ship HMS Oedipus, under William Babbington. Diana has given up the Blue Peter to a French minister, a diamond from the Golconda mines, to save Stephen. They marry on the ship, with Aubrey giving her away, and Babbington officiating.

Characters

See also Recurring characters in the Aubrey–Maturin series

Halifax

England

Sailing the Baltic Sea

France

Ships

Title

The book title is a triple entendre in its use of the term "mate", referring to the ship's surgeon's mate, a chess reference to Maturin's successful espionage efforts (i.e., checkmate), and Diana Villiers becoming Stephen's wife, the surgeon's mate.

Reviews

Kirkus Reviews find the story literate and amusing:

This time out, Captain Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin limp home from America for a brief rest before sailing to the Baltic to subvert the occupying Catalan troops--and then to the Bay of Biscay to run aground. The dashing Aubrey/Maturin naval tales (among others, The Ionian Mission--see above) continue to come out in intervals from England, where they are hugely and deservedly popular. Published some years ago in the UK, they've been arriving out of order, so readers find themselves sorting out prequels from sequels. But shipping arrangements do no damage to these polished, historically accurate, and intensely pleasurable tales of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era. Anglo-Iberian physician and spy Stephen Maturin is again the linchpin, providing the excuse for his dashing friend Aubrey to flee the mess he has made of his British investments. Aboard H.M.S Ariel, Aubrey transports Maturin to the Baltic, where the doctor will use his linguistic skills and impeccable Catalan separatist credentials to convince Spanish troops holding Baltic islands for Napoleon that they should desert the Corsican monster and throw their lot in with England. The Baltic mission is successful, but the subsequent flight from Scandinavia runs into the rocks off the French coast. The officers are taken prisoner and transported to Paris, where they dine handsomely on meals cooked by a pretty widow as they await execution. Splendid escape. Literate and amusing.

Publishers Weekly finds the series superb, and this novel looking at the dark side of intelligence work:

O'Brian's superb series on the early-19th-century adventures of Jack Aubrey, a Royal Navy officer, and his friend Stephen Maturin, Navy surgeon and naturalist, continues with a look at the darker side of Maturin's life: his work in British intelligence. Aubrey, Maturin and Diana Villiers (Maturin's fickle and enigmatic love) are passengers on a packet ship from Nova Scotia to England when two American privateers give chase. They are hunting Maturin, who has compromised U.S. spy networks. The Americans are eluded, and upon reaching England, Maturin sets off to France. Armed with safe conduct papers, he lectures on natural history and installs Villiers in Paris. Suspicious French agents try to bait Maturin but he refuses to be lured into an indiscretion. On his return to London, Maturin is sent to woo Catalan officers and troops from the French cause to the British. Aubrey provides transport, but despite his best support, including staging a splendid charade chase on the water, the mission takes a nasty turn when their ship founders; seized by the French, Maturin and Aubrey are hauled off to Paris's infamous Temple Prison.

Allusion to historical events

In 1807, the Spanish government, at that time allied with France, had sent 15,000 troops to Denmark to act as a garrison against a possible British landing there. These troops, among the best in Spain, garrisoned offshore islands in small detachments and remained in the dark about political developments in Spain following Napoleon's invasion and occupation of Spain in 1807 (see Peninsular War).

The Duke of Wellington dispatched the Scottish Benedictine monk James Robertson (on the advice of his brother Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley). Robertson, brought up at the Benedictine abbey at Regensburg in Germany, managed to pass through occupied Germany under the guise of "Adam Rohrauer", a dealer in cigars and chocolate. Robertson made contact with the Spanish general, the Marquis de la Romana, on the island of Funen, where the two agreed that the Spanish troops would defect and return to Spain on British ships. Robertson escaped to Heligoland (then a British possession) to inform Admiral Richard Goodwin Keats of the agreement, and a fleet of transports escorted by HMS Superb embarked 9,000 Spanish soldiers. The island named in the novel is fictional, but positioned off the Pomeranian coast and its garrisons were in similar ignorance of the progress of the war regarding their homeland.

The imprisonment of Aubrey and Maturin in the Temple prison in Paris may echo the case of Captain Sidney Smith, captured on 19 April 1796 while attempting to cut out a French ship in Le Havre. Instead of exchanging him as was customary, the French took Smith to the Temple prison and charged him with arson for his burning of the fleet at Toulon in 1793. Smith remained held in Paris for two years, despite a number of efforts to exchange him and frequent contacts with both French Royalists and British agents.

In 1798, Royalists pretending to take him to another prison instead helped him to escape. They brought him to Le Havre, where he boarded a fishing boat and then transferred to a British frigate on patrol in the English Channel, arriving in London on 8 May 1798. Some historians have speculated that he allowed the French Republicans to capture him so that he could make contact with the Royalists.

Allusions to science and technology

In Chapter 9, Aubrey explains rather clearly, in dialogue with Maturin, how a chronometer or watch set to Greenwich time, compared with local noon, lets a navigator establish longitude, or distance from Greenwich as the reference time point, when the sole chronometer set to Greenwich time is broken by one of the crew. Because they left England in such a hurry, Aubrey was not able to fetch his own set of chronometers from home. After the standard issue ship chronometer is dropped and broken by the lieutenant while returning from the Baltic, the lack of a chronometer combined with constantly stormy skies made it impossible to accurately navigate, leading to the Ariel's eventual foundering on the coast of France.

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 first of eleven novels 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.

Author's Note

(copied in whole, for later use in its parts)

Great men can afford anachronism, and indeed it is rather agreeable to find Criseyde reading the lives of the saints or Hamlet going to school at Wittenberg; but perhaps the ordinary writer should not take many liberties with the past. If he does, he sacrifices both authenticity and the willing suspension of disbelief, and he is sure to receive letters from those with a greater love of precision than himself. Only the other day a learned Dutchman reproached me for having sprinkled eau de Cologne in the forepeak of HMS Shannon in my last book: the earliest English reference to eau de Cologne, said he, quoting the Oxford Dictionary, is in a letter of Byron's dated 1830. I believe he was mistaken in assuming that no Englishman ever spoke of eau de Cologne before that time; but his letter made me uneasy in my mind, all the more so since in this present book I have deliberately kept Sir James Saumarez in the Baltic some months after he had taken the Victory home and struck his flag. In the first draft I had relied on the Dictionary of National Biography, which maintained the Admiral in command for my chosen period: but then, checking in the memoirs of one of his subordinates, I found that in fact another man had taken his place. Yet I did want to say something about Saumarez, an outstanding example of a particular type of sea-officer of that time, deeply religious, extremely capable, and a most effective diplomat, so as I really could not rearrange the calendar any more I decided to leave things as they were, although out of some obscure feeling of respect for that noble ship I omitted all reference to the Victory. The historical sequence, therefore, is not quite exact; but I trust that the candid reader will grant me this amount of licence.

Publication History