Treason's Harbour

Plot summary

The Surprises wait at Malta as their ship is slowly repaired, after their successful mission on the Ionian coast. Aubrey and Maturin meet Mrs Laura Fielding at music parties she holds. Besides her musical talents, she teaches Italian, waiting on news of her husband, a naval lieutenant who is a prisoner-of-war in France. French intelligence agents use Fielding's plight to manipulate Mrs Fielding into spying for them. Aubrey saves her huge dog Ponto from a fall in the well. This endears Ponto to Aubrey, leading the gossips of Malta to assume he is carrying on an affair with Mrs Fielding. She asks Maturin to pay her attentions, to satisfy the French agents. He lets it appear to the French spies watching her place as if they are conducting an affair, and prepares false materials for her to pass on. Professor Graham is returned to England rapidly when the new Commander of the Mediterranean fleet, Admiral Sir Francis Ives and acting second secretary Andrew Wray, arrive in Malta with their own advisor on Turkish affairs. Once Aubrey gets news that an earlier prize was accepted by the board, he spends money to speed up repairs on Surprise. French spies are active in Malta. Before he leaves, Graham describes Lesueur, a French agent known to him. Unbeknownst to Maturin, Wray meets with Lesueur, receives payments from him and learns what Maturin has done to French spies. Maturin is delighted to receive his diving bell, built on Edmond Halley's design. He and Heneage Dundas test it out from Dundas’s ship. It travels with Maturin on the next mission.

Aubrey is dispatched on a secret mission by the active Admiral Ives, to capture a Turkish galley laden with French silver in the Red Sea. They sail on the Dromedary to Tina, and then walk across the Sinai Peninsula to meet the HEI ship Niobe at Suez. Aubrey takes command of Niobe and sails her down the Red Sea with Turkish troops to intercept the galley. They spot it and give chase. Aubrey notices that the galley is using a drag sail to artificially slow its speed. Realizing the trickery, Aubrey sinks the galley to deny the French its silver. Maturin and Aubrey use the diving bell to retrieve the cargo, learning it is lead not silver, a complete trap. From a fishing boat Aubrey learns that the galley had been in the sea for a month awaiting them. It was to lure them under French cannons on land. They return on Niobe to Suez and offload the disappointed and dismayed Turkish troops. The Surprises retrace their steps across the desert. Bedouin horsemen steal their camel train, so they reach Tina exhausted. Only Aubrey’s chest, with his chelengk award and the dragoman’s papers, is saved by Killick’s diligent effort. They return to Malta on Dromedary.

Aubrey learns that Surprise is to return to England to be sold or scrapped, very sad news. Maturin is in a mood to gamble at cards. Wray loses their piquet games, betting more than the cash he has on hand, and thus owes Maturin, who asks for naval favors in return, like a ship for recently-promoted Pullings. Before despatching Surprise to England, Ives asks Aubrey to take the Adriatic convoy up to Trieste. There he meets Captain Cotton of HMS Nymphe, who has just rescued the escaped prisoner-of-war, Lieutenant Charles Fielding. Maturin removes a bullet from Fielding, who is a brave man, but also a very jealous one. He hears the rumour of Aubrey's liaison with his wife and refuses to return to Malta on Surprise, challenging Aubrey to a duel when they next meet on land. On this return journey Captain Dundas, commanding HMS Edinburgh, tells Aubrey of a French privateer, which Aubrey then captures with Dryad in convoy. The chase delays Surprise into port, two days behind Babbington's sloop Dryad, so the news of Lieutenant Fielding's rescue has begun to circulate. Maturin speeds to Mrs Fielding's house, but she is not home. Lesueur and Boulay, a double agent on the Governor's staff, arrive to kill her, as she is of no more use to them, and have already killed Ponto. Instead, Maturin quietly listens to their conversation until they leave. When she arrives, he takes her aboard the Surprise, saving her life.

Admiral Ives orders Aubrey to sail for Zambra on the Barbary Coast to persuade the Dey of Mascara not to molest British ships, in convoy with HMS Pollux, which is returning Admiral Harte to England. While Pollux waits at the entrance of the Bay of Zambra, the French Mars with two frigates fire on her, with a fierce ensuing battle. Pollux blows up, killing all 500 aboard, but she severely damages Mars. The two frigates chase Surprise deep into the bay until the heavier frigate runs aground on a reef. Her smaller consort deserts the fight. Aubrey wants to continue; on the political advice of Maturin, he sets sail for Gibraltar. This ambush on a voyage known to so few makes it clear that someone highly placed in the British command betrayed them to the French. Maturin hopes Wray will find the traitor out.

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 third 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.

Title

The title is drawn from a line in Shakespeare's play, Henry VI: 'Smoothe runnes the Water, where the Brooke is deepe. And in his simple shew he harbours Treason.' (It is also written: Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep / And in his simple show he harbours treason.) 2 Henry VI, a speech by Suffolk.

Reviews

Publishers Weekly, reviewing an inadequate audio book narrator, commends the series in the highest terms, and is sharply critical of the narrator's inability to properly convey the main characters.

This novel, the ninth installment of 20 in what is certainly the greatest series about the British Navy ever written--indeed, one of the most successful of its magnitude ever written in any genre--is not well served by its reader. Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actor Pigott-Smith has an appropriately English accent, but his characters' voices lack consistency and sensitivity to the subtleties of O'Brian's pen. In this recording, the swashbuckling Captain Aubrey and the ironic, stealthy Stephen Maturin, his ship's surgeon, do not step onto the stage of the Napoleonic wars as the nuanced heroes O'Brian's readers have come to know over three decades. Pigott-Smith's Maturin lacks compassion; his Aubrey lacks intelligence. The narrative turns from nefarious intrigues in Malta to an amazing mission in the Red Sea and back again, but the drama is conveyed with neither satisfying variation of tempo nor ringing cadence. While O'Brian's devotees will find all the naval and historical details they usually delight in, they will despair at hearing how this production tramples upon his genius in portraying shockingly real characters in an utterly foreign, far-off time. Based on the Norton hardcover. (Nov. 2000) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Patrick Reardon, writing in the Chicago Tribune when the paperback was issued in the US, mentions the incident of Mr. Hairabedian's abrupt demise. In assessing that shocking scene and the crew's reaction to it, Reardon says that "Not much happens in O`Brian`s books, not much, that is, in the sense of battles and great drama. But his novels are filled with real people doing real things, brilliantly imagined and conveyed in crisp, clear, strong writing."

Narrative style

Most of the novels in the series tell the story exclusively from the point of view of Maturin or Aubrey, either through descriptions through their eyes, direct conversations, their internal thoughts, or their letters and diary entries. In essence, the reader usually knows only what one or both of the two main characters know.

In Treason’s Harbour, however, O'Brian tells some of the story through conversations between the French agent Lesueur and Andrew Wray or other confederates in Malta, conversations which the protagonists neither hear nor overhear. Thus from the opening pages of the novel, the reader is aware that Wray, the acting second secretary of the British Admiralty, is secretly accepting money and taking orders from France. When Aubrey's mission to the Red Sea is a total failure, and again when Aubrey, Maturin, and Admiral Harte are sent on a suicide mission to the Barbary Coast, Aubrey begins to quietly doubt his luck, but the reader knows the true cause.

As the plot unfolds, Maturin gradually realizes that there must be a traitor in the upper echelons of the British Admiralty. But again unlike the reader, he does not know the traitor's identity as the novel comes to a close. In fact, one of his last actions in the book is to write a letter to Wray detailing his suspicions and describing the French spy network in Malta.

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 Treason's Harbour nine 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, 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.