Master and Commander

“His chief impression was of old-fashionedness: the Sophie had something archaic about her, as though she would rather have her bottom hobnailed than coppered, and would rather pay her sides than paint them.”

Aubrey’s first impression of his ship emphasizes how he is personifying the vessel, ascribing it with desires and human characteristics. He references forms of older naval technology to explain why he sees the ship as archaic. In the late 18th century, British ships began to use copper to protect the sides of a wooden ship from damage. Similarly, the narration plays upon the alliteration of “pay” and “paint,” with pay referring to having the cracks between boards caulked with pitch rather than covered in paint. This emphasizes the idea that the Sophie is not the sort of vessel awarded to a prestigious captain, but rather an old hand-me-down.

“He had been quite unprepared for this particular blow, striking under every conceivable kind of armour, and for some minutes he could hardly bear the pain, but sat there blinking in the sun.”

Maturin alludes to a tragic love affair in his past by using figurative language. This sentence compares being disappointed in love to being violently attacked. Because Maturin did not expect the loss of his romantic relationship, he did not have adequate emotional “armour,” emphasizing that this loss was as painful as being physically wounded in battle.

“Jack let her pay off until the flurry was over, and then, as he began to bring her back, his hands strong on the spokes, so he came into direct contact with the living essence of the sloop: the vibration beneath his palm, something between a sound and a flow, came straight up from her rudder, and it joined with the unnumerable rhythms, and creak and humming of her hull and rigging.”

O’Brian repeatedly uses sound and music as a metaphor for community throughout the novel. This description of Aubrey’s first time steering the Sophie emphasizes that part of what makes the ship seem like a living being is its noises. Like a group of musical instruments, the creaks and vibrations of the parts of the ship form a kind of musical composition, giving the ship its vitality. This is a smaller element of the way O’Brian portrays the Sophie itself as its own self-sufficient world.

“O’er the ship the gallant bosun flies / Like a hoarse mastiff through the storm he cries. / Prompt to direct th’unskilful still appears, / The expert he praises, and the timid cheers.”

William Mowett composes poetry about the technology and organization of the ship, often using his verses to explain nautical matters to Maturin. Mowett’s poetry employs meter, rhyme, and an elevated diction, which contrasts with his highly technical, working-class subject matter. In this poem about the ship’s bosun, a sailor in charge of discipline, Mowett praises the man for loudly calling out to the crew. This interaction also showcases The Customs of Sailors Versus the Customs of Shore, as Maturin, who is not used to life at sea, struggles to comprehend all the terms and concepts.

“Never mind manoeuvres—always go at them.” 

Aubrey claims that this was the advice of Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was a real historical figure and military hero of the British Navy. Using a short aphorism, Nelson expresses that attacking the enemy swiftly is more important than executing advanced maneuvers with the ship. This conveys his bravery and his similarity to Aubrey as a commander, and it establishes Aubrey as an ambitious person, tying into the theme The Cost of Ambition. 

“Deep depression was settling on him—anticlimax—such a bloody little engagement for so little—two good men killed—the gunner almost certainly dead—no man could survive having his brains opened, that stood to reason—and the others might easily die too—they so often did.”

After the Sophie’s first engagement with another ship, Aubrey‘s excitement for prizes becomes anxiety over the human cost of the encounter, building the theme of The Cost of Ambition. O’Brian uses short, fragmentary clauses, giving the impression of a stressed mind jumping from topic to topic. This passage foreshadows how Aubrey’s ambitions will eventually lead some of the crew to lose their lives, although in this instance, Maturin is able to save the men who Aubrey assumes will die.

“The Navy speaks in symbols, and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.”  

James Dillon and the other officers explain to Maturin the paradoxical irony of naval terminology: While the sailors use highly specific and technical jargon, their definitions are often flexible and often based on custom rather than literal meaning. Maturin, as a scientist and someone still unused to The Customs of Sailors Versus the Customs of Shore, is disoriented by the imprecise yet complex language, because he is used to the clear and exact terms used in biology. The British Navy’s language is figuratively compared to a code, using symbols and enigmatic phrases to convey meaning.

“Its tone of semi-literate, official, righteous dullness never varied; it spoke of the opening of beef-cask no. 271 and the death of the loblolly-boy in exactly the same voice, and it never deviated into human prose even for the taking of the sloop’s first prize.”

The narration describes the tone of the ship’s log, emphasizing how the document does not vary its emotional register based on circumstance. This sentence draws a contrast between a minor event—the opening of new food supplies—and a major event—the death of a sailor—to indicate how absurdly flat the tone of the official log is. Maturin notes that the sailors often act stoically under adverse conditions, theorizing that remaining calm helps them to feel calmer during action. 

“We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth.” 

Dillon’s remark to Maturin uses irony to suggest that he is deeply conflicted. Normally, speech helps people to understand one another, but Dillon suggests that attempting to explain his perspective has only made Maturin more confused about him. Throughout the novel, language barriers often make communication difficult. Here, Dillon and Maturin are speaking the same language, but Dillon’s conflicted thoughts make it impossible for him to express himself. This prevents Dillon from achieving the same Friendship Between Equals that Maturin and Aubrey share.

“Merriment, roaring high spirits before this: then some chance concatenation, or some hidden predilection (or rather inherent bias) working through, and the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove or channel), until he is lost in his mere character—persona—no longer human, but an accretion of qualities belonging to this character.”

Maturin writes in his diary, using a long sentence full of short, fragmentary clauses. The flow of his words is often interrupted by parentheticals that give synonyms for the terms he is using, suggesting his intelligence and large vocabulary. His analysis of human behavior metaphorically compares the personality to a path being worn down into a groove by a person repeatedly walking over it, implying that people become set in their ways when they grow old. Maturin worries that Dillon has reached this point in his life, as it means Dillon will struggle to resolve his turmoil and his resentment toward Aubrey.

“These wretched men were going to be flogged and it was their right to have it done with due ceremony—all hands gravely present, the officers with their gold-laced hats and swords, the drummer there to beat a roll.” 

In an example of The Customs of Sailors Versus the Customs of Shore, O’Brian draws attention to the irony of having a formal ceremony for a punishment, emphasizing how naval discipline is amusingly proper. Maturin notices that sailors often engage in rituals with specific rules and regulations in order to keep order aboard the ship. In this circumstance, the contrast between the “wretched” state of the men being punished and the dressed-up condition of the officers reminds the sailors that a breach of the rules in an offense against the King, not just Captain Aubrey. 

“An all-seeing eye, an eye that could pierce the darkness, would have beheld the track of the Spanish frigate Cacafuego running down to Carthagena, a track that certainly would have cut the Sophie’s if the sloop had not lingered a quarter of an hour to dowse her lighted casks; but as it was the Cacafuego passed silently a mile and a half to the westward of the Sophie, and neither caught sight of the other.”

While most of the novel uses a third-person limited perspective that switches between several major characters, this sentence employs a third-person omniscient perspective in order to foreshadow the Sophie and the Cacafuego’s future confrontation. O’Brian uses a conditional statement to show how close the Sophie came to confronting a dangerous enemy. While Aubrey is later able to defeat the superior Spanish ship, his reputation as being “lucky” is affirmed by this passage, which indicates that he avoided a possibly fatal battle here entirely by coincidence. 

“At one point he stepped out on to a bare rock and there, wonderfully far below already, rowed the boats with their train of almost sunken barrels, not unlike the spaced-out eggs of the common toad; then the path ran back under the trees and he did not emerge again until he was on the thyme and the short turf, the rounded top of the promontory jutting out bare from the sea of pines.”

Maturin appreciates the beauty of the sea from the shore. This sentence uses litotes, a form of verbal irony that expresses an affirmative by using a negation of the contrary. Maturin sees boats on the water that appear “not unlike” the eggs of a toad. Through figurative language, O’Brian describes the pine forest as a “sea,” creating an inversion of the land and the shore. This passage exemplifies how central the natural world is to Maturin’s perspective and how he finds himself caught between the world of the land and life on the sea. 

“You do not need a head, nor even a heart, to be all a female can require.”

Maturin’s analysis of the praying mantis’s mating habits employs irony to foreshadow the danger that Aubrey’s “womanizing” will pose to his career. While Maturin means this statement literally, the statement can also be interpreted using a synecdoche, a literary device where a part of something represents the whole. Thus, the sentence implies that a man does not need to be intelligent or loving in order to please a woman—his sexual ability is enough to satisfy her.

“The pure bourgeois in a state of social ferment. There was that typical costive, haemorrhoidal facies, the knock-knees, the drooping shoulders, the flat feed played out, the ill breath, the large staring eyes, the meek complacency; and, of course, you noticed that womanly insistence upon authority and beating once he was thoroughly drunk?”

Maturin analyzes the character of Mr. Ellis using medical jargon, implying that his physical body provides clues about his personality and private life. Maturin is critical of Mr. Ellis, using his expertise with natural philosophy in order to make a hypothesis about human social behavior. He calls Mr. Ellis’s obsession with harsh disciplinary punishment “womanly” because he believes a stronger and more masculine person would not need to rely on beating the sailors in order to maintain his authority. 

“It is not unlike sitting on a barrel of gunpowder in a busy forge, with sparks flying about (the sparks of my figure being the occasions of offence).”

Maturin’s diary compares the tense rivalry between Aubrey and Dillon to a situation where a violent explosion is likely. Using litotes and figurative language, Maturin describes being around the two men as feeling like being near gunpowder in a place where it is likely to catch on fire. He also points out that his presence seems to make the situation worse, acting like a spark that could blow up the barrel.

“He derives a greater pleasure from a smaller stream of wit than any man I have ever known.”

Dillon makes a snide comment about Aubrey’s sense of humor, implying that Aubrey is amused by his own bad jokes. This statement uses comparative language to indicate that Aubrey’s reaction is disproportionate to the quality of his wit. Throughout the novel, Aubrey often makes puns, such as his joke to Maturin that the bearded vulture must have forgotten to shave.

“There is a systematic flocci-naucinihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me.”

Maturin uses a neologism—the term “flocci-naucinihili-pilification”—to signify his intelligence and his classical education in Latin. This term was invented as a joke by British schoolchildren at Eton College using a nonsensical combination of Latin words. It means to regard something as worthless or unimportant, indicating that Maturin is irritated by people who do not care about the larger world.

“The sun worked upon the surface of the water, doing wonderful things to its colour, raising new mists, dissolving others, sending exquisite patterns of shadow among the tautness of the rigging and the pure curves of the sails and down on to the white deck, now being scrubbed whiter, to the steady grinding noise of holystones: with a swift yet imperceptible movement it breathed away a blue-grey cape and revealed a large ship three points on the starboard bow. Running southwards under the land.”

This long sentence uses sensory language to depict the beauty of the early morning sea mist dissolving, which contrasts with the context of the situation: the Sophie’s crew spotting the enemy ship Cacafuego. The peaceful atmosphere of the morning mist over the ship calls attention to how calm nature is while the humans are preparing for a violent battle.

“For example, it spoke of the engagement as something isolated in time, coolly observed, reasonably fought and clearly remembered, whereas almost everything of real importance was before or after the blaze of fighting; and even in that he could scarcely tell what came first.”

Aubrey acknowledges that his official letter describing the capture of the Cacafuego fails to capture the real experience of the battle. His written account does not capture the chaos of the fight, indicating that some events cannot be captured accurately using human language. The inadequacy of different languages or words is a recurring pattern throughout the novel, contributing to the idea that people from vastly different backgrounds must learn to communicate.

“He felt the life of the sloop under his fingers: and he saw the Desaix begin to yaw.”

As the Sophie is about to be captured by the French, Aubrey takes the tiller one final time, personifying the vessel by equating the vibrations and motions of its pieces as a form of “life.” Aubrey’s reaction to his ship’s capture is very pragmatic and stoic, but this sentence hints at the emotional wound he suffers when he is forced to surrender. Aubrey’s attachment to the ship as though it were a living being indicates how difficult it is for him to lose the Sophie. 

“It was a gallant effort, and they both of them talked away with a fine perseverance, their voices rising as the batteries on Green Island and the mainland began to roar and the thundering broadsides filled the bay; but Jack found that presently he was spreading marmalade on his turbot and answering somewhat at random.”

Aubrey tries to engage in polite conversation with a French captain as the British Navy attacks the town they are in. This sentence emphasizes the stoicism of sailors, who attempt not to react to the sound of gunfire. Because naval warfare occurs slowly, Aubrey is able to continue with his breakfast during the battle, although O’Brian notes that he is absurdly spreading marmalade on a turbot, a fish, rather than on toast. This physical detail suggests that while Aubrey is outwardly calm, he is internally excited by the coming battle. 

“And I shall add that I was sitting in the powder-magazine with a naked light at the time, imagining the death of the King, wasting my medical stores, smoking tobacco and making a fraudulent return of the portable soup.”

Emphasizing the Friendship Between Equals that Maturin and Aubrey share, Maturin reassures Aubrey that he will vouch for his behavior during the court-martial trial, using dark humor to exaggerate the extent of his loyalty. By describing all of the highly dangerous and treasonous actions he is willing to confess to, contrasted with the humorously minor offense of committing fraud with the soup supplies, Maturin comforts Aubrey that he has nothing to worry about during the trial.