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When we first began to discuss Year of Sail, littlerhymes and I knew we wanted to give the Aubrey-Maturin series a try. But we approached it with some trepidation, as we have each separately attempted Aubrey-Maturin before and bombed out.

I don’t know the details of littlerhymes’ first attempt, but I first tried it in the early 2000s, when I was a young teenager, after I read sartorias’s post about the series. I struggled through chapter three, in which Stephen Maturin receives an incredibly technical tour of the ship’s* rigging, and then he and Jack Aubrey discuss the case of a seaman who is supposed to be court-martialed for committing sodomy on a goat (!). The combination defeated me utterly.

*The ship is not in fact a ship but actually a brig, another point that agonized my tiny teenage brain. “Aren’t they all boats?” I wailed, thus sending all seamen within hearing distance into a state of apoplexy.

I am happy to report that this time we made it past chapter three! Made it all the way to the end of the book, and indeed enjoyed it enough to plan to read the next one! I still have no idea what’s going on with the brig’s rigging or why there’s a type of boat called a snow, but as an older and wiser reader I simply drift past these technical details. Possibly over time it will all fall into place. By the end of Year of Sail I might be talking about topgallants with the best of them.

In the meantime, let me introduce our protagonists.

Jack Aubrey, master and commander of the brig Sophie, which is like being a captain but also, technically, not a captain. The anti-Hornblower. Where Hornblower is cool, logical, awkward, and good at math, Jack Aubrey is warm, loud, emotional, terrible at math, and actually also kind of awkward but in a way where he is almost always completely unaware of it. Witness the scene where he complains to Lieutenant Dillon that lots of new sailors of Irish Papists, remembers that Dillon is Irish and realizes with horror that Dillon might take this as an insult to the Irish, so tries to cover himself by doubling down on how much he hates Papists. JACK.

Stephen Maturin, who becomes the Sophie’s surgeon, even though technically he’s a physician which is WAY better than a surgeon. “We call this thing by a thing that is not its name” is a definite theme here. Part Irish, part Catalan, all naturalist. Loves birds, beasts, medicine, music, and Jack. “He’s so stupid (affectionate),” he explains to Lieutenant Dillon, whom he knew previously when they were both members of the United Irishmen, a non-revolutionary party that perhaps became revolutionary? I’m unclear about the details. Anyway, now quite a dangerous association to have in one’s past.

James Dillon, lieutenant of the Sophie. Not over Jack’s attempt to apologize for the Irish thing by emphasizing that it’s PAPISTS he has a problem with. All but accuses Jack of cowardice, which is almost as wrong-headed as accusing Stephen of not loving insects enough. Realizes Jack is not a coward, briefly likes Jack, then hates Jack again for reasons that are in fact unrelated to Jack.

( spoilers )

Queeney. A childhood friend of Jack’s who helps him get his appointment as captain of the Sophie. Not a protagonist, but I had to include her because I was so proud of recognizing her as a real life person: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter! Evidence: Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter was called Queeney. Hester Thrale was a great friend of Samuel Johnson’s, and Queeney mentions the family friendship with Samuel Johnson. Jack goes on about how Queeney’s mom married a PAPIST, and indeed after Hester Thrale’s first husband died, she married an Italian Catholic music master named Piozzi, to the horror of Queeney and everyone else in England. (They were so horrified that she’s still usually referred to as Hester Thrale even though actually she should probably be called Hester Piozzi, since that’s the name she published under and the husband she actually loved.)

Both Queeney and the subplot about the United Irishmen are good examples of Patrick O’Brian’s total mastery of his period, as of course is literally everything he says about the rigging. Just casually tosses in Hester Thrale Piozzi’s daughter! A bit of tragic Irish backstory just for fun! Sometimes I do yearn for him to slow down just a bit and explain, but of course that would make the story far less immersive. We are perhaps getting a small taste of the landlubber’s experience of finding oneself at sea and having no idea what the heck is going on.

And so we sail onward. For now the plan is to bop back and forth between Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin, but over time one series may win out. We shall see!

At certain moments in Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, one feels that one has stepped into the middle of a barfight that’s been running for decades and shows no sign of stopping.

This barfight has a number of different sub-fights (Captain Cook: heroic scientific explorer or wicked vanguard of British imperialism?), but because this book is focused on Captain Cook’s final voyage, it deals most prominently with one question: did the Hawaiians actually believe that Cook was a god?

Arguing for the affirmative: Hawaiians had a well-established cultural tradition of men who were also gods. Their own high kings were considered gods, so it would not have been a stretch to look at the leader of an expedition from overseas and go, “Hmm, maybe this guy is also a god.” When Hawaiian historian Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau gathered evidence from Hawaiian elders in the mid-1800s, they did indeed tell him that they had all believed (at first) that Cook was Lono. Mark Twain learned the same thing when he visited in the 1860s. The crews of Cook’s two ships also believed that Cook had been acclaimed as a god.

Arguing against: saying the Hawaiians believed Cook was a god makes them look gullible and naive, and plays right into paternalistic, racist, imperialist beliefs about “primitive natives.”

Readers, I would like to suggest a third way. What if Cook was Lono?

When he walked into that ceremony in Kealakekua Bay, accepted the homage of the Hawaiian people, and ascended the tower where the priests spoke to the gods, he became Lono. He stepped into the role of Lono; he was inhabited by Lono. One may quibble about the exact mechanism, but the basic fact remains that the Hawaiians were right.

But in becoming Lono, Cook stepped directly on the path to his own destruction. In his own cultural terms, he had committed blasphemy, broken the first commandment: thou shalt have no other gods before me. In inhabiting the role of a man who was also a god, he had committed a crime against the One True God.

But, at the same time, he was stepping into a role that every Christian child knows. In Cook’s belief system, there was once a man who was God, and He died a violent death.

(In fact, one of Cook’s men argued that Cook died a genuine martyr, accepting his death - “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” - but he was almost certainly trying to cover his own ass for cowardice. He was in a boat just offshore when Cook died, and rowed away rather than rowing in to help.)

In the Hawaiian belief system, meanwhile, Cook’s identity of Lono did not make his death inevitable - yet. As long as he inhabited Lono’s role properly, he was safe.

But first, Cook outstayed Lono’s season, which lasts for four months and then departs. But Cook did not depart punctually. Great tension had grown up before he left.

And once he left, storms forced him back to Kealakekua. He arrived months before the time for Lono’s return, at which point the Hawaiians began to wonder: was this man Lono after all? Now both cultures were aligned, and Cook’s death became inevitable. The theft of one of Cook’s launches led to a confrontation on the beach at Kealakekua, which ended with Cook’s violent death.

What I Just Finished Reading

Kate Seredy’s The Open Gate. Driving toward their destination for summer vacation, a New York City family pauses at a farm auction. No one is bidding on the farmland itself, so Granny cunningly suggests to Dad, “Why don’t you bid? Just to get things started?”

“DON’T YOU DO IT, BOY!” I shouted, but as so often happens, the characters ignored my wise advice.

Of course Dad wins the farm. Of course, the family has to stay the night, and having stayed one night, they have to keep on staying. And then Granny goes to another farm auction, promising piously not to open her mouth to bid–

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH TO BID AT AN AUCTION!” I shouted at Dad, who once again foolishly failed to listen to me. He accepted Granny’s promise, and Granny promptly rules-lawyered the farm into two cows (both pregnant) and two horses (also both pregnant) by bidding with a twitch of the hand.

I am all for people going back to the land if they want to, but I prefer stories about it to feature people who actually want to, rather than people who get bamboozled into it by Granny.

Multiple people have recommended Uketsu’s Strange Houses (translated by Jim Rion), and it did NOT disappoint. The book is a mystery based around floor plans, and I am happy to report that there are indeed MANY floor plans (I love a floor plan), which makes the book an even zippier read than you might guess from its size.

Now, do I think the mystery is “plausible” or “makes psychological sense”? Well, no, not really, and if it took longer to read that might have bothered me. But the floor plans and the pacing make the book fly by, and I enjoyed it for what it was, which is an amusingly bizarre puzzle box mystery with, let me repeat, enough floor plans to satisfy even my floor-plan-mad self.

What I’m Reading Now

After years of procrastination, I’ve begun Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Happy to report that this ALSO features a floorplan in the endpapers. All the rooms are lettered, but curiously the key only includes some of the letters, so we are left guessing just which room Q might be.

What I Plan to Read Next

Obviously I need to read Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, too.