Two men, Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's doctor and intelligence agent, become fast friends aboard a man-of-war ship during the Napoleonic wars.

Third in the series of Aubrey-Maturin adventures, this book is set among the strange sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and in the distant waters ploughed by the ships of the East India Company. Aubrey is on the defensive, pitting wits and seamanship against an enemy enjoying overwhelming local superiority. But somewhere in the Indian Ocean lies the prize that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams: the ships sent by Napoleon to...

Jack's prize money has set the household accounts aright, but if he continues frittering it on naive extravagances, it will be gone in a fortnight. Fortunately he gets a commission aboard the Leopard, bound for Australia to rescue the hated and captive Captain Bligh.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by dispatch vessel to bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the attention of two privateers soon becomes menacing. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination, as anything Patrick O'Brian has...

The espionage activities of cunning ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin have kept him at odds with the most important French agent in the Mediterranean, Lesueur-a man with a long memory and a taste for revenge. When that revenge takes the shape of the delicate and distracting Mrs. Fielding, who also attracts the ever-wandering eye of Jack Aubrey, Stephen's sensibilities are severely tested.

Captain Jack Aubrey, R. N., ashore after a successful cruise, is persuaded by a casual acquaintance to make certain investments in the City. This innocent decision ensnares him in the London criminal underground and in government espionage-the province of his friend Stephen Maturin. Is Aubrey's humiliation and the threatened ruin of his career a deliberate plot? This dark tale is a fitting backdrop to the brilliant characterization and sparkling dialogue...

Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and Stephen Maturin, ships surgeon and intelligence agent, return to set sail for the South China Sea on a diplomatic mission intended to prevent links between Bonaparte and the Malay Princes.

"The Aubrey-Maturin series . . . ebbs and flows with the timeless tide of character and the human heart."—Ken Ringle, Washington Post

A British whaler has been captured by an ambitious chief in the Sandwich Islands at French instigation, and Captain Jack Aubrey is dispatched with the Surprise to restore order. But stowed away in the cable-tier is an escaped female convict. To the officers, Clarissa Harvill is an object...

For years, critics have hailed Patrick O'Brian's seafaring adventure series as the best historical novels ever written (New York Times). With elegant language, eccentric characters, and authentic period atmosphere, the series transports you to the high seas of the Napoleonic era. After a dangerous tour of duty in the Great South Sea, Jack and Stephen return to their families in England. For Jack, the homecoming is joyful, but for Stephen, it is heartbreaking....

Stephen Maturin tries to turn Napoleon's secret link to the Islamic world against the emperor.--