Master and Commander (Aubrey Maturin Series) - Hardcover

I haven t read novels [in the past ten years] except for all of the Patrick O Brian series. It was, unfortunately, like tripping on heroin. I started on those books and couldn t stop. --E. O. Wilson"

This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, RN, and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleanic wars. Details of life aboard a man-of-war are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggins, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.