History Literature / AubreyMaturin

* SpyDrama: Very much Stale Beer-or should we say Stale Grog-Flavored.
** Interestingly, with a few exceptions such as his activities in Boston Maturin's spy work is often basically paperwork. Deadly, deadly paperwork. We hear repeated references to his allowing particular pieces of information to be 'captured' which lead to the deaths of numerous enemy agents and, in one case, the collapse of a French intelligence department. Maturin with a prepared notebook is a dangerous thing.

** ''Master and Commander'' has no hint of Stephen's capacity for violence and only a tiny hint at his skills with intelligence, in fact rather than a key British agent, he's basically laying low after his involvement in the failed 1798 Irish Uprising. There's also a third character, James Dillon, who acts as a {{Foil}} to both Jack and Stephen and seems shaping up to be a third protagonist, [[spoiler:until he dies]]. The EarlyInstallmentWeirdness continues until either ''HMS Surprise'' (the third book, where Jack and Stephen's characteristics and dynamic had taken on their permanent shape) or ''Desolation Island'' (the fifth, where the books became slimmer, more serialized, and more consistent in writing style), depending on which fan you ask.

* GentlemenRankers: Jack Aubrey spent some time "before the mast" early in his career, being disrated by his captain for smuggling a woman aboard ship and hiding her in the cable tier; he ultimately spent 6 months as a common sailor before earning his way back into the captain's good graces and being rated midshipman again. As Jack often says, while he much regretted and resented his disrating at the time, his sojourn between decks gave him an intimate understanding of, and sympathy with, the ways in which ordinary seamen behave and carry out their duties which has stood him in excellent stead ever since in his career as an officer.

** In ''The Ionian Mission'' Captain Babbington insists the women on his ship are all Lesbians - meaning female inhabitants of Lesbos he rescued from the pirates.
** In ''The Surgeon's Mate'', in a rare moment, Stephen is described as "positively gay" - opposite to his usual not very cheerful personality.

* ChekhovsGunman: Or in this case, Chekhov's Gunwoman. At the beginning of ''The Surgeon's Mate'', Jack, irritated and upset because he has apparently received no mail from Sophie during his imprisonment in Boston, has a brief fling with a young woman in Halifax, whom he meets at a ball celebrating the ''Shannon'''s victory over the ''Chesapeake''. [[spoiler:It turns out that the mail, several packets' worth, had been set aside especially for Jack, but nobody had thought to inform the post office clerk. This indiscretion comes back to almost wreck his marriage in ''The Yellow Admiral'', when Sophie is shown old letters that the young lady has written to Jack that he has unwisely kept. She throws him out of the house - or would have thrown him out of the house, except that he's already at sea - but Stephen, with the help of Diana and Clarissa Oakes, manages to save the situation.]]

* CluelessChickMagnet: Jagiello, the handsome Lithuanian nobleman and a close friend to Jack and Stephen. He speaks passionately of the day that he'd meet a woman who can see him as an equal--considerably harder than it looks considering all the pretty ladies who throw themselves at him. One particularly hilarious incident, during Jack and Stephen's expedition to the Baltic in ''The Surgeon's Mate'', occurs during a port call in Sweden where a local beauty who is apparently quite the favorite with visiting naval officers - her nickname is "The Gentleman's Relish" - tries to stow away in poor Jagiello's cabin, much to his appalled outrage.

* CombatPragmatist: Played straight, played with and occasionally averted. Aubrey, while enjoying a fair fight with a ship of equal or similar force, is not adverse to trickery, deception and plain running away from a superior opponent. On one notable occasion he is sent to intercept a French ship which is due to sail from a port on a certain date. Rather that wait for her to come out and engage in honourable combat at sea he sneaks his men into the port the night before she is due to sail, assuming that most of the French will be ashore getting drunk, and takes the ship out himself.

* ComicBookTime: O'Brian moved the series into this after the first half-dozen books when he realized he was running out of Napoleonic War years. O'Brian somehow manages to squeeze what would properly be at least five, perhaps even ten years' worth of action into a period of less than 6 months, roughly spanning June 1813 (the end of ''The Fortune of War'') to November 1813 (the beginning of ''The Commodore''). Time resumes its normal sequence with ''The Yellow Admiral''; the last completed book in the series, ''Blue at the Mizzen", presumably ends in early 1816. O'Brian even admitted this, saying it only made sense if you pretended there were "hypothetical years [...]. An 1812a, as it were, or even an 1812b."

* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: In the first novel, Stephen lists on the potential disasters Jack's daring actions might cause as "A slaughtered crew, a sunken ship, and my collections destroyed..."

** While Captain Aubrey was undoubtedly a badass, he was also a bookworm in his own right being an excellent mathematician and skilled astronomer who wrote several well respected academic papers on the subjects.

The ''Aubrey-Maturin'' series consists of 20 books written by [[FakeIrish pseudo-Irish]] author Patrick O'Brian (born Richard Patrick Russ). The series takes place during UsefulNotes/TheNapoleonicWars, following the adventures of an English naval captain, Jack Aubrey, and his surgeon and particular friend, Stephen Maturin, who also works for Naval Intelligence. O'Brian also wrote the first couple of chapters of a 21st book before his 2000 death, which have since been published, along with his notes about what happened afterward.

* NumberTwo: Tom Pullings, the first of Jack's midshipmen to pass for lieutenant, is often found as Jack's first lieutenant aboard his many commands--indeed, when Jack is temporarily struck off the Navy list, Pullings offers to temporarily volunteer himself as part of his command of a letter of marque. After Jack's reinstatement and assignment to the commodore of a squadron, he makes it a point to ask for now-Captain Pullings to be the captain of his flagship, ''HMS Bellona''.

* FishOutOfWater: a straight example when it comes to landsmen on water, and almost literally when it comes to sailors on land. Jack, for instance, manages to endanger most of his fortune when it comes to falling for various {{Get Rich Quick Scheme}}s, while mention is made of Mowett being unable to differentiate between commercial and "vanity" publishing when he tries to publish his poetry.

* ItsPersonal: implied for the captain of the ''Waakzeimheid''; after the first few exchanges of fire, he is seen wearing a black coat, and chasing ''Leopard'' despite suicidal weather for battle. Jack wonders if his son had died in their skirmishing.
* [[JokeCharacter Joke Ship]]: The ''Polychrest.'' She's unwieldy, leaky, and just plain ugly looking due to being designed for a secret weapon that never made it off the drawing board. While Jack is able to get some used to it, she ends up running aground and is shot to pieces by French batteries while Jack and the crew capture and escape on a more capable French vessel.

* [[JokeCharacter Joke Ship]]: The ''Polychrest.''

** Jack’s success as a captain is in large part, due to his ability to attract snd retain good men. A captain of the time was responsible for recruiting and manning his ship.

--> '''Aubrey:''' Come now, Stephen, this is coming it pretty high: your brute (a wombat) is earing my hat.\\