Blue at the Mizzen

Patrick O'Brian, CBE , born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and centred on the friendship of English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish–Catalan... physician Stephen Maturin. The 20-novel series is known for its well-researched and highly detailed portrayal of early 19th-century life, as well as its authentic and evocative language. A partially finished twenty-first novel in the series was published posthumously containing facing pages of handwriting and typescript. O'Brian was born Richard Patrick Russ, in Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, and was the son of a physician of German descent and an English mother of Irish descent. The eighth of nine children, he lost his mother at the age of three, and his biographers describe a fairly isolated childhood, with sporadic schooling and long intervals at home with his father and stepmother, during which time his literary career began.
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The Aubrey–Maturin series is a sequence of nautical historical novels—20 completed and one unfinished—by Patrick O'Brian, set during the Napoleonic Wars and centering on the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin, who is... also a physician, natural philosopher, and secret agent. The first novel, Master and Commander, was published in 1969 and the last finished novel in 1999. The 21st novel of the series, left unfinished by O'Brian's death in 2000, appeared in print in late 2004. The series received considerable international acclaim and most of the novels reached The New York Times Best Seller list. These novels comprised the canon of an author often compared to Jane Austen, C. S. Forester and a myriad British authors central to the English literature canon The 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World took material from books in this series, notably Master and Commander, HMS Surprise, The Letter of Marque, The Fortune of War, and particularly The Far Side of the World. Russell Crowe played the role of Jack Aubrey, and Paul Bettany that of Stephen Maturin.
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