Master and Commander

Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander opens in April 1800 in Port Mahon on Minorca, where Jack Aubrey is a lieutenant with no ship. At a concert he is elbowed by a stranger, Stephen Maturin, for beating time half a beat ahead of the music, and the two of them take the matter seriously as a question of honour. By the end of the evening Aubrey has his promotion to master and commander, along with command of the fourteen-gun sloop-of-war HMS Sophie, and he takes on the destitute physician and naturalist as the ship's surgeon. The novel was first published in 1969 in the United States and 1970 in Britain.

The Sophie sails the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars with James Dillon, an aristocratic and wealthy Irishman, as first lieutenant, and her business runs from escort work to the pursuit of prizes and a fight against a considerably larger opponent. The naval actions in the book are drawn from the career of Lord Cochrane. Aubrey and Maturin, one a sailor and the other a physician with interests in natural philosophy, form the partnership on which the rest of the series is built.

The book began the twenty-volume Aubrey-Maturin sequence, most of it set during the Napoleonic Wars, which O'Brian went on writing until he died in 2000, and it is the first volume.