The Commodore

The Commodore is the seventeenth novel of the Aubrey-Maturin series by the English writer Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1995. It completes the circumnavigation begun in The Thirteen Gun Salute, and it is the last of the series' long voyages before the books settle into a different stretch of the war.

The opening is domestic and unhurried by the standards of the series: the ships come home, the crews disperse, and Aubrey and Maturin have a spell ashore in England among families and old friends. It ends for Aubrey with a squadron and a roving commission against the slave trade on the West African coast, and for Maturin with a piece of private news that changes the shape of his life.

Maturin's daughter is the person at the centre of the second half of the book: he has only now met her, and the enemy who has been hunting him for years knows it. The novel moves between England, Spain, West Africa and the west coast of Ireland, and between the business of a squadron at sea and the danger that waits for the family a long way inland.