The Wine-Dark Sea is the sixteenth historical novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by British author Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1993. The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812.

This novel constitutes the fourth of a five-novel circumnavigation of the globe; other novels in this voyage include The Thirteen Gun Salute, The Nutmeg of Consolation, Clarissa Oakes/The Truelove, and The Commodore.

The chase of the Franklin brings the Surprise to Peru and the undercover mission so long delayed. Aubrey navigates through an undersea volcanic eruption, which decides him as winner of the chase. Captain Aubrey's illegitimate son, Father Panda, provides crucial help to Maturin in Lima and for his long walk along the Andes Mountains to meet the Surprise. Aubrey is unable to beat to windward during a hard blow while trying to reach Maturin to warn him of Dutourd's escape and is nearly starved.

This novel received enthusiastic positive reviews on its release. The writing is "literate, leisurely, and as charming as the rest of the series" a habit he learned too well when in the Royal Navy.

  • Barret Bonden: Captain's Coxswain on the Surprise.
  • Preserved Killick: Captain's Steward on the Surprise.
  • Awkward Davies: Able Seaman on the Surprise.
  • Joe Plaice: Cousin to Bonden and able seaman.
  • Mr Grainger: Acting mate or Lieutenant joining the Gun room. He is promoted from forecastleman due to vacancy from battle at Moahu; he sailed his own brig before joining Surprise at Shelmerston for this voyage (which began back in The Thirteen Gun Salute).
  • Henry Vidal: Acting Second Lieutenant on the Surprise; by religion, he is a Knipperdolling from Shelmerston. While Maturin walks the Andes, he is put off the ship by Aubrey for having let Dutourd escape to shore.
  • Ben Vidal: Nephew to Vidal who is taken on the cutter with Aubrey when trying to reach Callao to recapture Dutourd or warn Maturin.
  • Mr Adams: Skilled captain's clerk.
  • William Sadler: Replaces Vidal as acting second mate or lieutenant on Surprise.
  • Sarah and Emily Sweeting: Melanesian girls rescued earlier by Maturin in The Nutmeg of Consolation, rated as ship's boys. Jemmy Ducks tends them and they work in the sick berth as well as help Maturin with his collections.
  • Edward Shelton: One-time Royal Navy serving on the American whaler since the peace, joins Surprise as able, and shares information about the pirate ship with Aubrey.
  • Fabien: Apothecary's assistant from New Orleans, was aboard the Franklin, taken by Maturin as an assistant in the sick bay and for drawings of fauna in his collections.
  • Zeek: American whaler on the ship taken by Surprise, who killed his captain with the whaling spear, because he was about to abandon him in a small boat.

;In Peru

  • Dr Francis Geary: Surgeon of The Three Graces merchantman, once a classmate of Maturin, who agrees to care for Martin on their return to England.
  • Sam Panda: Young Catholic priest, illegitimate son to Aubrey and now grown taller and larger than his father, raised by Irish missionaries in southern Africa, now a rising star in the Catholic church. Maturin is a good friend to him. Introduced in The Reverse of the Medal.
  • Eduardo: Maturin's Inca guide in the Andes, notable naturalist, fluent in Spanish and Quechua.
  • Don Jaime O'Higgins: Vicar-General in Peru, abolitionist and supporter of the split from Spain.
  • Joselito: Mule belonging to Don Bernardo O'Higgins and loaned to Maturin for his botanizing walk.
  • Pascual de Gayongos: Wealthy Catalan merchant and revolutionary sympathiser in Peru with whom Maturin makes a strong link. He supplies the boat to take Maturin from Arica along the coast near Valparaiso.
  • General Hurtado: High-ranked Peruvian General who made the decision that the revolution could not proceed with the charges of foreign gold in the air.
  • Castro: Low level official in Lima who is the unstable figure trying to gain benefit from Dutourd's noisy talk.

;Howmeward bound

  • Heneage Dundas: Captain of HMS Berenice and longtime friend of Aubrey.
  • Philip Aubrey: Much younger half-brother of Jack, who has been sailing with Captain Dundas as a midshipman. His birth is mentioned in Post Captain.

Ships

  • British
  • HM Hired Vessel Surprise - an elderly twenty-eight gun frigate
  • The Three Graces merchantman
  • HMS Berenice - sixty-four-gun man-of-war
  • A Baltimore clipper (Berenices tender), not named in this book but name given as Ringle in The Commodore
  • French
  • Alastor - pirate ship
  • Alastors launch - used by Aubrey to sail to Callao
  • American
  • Franklin (captured)
  • American whaler - captured by the Surprise and Franklin
  • Nootka fur trader - captured by the Franklin
  • Unnamed thirty-eight gun frigate and brig in convoy

Title

The novel's title is the English translation of an oft-repeated description from Homer. Example of Homer's verse: “And if some god should strike me, out on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it,”

Series chronology

This novel references actual events with accurate historical detail, like all in this series. In respect to the internal chronology of the series, it is the tenth of eleven novels (beginning with The Surgeon's Mate) that might take five or six years to happen but are all pegged to an extended 1812, or as Patrick O'Brian says it, 1812a and 1812b (introduction to The Far Side of the World, the tenth novel in this series). The events of The Yellow Admiral again match up with the historical years of the Napoleonic wars in sequence, as the first six novels did.

Continuity

In this novel, the voyage begun in The Thirteen Gun Salute, with a covert mission (first mentioned in The Reverse of the Medal) in Peru for Maturin, comes finally to Peru. Because of the demands of the Spanish government not to interfere with their colonies in South America, the Surprise sailed under Captain Pullings as a privateer, west to Peru, sailing until she met up with Aubrey in the Salibabu Passage in the South China Sea on the other side of the world. Aubrey and Maturin sailed on HMS Diane to complete a mission to the east, in Pulo Prabang and Maturin eliminates two traitors to the British cause. Aubrey sails again in the Surprise, sending the Nutmeg back to Batavia, where the Governor had given it to him (The Nutmeg of Consolation). Surprise proceeds to Australia, picking up a friend and a stowaway. The Governor at Sydney sends Aubrey on a mission to Moahu, successfully completed (Clarissa Oakes / The Truelove). Surprise chases and takes the American privateer Franklin in this novel, bringing Surprise to Peru, where Maturin's mission, so close to success, is jeopardized, and Maturin walks the Andes Mountains until he can reach the coast safely and rendezvous with Surprise. They sail around the Cape Horn, suffering damage from lightning, but meet with HMS Berenice, with supplies to repair her, and Aubrey and Maturin are ready to be home after the long voyage around the world.

Reviews and awards

By the time of the publication of this novel by WW Norton jointly with HarperCollins, reviewers have read the series in order and have caught up with the plot, ending the confusion seen in reviews of novels earlier in the series, reviews written at the time of re-issue, not at first publication. There are more reviews in newspapers of note.

Kirkus Reviews said this novel is literate, leisurely, and as charming as the rest of the series. Sending Maturin to deal with the tottering Spanish vice regency in South America is a good choice, aboard the privateer Surprise. "Maturin's mission, complicated enough by the various revolutionary factions, becomes a real hair-raiser involving an arduous transit of the Andes, where he is spit on by llamas and sees the great condors."

Thomas Fleming writing in the New York Times noted that "O'Brian's persistence . . . eventually induces a rueful awe at the depth and intensity of the author's determination to make his characters authentic creatures of their time. It is life aboard the Surprise that mainly animates O'Brian. His narrative of the proto-revolution in Peru is sketchy at best. . . . This deficiency is more than balanced by the intricate intimacy with which the reader comes to know the Surprise. . . . Equally fine is O'Brian's nuanced handling of everyone's political and religious beliefs and how these relate to the war they are fighting."

Publishers Weekly remarks that If O'Brian hasn't quite had a break-out book yet, then this deserves to be it. In an enthusiastic review, they describe the writing: "The naval actions are bang-on and bang-up--fast, furious and bloody--and the Andean milieu is as vivid as the shipboard scenes. As usual, readers can revel in the symbiotic friendship of Jack and Stephen, who make for a marvelous duo, whether in their violin and cello duets or in their sharp dialogue."

Patrick T Reardon writing in the Chicago Tribune describes how the author brings this story to full life: "The best way to think of these novels is as a single 5,000-page book. But this is no overstuffed epic. It is, if you can imagine such a thing, an intimate book that just happens to be 5,000 pages long. . . . As usual, O'Brian's battle scenes are engrossing, and his storm chapters are even more riveting. But it's the in-between times, the closely observed and meticulously recorded mundane moments of the story (and of the sea journey) that bring the novel to full life."

Paul D Colford, writing in the Los Angeles Times, cites a quote from the story as an example of the fine prose and painstaking research by the author that elevates this book, and the series to a higher level.

<blockquote>Here, in The Wine-Dark Sea, are the two old friends as they puzzle from the quarterdeck at a "strange-coloured" swirling sea:<br />

Aubrey: "I have never seen anything like it."<br />

Maturin: "It is much thicker now than it was when I went below. And now an umber light pervades the whole, like a Claude Lorrain run mad."<br />

It's this kind of passing historical reference (to the 17th-Century landscape artist known for his rendering of light), as well as O'Brian's painstakingly researched details about 19th-Century life aboard ship, that elevates his tales into heady escapism.

Allusions to history, natural science, real places and persons

Crew members recruited from Shelmerston, the fictitious port on the west coast of England, report a large number of religious sects. One such is the group called Knipperdollings, a group who do not hold to the precepts of the first such group centuries earlier, but took the name to identify their beliefs apart from others. Martin gives Aubrey a full detailed history of the Knipperdolling beliefs then and on the ship.

Maturin mentions the Viennese treatment for the pox (venereal diseases), saying it relies on murias hydrargi corrosivus, which is a corrosive compound of mercury.

Dutourd asks Maturin if he knew Georges Cuvier, a well-known anatomist and natural philosopher in Paris.

In his botanizing walks up into the high Andes Mountain peaks, Maturin is delighted to see numerous condors, a puma, huge flowering bromeliads and to see and then learn the difference between guanacos and vicuñas. In the long trek out of Peru, llamas are used, a domesticated breed, which took some time to stop spitting at Maturin.

The Vicar General (a Catholic priest) with whom Father Sam Panda works has the last name O'Higgins, and is suggested to be a relative of Bernardo O'Higgins, who was fighting for Chilean independence from Spanish colonial rule since 1810.

Aubrey mentions the Spanish Disturbance in Nootka Sound (off Vancouver Island) in 1789 as being a year with good effects in his life. After the loss in the American Revolution, the Royal Navy left midshipman and officers "on the beach". The Nootka crisis took some years to be resolved, on the question of which European power has rights to North and South American lands, if there is no settlement from that European power on the land. The Royal Navy stepped up its ship making, and in 1792 allowed master's mate Aubrey to pass for Lieutenant and get a berth on ship, at the same time readying the Royal Navy for the long war against France.

The port town at Callao is real, as is Lima, up higher in the mountains from Callao; in current times, the two are part of one urbanized area. The Andes Mountains are noted for many high peaks and passes, with an average height throughout the long range of 4,000 m (13,000&nbsp;ft). Maturin and Eduardo viewed Lake Titicaca and its wildlife. Such high altitudes can strain breathing; the coca leaves that Maturin liked to chew, something he learned on his first visit to Peru, make it easier to stand the altitude. Maturin and Eduardo drank mate as they walked, which is a tea made from the coca leaf. Maturin came down from the mountains at Arica, a port now in Chile but then considered part of Peru. He made his way to the appointed meeting place at Valparaiso, a major port city in Chile.

Publication history

As listed

  • 1993 HarperCollins hardback / 978-0-00-223826-7 (UK edition)
  • 1993, November W. W. Norton hardback / 978-0-393-03558-2 (USA edition)
  • 1994, April Thorndike Press paperback / 978-0-7862-0133-4 (USA edition)
  • 1994, October W. W. Norton paperback / 978-0-393-31244-7 (USA edition)
  • 1994 Recorded Books audio cassette edition / 978-0-7366-2657-6 (USA edition)
  • 1995, March Chivers Large print / 978-0-7451-3576-2 (UK edition)
  • 1995, September Isis Audio cassette edition / 978-1-85496-922-4 (UK edition)
  • 1997, July HarperCollins paperback / 978-0-00-649931-2 (UK edition)
  • 2000, March HarperCollins audio cassette edition / 978-0-00-105579-7 (UK edition)
  • 2001, January Books on Tape audio CD edition / 978-0-7366-6166-9 (USA edition)
  • 2002, January Random House Audio cassette edition / 978-0-375-41602-6 (USA edition)
  • 2006, November Blackstone Audiobooks Audio CD edition / 978-0-7861-5978-9 (USA edition)
  • 2008 Playaway audio edition / 978-1-60775-420-6 (USA edition)
  • 2008, June Harper Perennial paperback edition / 978-0-00-727559-5 (UK edition)
  • 2011, December W. W. Norton E-Book edition (USA edition)
  • 2011, December Harper E-book edition (Canada & UK edition)
  • 2013, October Audible Studios audio edition (UK edition)

It is in this book that the drawing of a sailing ship of this era is added to the print copies. "Far more confusing to newcomers may be some of the nautical and scientific dialogue the characters exchange. O'Brian's publishers have equipped the book with a drawing of the Surprise, numbering 21 sails, from the flying jib to the mizzen topgallant staysail. But that hardly prepares the unwary for Captain Aubrey and his crew's discussions of recondite items like cross-catharpins, dumb-chalders, side-trees, heel-pieces, side-fishes, cheeks, front-fish and cant-pieces." The activities of US publisher W. W. Norton & Company are mentioned as part of the increase in popularity: "Norton also plans to keep stoking interest in O'Brian by reissuing all his books in hardcover starting in the spring and by bringing out two additional titles in April."