At the end, how did Dr. Maturin know that the French doctor had been dead for months?
Are we to assume that he’d just had conversations with the members of the other boat? For a movie that paid so much attention to detail, that line always seemed to hang out there like an albatross.
Yeah, I always assumed that he had to assign his underling to the Acheron, since the prize ship didn’t have a surgeon for its voyage to port.
Example:
Acheron crew: We no have le surgeon, he died months ago.
Maturin: Oh jolly good, take this fellow, he’s so inept I’d rather operate on myself anyway.
Acheron crew: Oui, thank you!
Alternately, one of the skeleton crew assigned with Mr. Pullings could have told him that they didn’t have a surgeon, and he just assigned the underling as a matter of course without consulting Lucky Jack.
I never had a problem with it, really.
There was a huge amout of time with the two ships together to repair the damage so Pullings could sail off. I understood it that during that time Stephen would have been going back and forth tending to all of the wounded and would know the French Doctor was dead.
My real question is if they are planning another movie.
The only problem with that is that under that scenario, Capt. Aubrey would have known it too, no?
During this huge amount of time together, it wouldn’t have come up that Jack thought there was a doctor, and Maturin knew there wasn’t?
I tend to agree with Grossbottom but the way Maturin says it makes it sound like it’s knowledge he has had for a while. He says it matter-of-factly like he heard it on the doctor-wire months ago.
OK, this is wierd, I was just thinking about asking the question in the OP. Wasn’t there some kind of deception going on, concerning the captain of the French ship? I wanted to know why Aubrey had them “turn around” and sail after it at the end, when he’d put his junior officer in charge of it as a prize.
Yes, the deception was this: the guy on the doctor’s table on the French ship was supposed to have been the captain, but the man posing as the doctor actually was the captain. Pullings doesn’t know this, so Aubrey decides he’d better catch up with the ship since there’s no other way to tell him. He probably thinks the clever French fellow would try to pull something over on Pullings.
Mr. Goob: That’s all up in the air. The ship is sitting at the San Diego maritime museum indefinitely, but the studio has the option of reclaiming it if they ever wish to make a sequel.
It’s true that Maturin may or may not have communicated everything he knew to Aubrey - in the books, sometimes Maturin was inexplicably cagey, a habitual tendency because of his spying activities. But the fact that he was always going aboard the Acheron to doctor the other ship’s wounded should have clued Aubrey in as to what was going on. Maybe the captain was too buzzed on the captured French wine to put two and two together.
You see, just as the animals on Galapagos disguised themselves for a defense, and Jack disguised his ship as a whaler to get close to the French, the French captain disguised himself to escape.
When the French captain introduced himself as the doctor, and identified some other unnamed corpse as the captain, he effectively ceased to exist as a person in Jack Aubrey’s eyes. He became just one other member of the defeated Acheron crew. Presumedly the position of ship’s doctor in the French navy was just as lowly and ill-staffed as their English counterparts, and Aubrey would have only concerned himself with finding out who the surviving officers were.
Maturin, on the other hand, would undoubtedly have been heavily involved in patching up the French survivors. The French crew would have been smart enough to refrain from giving the disguised captain away, but the existence of older, unhealed injuries and untreated sicknesses would make it obvious to Maturin’s eye that there had been no medical treatment available. And the French captain would presumably have concluded that he would not be able to keep up the charade of being a doctor in Maturin’s presence, so he simply blended in with the crew. So Maturin would not have had trouble learning that the doctor had died some time ago. But not having been with Jack during the surrender, he didn’t have all of the pieces of the puzzle.
Any way you look at it, it was a flimsy deception. All it would have taken for the captain to be found out would be for Jack and Stephen to compare notes. Which is what, eventually happened, of course. But the question is this: did it happen soon enough to prevent the French captain from re-taking his ship? The closing shot has the ships separated by only a few miles of ocean. If Pullings is still in command once the Surprise has changed course and closed the distance, then the game is effectively up.
I supposed that all makes sense. One think that at some time before the ships parted Maturin and Aubrey would have had an exchange like,
“Wow, I’ve been working hard on those sick Frenchmen.”
“Well, isn’t their doctor helping you?”
I guess the thing is, Maturin says it so matter-of-factly. It always struck me like he said it like he knew BEFORE THEY EVEN MET THE ACHERON that the doctor was dead, not that I could know that.
Here’s from a script I found online. It’s not well annotated.
Come on, lads…it’s a classic ending to a great film…maybe the best swashbuckler ever filmed, certainly from both a technical and character point of view, even though I find Charles Laughton’s turn as Captain Bligh to be definitive of the sadistic English Navy Captain archtype.
Unfortunately, a sequel seems unlikely; it had rather modest earnings (upper eight figures) against a reported $150M budget. A masterpiece, but not a profitable one.
Stranger
I assumed that the French captain would be hanged by the British if captured alive, so at the least he was trying to avoid the noose even if he didn’t try to recapture his ship.
I don’t recall if this was made clear in the movie, but in the books, it’s an amazingly huge deal to have Maturin, an actual surgeon, on board the ship. Most ship’s doctors of the day had the barest training, or none at all, so it wouldn’t have been at all unexpected for Maturin to essentially take over the care of the wounded French sailors, even with another “doctor” present.
Nitpick – the amazing thing about Maturin was that he was an honest to god physician, not a surgeon. Surgeons were just getting past their barber days.
I was so happy to see the movie made that I was perfectly willing to forgive a few plot holes, but this is the kind of thing that I don’t think O’Brian would have ever allowed to happen in one of his stories. There WAS in instance in which a captured French captain escaped, but in a different and more believeable way. I suppose it’s just possible that Jack might not have given a second thought to the story he had been given, but he had just freed a large number of English prisoners from the privateer and it seems unlikely to me that none of them would have recognized the man who had taken them prisoner. I think that it would also have been difficult for the French crew to overcome the habits of deference toward the man they had related to as their CO for so long.
Well Aubrey, being such a hands-on captain, would have been very much involved during all his waking hours in overseeing repairs to both vessels; likewise, Maturin, being a very consciencious physican, would have been kept pretty busy with battle casualties from both ships, along with the regular hernias, broken limbs and crush injuries from hard-working sailors (and whatever chronic illness there was among the French crew, lacking medical attention for a long time). It is quite within the realm of possibility (and certainly in the spirit of the books), that they might not see each other to converse during this hectic period.
Maturin is also well-known to sometimes overlook the obvious, in an almost absent-minded way; on the other hand, since he is actually an intelligence agent of no mean reputation, he should have realized the import of such a deception. (But unless Aubrey had reason to mention that he had spoken to the French surgeon, Stephen might not smoke said deception).
The French Captain would have been held as a Prisioner of War and treated very kindly by Jack. Over the span of books Jack and Stephen were captured, and captured other officers a number of times. They were treated as honored guests and became friends after a fashion.
With this movie I took it as Stephen and Jack just never discussed the death of the surgeon. Each assuming that the other knew what was going on.
This is what I have arrived at in my mind as the most likely explanation. But Curate raises some good points against.
I also assumed the time between the end of the battle and when the two ships separated must have been very short, maybe only a day or two.
Not after disguising himself. He wouldn’t be a gentlemen. Jack wouldn’t even put it due to “After all, he’s only a foreigner”; the man didn’t behave as an officer, and God knows what a sneaky bastard like that would do; a knife in the back while posing as a surgeon, or poison in the food.
I’ve wondered why the film made a point of making the ship a French privateer, as opposed to a ship of the regular Navy (I’ll have to rewatch the movie, but I do seem to recall one of the glimpses of the French privateer early in the film that showed it flying a comission pendant). Once again, in the books the similar story line involved an American privateer, but that ship’s non-regular navy statuswas an integral plot point for subsequent story lines.
It seems to me that the ship’s status as a privateer might have had a bearing on the French capitain’s unwillingness to be recognised. It’s true that Jack would extend every courtesy to a captured enemy officer, but if the captain of the privateer was unable to show a letter of marque, Jack would have considered him a pirate and considered it his duty to hang him.