:: bows to muldoonthief ::
You are too kind, good sir.
Save it for the Pit, you two!
I’ve not seen such rumjiggery since MelWallace spinner-rigged the foreswain under O’Banahan’s belportalen car’leray, and THAT was with a headwind!
Some of the very best (and funniest) passages are when Jack is trying to explain something to Stephen.
One of the most interesting (for me at least) aspects is the number of idiomatic words or phrases that pop up in the series that are being used in their original context. I would find myself reading past them only to come to a complete stop a few sentences later with a virtual light bulb going off over my head. Fun stuff.
Sailors can call it rumjiggery to each other, but it’s rude when you do it.
As a word nerd (though I prefer verbivore), I was amazed by how many terms and expressions in common use today have their origin with nautical jargon. Just a few of them:
[ul]
[li]By and large[/li][li]Learning the ropes[/li][li]Mainstay[/li][li]To the bitter end[/li][li]Taken aback[/li][li]Broad in the beam[/li][li]Skyscraper[/li][li]Lifeline[/li][li]Batten down the hatches[/li][li]Gangway[/li][li]First-rate[/li][li]Feeling blue[/li][li]Scuttlebutt[/li][/ul]
And:
Jury-rigged (or is it jerry-rigged?)
The devil to pay and no pitch hot
Going at loggerheads
another one…
the whole shooting match
and when they were fighting the american navy, someone passed on a phrase
it cuts no ice, which was a native american expression.
I passed on M&C to my Dad, who is not familiar with Obrien, I am hoping it hooks him!
a real favorite, this is my third read through now, might be picking up the jargon a bit now.
though a landlubber to the core, urp…
Not to mention “let the cat out of the bag” from the cat o’ nine tails 
Too bad it is likely false. 
My favorite phrase comming from this series (as opposed to nautical history) is the ever memorable " ’ Jack, you have debauched my sloth.” 
I think Snopes is full of shit on this one.
Oh, come now! It ain’t very gentlemanly to, forgive the expression, piss on a man and tell him that it’s a half-dozen of the other. It’s rather like topping it the brass bull, if you smoke my meaning.
I work in a large multi-story office building. Historically, about 3/4 of this office building was filled with a large nationwide accounting firm, but they moved out when they needed larger quarters. As a result, our indoor parking garage was mostly emptied of cars, and one had one’s choice when parking.
The first week of the empty parking garage, I was giving someone a ride in to work. As I drove up the ramp, I looked around the completely empty second level and said “Someone’s made a clean sweep of this deck, fore and aft. I say fore and aft” and looked significantly at my passenger. Of course she didn’t get it, but it was a perfect time to use it. I felt smug, anyway.
Another excellent reference work is Life in Nelson’s Navy by Dudley Pope.
Would you care for a promenade along the quarterdeck perhaps?
And its significance was…?
It irritates me just a little, what a great number and variety of far-flung parts of the globe the guys get to visit, largely (I feel) so that Stephen and the Reverend Martin can indulge to the max, their passion for the natural world. None of it totally impossible in the context of that period of history; but in the aggregate, pretty amazingly unlikely – requiring the willing suspension of disbelief to work overtime. Worth it, I suppose, in the interests of getting good stories.
Another problem with O’Brian is if you’ve read Forester first (as I did).
You can sympathize with O’Brian. Back in 1969 when he was first starting on his Jack Aubrey books, the 800 lb gorilla of the genre was Horatio Hornblower (the last Hornblower books had been published in 1967). And I can appreciate why an author starting a new series with a new character in the same setting would dread comparisons.
But it’s almost comical to see what lengths O’Brian went to in Master and Commander to establish that Jack Aubrey is not Horatio Hornblower dammit! It’s like O’Brian made a list of every personality trait and quirk that Hornblower had and made sure to give Aubrey the opposite.
I understand that there can be a bit of polarisation in Napoleonic-fiction fandom, between Forester-ites and O’Brian-ites. (I could never get on very well with Forester’s writing, whether about “sea or land”.) In recent decades, there seems in fact to have arisen in the wake of the two giants, almost a multitude of Napoleonic-Wars-Royal-Navy fiction series. Dudley Pope’s “Ramage” novels come to mind. I actually don’t have a lot of use for Pope’s stuff – find it rather dull and trite, and off-puttingly info-dump-ish.
I sometimes feel that it would be a nice change to have such a set of novels from the point of view of the other side, i.e. the French navy. (The captain could be, personally, a sympathetic character, regardless of the cause for which he was fighting.) If one were a would-be author in this genre… For all I know, there is a French Forester or O’Brian, doing his stuff which happens not to have been translated into English. I rather get the impression, though, that the French don’t “do” war-centred fiction as entertainment, in the mannner which we Anglophones are fond of.
Yes, Forester and O’Brian are the two big dogs of the genre. And I think O’Brian is now the champ. The Hornblower books are all rather dated to modern readers.
In addition to Forester, O’Brian, and Pope, there’s also Douglas Reeman (using the pseudonym Alexander Kent) who writes the Richard Bolitho series; C. Northcote Parkinson, who wrote the Richard Delancey series; Dewey Lambdin, who writes the Alan Lewrie series; James L. Nelson, who writes the Isaac Biddlecomb series; and Richard Woodman, who writes the Nathaniel Drinkwater series.
I think the problem is the French navy historically didn’t do all that much. The British pretty much blockaded France throughout the Napoleonic wars. So a book about about a French captain would have him sitting in pot for month after month, waiting for orders to sail.
There have been some books written about American captains of this era.