Spoilers are allowed.
Mr. Reade, who regrew part of his arm and aged rapidly. Last seen Commander of the Ringle. Did he distinguish himself sometime between 1812 and the American Civil War? Sarah and Emily were fond of him.
Sarah and Emily. Did they marry British Royalty? Commoners? Were they inspired by Stephen to become physicians?
Stephen. Did he endow a natural history museum? Run one?
Are you asking us to speculate or are you wondering how the series ended?
I haven’t read the last few yet, but wiki does not have answers to your questions.
BTW, when does Reade re-grow part of his arm?
To speculate.
I have forgotten which novels Reade is a character in. Stephen “takes it off at the shoulder”. Later “such part of his arm as was left” is requires bandaging. He frightens the crew by climbing the rigging and focusing a telescope with one arm. Thuis he sights either the Doctor in a cork boat or Aubrey in the launch. At some point he acquires a hook that lets him climb into the rigging. One presumes it is on an arm rather than the shoulder.
POB never let consistency get in the way of the story he wanted to tell. Look no further than all of the various ships/battles Jack said he was in as a child, Jack would have had to have been a kid for 30 years and have been able to be in different ships at the same time. And that’s only one example. Stephen and Jack’s ages fluctuate, as do a ton of other things.
Thanks. I am on The Wine-Dark Sea now and Reade is still armless. He spots Aubrey from the rigging and the point was (again) made how awkward it was for him to focus and use a telescope single-handed.
True, but he does acknowledge as much in one (or more) of the forwards.
That was the one I had in mind.
If I have time tonight I’ll try to find the name, but at one time, Jack has a couple of lieutenants and sends one of them off in a prize with some important message. We never hear from him again. I always wonder what happened to him.
ETA: I think they were in the Med at the time but I could be wrong.
Tom Pullings or Babbington?
No, neither of them. ISTR that the lieutenant in question is introduced in the same book and and fairly well fleshed out before being sent of to oblivion. I’ll hunt around the POB wiki and see if I can dig him up.
The other poet, perhaps.
William Mowett? The one who was trying to have a book of his poems published?
Yeah, he was a poet but he didn’t disappear. He shows up at some point later in the books.
A rambling reply:
Yeah, I have a theory that especially as he got older, O’Brian just liked writing the stories so much that he wasn’t particularly beholden to a strict consistency (sort of an anti-Tolkien) and had no issues with rehashing story lines to suit his needs. Jack and Stephen become rich and poor and rich again with comical frequency, the excuses for Jack never being able to get a decent ship with his fighting record are semi-absurd, and the hot and cold currents of Jack and Stephens’ relationships are contrived, etc. But the thing about POB is that stuff doesn’t really matter, his stories are more about the getting to the destination, rather than the destination itself. I mean how many times does he spend 100 pages telling you about the lead up to some important event and then have the actual event happen off stage? I think that this is largely because POB’s research would reveal to him some interesting situation and that he would then want to write about it, with Jack and Stephen as the excuse. I’m thinking for example of the book that takes place in Australia. POB says in the forward that its in response to reading The Fatal Shore. I think that when you look at the books as something that POB loved to write in order to explore specific historical situations and happenings that its easier to understand some of their quirks.
Maybe carnivorousplant means Rowan, who was Mowett’s poetic rival in The Ionian Mission. I don’t remember what happened to him.
Yes, I believe so.
I have a vague recollection that in the preface/introduction to one of the books (the one in which the Surprise runs into one of the bloody American heavy frigates off Cape Horn, maybe) O’Brien confesses that he is playing fast and lose with time and chronology, saying in effect that the year 1812 is about sixty months long.
We can suppose that someone will do to the O’Brien characters just what Northcut (?) did to Hornblower and write a book that explains some mystery and gives a biography of Jack and Steven’s lives after 1815. In the Hornblower book our hero rose to the top ranks of the Admiralty, championed steam propulsion, retired, became a director of the Pacific and Orient Shipping Company and died peacefully while reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, full of years, wisdom and adventures.
My disappointment is that Jack and Steven did not get to pick up Napoleon after his second abdication after Waterloo in 1815. The ship that actually carried him away was a RN frigate named the Surprise. Can’t you see Steven’s determination to murder the man he regards as the very essence of evil, while Jack, true to the warrior’s code struggles to restrain Steven from revenging himself on a defeated adversary?
Oooo that’s a good one. iirc, the real Surprise was also at the bombardment of Ft. McHenry in the War of 1812. It would have been cool to F.S. Key on board the Surprise and actually get the idea for the Anthem from Mowett or Martin or someone like that.
oo Northcote Parkinson, The Life and Time of Horatio Hornblower.
http://dannyreviews.com/h/Parkinson.html
Q=What was with Hornblower’s meteor like rise, apparently skipping over other guys in the sacred Navy List?
Surprise is no longer Royal Navy, now property of Jack and sometimes “His Majesty’s Hired Vessel”, but that’s nit picking. That would be a great scene, but I don’t think Stephen would want to kill Napoleon. I think he would want to gain “Moral Superiority”, pull his nose until it bled, to berate the man who had made him stain his soul with murder and lies, who had cost the world countless treasure and lives, who…maybe he would at that.