All Blue At the Mizzen

I recognize that, in the end, it's a shared love of the "Master and Commander" novels that has brought us together.

I know we all agree that this is the greatest serialized, Napoleonic-era historical fiction ever attempted by an Irish writer over 50 in the past 35 years.

I, too, prize the interplay between Lucky Jack and that scheming Dr. Maturin.

But why is it sometimes that I recently find myself reading a passage that makes the suspension of disbelief a sudden chore? Why am I left to stub the toe of my mind's eye --if you will-- on a clumsy bit of narrative set-up left lying around on deck?

Lack of B vitamins? I know it must be me, because I share your belief that this is more than a very long chronicle of guys fighting in boats.

Even so, here's when I felt the bottom give way and was left to confront my own dizzying doubts:


"Take that word sloop for example."

"Yes," said Stephen, narrowing his eyes through the haze of port and trying to remember the definitions he had heard.

"Why now a sloop, as you know, is properly a one-masted vessel with a fore and aft rig. But in the Navy, a sloop may be ship-rigged -- she may have three masts."

"Or take the Sophie," cried the master, eager to bring his crumb of comfort. "She's rightly a brig, you know, Doctor, with her two masts." He held up two fingers in case a landman might not comprehend so great a number. "But the minute Captain Aubrey sets foot in her, why, she too becomes a sloop; for a brig is a lieutenant's command."

"Or take me," said Jack. "I am called captain, but really I am only a master and commander."

"Or the place where the men sleep, just for'ard," said the purser, pointing. "Rightly speaking and official, 'tis the gun-deck though there's never a gun on it. We call it the spar-deck, though there's no spars, neither -- but some say the gun-deck still and call the right gun-deck the upper-deck. ..."

("Master and Commander," 1970, W.W. Norton & Co., p. 169)