Master & Commander

1800: This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey Novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's Navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the wardroom and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of the broadsides as the great ships close in battle