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See the Sea

by Broos Campbell

The Napoleonic Wars have been bread and meat for scholarly novelists since Napoleon met his Waterloo. But early sea novels, like early Westerns, sacrificed detail for the sake of a good yarn.

When a historical novel is injected with too much detail, the results can be as silly as Wyatt Earp expounding on the effect of the frontier on the American psyche before going out to plug him some bad men. Staying accurate without boring or bewildering the reader is a difficult task.

Then Patrick O'Brian, a fine fiction writer but more famous for his scholarly works, tried his hand at a sea story, assembling an impeccably researched and fascinating tale around Jack Aubrey, a dashing captain inclined to stoutness, and his "particular friend" Stephen Maturin, an amateur naturalist with a talent for intrigue. O'Brian has released nearly a score in the series.

Men-of-War: Life in Nelson's Navy (Norton, 91 pages, $23 in hardcover) is a compact companion piece, plush with beautifully reproduced portraits, paintings of naval actions, and diagrams of warships, surrounded by O'Brian's easygoing prose explaining just what a midshipman did (as little as possible), or what was so all-fired important about keeping the weather gauge.

This book doesn't dig deep, but it is concise, handsome and entertaining. If manners did not prevent him, O'Brian might call it exactly what it is: a splendid little book.

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