The Barnes & Noble ReviewNovember 1999Blue at the MizzenC. S. Forester had his swashbuckling Horatio Hornblower, Bernard Cornwell his dashing Richard Sharpe, but Patrick O'Brian, with his 20-volume adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, has transcended the genre and thrust Napoleonic storytelling into the literary limelight. O'Brian's latest novel (and the second to be touted as the penultimate book in the series) is Blue at the Mizzen.The narrative begins with a festive display of bonhomie and largesse that belies Jack Aubrey's deep unease. The men of the Surprise have profited handsomely from their recent capture of a Moorish galley at the close of The Hundred Days. But the one prize Jack most desires -- his commission -- remains elusive. And with Napoleon safely bottled up once again, his frigate, lately attached to the Royal Navy, now officially reverts to its former status as a hydrographical vessel. Worse, this sudden outbreak of peace means that Jack runs the very real risk of losing his seasoned crew: "Your seaman," he muses, "can put up with uncommon dirty weather, endure great hardship and very short commons -- a good, steady, courageous, uncomplaining creature under officers he can respect.... What he cannot bear is sudden wealth. It goes straight to their heads, and if there is the least possibility they get drunk and disorderly, and desert in droves."To forestall such an event, Jack orders Surprise to slip away from Gibraltar atdusk. But this stealthy gambit takes the ship into the first of several near-disasters that will bedevil her peacetime mission. In the dead of night, Surprise is struck a glancing blow across the bows by a dark Scandinavian timber carrier and nearly sunk. The ship is forced to