Treason's Harbour

Treason's Harbour

First edition cover
Author Patrick O'Brian
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Series Aubrey-Maturin series
Genre Historical novel
Publisher Collins (UK)
Publication date
 1983
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) & Audio Book (Cassette, CD)
Pages 408 paperback edition
ISBN 0-393-03709-6 first edition, hardback & 0-393-30863-4 paperback edition UK
OCLC 31989694
LC Class PR6029.O55
Preceded by The Ionian Mission
Followed by The Far Side of the World

Treason's Harbour is the ninth historical novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by British author Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1983. The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars.

Maturin finds Malta teeming with French spies. One is an unwilling spy, wife of a sailor taken prisoner, who needs Maturin's protection. The new fleet Admiral arrives, sending Aubrey on three missions in the Mediterranean, working with the Turks.

Plot summary

The Suprises wait at Malta as their ship is slowly repaired, after their successful mission on the Ionian coast. Aubrey and Maturin meet Mrs Laura Fielding at music parties she holds. Besides her musical talents, she teaches Italian, waiting on news of her husband, a naval lieutenant who is a prisoner-of-war in France. French intelligence agents use Fielding's plight to manipulate Mrs Fielding into spying for them. Aubrey saves her huge dog Ponto from a fall in the well. This endears Ponto to Aubrey, leading the gossips of Malta to assume he is carrying on an affair with Mrs Fielding. She asks Maturin to pay her attentions, to satisfy the French agents. He lets it appear to the French spies watching her place as if they are conducting an affair, and prepares false materials for her to pass on. Professor Graham is returned to England rapidly when the new Commander of the Mediterranean fleet, Admiral Sir Francis Ives and acting second secretary Andrew Wray arrive in Malta with their own advisor on Turkish affairs. Pullings is very happy with his promotion, though he has no ship to captain. Once Aubrey gets news that an earlier prize was accepted by the board, he spends money to speed up repairs on Surprise. French spies are active in Malta. Before he leaves, Graham describes Lesueur, a French agent known to him. Unbeknownst to Maturin, Wray meets with Lesueur, receives payments from him and learns what Maturin has done to French spies. Maturin is delighted to receive his diving bell, built on Halley’s design. He and Heneage Dundas test it out from Dundas’s ship. It travels with Maturin on the next mission.

Aubrey is dispatched on a secret mission by the active Admiral Ives, to capture a Turkish galley laden with French silver in the Red Sea. They sail on the Dromedary to Tina, and then walk across the Sinai Peninsula to meet the HEI ship Niobe at Suez. Aubrey takes command of Niobe and sails her down the Red Sea with Turkish troops to intercept the galley. They spot it and give chase. Aubrey notices that the galley is using a drag sail to artificially slow its speed. Realizing the trickery, Aubrey sinks the galley to deny the French its silver. Maturin and Aubrey use the diving bell to retrieve the cargo, learning it is lead not silver, a complete trap. From a fishing boat Aubrey learns that the galley had been in the sea for a month awaiting them. It was to lure them under French cannons on land. They return on Niobe to Suez and offload the disappointed and dismayed Turkish troops. The Surprises retrace their steps across the desert. Bedouin horsemen steal their camel train, so they reach Tina exhausted. Only Aubrey’s chest, with his chelengk award and the dragoman’s papers, is saved by Killick’s diligent effort. They return to Malta on Dromedary.

Aubrey learns that Surprise is to return to England to be sold or scrapped, very sad news. Maturin is in a mood to gamble at cards. Wray loses their piquet games, betting more than the cash he has on hand, and thus owes Maturin, who asks for naval favors in return, like a ship for Pullings. Before despatching Surprise to England, Ives asks Aubrey to take the Adriatic convoy up to Trieste. There he meets Captain Cotton of HMS Nymphe, who has just rescued the escaped French prisoner-of-war, Lieutenant Charles Fielding. Maturin removes a bullet from Fielding. He is a brave man, but also jealous. He hears the rumour of Aubrey's liaison with his wife. He refuses to return to Malta on Surprise and offers a duel when he and Aubrey do meet on land. On the return journey Captain Dundas, commanding HMS Edinburgh, tells Aubrey of a French privateer that Aubrey captures with Dryad in convoy. The chase delays Surprise into port, two days behind Babbington's sloop Dryad, so the news of Lt. Fielding's rescue has begun to circulate. Maturin speeds to Mrs Fielding's house, but she is not home. Lesueur and Boulay, a double agent on the Governor's staff, arrive to kill her, as she is of no more use to them, and have already killed Ponto. Instead, Maturin quietly listens to their conversation until they leave. When she arrives, he takes her aboard the Surprise, saving her life.

Admiral Ives orders Aubrey to sail for Zambra on the Barbary Coast to persuade the Dey of Mascara not to molest British ships, in convoy with HMS Pollux, which is returning Admiral Harte to England. While Pollux waits at the entrance of the Bay of Zambra, the French Mars with two frigates fire on her, with a fierce ensuing battle. Pollux blows up, killing all 500 aboard, but she severely damages Mars. The two frigates chase Surprise deep into the bay until the heavier frigate runs aground on a reef. Her smaller consort deserts the fight. Aubrey wants to continue; on the political advice of Maturin, he sets sail for Gibraltar. This ambush on a voyage known to so few makes it clear that someone highly placed in the British command betrayed them to the French. Maturin hopes Wray will find the traitor out.

Characters

See also Recurring characters in the Aubrey–Maturin series

Ships

Series chronology

This novel references actual events with accurate historical detail, like all in this series. In respect to the internal chronology of the series, it is the third of eleven novels (beginning with The Surgeon's Mate) that might take five or six years to happen but are all pegged to an extended 1812, or as Patrick O'Brian says it, 1812a and 1812b (introduction to The Far Side of the World, the tenth novel in this series). The events of The Yellow Admiral again match up with the historical years of the Napoleonic wars in sequence, as the first six novels did.

Title

The title is drawn from a line in Shakespeare's play, Henry VI: 'Smoothe runnes the Water, where the Brooke is deepe. And in his simple shew he harbours Treason.' (It is also written: Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep / And in his simple show he harbours treason.[1]) 2 Henry VI, a speech by Suffolk.

Reviews

Publishers Weekly, reviewing an inadequate audio book narrator, commends the series in the highest terms, and is sharply critical of the narrator's inability to properly convey the main characters.

This novel, the ninth installment of 20 in what is certainly the greatest series about the British Navy ever written--indeed, one of the most successful of its magnitude ever written in any genre--is not well served by its reader. Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actor Pigott-Smith has an appropriately English accent, but his characters' voices lack consistency and sensitivity to the subtleties of O'Brian's pen. In this recording, the swashbuckling Captain Aubrey and the ironic, stealthy Stephen Maturin, his ship's surgeon, do not step onto the stage of the Napoleonic wars as the nuanced heroes O'Brian's readers have come to know over three decades. Pigott-Smith's Maturin lacks compassion; his Aubrey lacks intelligence. The narrative turns from nefarious intrigues in Malta to an amazing mission in the Red Sea and back again, but the drama is conveyed with neither satisfying variation of tempo nor ringing cadence. While O'Brian's devotees will find all the naval and historical details they usually delight in, they will despair at hearing how this production tramples upon his genius in portraying shockingly real characters in an utterly foreign, far-off time. Based on the Norton hardcover. (Nov. 2000) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.[2]

Narrative style

Most of the novels in this series tell the story from the view point of Maturin or Aubrey, either in direct conversation, unspoken reflections or writing letters or notes. In essence the reader knows what they know. In Treason’s Harbour, the author tells some of the story from conversations held by the French agent Lesueur, which neither Aubrey nor Maturin hear or overhear.[3] Thus the reader knows that from his first arrival at Malta, Wray is in direct communication with Lesueur, receives money from France, and that he contemplates using the Dey of Mascara, in sympathy with Napoleon, “to kill two birds with one stone, as we say”[4] when Lesueur tells him of Maturin’s past successes against Napoleon’s spies. Combining that knowledge with what happens at that place on the Barbary Coast at the end of the novel, Wray is shown to be more brutal than Aubrey or Maturin know, stopping at nothing to murder those in his way, including his father-in-law and Maturin. Maturin and Aubrey are not killed, but his father-in-law is, along with the entire ship’s crew of 500. Maturin begins to deduce the nature of his enemy inside the British Admiralty, but does not yet know the names. Maturin acts with caution around Wray because of a letter received from Sir Joseph Blaine, pointedly not telling Maturin to assist Wray and is told about Lesueur on Malta by Graham. Aubrey knows he has been passed over when he merited more recognition, but in his realistic fashion lets it go. While the Turks give Aubrey with their high military honour, the chelengk, his own government merely accepts Aubrey's recommendation to promote the long deserving lieutenant Pullings to commander, about which Wray says "that I insisted all the more strongly, because at one time Captain Aubrey seemed to do me an injustice, and by promoting his lieutenant I could, as the sea-phrase goes, the better wipe his eye."[5]

Publication history

References

  1. ↑ "Still waters run deep". Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Bartleby. Retrieved 5 September 2014.
  2. ↑ "Treason's Harbour". Editorial Reviews. Barnes and Noble. 2001. Retrieved 31 August 2014.
  3. ↑ conversations in Chapter 1 with Guiseppe and in Chapters 2 and 8 with Wray
  4. ↑ Chapter 2
  5. ↑ Chapter 1

External sources