For the sounds of the shot hitting the ships, they set up wooden targets at the artillery range and blasted them with the cannon, but found the sonic results underwhelming. A significant subplot of the novel concerns the divided loyalties of two Irishmen, Dillon and Maturin, following their involvement in the unsuccessful Irish Rebellion of 1798. That night, Hollom commits suicide by jumping overboard with a cannonball; Aubrey holds a service for Hollom the next morning. In his introduction to The Far Side of the World, the 10th book in the series, O'Brian wrote that if the author "had known how many books were to follow the first, he would certainly have started the sequence much earlier" in real historical time. Jack Aubrey is a large man (both literally and figuratively) with an energetic, gregarious, cheerful, and relatively simple personality and a deep respect for naval tradition.

note 2] As well, the film excludes scenes from the books that took place in ports, [ clarification needed] and, besides Brazilian women in a single scene, the novels' female characters were not adapted. Following the privateer south, Surprise rounds Cape Horn and heads to the Galápagos Islands, where the whaling fleet is concentrated.

But that's as may be; as Keith said, it's to the book's credit that you can skip past the exact details of what's being done to which part of the ship without losing the story, or you can follow every decision and maneuver, and have a completely different but no less immersive experience. Discover the joy of reading with us, your trusted source for affordable books that do not compromise on quality. The film's plot and characters are adapted from three novels in author Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series, which includes 20 completed novels of Jack Aubrey's naval career.

Although 20th Century Fox engaged Miramax Films and Universal Pictures to co-finance and co-produce the film, Fox itself distributed the film.In an introductory Author's Note to the novel, O'Brian sets out his approach to historical accuracy, noting that historic records of naval battles are filled with "actions that few men could invent".

At the very end of the film, the captured Acheron is sent to the Spanish colonial port of Valparaíso in Chile.Though filmmakers could not get an exact replica, the ship used to depict the Surprise was quite close to the real thing. One character in the novel, Sir Joseph Blaine, saw the two friends as romantics, in his remarks on Maturin in HMS Surprise Chapter 4: "As I was saying, strong; but not without his weaknesses.

Great efforts were made to reproduce the authentic look and feel of life aboard an early nineteenth-century man-of-war. King, Laco, and two assistants went to Michigan and recorded the sounds of the cannon firing at a nearby National Guard base. Harbors and High Seas: Map Book and Geographical Guide to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels of Patrick O'Brian.As the series of novels expanded, single-volume reviews became less common and reviewers tended to prefer retrospectives of the entire series to date.