Blue at the Mizzen by O'Brian, Patrick - 1999

New york: W. W. Norton & Company. Fine in Fine dust jacket. 1999. 1st American Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. 0002259591 . This book is in Fine condition and has a Fine dust jacket. The book and its contents are in clean, bright condition. The text pages are clean and bright. The dust jacket is crisp and clean. "Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace takes on an ugly complexion for Jack Aubrey; drunken, violent celebartions of the English sailors in Gibraltar; the desertion of nearly half his crew; and the sudden dimming of his own career prospects in a peacetime navy. To cap it all off, the Surprise is nearly sunk in a shattering night collision on the first leg of her journey to South America, where Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are to help Chile assert her independence from Spain." "In the 1950s O'Brian wrote three books aimed at a younger age group, The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean, and The Unknown Shore. Although written many years before the Aubrey–Maturin series, the two naval novels reveal literary antecedents of Aubrey and Maturin. In The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore, based on events of George Anson's voyage around the world from 1740 to 1744, they can be clearly seen in the characters of Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow in the latter novel. Over four decades he worked on his own writings, his British literary reputation growing slowly. He became an established translator of French works into English. His early novels and several of the translations were published by Rupert Hart-Davis from 1953 to 1974. O'Brian wrote the first of the Aubrey-Maturin series in 1969 at the suggestion of American publisher J. B. Lippincott, following the death of C. S. Forrester in 1966, a writer of popular nautical novels. The Aubrey-Maturin books were quietly popular in Britain; after the first few volumes they were not published in the United States." .