We join Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, captain in the Royal Navy and surgeon/intelligence agent respectively, where we left them at the end of The Thirteen Gun Salute: shipwrecked on a remote Dutch East Indies island. Employing great enterprise, Aubrey secures a new ship and sails for Australia. A penal colony by charter, in fact a grim outpost of legalized slavery, conditions there exacerbate Maturin's Irish temper and nearly provoke a diplomatic crisis. And an excursion into the bush ends in a close encounter of the final kind.
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Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000), a translator and author of biographies, was best known as the author of the highly acclaimed Aubrey–Maturin series of historical novels. Set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars ,this twenty-volume series centers on the enduring friendship between naval officer Jack Aubrey and physician and spy Stephen Maturin. The Far Side of the World, the tenth book in the series, was adapted into a 2003 film directed by Peter Weir and starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany. The film was nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture. He wrote acclaimed biographies of Pablo Picasso and Sir Joseph Banks. He also translated many works from the French, among them the novels and memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Lacouture’s biographies of Charles de Gaulle.