I am heartily sorry for it, he being a most capable, obliging man, speaking all the languages of the Levant and excellent English too - might have built the Tower of Babel singlehanded.
How happy you make me, Jack, said Stephen. And you might make me even happier, should you so wish, by giving me a hand with this. The unreasonable attitude, or lurch, of the ship caused me to overset...
Hitherto, Jack had been too busy working up his crew to pay much attention to the education of his midshipmen, but he had looked at yesterday's slips and they, with a very suspicious unanimity, had sh...
His forehead hurt, but not very much, and he lay there swinging with the long motion of the ship, watching the grey light grow and musing upon cuckoldry, cuckoldom, and the almost universal mirth exci...
His departure was a sad disappointment to those hands who had been preparing their testimony for the trial. Some of them were old shipmates of Jack's, and they were perfectly ready to swear through a...
He was smiling openly when Stephen walked in, looking shrewish. Like many large, florid, good-natured men, Jack Aubrey was afflicted with an undue proportion of small pale, meagre friends of a shrewis...
He reflected on his hitherto reflection that soldiers and sailors were, upon the whole, quite different creatures. ‘And perhaps they are, too: yet perhaps drink, in very large quantities, may make the...
First there was the sky, high, pure and of a darker blue than he had ever seen. And then there was the sea, a lighter, immensely luminous blue that reflected blue into the air, the shadows and the sai...
Christ's blood in heaven, you ignorant, incompetent whey-faced nestlecock, do you think I am a hired spy, an informer? That I have a master, a paymaster, for God's love? You silly little man.
But, however, I clapped a stopper over his capers.’ Dr Maturin was proud of his nautical expressions: sometimes he got them right, but right or wrong he always brought them out with a slight emphasis...
But when a man puts on maturity and invulnerability, it seems that he necessarily becomes indifferent to many things that gave him joy.
Because, sir, teaching young gentlemen has a dismal effect upon the soul.It exemplifies the badness of established, artificial authority. The pedagogue has almost absolute authority over pupils: he of...
At that time I attached a perhaps undue importance to staying alive, and I became moderately proficient with both the pistol and the small-sword.
Any innocent pleasure is a real good: there are not so many of them.
Another roll like that, and we shall have no masts,' said Pullings, as the remaining crockery, the glasses and the inhabitants of the gun-room all shot over to the lee. 'We'll lose the mizen first, Do...
A lane instantly formed in front of Stephen, and he passed through with smiling faces and kind looks on either side of him; he noticed some of the men whose backs he had oiled earlier that morning loo...
A conquering race, in the place of that conquest, is rarely amiable; the conquerors pay less obviously than the conquered, but perhaps in time they pay even more heavily, in the loss of the humane qua...
There is here a striving, avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, to this incessant buying and selling, that make that self evident; but I had no conception of the ubiq...
Or there will be wigs on the green.
For Captain Aubrey, as for the rest of brute creation, there were only two kinds of birds, the edible and the inedible.