The Jack Aubrey guide to management

Or, the business end of a British naval frigate

The Book:

Post Captain
By Patrick O’Brian
W. W. Norton & Company
First Published in 1972

The Talk:

The situation was still fluid; it was more a potentiality than a situation. But any decision now would crystallize it, and the moment it began to take shape all the succeeding events would follow of themselves, moving at first with slow inevitability and then faster and faster, never to be undone.

Good novelists have good voices. When you find a novelist with a good voice, you can listen to them talk for hours and never get tired. They can take you anywhere, tell you anything, and you’re happy to go along with it. It’s a voice you trust to entertain and delight you all along the way. And that’s important particularly for novels because, in my opinion, novels work best when they are wander-y. And the key to a good wander is enjoying who you are wandering with.

Post Captain is the second Aubrey/Mautrin book I’ve read in the 21-book series, but O’Brian’s voice already has that cozy, comfortable quality to it. Whatever happens in a chapter, I enjoy reading it. And I look forward to the next chapter, not for what will happen, but just to listen to that voice some more.

The Jack Aubrey books are known for being dense with detail, but they also sing along quite quickly, almost cinematically. O’Brian uses a couple different techniques to achieve this. Often entire scenes change between paragraphs (occasionally within paragraphs!) Dialogue ends and suddenly we are in a different location with different people. Sometimes it’s confusing, but mostly it works.

O’Brian also has long stretches of dialogue in which actions are happening and the speaker is reacting to the actions as they speak. The reader has to fill in the blanks, but it keeps things moving without having to describe every action.

We are here, of course, for the sea battles. But O’Brian puts off life at sea for about a hundred pages. When we finally get to the topsails and mizzenmast, it feels like a huge relief, and the stakes of the expedition are properly set.

For the first two books of the series at least, the core of the drama centers around, essentially, management. How can Aubrey shape the vague, complicated organism that is his crew into something healthy, productive, and profitable? (Prize money is the primary motivation of these British ships, patriotism is secondary.)

This book takes up the topic of impressment in detail. During this era, the British navy rounded up men and forced them on to ships to operate them, essentially a kind of legal kidnapping. Some were prisoners, some were physically or mentally ill, but others were professional trades people. Few had experience of spending months at sea, let alone operating the complex machinery of sailing ships.

This is the kind of crew Aubrey starts with on his new ship Polychrest, a cursed failure of ship construction. The crew—a mass of a eighty-odd men—has its own collective feel. Today we’d call it “team culture.” If the discipline is too harsh, morale falls. If the discipline is too lax, people will get hurt from injury, drunkness, or disorder. If they don’t earn some money soon, mutiny is a real possibility. But if they can’t fight well, they won’t be able to take significant prizes.

Captain James Aubrey isn’t an intellectual. He feels all these factors intuitively, and he solves them intuitively. He discovers that some impressed weavers are best used repairing sails. He has to gently guide his lieutenant, who is too harsh with discipline, to ease up, without undercutting him in front of the crew. And sometimes, when the possibility of mutiny is rising, it’s time to get into some action to get everybody’s mind off it.

He knew all these faces now; some had improved almost out of recognition; some had deteriorated—too much unfamiliar misery; dull minds unused to learning and yet forced to learn a difficult trade in a driving hurry. Three categories: a top quarter of good sound able hands; then the vague middle half that might go up or might go down, according to the atmosphere of the ship and how they they were handled; and then the bottom quarter, with some hard cases among them, brutal, or stupid, or even downright wicked.

There’s no way to opt-out of the situation. It is what it is, and these men are the men he has to make magic happen. Getting the most out of them requires constant attention and awareness of their changing moods, adapting one’s style to individual personalities, and recognizing when to hold steady and when to take risks.

In the climactic scene of the book, when Aubrey shouts for his men to rush with him in a near-suicidal final attack (“Polychrest! Polychrest!”) a question lingers: Will they listen? Will they run headlong into death’s maw for him? And we realize that everything Aubrey has done up to this point has led to this moment. They will charge because he has taken them, a random group of impressed men, trained them well, and given them an identity, based out of his his own love for them.

It’s a stirring moment, and I admit I got a little choked up. O’Brian’s tales winsomely portray a world of men that is complex, exploring every aspect of their lives, from political party intrigues and intellectual hobbies to love letter writing and sexually transmitted diseases. How it will all work out in the end, we cannot tell.

Life is complicated, O’Brian seems to suggest, and the solution to the problems we find ourselves in is usually something we must feel out intuitively. And many times, perhaps most of the time, we get things wrong. But sometimes, by talent, effort, and chance, we get things right. And when everything comes together, it’s a beautiful thing.