from Master and Commander to Desolation Island from American publishers twenty years earlier. O'Brian's "portrayal of life aboard a sailing ship is vivid and authoritative" and O'Brian presented "the lost arcana of that hard-pressed, cruel, courageous world with an immediacy that makes its workings both comprehensible and fascinating." He noted too that "behind the humor, behind the storms and the broadside duels . . . loomed something larger: the shape and texture of a whole era." As strong as the historical detail was, Snow remarked that "in the end it is the serious exploration of human character that gives the books their greatest power", and he also referred to the poetry of the writing, saying that O'Brian "manages to express, with the grace and economy of poetry, familiar things that somehow never get written down, as when he carefully details the rueful steps by which Stephen Maturin falls out of love." At this time of the re-issues of the novels by W W Norton in the US, Snow recommended that a reader start with the first and keep reading to the last one, then "You will have read what I continue to believe are the best historical novels ever written." Allusions to science and history On the voyage to Java, Jack has with him a chart showing Alexander von Humboldt's maximum and minimum sea-temperatures over a vast stretch of ocean. He sets out to carry on Humboldt's programme of measuring temperatures at various depths, salinity, atmospheric pressure etc. - as he says to Stephen, to have 'A chain right round to the Pacific'. For instruments, he takes on board the Surprise: an improved dipping-needle a very delicate hygrometer of Jack's own invention an improved azimuth compass a Geneva cyanograph thermometers graduated by Ramsden Captain Aubrey's orders to HMS Diane are mentioned as occurring in the "fifty-third year" of the reign of King George III, thus fixing the year about 1813. The years of his reign began in October, and the story mentions the months of May, June and being in the austral winter after crossing the equator when sailing around Africa on HMS Diane; the author, as promised in the preface to the first book in the series, takes liberties with times of events. May of the 53rd year of the reign of George III might well be May 1814. O'Brian refers to these novels with no precise connection to