The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian

At the opening of a voyage as filled with disaster and delight as any the pair have undertaken, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are in pursuit of a privateer sailing under American colours through the Great South Sea. It is the strange colour of the waters through which they are passing that reminds Stephen of Homer’s famous description so often rendered into English as ‘wine-dark’. What this portends is brilliantly described by a master of wind and weather. Their ship, ageing now like themselves, is Jack’s old favourite Surprise – no longer HMS as she is herself a privateer, the better to escape any diplomatic complication from Stephen’s activities. The incidental opportunities of profit thereby offered to the ship’s company are eagerly and excitingly accepted and exploited. Stephen is in fact charged with setting the revolutionary tinder of South America ablaze to relieve the pressure on a British government which, already engaged in a death-struggle a with a Europe dominated by Napoleon, has blundered into a war with the young but uncomfortably vigorous United States