The Golden Ocean

[A] rousing novelistic retelling of a particularly colorful chapter in the history of the imperialist wars of the mid-18th century....Robust and exhilarating....[The] power [of the sea] as a kind of fate is rendered with the Conradian force that shows where O'Brian was headed as a narrative writer.--Tom Clark

Both aficionados and newcomers will be swept up by the richness of Mr. O'Brian's prodigious imagination.--Scott Veale

In the present case the names were provided for me, together with the whole sequence of events, just as they were for Homer, Virgil, and many others....I was fortunate enough to have great material, and I wrote the book in about six weeks (or was it less?), laughing most of the time.--Patrick O'Brian on the writing of The Golden Ocean

I haven't read novels [in the past ten years] except for all of the Patrick O'Brian series. It was, unfortunately, like tripping on heroin. I started on those books and couldn't stop.--E. O. Wilson

In the mid-eighteenth century, Peter Palafox, the son of a poor Irish parson, signs on a ship as a midshipman, just in time for Commodore Anson's epic circumnavigation of the world. Reprint.