The Thirteen Gun Salute Vol Book 13 Aubrey Maturin Novels

Entrusted with a secret mission, the perils of the South China Sea await.

Captain Jack Aubrey sets sail for the South China Sea, shepherding a diplomatic mission to prevent links between Bonaparte and the Malay princes. At the barbaric court of Pulo Prabang a classic duel of intelligence unfolds: the French envoys versus the savage cunning of Stephen Maturin.

Captain Jack Aubrey sets sail for the South China Sea, shepherding a diplomatic mission to prevent links between Bonaparte and the Malay princes. At the barbaric court of Pulo Prabang a classic duel of intelligence unfolds: the French envoys versus the savage cunning of Stephen Maturin.

"[The series shows] a joy in language that jumps from every page....You're in for a wonderful voyage."—Cutler Durkee, People Shipwrecked on a remote island in the Dutch East Indies, Captain Aubrey, surgeon and secret intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, and the crew of the Diane fashion a schooner from the wreck. A vicious attack by Malay pirates is repulsed, but the makeshift vessel burns, and they are truly marooned. Their escape from this predicament is one that only the whimsy and ingenuity of Patrick O'Brian—or Stephen Maturin—could devise. In command now of a new ship, the Nutmeg, Aubrey pursues his interrupted mission. The dreadful penal colony in New South Wales, harrowingly described, is the backdrop to a diplomatic crisis provoked by Maturin's Irish temper, and to a near-fatal encounter with the wildlife of the Australian outback.

Thrown out of the navy for a crime he did not commit, Jack Aubrey has lost everything he held most dear.

"The old master has us again in the palm of his hand." —Los Angeles Times Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace brings with it both the desertion of nearly half of Captain Aubrey's crew and the sudden dimming of Aubrey's career prospects in a peacetime navy. When the Surprise is nearly sunk on her way to South America—where Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are to help Chile assert her independence from Spain—the delay occasioned by repairs reaps a harvest of strange consequences. The South American expedition is a desperate affair; and in the end Jack's bold initiative to strike at the vastly superior Spanish fleet precipitates a spectacular naval action that will determine both Chile's fate and his own.

Whether close to home or far away, there are no safe harbours while Napoleon seeks to dominate the known world.

Napoleon has escaped from Elba – the Hundred Days have begun.