Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Real Hols
Phoenixine Ninety-One, March 1997
I'm back at work now. I took a whole month off over Christmas and that meant, of course, that for all
that time I never once wore a tie or even a pair of socks. The first week back was a strain. I felt like I was
being strangled.
I put the month to good use, in terms of books read. The Yellow Admiral is the latest of Patrick
O'Brian's seafaring stories of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. As the title suggests, Aubrey is much
worried that his promotion chances may be compromised (particularly as the war with the French is
obviously drawing to a conclusion) and it seems likely that his future will place him in the humiliating
position of being "yellowed". A yellow admiral has no fleet responsibilities and is generally considered to
be a failure in his chosen career. This is not something that Aubrey is looking forward to (of course) and
Stephen, ever anxious to help his friend, pulls some political strings and a complex plot is brewed which
should see Aubrey on secondment, serving as an Admiral in the Chilean navy.
And then something quite extraordinary happens.
In a sense the book is infuriating. The cliff-hanger ending left me gasping for more. I want to know the
details of what happens next and I want to know NOW, damnit. But like everybody else I'm just going to
have to wait patiently for the next book. O'Brian is an old man. I hope he lives long enough to write it.
Otherwise my blood pressure may suffer.
Of course, the main attraction of an O'Brian book is the sheer elegance of his prose, the sharp social
observation, the immaculately presented and very real invocation of the minutiae of eighteenth and
nineteenth century life, and the wonderful wit and humour that enlivens almost every line. Not for
nothing has he been compared to Jane Austen. I confess, I read the book and wallowed in all of this, and
I was sorry when I came to the end.
Fortunately, the day after I finished it, and quite unexpectedly, I came across The Golden Ocean.
O'Brian first published this book in 1956. And it has long been out of print. I have never even seen a
copy before. I fell on it with glad cries of glee and devoured it far too quickly (because now I have no
more O'Brian books to read and I am bereft). The book takes as its subject Commodore Anson's
circumnavigation of the world which began in 1740. It was O'Brian's first maritime novel and the first he
wrote about eighteenth century life. But you wouldn't know that to read it. The same wit, the same
immaculate attention to detail, the same reality that pervades his later books are presented here whole
and entire for the first time.
After Anson finally succeeded in rounding the Horn, his ships and his men were in a parlous state.
Scurvy was rife and Anson determined to make landfall at the island of Juan Fernandez to reprovision.
Eventually he crossed the latitude of the island, but because he was uncertain of his own longitude was
faced with a dilemma. He did not know whether to travel east or west along the latitude line. He tossed a
mental coin and set off. However after several days without sight of land he conceded that he may have
been wrong and put the ship about. During the two weeks it took to retrace his steps many men died.
Eventually, continuing along the latitude line, land was sighted. Hopes were dashed however, when it
turned out to be the inhospitable coast of Chile and Anson realised that when first he put the ship about
he had probably been only hours away from Juan Fernandez. It was a bitter pill. Now he had to put the
ship about again, retrace his steps again. So much time wasted, so many lives unnecessarily lost, so
many more that would be lost before Juan Fernandez was eventually sighted.
This famous incident was one of many tragedies of that era; all of them caused by the inability of those
early navigators to calculate their precise longitude. The British Parliament was so concerned about this
problem that in 1714 it passed the Longitude Act which offered a prize equivalent to several million
dollars in today's currency for a "practicable and useful" means of determining longitude. Dava Sobel's
little book Longitude tells the history of this scientific puzzle and introduces us to the man who
eventually solved it, the English clockmaker John Harrison. The book has been a world-wide best-seller,