（外文电子版资料）OBrian Patrick - Aub-Mat 16 - The Wine-Dark Sea.doc

PATRICK OBRIAN The Wine-Dark Sea Chapter One A purple ocean, vast under the sky and devoid of all visible life apart from two minute ships racing across its immensity. They were as close-hauled to the somewhat irregular north-east trades as ever they could be, with every sail they could safely carry and even more, their bowlines twanging taut: they had been running like this day after day, sometimes so far apart that each saw only the others topsails above the horizon, sometimes within gunshot; and when this was the case they fired at one another with their chasers. The foremost ship was the Franklin, an American privateer of twenty-two guns, nine-pounders, and her pursuer was the Surprise, a twenty-eight-gun frigate formerly belonging to the Royal Navy but now acting as a privateer too, manned by privateersmen and volunteers: she was nominally commanded by a half-pay officer named Thomas Pullings but in fact by her former captain, Jack Aubrey, a man much higher on the post-captains list than would ordinarily have been found in so small and antiquated a ship - an anomalous craft entirely, for although she purported to be a privateer her official though unpublished status was that of His Majestys Hired Vessel Surprise. She had set out on her voyage with the purpose of carrying her surgeon, Stephen Maturin, to South America, there to enter into contact with those leading inhabitants who wished to make Chile and Peru independent of Spain: for Maturin, as well as being a doctor of medicine, was an intelligence-agent exceptionally well qualified for this task, being a Catalan on his mothers side and bitterly opposed to Spanish - that is to say Castilian - oppression of his country. He was indeed opposed to oppression in all its forms, and in his youth he had supported the United Irishmen (his father was a Catholic Irish officer in the Spanish service) in everything but the violence of 1798: but above all, far above all, he abhorred that of Buonaparte, and he was perf