We board this opening chapter of yet another maritime masterpiece with excitement, a bosun’s whistle piercing the skull of our collective readership as a gimlet would thread a rotten peach.  Jack Aubrey is mulling over an idea to improve the man-o-war’s towing qualities by means of a reversible taffrail; the hands on watch are subserviently clustered on other sections of the dreadnought (they dearly love Jack, having been enriched under his leadership on page 171 of the preceding adventure, and having not yet learned of developments 88 pages hence).  Stephen Maturin is below; far below, in fact on the orlop deck, studying an incipient mutiny of weevils. He has isolated this mutiny in stable condition by applying opium at sunrise (when the unrest needs quieting) and setting pill-bugs to roll on the planking at night (when it needs stirring-up); and with this unprecedented opportunity to observe, as it were, the mind of the hive, he is unaware that Jack’s bulimia is now a hazard to the officer’s mess.

At this point we wonder if there will be any sea action at all, for the bark is becalmed, making no headway whatsoever. Her crew members are whiling away the endless evenings in recreational activities. Intramural roller-derby is the most popular; the feverish stroke of bodies hurtling counter-clockwise in the confined space of the quarterdeck, the clash of whirring wheels, the rivalry between Thunder On The Left and the Stern-Chasers — these are vastly entertaining to hands of every station, but they provoke the miserable weevils beyond what they can endure.  On top of that, Steven’s supply of palliatives is running low. It is in the midst of the outbreak of weevil vengeance against the tyranny of the bargemen that Jack discovers Stephen’s role on this voyage [WARNING: plot spoiler] is more important than he had guessed:  for when the stuffed liger — a handsome specimen from Napoleon’s zoological collection, recently (and very secretly) bestowed on Stephen by a grateful Josephine — is knocked over in the violence, Jack can see that its midsection conceals a PreEnigma coding machine. 

To the author’s credit, Stephen is unsurprised by the arrival of new orders from the Admiralty, even when they reveal Guantanamo Bay as the brig’s true destination. But when he learns the weevils have voted to maroon the alpha-bargeman on his own person, Stephen feels his loneliness increase — that familiar burden of a knowledge too dangerous to share with any other soul.

Having picked up a breeze and arriving at Gitmo, the frigate deposits Stephen on shore where he participates in Mardi Gras by joining a procession of Capuchins.  He becomes disoriented by the jostling mob, and the bargeman is smashed between the liger and a fossilized ferret in his coat pocket.  Stephen deftly applies his catlin, but the injury proves fatal as he is unable to stem the flow of ichor. Who should appear at this moment but Diana, Stephen’s long-lost obsession.  This happens as usual with a sudden serendipitous eye-contact, followed by Stephen’s private observation that Diana is as unaffectedly graceful as she ever was, though less so.  However his joy is sensibly diminished [WARNING: plot spoiler] when Diana displays her new tatt, an amatory portrait of Glenn Beck.

The early appearance in the sky of a few stars reminds Stephen that his other plans must soon reach their dangerous dénouement. The demise, too, of the diminutive despot has distressed him deeply (despite his denials); so he dismisses Diana with a doting adieu. It occurs to him that the liger’s thoracic cavity affords something like privacy. Thus midnight finds Stephen beginning an entry in his private journal, choosing (though without any conscious decision) his most inscrutable Welsh-Catalan cipher:  O-yay, Salom-a-bey i-may on-say, phal-allay argeman-bay, o-yay o-yay o-yay. The rumor, eagerly accepted throughout the lower deck, that it was the bargemen who were cutting off the candy — that was necessary, the Dear knows. Could anyone have seen the consequences? But now the PreEnigma stops working, the gears are badly jammed; and by the time Stephen has retrieved his ferret from the depths of the cursed machine, the morning sun is just above the horizon and the liger is being wheeled into the American compound.

At that moment, Jack is conning the hermaphrodite a few furloughs off the coast (Havana two beams off the point, a Tarantella advancing out of the northeast, setsails stayed).  He is jerked into awareness of Stephen’s peril by the distant squeal of the liger’s larboard fore-wheel — a familiar noise, thanks to the doctor’s prowess in roller-derby on those occasions when he would surface from his solitary weevil pursuits (occasions as rare as they were unwelcome).  A glance through the telescope, seconds before the liger disappears behind the gates of Gitmo, shows the yellow garland, not the blue, draped on its neck.  Realizing instantly the mission has gone awry, Jack redirects the sloop to stand into the harbor, hauls the JAG ensign up the mizzenmast, and orders his Gaffer to issue orange jumpsuits to all hands.  Obedience is even quicker than usual, since the Gaffer is ashamedly aware of his lapse (indeed, his studied deliberate long-standing negligence) in keeping the liger properly lubricated — aware, moreover, of the effect of this dereliction in ruining the Captain’s trifecta three weeks ago.

Jack’s successes in water-boarding the liger, hacking his dear surgeon, fumigating the PreEnigma and greasing the Gaffer are audacious enough to thrill even the weariest follower of this series; and if my humble and adoring review has presented any hitherto hidden charms to the one who finds it, why, I can only urge that one — that finder, as who should say — to become a keeper by reading one of the actual books.