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.