A rare bird casts a shadow as O’Brian goes to the big screen

I’m with Roy Disney, who was quoted in last month’s SAILING as saying he had never seen a good sailing movie. Neither have I. Nor have I ever seen a film based on a good book about anything that was as good as the book. So I will go to see “Master & Commander: Far Side of the World” (opening at a theater near you about the time this issue arrives at your home) with low expectations. But at least I will go with an open mind. Not like some members of the Cult of POB, who declared the first film ever made from a Patrick O’Brian book an abomination before the first cannon shot was fired on the movie set.

I will admit that O’Brian’s marvelous British Navy sailing stories would not seem to translate well to the screen. They contain far more talk than action. The talk, in fact, is their charm, the long, flowing passages of dialogue replete with arcane facts, wit and nuance, rendered in such handsome language. Still, there’s plenty of seafaring drama for an adept screenwriter to separate from the sedative discourse to keep movie viewers awake.

That’s what enrages some POB cultists, that a filmmaker would dare to mess with words written by the master for naval history purists like them to satisfy the popcorn-chomping hoi polloi. As one contributor to a Patrick O’Brian Web site put it: “The philistines in Hollywood are hijacking a perfectly satisfying piece of literature, operating under the bland conviction that it would be better with pictures.”

One cult member set up a Web page for the express purpose of heaping abuse on the movie and sought signers for a petition condemning the production. The kindred spirits who posted messages generally took the broad view that no movie could do justice to O’Brian, though some picked at nits, complaining, for example, that movie star Russell Crowe wasn’t fat enough to play the role of the larger-than-life hero of the O’Brian series, Capt. Lucky Jack Aubrey.

I have to take issue with that. I have an idea of what Lucky Jack looks like, and it’s pretty much Russell Crowe, after he’s stuffed into a buttons-bursting naval uniform and given Aubrey’s shoulder length blond hair and florid complexion. Crowe doesn’t weigh Aubrey’s 16 stone (224 pounds), but he’s beefy enough, and his Richard Burtonesque voice is made to be heard on the quarterdeck over a shrieking gale.

The native Kiwi raised as an Aussie should have no trouble tuning up an acceptable English sea captain’s accent. Nor should he have trouble tuning up a violin, no small matter because Aubrey spends many pages of every O’Brian book performing classical duets in the captain’s cabin with his cello-playing sidekick Dr. Steven Maturin. As an electric guitar player in the eccentrically named pub rock band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, Crowe is well acquainted with stringed instruments.

I am permitted to give the movie some latitude because I am not a card-carrying member of the Cult of Patrick O’Brian. It’s not that I don’t admire the writer. I am a longtime O’Brian aficionado who thinks his descriptions of square-rigged ships sailing in conditions from glorious topgallant breezes to evil storms are some of the most beautifully wrought in nautical literature. But I just haven’t been able to meet the cult’s strict membership requirements.

To qualify for even the most basic level of membership, one must have read all 20 Aubrey-Maturin novels. Rereading them takes you to the next level. Here cultists are permitted tactful boasting over the number of O’Brian readings they’ve tallied, much the way a bluewater sailor manages to insert his personal number of ocean miles sailed in conversations and correspondence.

Further advancement requires at least a partial mastery of the O’Brian lexicon of sailing terms, demonstrated by, say, knowing the difference between a slab-line and selvagee. Complete mastery is probably unattainable, so obscure, and so invisible in the standard nautical reference books, are O’Brian’s terms for the nomenclature of 18th and 19th century warships. A few times I’ve been puzzled enough by them to wonder whether the author made them up. But that would be unthinkable.

To reach the highest cult status, a POB disciple must be be conversant in the Latin entomological, zoological and botanical terms that flow from the mouth of Dr. Maturin in every Aubrey-Maturin book. The cachet in being a member in good standing of the Cult of POB is that, as one true believer put it, the works of Patrick O’Brian are “forbiddingly erudite.”

At the risk of not endearing myself to the cult, I must report a discovery that casts a small shadow on O’Brian’s erudition. As the title suggests, the movie is an amalgam of two books, Master and Commander, the first in the series, and The Far Side of the World, the tenth. I hadn’t read the latter, so I took it along on a cruise. It proved to be classic O’Brian, a compelling sea story, embroidered with typical Aubrey-Maturin digressions, set partly in the Galapagos Islands. All was well until page 240, where I was shocked, as the author went on in his profuse way about the abundance of birds surrounding the frigate Surprise, to read the following: “Most of these birds were boobies, masked boobies, brown boobies, spotted boobies, but above all blue-faced boobies.” Yes, you read it right—blue-faced boobies!

Now, it happens I read these alarming words while cruising in the book’s locale, the Galapagos. And because the only way you are allowed to cruise among these islands of astonishing and vulnerable animal life is in the company of a guide provided by the Galapagos National Park of Ecuador, who as part of the job immerses his or her charges in a comprehensive education in all things related to boobies, I am somewhat expert on the subject of these particular sea birds. So I can tell you, unequivocally, that there is no such thing as a blue-faced booby. And if there are brown boobies or spotted boobies, which I doubt, they are never seen in the Galapagos. The only boobies in the Galapagos are the blue-footed booby, the red-footed booby and the nazca booby (often confused with the masked booby).

Patrick O’Brian, who died in 2001 in Dublin at the age of 85, is not around to explain this. So we are left to wonder: Was his booby blunder sloppy scholarship, a momentary lapse in his vaunted erudition? Or did he just make up some likely sounding booby names, which begs the question of what else he invented and passed off as fact? Or was he merely pulling his readers’ legs? Now there’s an intriguing possibility: Maybe the blue-faced booby was O’Brian’s little joke on the oh-so-serious members of the Cult of POB.

Peter Weir, the director of “Master & Commander,” claims to have gone to extraordinary lengths to faithfully recreate O’Brian’s books on the big screen. So if you go to the movie, keep your eyes peeled for a blue-faced booby.