Who Is More "Like A Boy" In the Aubrey-Maturin Series: Captain Jack Aubrey, or Diana Villiers?

Previously in Patrick O’Brian coverage: How to tell if you are Stephen Maturin and How to tell if you are Captain Jack Aubrey (“Your best friend tells you that you’re looking fat at work, in front of dozens of your employees. This does not bother you in the least; later that day you eat sixteen birds in front of him”).

“The Fish Rejoice in the Departure of the Cabin Boy”

Being a boy in a Patrick O’Brian novel is no very good thing. At least once per book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, someone (usually Jack Aubrey) complains about what dead weight boys are in the Navy. They’re terrible at learning Latin and astronomy, useless in the daily maintenance of a ship, practice substandard hygiene, have lumpy faces et cetera. Jack will take every possible opportunity to turn them away, short of faking his own death, but family friends are nevertheless constantly trying to get unload their kids onto him, so whenever Jack is in port he becomes a sort of comically inept, would-be deadbeat dad to all of England’s sons.

The presence of boys also means that the ship has to carry a schoolmaster, who is almost as bad as a boy himself. Once every other book or so someone, usually Stephen Maturin, will point out that anyone whose job requires them to instruct boys usually becomes a tyrant, and unfit for the rest of society, in no short order.

But being boyish, or boylike, or looking surprisingly like a boy, so long as you are a grown man or woman in a Patrick O’Brian novel, is one of the best things a person can possibly be. The two characters who are most frequently, and always positively, described in this way are the two most important people in Stephen Maturin’s life: his best friend, Captain Jack Aubrey, and his love interest/eventual spouse, Diana Villiers (you could easily reverse the description of these characters and you would still be correct). Maturin is not boyish at all. O’Brian describes him as “lizardlike,” “pale,” and “reptilian” about as often as Francine Pascal described the Wakefield twins as being “perfect size sixes” with “sun-kissed hair” and “sparkling aquamarine eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean.”

In Jack’s case, boyishness denotes simplicity, enthusiasm, pureness of heart, and occasional innocence and vulnerability (though only occasional, as it can’t conflict with his overall manly competence and personal bravery); in Diana’s, it denotes a not-like-other-girls spirit, independence, idiosyncratic code of honor that is nonetheless subordinate to Maturin’s real-deal manly honor, a girlfriend-in-a-sexy-big-shirt moment.

Let’s tally up the boyish descriptions (I’m only on book 13 of 20, so no scores are final until I finish, although in fairness I have omitted the first book, Master and Commander, since Diana doesn’t appear until Post-Captain).

Jack:

• “He clapped the glass to, and heaviness forgotten he shot down on deck like a boy to join Chads on the forecastle.”

• “Slinging his glass, he ran up the masthead like a boy.”

• “Jack mounted to the masthead like a boy – a heavy boy – and from there, since the rising sun made it difficult to see the stranger, he first studied the Liberty and her companion, the one a little abaft the beam and the other on the packet’s quarter.”

• “He was excited as a boy, and it was clear that he wished to be doing right away.”

• “Stephen had been standing with Mrs Wogan on the poop, and Jack, glancing round to see whether he were on his way, caught Mrs Wogan’s astonished gaze full in the eye. He blushed like a boy, seized the fully-clothed Pullings as a shield, and darted down the main hatchway.”

• “Stephen nodded, took a draught, and asked how the Captain did. ‘Which he’s just turned in,’ said Killick, ‘a-laughing like a boy. Says we’ve cleared the doldrums: the true blessed trade, he says, and never will he touch a stitch till we’re at the Cape.’”

• “‘The cursed old woman,’ he said, as he thrust through the hurrying seamen, the swabs, holystones, and buckets that littered the deck, and ran up to the maintop like a boy. ‘A matter of minutes, and he sends to wake me.’”

• “‘Not to ours, brother,’ said Jack, ‘not to ours. And I will not thank you, since you don’t like it; but Lord, Stephen, I am a different man.’ He was indeed. Taller, younger, pinker, his eyes blazing with life. His stoop had gone, and a great boyish grin kept ruining his attempted gravity.”

• “How exactly he remembered it all; there were a few more civilian houses in the village at the bottom of the bay, but everything else was just the same – the steady beat of the surf, the mountains, the men-of-war’s boats crossing to and fro, the hospital, the barracks, the arsenal: he might himself have been a lanky boy, returning to the Resolution after catching Roman-fish off the rocks. He was filled with a pleasurable excitement, with countless memories, yet at the same time with an apprehension that he could not define.”

• “And his attitude towards the ship itself: well do I remember his boundless delight in his first command, although the Sophie was a sad shabby little tub of a thing – the way he could not see enough of her meagre charms, bounding about the masts, the rigging, and the inner parts with an indefatigable zeal, like a great boy. Now he is the captain of a lordly two-decker, with these vast rooms and balconies, and he is little more than polite to her.”

• “‘Poor Jack,’ said Diana, wiping it off. ‘Do you remember – oh how long ago it seems – I told you he was little more than a huge boy? I was pretty severe about it: I preferred something more mature, a fully-grown man. But how I miss all that fun and laughter!’“

Diana:

• “Nor had she: still the same pretty young woman – black hair, blue eyes, lithe, like a plump boy, lovely complexion: she was wearing the sea-otter furs that Stephen had given her on Desolation, down there towards the southern pole, and they had the happiest effect upon her looks.”

• “She sprang up the side like a boy, took off her shawl, wrapped the papers in it, tied the corners, and tossed it into the boat.”

• “Her gruel had done her good; she had washed in what little water the Shannon could afford her; and above all she had done her hair: it streamed up, pure black on the pillow, showing the boyish fluting of her neck and an ear whose formal perfection surpassed that of any shell he had ever seen.”

• “Diana refused Wallis’s offer of a bosun’s chair and ran down after Stephen as lithe and nimble as a boy, while the boat’s crew stared woodenly out into the offing, lest they should see her legs; but she did call out to beg that those on deck might take great care of her trunk.”

• “Stephen Maturin appeared. Diana’s face changed at once – a look of straightforward, almost boyish delight – and as he came up she gave him both hands, crying, ‘Oh, Maturin, how very glad I am to see you! Welcome home.’”

• “She plucked his waistcoat straight and said, ‘Stephen, is it true that you sail tomorrow?’

  ‘With the blessing,’ he said, looking a little doubtfully into her face.

  She turned straight out of the room and could be heard running upstairs two at a time, like a boy.

An honorable mention goes to Jagiello, the beautiful Lithuanian officer briefly attached to one of Jack’s commands, who is both boyishly charming and girlishly beautiful, and whose popularity with women baffles Jack beyond understanding:

• “A few moments later Stephen came in, followed by the sweet young gentleman, a slim officer in a mauve coat with silver lace; he had surprisingly golden hair, bright blue eyes, large and set wide-apart, and a complexion that any girl might have envied.”

• “But what I cannot for the life of me understand is what they see in him. He is a good fellow, to be sure, but he is only a boy; I doubt he shaves once a week, if that. And indeed he is rather more like a girl than anything else.”

Jack’s 11 mentions beats out Diana’s 6, to be sure, but taken proportionally (since he is one of the two main characters and she is only in the second tier) I think she might match him, step for step. I will be sure to update the count once I’ve finished the series.

---

Incidentally, book 13, The Thirteen Gun Salute has set a new record for Stephen’s mean-spirited discussions of Jack’s weight, which Jack cheerfully refuses to countenance and has quickly become one of my favorite elements of the series. It’s better than the time my mother offered, unprompted, to pay for me to get liposuction when I came home for summer break my junior year of college.¹

I don’t mean to sound too flippant about this sort of cruelty, which is quite common and can be tremendously damaging, but I nonetheless find its presence very funny in these books, particularly as Jack cheerfully sidesteps the issue every time.

“‘There you are, Stephen,’ cried Jack. ‘They told me you might be here; but if I had known you was gone so far up the mountain-side I should have taken a pony. Lord, ain’t it hot! Where you get the energy from, after your nightly activities, I cannot tell, I am sure…’

‘To be sure,’ said Stephen, thinking of their work last night on the tapir, now a mere skeleton, ‘I was very busy last night. But you too would walk far up the mountain-side without gasping if you did not eat so much. You were much better, physically, when you were poor and wretched. What do you weigh now?’

‘Never mind.’

‘At least another stone and a half, perhaps two stone, God be with us. You fellows of an obese and sanguine habit are always on the verge of an apoplexy, particularly in this climate. Will you not omit suppers, at least? Suppers have killed more than Avicenna ever cured.’

‘The reason I came sweating up this infernal hill,’ said Jack, ‘was to tell you that Fox summons us both to a conference this evening.’”

[Image via]

1. Which I accepted immediately and without any further discussion, much in the same way you say “Oh — sure” if you’re getting your eyebrows waxed and the technician says, “Would you like your upper lip done, too?” The first guy we made an appointment with was struck from the medical board and fled the country before the consultation. It was a very interesting summer!