I maintain, as asserted in this space at least a couple of times over the past few years, that Master and Commander is far and away the manliest movie ever made, a view from which I’m unlikely ever to waver. However, I need to be clear: by “manly” I do not mean there’s any set of laudable character traits exclusive to men, nor am I talking about the sort of machismo displayed crudely and unidimensionally by, say, Stallone’s Rambo, or Gerard Butler’s Spartan king in 300, or by the protagonists in any number of films featuring Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or any of their latter day equivalents, say Jason Stratham, or Vin Diesel (entertaining as all those actors and their films can be).
What we observe in stalwart Royal Navy Captain Jack Aubrey, as portrayed to perfection by Russell Crowe, is altogether different, a diverse set of virtues to which anyone mindful of the awesome responsibilities of his position ought to aspire: extensive general knowledge; moral, intellectual, and physical courage; a steadfast willingness, in a time of existential national combat, to do what’s necessary to govern a ship of war, acknowledging the necessity of enforcing strict discipline while exhibiting not the merest taste for authoritarian cruelty; deep personal loyalty; the instinct to lead not by fear and intimidation, but by example; an innate capacity for empathic kindness, combined with a certain spirituality; obvious and special concern for the well-being of the subordinates he’s duty-bound to lead into harm’s way; flexibility of mind born of intellectual curiosity; a wry sense of humour; above all, an unwavering belief in the need to serve something bigger than oneself. Aubrey, “Lucky Jack” to the sailors of the frigate H.M.S. Surprise, is the sort of officer for whom any ship’s complement would willingly join battle with an opposing vessel that just sailed straight out of the bowels of Hell, commanded by Satan himself.
Which, as it turns out, they damned near do.
The first of the attached clips sets out the initial encounter of Aubrey’s Surprise with what immediately proves to be its nemesis, the heavy French frigate Acheron, intercepted unwittingly off the coast of South America, thousands of miles from the European theatre in the distant South Atlantic, where Aubrey has been ordered to hunt her down. Unfortunately, no posted clip I can find includes the crucial prelude that reveals so many of the traits that inform Jack Aubrey’s character. One of his junior lieutenants, peering through his telescope into a thick bank of fog, thinks he sees something, but it’s fleeting. It could be something innocuous, or maybe something dangerous, or more likely nothing at all, just a trick of the light combined with an overactive imagination. The young man, just a kid really, doesn’t know what to do. He seeks the advice of another lieutenant, who can’t see anything through his own telescope, but immediately decides, on general principles, to command “beat to quarters”, that is, high alert and combat stations. This, of course, immediately draws the Captain into it, and he can’t see anything either – clearly, it’s a false alarm – but Aubrey doesn’t get angry, or reproach his subordinates. He tells them they made the right call, and turns away, but then – wait – he has second thoughts. The men he commands may be young and relatively inexperienced, but they’re by no means incompetent, quite the contrary, and if they suspect there’s something out there…
What follows is what I’m led to believe is the most realistic depiction of Napoleonic era naval combat ever filmed. It’s horrifying, yet look at how everybody in Aubrey’s well trained crew reacts. The Captain strides calmly down the deck, issuing crisp orders which his sailors, equally unflappable, immediately execute, until he comes across a child – and yes, the Royal Navy sent mere children to sea as “midshipmen”, officers-to-be of an age that today would place them in junior high, or even elementary school – cowering, quire naturally, behind a bulwark, terrified. Jack simply hoists him to his feet, again without anger or reproach, telling him “we stand tall upon the quarterdeck, all of us”. Aubrey understands the fear, but the boy has to learn how warships work. You can’t order the swabbos to stand fast in the teeth of close quarter cannon fire, deadly wood splinters and shattered body parts coming at them from all directions at near supersonic speeds, unless they can see their superiors standing right there with them. Nobody’s saying it’s easy. Nobody’s calling anyone a coward. It’s just that out here, in the thick of battle, the ordinary instincts of self-preservation need to be governed and suppressed. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the resolve to do the things that are most frightening. The boy needs only to watch Aubrey to see how it’s done.
The second clip shows Aubrey confronted with one of the most terrible burdens of command, forced to decide (not, we’re sure, for the first time), who lives and who has to die. There’s a ton of back story behind how it comes to this, which I won’t recount here, but the Surprise, fighting high winds and deadly seas rounding the treacherous Cape Horn, sheds top hamper, with rigging and yardarms now dragging behind the struggling ship, the shattered mess still tethered to the hull by all the ropes integral to the mechanisms of sail propulsion. A sailor, a character we’ve come to know, is out there too, having gone overboard along with all of that wood and heavy cabling, flailing in the maelstrom. His only hope is to swim like hell until he can cling to the draggy encumbrance that’s become what’s known as a “sea anchor”, compromising the vessel’s ability to navigate and threatening to capsize the ship. It has to be cut away. The poor guy struggling to make his way to the wreckage has to be left out there to die, and of course it falls to Aubrey to wield the blade that cuts the increasingly dangerous sea anchor loose; others pitch in, but only to follow Aubrey’s lead. He’s the Captain. It’s his call. To the soundtrack of Vaughn Williams’s beautiful, haunting Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, the most appropriate score imaginable for a scene of such utter emotional devastation, Aubrey does what needs to be done, no matter that it breaks his heart.
One of the most heart-warming aspects of the story is Aubrey’s deep and abiding friendship with Stephen Maturin, ship’s doctor, naturalist, and one of those enthusiastic amateur scientific polymaths who roamed the world in the 19th century, cataloguing newly-discovered species of flora and fauna, and placing them within the developing biological taxonomies. Again, there’s a lot of back story, but it happens that the doctor comes to owe Jack an immense debt of gratitude, not just for getting him to the Galápagos Islands, where he can study the novel wildlife to his heart’s delight, but for doing so as the only way to find a suitable patch of stable dry land upon which delicate surgery can be performed to save Stephen’s life. This has required Jack to abandon his pursuit of the Acheron, against every instinct that might otherwise have governed his decision-making, and arguably against the specific orders under which the Admiralty sent him to the far side of the world in the first place. For Lucky Jack, this involves personal cost, and personal risk, as Stephen well knows. How can the doctor ever pay him back? Aubrey, true to form, isn’t looking to collect, not now, not down the road. Stephen owes him nothing, but if he truly feels obliged, Jack has an idea. “Name a shrub after me”, he tells his old friend. “Something prickly, and difficult to eradicate”.
Like I’ve been saying. Manly.
A naval historian’s view:
