The Golden Ocean series

Thanks to a comment by conaghan in yesterdays online discussion I have now added this 2 book series by POB to the website. It is based around Anson's 1740 voyage and predates the Aubrey/Maturin series.

I'll leave conaghan to give us a bit more detail.

The Golden Ocean was published in 1956 and was POB's first ocean-going novel.

It is a single book, based on British commodore Anson and his four year circumnavigtion voyage. The main character is a young Irish fellow Peter Palafox, who is to be a midshipman, and his friend Sean, who becomes a crewman. Along the way the flotilla faces shipwreck, disease, starvation, and battles with a Spanish treasure fleet.

A good read, and POB fans get a taste for his pre-Aubrey age of sail writing.

From what I have gathered on the net, The Golden Ocean (book) had a sequel The Unknown Shore.

The two now seem to be known as The Golden Ocean Series. Whether they originally had that title or it's modern usage I'm not sure.

From the descriptions I've seen, The Unknown Shore features the ship sinking early on off of Chile and then lengthy shore based treks back to civilisation. It may well be largely shore based.

Strange that these books have received so little attention/promotion.

Borrelpeff wrote:Strange that these books have received so little attention/promotion.

I've lucked onto both in bookstores, tucked in with the Canon. They're both fairly enjoyable reads, assuming you enjoy Patrick O'Brian. Similarly good prose and insights into the period. The lengthy description of the privations of the protagonists after their shipwreck in the Unknown Shore gets a bit grueling to read at points, and yes that book is largely a description of events ashore, especially if we also count rowing and paddling in small craft along a bleak coast as events ashore. There's a lot of tightening of belts, but no real swash-buckling, the heroes having lost their swashes early on.

I believe students of O'Brian regard these two books as prototypes of the Aubrey-Maturin series, and they do also foreshadow the volumes of that which take place along the western coast of South America and in the Pacific or Indian oceans. Within the Aubrey-Maturin series there are a few references here and there to the historical events and figures of this series, which deals with the period in which the British were first learning how to operate in the South Pacific.