Patrick O'Brian · 1991 · survival

The fourteenth novel opens with the Diane lost on a reef and her people cast away on an uninhabited island in the South China Sea. This route follows their survival and recovery: the building of a schooner, the attack by Dyak pirates, the rescue to Batavia and a new ship, the running fight with a French frigate in the Celebes Sea, and the long passage on to the harsh convict settlement of New South Wales.

1. 1
   Shipwreck Island

   Wrecked by the typhoon on a reef off an uninhabited island, Jack and his people make a camp and set about building a schooner from the bones of the Diane, even playing cricket to keep up their spirits. Their precarious peace is broken by seafaring Dyak pirates and a sharp, bloody fight, before rescue comes in the form of a Chinese junk.

2. 2
   Batavia

   Carried in the junk to Batavia on Java, Jack is given a new ship by the British governor Raffles, a sweet-sailing little sloop he names the Nutmeg of Consolation after one of the Sultan's many titles. Refitted and rearmed, he puts to sea once more to rejoin the Surprise and resume the interrupted voyage.

3. 3
   The Celebes Sea

   In the Celebes Sea the Nutmeg falls in with the French frigate Cornelie and, hopelessly outgunned, is run ragged through the Salibabu Passage in a desperate chase. At the very last extremity, with the enemy almost alongside, the Surprise herself appears out of the sea-haze, and the tables are turned.

4. 4
   New South Wales

   The reunited ships sail south at last to New South Wales and the convict colony at Botany Bay, a place O'Brian paints in all its grimness. There Stephen marvels at the platypus and the strange new world of Australian life, and works quietly to free a man he had wronged from the brutal hands of the penal settlement.