Patrick O'Brian · 1986 · sea

The eleventh novel brings Jack home from the Pacific to face the hardest trial of his life, and all of it ashore. Returning by way of the West Indies, he is lured into a Stock Exchange swindle engineered by his enemies, brought to court on a false charge, and convicted. This route follows the homeward voyage from Barbados, the chase of an American privateer into Brest, and the landfall that leads to a London courtroom and the public pillory, where his fellow seamen gather to stand by him.

1. 1
   Bridgetown

   Returning from the far side of the world in the battered Surprise, Jack brings his prizes and prisoners in to the West Indies squadron at Bridgetown, Barbados. There, in a quiet and moving moment, he meets for the first time his grown natural son, Sam Panda, bound for the priesthood in the Brazils.

2. 2
   Off Brest

   The voyage home across the Atlantic is enlivened by the chase of the Spartan, a fast American privateer that has been preying on British trade. In the end she slips away in the fog, running through the blockade into the safety of Brest, and the Surprise must let her go and stand on for England.

3. 3
   England

   Jack lands in England expecting honour and instead walks into a trap. Lured by a plausible stranger into a fraudulent scheme on the Stock Exchange, got up by his hidden enemies to ruin him, he finds himself charged, tried before a hostile judge, and to his disbelief convicted.

4. 4
   London

   The sentence is a heavy fine and an hour in the public pillory, and his name struck from the Navy List, the cruellest blow of all. But on the day, the square fills not with a jeering mob but with hundreds of seamen who have served with him, standing in silent ranks to guard him from insult, a tribute worth more than any medal.