Master and Commander Movie Anchored in True History

Stefan Lovgren in Los Angeles
for National Geographic News

November 14, 2003

When screenwriter John Collee was first approached about adapting to the
silver screen Patrick O'Brian's adventure tales of the British Navy
during the Napoleonic Wars, Collee had to make a confession: He hadn't
read the books.

O'Brian's 20 novels of the sea, beginning with Master and Commander in 1969 and ending with Blue at the Mizzen in 1999, chronicle the fictional friendship between the rowdy Captain Jack Aubrey and the studious surgeon Stephen Maturin during the British-French naval wars of the early 19th century.

The books, which have sold some three million copies in the United States, have a legion of devoted followers who revere their vivid and complex portrayal of maritime history. One historian, Richard Snow, went as far as to call the books "the best historical novels ever written" in a 1991 New York Times article. But ask anyone outside of O'Brian's immediate circle of fans, whose Internet discussion groups are affectionately known as the "Gunroom," and few will have even heard of the English-born writer, who died in 2000 at the age of 85.

"O'Brian was a niche author," Collee, who quickly became a great fan of O'Brian's yarns, said in a telephone interview from his home in Sydney, Australia. "It's not the most accessible writing when you first try to get into it. O'Brian doesn't write plots in the way that a lot of modern authors write, which follow pretty closely the three-part structure of films. Instead he writes meandering, 19th-century plots in which stuff happens."

Now, O'Brian's popularity may get a boost as Master and Commander: Far Side of the World sails into movie theaters across North America. The sweeping epic stars Russell Crowe and is directed by Peter Weir, who helmed Witness and The Truman Show.

The movie is actually based on the tenth book in the series, Far Side of the World. Weir, a long-time O'Brian fan, chose the book because its storyline is more straightforward than in some of the other Aubrey/Maturin novels.

When Weir, a fellow Australian, asked him to collaborate on the screenplay for Master and Commander, Collee had scant knowledge of maritime history, but soon found that he didn't have to go far in his search for background reading.

"Often when you write a screenplay adaptation you have to read masses of research material beyond the book," Collee said. "With O'Brian, that wasn't necessary. His books are the best source of information that's available on that period."

Accurate History

O'Brian didn't begin writing his books until the latter part of the 20th century, when he was already in his 50s. His followers say he was someone who seemed to have walked out of another era: the arcane world of the 19th-century British Navy.

Retaining O'Brian's obsession for historical detail was always going to be a monumental task for the filmmakers. First, they had to find a vessel to portray the H.M.S. Surprise, Aubrey's 28-gun warship.

They found it in Rhode Island, the homeport of a 20th-century replica of an 1800s-era British tall ship named Rose. A crew sailed the three-masted wooden frigate through the Panama Canal to San Diego, where she was retrofitted, then taken to Ensenada, Mexico, where most of the movie was shot.

In Mexico, a second ship was built from scratch and placed in the same 6.5-acre (2.6-hectare) water tank that was used for Titanic. Everything had to look right, from the mooring cables to the aging of the sails. A scene where the H.M.S. Surprise is repaired after an enemy attack, proved a particular challenge.

"We poured through lists of lading and billing for similar ships on similar voyages to learn how much timber and how much glass the ship would carry, and how that was carried—to understand what could be repaired and what couldn't," said Gordon Laco, the lead historical consultant on the movie. "It's all there in the British Admiralty records. They were obsessive record keepers."

Life on board the ship was undoubtedly tough. Boys as young as eight years old worked as "powder monkeys," running back and forth to the gun deck delivering powder to the gun crews. But Laco says that a well-run ship wasn't the hellhole that Hollywood usually portrays it as.

"I bridle at the concentration camp images of the Navy that's in most movies," said Laco. "It's not in the interest of any service to treat people habitually the way you see them treated in films and books. It wasn't a humorous institution, for sure, but the job was to keep those men as healthy and willing as possible, because they were the sinews that drove the ship."

The most common complaints from crew members were not about the food, press gangs or lashings, Laco added, but instead about increases in pay, time off, and leadership.

An Age-Old Question

O'Brian's historical lesson was that times change, but people don't. Collee believes the conflict between Aubrey, a man of action, and Maturin, a person of contemplation, resonates today.

"I've always felt that a lot of modern films tackle without resolving this kind of problem of how a man should behave in the modern day," said Collee. "We're all attracted to the idea of a life of fighting and adventuring, but at the same time we're trying terribly hard to be this other kind of considerate, reflective figure.

"O'Brian's whole body of work is really a prolonged dialogue between those two types of people," said Collee. "The question that he poses is, where does the proper man sit between these two extremes?"