The Nutmeg of Consolation

The Nutmeg of Consolation is the fourteenth historical novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by British author Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1991. The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Building a schooner on an island in the South China Sea as food supplies grow scant, Aubrey and his shipmates are attacked by pirates then rescued by a Chinese ship large enough to hold them all as far as Batavia, where Raffles has a ship for them. Aubrey names the sweet-smelling ship from one of the sultan's many titles, Nutmeg of Consolation. They sail into the Celebes Sea, where battle commences. This novel constitutes the second of a five-novel circumnavigation of the globe; other novels in this voyage include The Thirteen Gun Salute, Clarissa Oakes/The Truelove, The Wine-Dark Sea, and The Commodore. Reviews written soon after publication were generally impressed with the main characters, drawn well, though opposite in abilities. The author's ability to put the reader in an era about 200 years ago was judged to be impressive and engrossing, "contemporary novels. written, paradoxically, in an 18th-Century voice", also that O'Brian created "a whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit." Some feared that too much nautical detail will put off some readers, while others found that of small importance compared to the characters and how they are facing the world. The author's descriptions of the flora and fauna seen in Maturin's rambles received strong praise. All of the reviews noted the descriptions of the squalor and brutality of the penal colony at Botany Bay in that era. One reviewer said that Doctor Maturin was the more interesting of the two characters in this novel, for his botanising and his reactions to the changes of fortune and to insult. At least one reviewer gave his view of the fourteen novels as a whole, and on O'Brian's ability to break out of the nautical genre, to write excellent novels.