No fiction writer of the modern period has captured the world of wooden walls, broadsides and the press gang in quite the same way as the late Patrick O'Brian. The twenty books in the O'Brian canon, featuring the lives and adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and confidant, the naval surgeon, Stephen Maturin, are read and lauded across the world for their blend of classic storytelling, historical scholarly accuracy and consistently inspired characterisation. In Jack Aubrey Commands Brian Lavery, one of the most respected naval historians of his generation, relates the naval fiction of Patrick O'Brian and C S Forester to the real world inhabited by famous Royal Navy heroes such as Lord Nelson, Sir Sidney Smith and Thomas Cochrane. It draws on the experiences and activities of men such as Frederick Marryat, the founder of naval fiction, the Austen brothers whose sister Jane created our most intimate picture of shore life in the period, and Nelson's chaplain Alexander Scott, who also served as a part-time spy. All these individuals and others provided inspiration for Patrick O'Brian's character of Jack Aubrey. The historical naval facts behind the great works of naval fiction are fully explored while the text fully contextualises a number of key episodes and characters as well as the minutiae of naval life in the era of Nelson, as it is put forward in these enduring sea stories. The book includes a foreword by Peter Weir, director of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, where he outlines the challenges posed by, and encountered in, the dramatisation of the O'Brian novels.

Brian Lavery is Curator of Ship Technology at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and a renowned expert on the sailing navy. His earlier title for Conway Maritime Press, Nelson's Navy, The Ships, Men and Organisation 1793-1815, is an international bestseller and was used as a technical reference by Peter Weir and his crew during the filming of Master and Commander. His other published titles include: the two-volume The Ship of the Line; The Arming and Fitting of English Ships of War 1600-1815 and The 74-gun Ship Bellona and The Colonial Merchantman Susan Constant 1605 in Conway's Anatomy of the Ship series.