SOURCE: “O'Brian's Great Voyage,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. 47, No. 4, March 9, 2000, pp. 11–16.

In the following essay, Hitchens compares and contrasts O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series to C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower saga, and discusses the personal insights found in Dean King's biography Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed.

1.

On any approximately proportionate view of history, of the kind that may become more gradually available to us as the long day of the twentieth century wanes, the Napoleonic conflict would deserve to be called the First World War. Never before had two great powers and their volatile allies mobilized their societies so extensively to contend for mastery over so immense a reach of the earth's surface. Great engagements were fought at the gates of Moscow, in the Baltic, at the mouth of the Nile, in Italy, Turkey, and Spain, but the reverberations extended, by way of proxy fighting, to...