Rob Baker’s Reviews > Master and Commander > Status Update

"A four-pounder (cannon) may not throw a very great weight of metal, and it may not be able to pierce two feet of oak half a mile away, as a thirty-two-pounder can; butit does throw a solid three-inch cast-iron ball at a thousand feet a second, which is an ugly thing to receive...and when it is fired it leaps back as though it were violently alive" (138).

Sometimes it feels like this book is 75% nautical jargon I don't understand. Cool but mostly meaningless words:

"'Trice up. Lay out.'

The calls agin, and the topmen hurried out on the yards. They cast off the gaskets, the lines that held the sails tight furled to the yards; they gathered the canvas.

'Sheet home. Hoist away. Cheerly there in the foretop. T'garns'l sheets. Hands to the braces. Belay'" (76).

"She despised her scrub of a husband, who truckled to her; and she had taken to music as a relief from him. But it did not seem that music was enough, for now she poured out a bumper and drank it off with a very practised air" (27).