Captain Aubrey and his crew are shipwrecked on a remote island. They managed to make a schooner from the wreck, only to have it burned by Malay pirates.Their escape from this predictament is one that only the ingenuity of Patrick O'Brian--or Stephen Maturin--could devise. The dreadful penal colony in New South Wales, harrowingly described, is the backdrop to a diplomatic crisis provoked by Maturin's Irish temper--and to a near-fatal encounter with the wildlife of the Australian outback.
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