Aubrey-Maturin/Characters

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Captain Jonathan "Jack" Aubrey

Lucky Jack Aubrey, Goldilocks, a tall, blond beefy Englishman, at sea since he was eight years old, beloved by his men, rather less so by his superiors. A lion at sea, and particularly inept on land.

• A Father to His Men: He feels it strongly when any of his men die, and takes a personal and abiding interest in the lives and careers of his personal followers and officers. This is particularly true of his midshipmen (the "squeakers"), who come to him at a very young age and whose education and moral upbringing he takes a direct hand in.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted
• A Man Is Always Eager: This gets him into a great deal of trouble personally and professionally beginning with the first book and lasting much of the series. It's less that he's a slut and more that he's spent his entire life at sea and has no clue how to behave on land (let alone say "no".)
• Animals Hate Him: Although people tend to love him, he simply cannot catch a break with animals. Horses throw him, a wombat eats his hat, and he has to get a sloth drunk to keep it from wailing in despair at the sight of him.
• Badass Bookworm: A bit less heavy on the bookworm than Stephen, especially at first, he really applies himself and becomes quite a scholar.He is a war hero and immensely successful naval commander who is also a Fellow of the Royal Society (Britain's most prestigious academic society). He has written a number of well-received papers on astronomy and geometry, and built his own observatory and telescopes.
• Boisterous Bruiser
• The Captain
• The Chains of Commanding: Jack has to write letters home to the parents of the officers and the midshipmen killed under his command. Additionally, the authority of the position means that it's nearly impossible for a captain and his officers to really become friends, a kind of social burden that falls on Jack quite often.
• Clueless Chick Magnet: At a party, two women are talking about the beautiful man. Jack turns around to see who they're talking about. He honestly has no idea.
• Companion Cube: The violion he's had since he was a boy. He's distraught when it breaks.
• Cultured Warrior: Jack is incredibly fond of music, and as an adult has taken to math and astronomy like a fish to water.
• The Drunken Sailor: Occasionally the result of a really good party, it only gets him into trouble once or twice, usually ashore.
• Duet Bonding: With Stephen
• Eek! A Mouse!: Well, a Snake. Jack Aubrey has a serious fear of snakes, and at one point in Master and Commander jumps up onto a chair when one crawls into the room, not coming down until Stephen removes it. Stephen doesn't help matters any by being a Deadpan Snarker about it, pulling Jack's leg about the (nonpoisonous) snake being a deadly and aggressive viper.
• Genius Ditz: For all his incredible talent as a navigator, seaman, and man of war, Jack is spectacularly incompetent ashore, getting himself into every kind of trouble imaginable.
• Get Rich Quick Scheme: Some of Jack's problems involve falling for one of these. Fortunately, he managed to give his wife power of attorney, putting everything in a tangle and keeping him from complete destitution.
• Good-Looking Privates: Ladies, meet Goldilocks, a man who, even though covered in scars, is something of an Adonis.
• Heterosexual Life Partners: With Stephen.
• Historical Domain Character: Master and Commander in particular was heavily based on the real-life exploits of Captain Cochrane (particularly the Sophie-vs-Cacafuego/Speedy-vs-Gama duel, accurate down to the number of guns and the number of crew), who really was captured by Christy-Palliere in the same way that Jack Aubrey was captured—and the real-life Christy-Palliere was so impressed by Cochrane's exploits that he refused to accept his sword in surrender, the same as with Aubrey.
• If I Were a Rich Man: Jack wasn't born into poverty, but he also never had money, and spends much of the series wishing he were rich, and usually doing exactly the wrong thing to get that way.
• In-Series Nickname: Aubrey is referred to as "Goldilocks" by the crew (though never to his face, of course), for his blonde hair. In the wider world, he's well known as "Lucky Jack Aubrey" for his good fortune in capturing prizes.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Jack loves these.
• Living Legend: Captain Jack Aubrey, globe-trotting badass much caressed by the Admiralty, astronomer and geometer, member of the Royal Society.
• Mixed Metaphor: Jack couldn't keep an aphorism straight if it walked in the room and put a bird in the bush.
• Mugging the Monster: Someone demands of an unhappy Jack, "Your money or your life". It doesn't end well for the erstwhile cutpurse.
• Must Have Caffeine: While he's not as bad as Stephen, Jack is inhuman without his morning coffee.
• Nautical Folklore: For all he insists he's not, and for all he's a very scientific sailor, Jack is still ridiculously superstitious, at one point spending weeks taking the ups and downs in the recovery of a particularly ill sailor as an omen for the success of an entire naval campaign.
• Nouveau Riche
• Perpetual Poverty: Jack's money will never last. He's a genius at sea and completely at a loss ashore.
• Privateer: During a particularly low point in his career, Jack ends up one of these.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: He's "no friend to the cat", meaning the cat of nine tails, meaning he prefers not to have his mean beaten for punishment unless discipline starts to go by the wayside. He likes a taut ship, but a taut ship and a happy ship go hand in hand.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Red to Stephen's Blue.
• Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: Despite a star-studded career, people mostly remember Jack's first absurd success, taking the Cacafuego with a ship half her size.
• Renaissance Man: astronomer/telescope builder/mathematician/Member of Parliament/musician
• Stout Strength: He weighs about 18 stone (~250 pounds), and Dr. Maturin often frets about his weight and tries to get him to eat less. But he's still fit enough to lead his crew into hand-to-hand battles and scramble up the ship's ropes like an ape. If you have ever tried to climb up a sailing ship's rigging, you will grasp that he is, even by modern standards, quite physically fit. Jack is quite tall (his exact height isn't recorded, but is probably at least 6 feet, in a period where most men were under that; Napoleon is always depicted as being short but was probably actually of average or slightly less-than-average height for the time). His 18 stone probably doesn't hang on him in such an unseemly manner as might be supposed by modern readers.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Though a good-looking man in general, Aubrey is covered in scars, including missing most of his right ear (getting it reattached is almost a Running Gag), and when you consider his wife...
• Wooden Ships and Iron Men: Almost literally; he practically rattles when he walks, he's got so many bits of metal floating in his various scars.
• Worthy Opponent: Jack accumulates these, whereas Stephen tends to cut their throats.

Dr. Stephen Maturin (Sr. Esteban Maturin y Domanova)

In the first book, Stephen is something of a genius ditz and Audience Surrogate. He gets more fleshed out starting in the second book, as a physician, as a lover, as a fighter, and as a badass secret agent. From then on, he's reliably the Deuteragonist, if not a second protagonist.

• Addiction Displacement: As soon as he swears off the alcoholic tincture of laudanum, he purchases some coca leaves. Purely for medicinal purposes.
• All Love Is Unrequited: It takes a long time for him to get the girl.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: His marriage proposal in the first book is a painful thing.
• Audience Surrogate: His main purpose in the first book was to have all things nautical explained to him so the audience wouldn't be completely at sea. We still tend to drown in jargon. This declines late rand he comes into his own and other surrogates come and go.
• Autopsy Snack Time: Whereas Jack is a stickler for cleanliness, Stephen will frequently eat while surrounded by the decaying remains of his collection (including gallows-corpses he bought for sixpence).
• Badass Bookworm: He's 5'6", gaunt, clumsy, "small, indefinably odd and even ill-looking" man as well as a doctor, polyglot, natural philosopher and all-round intellectual. He is also Britain's greatest spy. Over the course of the books he is seen shooting the pips out of playing cards, winning several duels, operating on himself, and dispatching his enemies in very badass ways. And then dissecting them.
• Berserk Button: It's always dangerous to disparage the Irish and the Catholics around Stephen, who is both. He doesn't mind when Jack occasionally puts his foot in his mouth with anti-Catholic sentiment, though, since he knows Jack never does it intentionally, and he always apologizes for it.
• Betty and Veronica: With Jack in the second book, to Diana.
• Byronic Hero
• Celibate Hero: At one point, so celibate that the Admiralty was worried he might be a blackmail target by foreign intelligence services. Then he had a love affair go badly (with a woman), and so they were relieved.
• Cloudcuckoolander: He may be able to speak half a dozen languages and cut your head open without killing you, but god help him if he tries to do anything else. The sailors view him as just this side of completely helpless.
• Cool Shades: He frequently wears glasses with colored lenses. This helps him win at cards. It also helps him be the best intelligence agent in the Empire. It also helps disguise his distinguishing feature, his pale, almost reptilian eyes.
• Cold Sniper: In a Missed Moment of Awesome, he takes out two enemy agents. Then he and a friend dissect them and hide the bodies.
• Combat Medic
• Cultured Warrior: Stephen plays the cello and attends the opera. At sea he prefers to be a physician and natural philosopher, professionally, though this also acts as a cover for his intelligence work, which occasionally sees him fighting for his life and enduring Cold-Blooded Torture.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Stephen is illegitimate and an orphan, fostered in the back of beyond, sent from uncaring relative to relative, spends time in several prisons in Spain and Portugal, a Catholic who goes to a Protestant university in his mid-teens, survives the Terror, flees to Ireland, survives the 1798 rebellion, loses Mona, loses Lord Edward Fitzgerald, becomes a fugitive, and ends up penniless. All before the first page of the first book. As an adolescent, he also spends "a long time" locked in a prison cell with a convicted rapist.
• Deadly Doctor: He'll go to the ends of the earth to keep you alive if you're his patient. But test his patience and he can kill you with sword, pistol, or notebook.
• Deadpan Snarker: To Jack's lame punnery. In the second book, he shows a flash of wit that continues to amaze and delight the Navy until the end of the series, twenty books later. Not the wit mind you, the very same joke continues to delight.
• Deconfirmed Bachelor: A good example of the trope. As a philosopher, he has no particular attachment to the married state, and many view him as likely to be a lifelong bachelor, what with being a very odd, very solitary man. His eventual marriage really does surprise the hell out of everyone. That he and his wife maintain separate residences cause them to nod wisely.
• Destructive Romance: His affair with laudanum begins at roughly the same time as his affair with Diana.
• Duet Bonding: With Jack
• Genius Ditz: At one point, while talking to himself on the beach, he fails to notice the tide and nearly loses his shoes. He then nearly drowns saving them. This sort of thing happens a lot.
• Heterosexual Life Partners: With Jack
• Honey Trap: By French agents in Malta.
• Hopeless Suitor: First to Jack, then Canning, then Johnstone.
• Impoverished Patrician: He owns a castle and earns a few hundred pounds a year just from rent, but the castle is in disrepair and, anyway, it's in Spain. When we first meet him, he's completely broke, wondering how he's going to get back to England from Gibraltar, and also wondering whether to eat or sleep well that night.
• Informed Self Diagnosis: Stephen is generally quite good at this, with the notable exception of failing to diagnose his own addiction to the alcoholic tincture of laudanum.
• The Klutz: Stephen somehow contrives to get into accident after accident at sea, ranging from falling out of the boat to somehow turning a complete somersault in a particularly violent sea. As a result, the seamen around him look upon with real affection and considerable respect for his medical prowess—and stand wary in case he manages to take yet another improbably at every possible opportunity.
• La Résistance: A passionate member in his youth, fighting for Irish independence.
• Like Brother and Sister: With Sophie, Jack's wife.
• Living Legend: World-renowned naturalist, physician, and the James Bond of the Napoleonic Wars personally responsible for the destruction of at least one branch of the French intelligence service.
• Love Hurts: His relationship with Diana certainly doesn't bring him happiness for quite some time.
• Loving a Shadow: Stephen's feelings for Diana run the gamut over the course of the series, from dangerous passion to a memory of fondness to genuine abiding romantic love.
• Married At Sea: So Diana can get her British citizenship back.
• Minored in Asskicking: The Irish are very fond of "stepping out" and Stephen has never lost a duel.
• Mistaken for Cheating
• Money to Throw Away: A few times, he manages to acquire a good some of money, and is usually happy to throw it at the nearest friend. The earliest may be when a wealthy and foolish Marine insults a woman Stephen likes and so Stephen takes him for a year's pay at cards.
• Motor Mouth: Stephen has been known to go on and on about exotic birds. He knows this and uses it deliberately; while he's babbling on about the feathers of an albatross no one would expect him to be a spy.
• Must Have Caffeine: Without his morning coffee, Stephen is a complete monster.
• Perpetual Poverty: Less so than Jack, as he has a Spanish castle to fall back on, and he doesn't really care about money, but he fell in with Jack at a good time and his fortune tends to rise with Jack's.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Blue to Jack's Red.
• Renaissance Man: physician/zoologist/cellist/duelist/James Bond
• Running Gag: Stephen's complete inability to board a naval vessel.
• Smart People Know Latin: Maturin will often use Latin around patients both to keep them from knowing what he is saying (when he is talking to another physician or an assistant who also speaks Latin) and because patients are reassured by the fact that their doctor is learned enough to speak Latin. The crews of the ships he serves on often brag that their ship has a real physician who speaks Latin and Greek.
• Spy Drama: Beginning in the second book.
• Sugar and Ice Personality: Partly by personal inclination, but also professional (he's required to be secretive both as a physician and a spy), he's cold and distant with most people. Those few who get close to him discover he's incredibly warm and caring. Even they don't really know the full depth, as they see him as an incredibly competent, contained, and certain figure, little knowing the vasty sea of passion and doubts within.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Stephen is generally described by himself and the narrator as a dark, scrawny, ill-looking man, but women generally find him attractive, suggesting he's more of a Byronic Hero.
• With This Ring

Sophia Aubrey née Williams

• Betty and Veronica: With Diana in the second book.
• English Rose
• Lie Back and Think of England
• My Biological Clock Is Ticking: Really wants marriage with children.
• Naive Everygirl
• Old Maid: Rather resigned to this fate, as she's willing to wait for Aubrey, even if she can't have him.

Diana Maturin, née Johnson, née Villiers

• Action Girl: Of a sort. She's a very competent horsewoman.
• Betty and Veronica: With Sophia in the second book.
• Broken Bird: Her determination to win a husband and willingness to use sex to get him ends up destroying her reputation and leading her into the power of unscrupulous men, until she's desperate to get away. And all that's after her father and husband die in India.
• Cool Big Sis: Of a sort, to Sophia. She's a few years older and a war widow who grew up in India, whereas Sophia is a sheltered naïf who cried to learn men had hairy chests. Diana's the cynical slut variety.
• Cry Into Chest: During a moment of despondency in India, she gets comfort from Maturin. Then Canning walks in and violence ensues.
• Determined Widow
• Distracted by the Luxury: Given to be the reason she keeps throwing over Stephen for other men. She doesn't just want any old marriage, she wants to marry a wealthy man. "Love in a cottage" isn't her style.
• Does Not Like Men: She views men as the enemy, figuring they're just out to screw her (literally) so she has to do what she has to do to get by. Stephen is her only male friend.
• First Girl Wins: She's not the first girl Maturin meets, but she is the first he shows any interest in.
• Gamer Chick: Nineteenth century version; we meet her riding a horse on a fox hunt.
• Girl in the Tower: While living with her crazy cousin, she has a room on the second floor. At one point Jack, visiting late at night, climbs up to visit her.
• Kissing Cousins: A crazy cousin she was sent to take care of to get her away from the men courting the Williams daughters
• The Ladette: To a degree. She drinks, swears, rides, games, fucks.
• My Biological Clock Is Ticking: Not so much wanting children, but desperate to get remarried before age steals her beauty.
• Romancing the Widow
• Runaway Bride
• Sleeps with Everyone but You: To Stephen, because she actually values his friendship and doesn't see him as a potential husband, ironically. Maybe. The text states that they kissed a few times, so its hard to know what they might have done.
• Smells Sexy: Stephen gives her a bottle of scent in the first book, a gift he greatly regrets as it keeps showing up on other men.
• Slut Shaming: A penniless widow, she rather transparently uses her charms to befriend men in the hopes of securing a second marriage. This does absolutely nothing for her reputation in England, and she bounces from her cousin's home, to her mad cousin's home, to the care of a Jewish merchant in England (where she's friends with the notorious mistress of the Prince of Wales), to the care of the merchant, only in India, to the care of an American businessman in Boston, to a respectable marriage to an Irish-Spanish bastard orphan physician. Still, at least she's finally an honest woman.
• Wartime Wedding: As part of her confused relationship with Johnstone, she gave up her British citizenship, which leads to problems when she wants to return during the war of 1812. She and Stephen quickly get married to rectify that.

Mrs. Williams

Sophia's mother, Diana's aunt, Jack's mother-in-law. She's conniving, bitter, a pain in the ass, and she will see her daughters well set up in good marriages or she'll die trying.

• Evil Matriarch: No one who knows her is at all fond of her. With the exception of her grandchildren, the only people she shows any kindness to.

Brigid Maturin

Stephen and Diana's only child.

• Ambiguous Disorder: she's very quiet and self-contained as a young child, and some readers speculate that she might be autistic by modern standards.
• Intergenerational Friendship: with Padeen Colman, Stephen's assistant.