Ship Ahoy!

Boxing and Masculinity in the novels of Patrick O’Brian

Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey, O’Brian’s hero; Paul Bettany as Stephen Maturin; HMS Surprise, their ship. Image from GQ, March 2023

Twenty years after the release of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a film adaption of Patrick O’Brian’s sea novels, GQ critic Gabriella Paiella suggested that the film’s indifferent reception resulted from the “low-key intimacy” of its masculinity.

Master and Commander lacks the violent power of Gladiator, a favorite of star Russell Crowe’s fans. Instead, it models a masculinity that is “overwhelmingly wholesome and positive” and about “healthy male bonding,” Paiella wrote. It now seems to be “an exquisite Dad Movie,” giving more time to the routines of shipboard life than to combat. She names a Dad Movie for every year, it seems, perhaps thinking, in this case, that the film’s characters resemble men who trade the excitement of being single for diapers and trips to the grocery store.

To give the film a bit more muscle, director Peter Weir might have incorporated some of O’Brian’s boxing scenes. O’Brian uses boxing to manifest masculinity and “male bonding” in ways that are neither low-key nor intimate. For him, boxing supports a healthy masculinity born of combat and conflict, but by no means in love with bloodshed and suffering.

Boxing and naval life have long been partners. “The Navy has always had a special connection with the boxing world,” writes Senior Chief Petty Officer John Scorza for the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDShub.net, Dec. 12, 2023). “In fact,” he says, “sailors have been boxing aboard U.S. Navy ships for more than 150 years.”

The occasion for Scorza’s remark was the introduction of boxing lessons on the USS Boxer. The connection between the Navy and boxing goes deeper than Scorza suggests. The name Boxer refers to a man in a boxing match and has a long history in both the Royal Navy and the US Navy. The service traditionally uses place names or martial terms for ships. Boxer joins HMS Defiant, HMS Courageous, USS Warrior, and  many others.

Boxer and boxing

The first HMS Boxer lived up to its combative name. During the War of 1812, which involved England and her allies and the United States and hers, HMS Boxer was captured by the USS Enterprise off the coast of Maine. The name Boxer was subsequently used by the US Navy. The first USS Boxer was built in 1815 and lost at sea in 1817.

In life, as in fiction, naval warfare balances political difference with the elite status and mutual respect that are endemic to naval tradition. The captains of both Boxer and Enterprise were killed in the action and were buried side by side in Portland, Maine. Washington Irving noted the “striking and affecting sight, to behold two gallant commanders, who had lately been arrayed in deadly hostility against each other, descending into one quiet grave, there to mingle their dust peacefully together.” Henry Wordsworth Longfellow mentioned the battle and the burial in a poem, “My Lost Youth.” (Information from Wiki; the captains’ graves are marked with separate box tombs, seen in the photo, c. 1900-1910.)

With thanks to H. Doggett and Spirits Alive for preservation work at the Eastern Cemetery in Portland.   https://www.spiritsalive.org/special/boxer-and-enterprise.htm.

Boxing at sea became popular during the nineteenth century. The US Naval Academy began a boxing program in 1865. Under Theodore Roosevelt (president 1901-1909), himself a boxer, boxing on board became legal and was encouraged as way to build morale. The matches were catch-as-can. A photograph taken on the USS Oregon (1896-1901) shows two gloved sailors in a ring defined on three sides by ropes and on one by seated, uniformed observers. The mustachioed man at the center is the referee. The photograph suggests what shipboard boxing might have looked like in the Royal Navy at the time.

The name Boxer has been in continuous use in both navies since that time. At present, the USS Boxer is an amphibious warfare assault ship (similar to an aircraft carrier, but with more functions).

Boxing at sea in 1815

We expect to find boxing in O’Brian’s books about life in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815). O'Brian (1914-2000) was a master of extended story-telling; his work ranks with the best historical English fiction of the last century. These 20 volumes form one of the great fiction cycles in the language, although, in popularity, the series is no match for Harry Potter or Nancy Drew. The two main characters are Captain Jack Aubrey and his ship surgeon, Dr. Stephen Maturin (the books are collectively known as the Aubrey-Maturin novels). The men’s friendship serves as the backbone for the narrative, much of it aboard the HMS Surprise.

Boxing in O’Brian’s work is faithful to Napoleonic-era practices. The sport is especially prominent in The Yellow Admiral, the eighteenth in the series (1996), and Blue at the Mizzen (1999), the last volume that O’Brian completed. Boxing figures into two others, The Far Side of the World, the tenth (1984), and in the fifteenth (1992), The Truelove (published in the UK as Clarissa Oakes). Each of the matches O’Brian describes reveals a different way in which boxing defines masculinity.

Aubrey has been at sea his whole life; he embodies the classic virtues of the captain. Infinitely knowledgeable in nautical matters, he is calm in a crisis. His masculinity is martial in the best traditional sense.

Maturin’s masculinity is partly defined by his extraordinary command of natural sciences and languages. He is not part of the Royal Navy. He is an esteemed naturalist and an undercover intelligence agent with obscure allegiances. He wears colored glasses that help to conceal his intentions and moods. He proves to be a deadly opponent, although not because of his fists. Both men are accomplished musicians and often play duets in the evening.

Never far from the novels’ action are Preserved Killick, who is Aubrey’s sullen, often cheeky personal servant, and Barret Bonden, coxswain of the Captain’s barge and his bodyguard. Bonden is also a highly experienced boxer. O’Brian derives both social commentary and humor from the contrast between these men and their lofty masters.

Practical matters elude Maturin, a running joke. After years at sea, he does not know larboard (now called port, meaning left) from starboard. His ignorance is useful. Amused sailors, in awe of the doctor’s seemingly magical power to restore them to health, and astonished at his vast knowledge, patiently explain the basic operations of the ship to him. This is all to the good, since O’Brian’s readers also need to be educated.

There is a lot to  learn. The frigate or man-of-war was the Boeing 787 of its time. Equipped with three tall masts (reaching two hundred feet or more) and armed with anywhere from 40 to 60 guns, the frigate required about 44,000 square feet of sail, enough to cover an acre. Hundreds of men were needed to manipulate the sails and their rigging, climbing high in all weathers to work barefoot on yards (cross-pieces that supported the sails); boots would have been slippery and dangerous. The men wear buckled pumps when ashore.

Sails and other parts of the ship had to be replaced at sea, meaning that the ship carried far more gear than what was in use at any one time. The resources needed to make repairs and to provision the ships had to be replicated at British ports around the world. Storm-battered or battle-scared ships might need extensive repairs during years-long voyages, a frequent occurrence in the novels. Airports today serve planes in the same ways.

The Yellow Admiral is the richest in boxing lore. (The color denotes the admiral’s lack of seniority, not his lack of courage. Squadron colors were red, white, and blue; a yellow pennant meant that the admiral did not command a squadron.)

Cover of the original edition, from Wiki (as are the next 3 covers)

Bonden, the coxswain, is one of the Royal Navy's champion boxers. Stationed near Aubrey’s home between voyages, Bonden gets into a tavern brawl. When he hears about it, Aubrey is outraged that public disorder should have involved one of his most trusted men. Just as he would at sea, Aubrey insists that the men to settle their differences formally, in this case with “a proper mill,” i.e., a boxing match. One is quickly arranged (near the end of ch. 2; note that there are many different editions; I give pages or chapter numbers to those I used).

Maturin is not a boxing fan, and this gives Bonden the opportunity to inform him, and us, about the era’s rules of boxing. They include:

Space

The fighting space could be defined either as a ring marked by posts or by a circle of bystanders with their arms linked. Bonden prefers the former, since, he says, the “other man’s friends” might well kick his opponent if he were knocked down (p. 54).

Time

Bonden says a round lasted as long as it took for one man to knock the other down or throw him down; a round could last one minute or twenty. After a rest of either thirty or forty-five seconds, the referee scratched a mark in the middle of the ring and the fighters went at it again (the command is “start the mill”). This was repeated until one of them could not come up to the mark—that is, doesn’t come up to scratch, the origin of that idiom (p. 55).

Duration

Fights were famously long. Bonden reports one of 43 rounds that lasted over an hour; he himself went 68 rounds in an hour and twenty-six minutes to win the naval championship of the Mediterranean (p. 56). Just as naval officers in O’Brian’s books can describe every phase of combat between two ships or fleets, Bonden is an encyclopedia of boxing history: Jem Belcher and Dutch Sam fought over two hours, as did Gully and Game Chicken (all these are boxers whose histories are to be found in boxing books and Wiki).

Training

Bonden says that new fighters usually could go a quarter of an hour and perhaps three or four rounds if they fought “with some pluck but with little wind and no science.”  He also describes a long list of common fouls, including “to catch your man by the hair and batter him something cruel with his head held down” (p. 56). Something very like this will happen to Bonden, who, like all sailors, is inordinately proud of his long pigtail.

Bonden’s fight with Evans

Bonden’s fight with Evans is bloody and long. Between rounds the boxers to go their corners (p. 67). This indicates that the match is fought in a square space, not a circle. The fight comes to a violent end when Evans grabs Bonden’s pigtail with both his hands and throws him against a corner post (pp. 65-68). Bonden suffers a concussion and is unable to come up to scratch, meaning that Evans wins, although he has to be helped to the mark by his friends.

Bonden’s pigtail had taken him ten years to grow, which is why he did not cut it for the fight. His head injuries are so serious that he has to be shorn anyway; he takes to wearing a wig until his hair grows out.  The fairness of the outcome is disputed and fights break out in the crowd. It seems that the better man did not, in this case, win.

As suits his practical nature, Bonden gives us a quick education in the rules and traditions of boxing, emphasizing that science is as important as stamina to success. For his part, Aubrey underscores the formality required to make boxing respectable.

Blue at the Mizzen illustrates how boxing can cross class boundaries, a phenomenon readers will remember from my essays about George Gordon, Lord Byron, and his contemporary, John Clare.

In Blue at the Mizzen, Aubrey and his crew are in England and about to set off on a voyage that mixes espionage with natural science. William Henry, Duke of Clarence, later to become William IV (1765-1837), king of the United Kingdom and Ireland 1830-37, was known as the “Sailor king.” He asks Aubrey to place Horatio Hanson as a midshipman on Jack’s ship. Hanson is the son of a man lost during William’s service with Lord Nelson in the West Indies (cited from the edition of O’Brian’s complete novels, p. 6275).

Aubrey is reluctant to take on anyone who might be considered a “suckling” (pp. 6276-77) but he agrees to interview Horatio, whose name bows to Horatio Nelson and, for readers, recalls Horatio Hornblower, the hero of C. S. Forester’s naval novels. Aubrey finds that Hanson, who is 15, knows algebra and geometry as well as Latin and French.

Once at sea, Aubrey notices the boy’s bruised knuckles. Hanson has had a fight with someone who called him “a pragmatical son of a bitch.” Jack forbids further fighting but later again sees the boy’s knuckles bleeding. Jack learns that Hanson and other boys “used to mill” after school and that a coachman’s son, who learned to box from “a real prizefighter” (p. 6291), taught Hanson to fight.

Aubrey recalls seeing boxing matches between ships when he was a midshipman and decides to set up something similar for the Surprise. He does, and Hanson bests a burly fighter from another ship in five rounds “of a singular ferocity” (p. 6330).

A few days later Hanson is promoted over other midshipmen. This causes some tension among them, but the promotion is greeted “with general approval by the lower deck.” This happens because the men “set an even higher value on physical courage than on the finer points of seamanship—not that Mr. Hanson was so deficient in them, either” (p. 6332). Hanson is an exemplary gentleman boxer, as well-schooled in prowess as he is in good manners and seamanship. We might say that his conduct is princely, since it seems to be assumed that William, the king, is not really Hanson’s uncle but rather his father.

Boxing reinforces two sides of this boxer’s masculinity. Hanson not only boxes but dominates—outperforms—his young peers in nautical matters. And because of his fighting he earns the admiration of the men who work the ship. Hanson reflects some of the outstanding qualities of Aubrey, who is a master of nautical knowledge and an exemplar of martial courage. One could easily imagine the young boxer as the hero of a series of novels about his own future exploits.

History also figures into The Far Side of the World (a title appended to the 2003 film based on the first novel in the series, Master and Commander). Aubrey and Maturin are rescued from a deserted island. The hands of the Surprise want to stage prizefights to celebrate the men’s return to the ship, but Aubrey refuses (chapter 9). Maturin says that has never seen a fight but adds that he hopes to see “the peculiarly English prizefighting,” which he says is “so much a part of modern life.”

There will be no prizefighting, Aubrey says, but he will permit a fight with padded gloves. The men may see “sparring and boxing like Christians, with nothing on the murdering lay, no wrestling, no cross-buttock falls or gouging or strangling, no head in chancery or catching hold of pigtails.” Aubrey uses rules and gloves to elevate the version of boxing he will permit—no bleeding knuckles here. He is ever mindful of the crew’s discipline.

Maturin reports that he once met a fighter named Henry “Hen” Pearce. Aubrey and his first lieutenant, Mowett, exclaim at hearing Maturin refer to “The Game Chicken.” Nobody expects the learned doctor to know a prize fighter’s ring name. Mowett has seen Pearce fight “the Wapping Slasher,” a match that lasted over 77 minutes and 41 rounds. Aubrey too knows fighters and once travelled over 50 miles to “see Mendoza or Belcher or Dutch Sam” and “had himself lost two teeth in friendly encounters.” Aubrey points out that Bonden, his coxswain, is a successful boxer, winner of a contest involving fighters from 11 ships; also on board is Davis, whom Aubrey calls “a smiter.”

With typical dexterity, O’Brian crams a lot of historical detail into a couple of paragraphs. I find no reference to “the Wapping Slasher,” but Belcher, Dutch Sam, and Pearce are easily tracked in boxing records of the Napoleanic era (c. 1800-14).

This example also illustrates the power of boxing to cross class lines. Aubrey distinguishes between a prizefight and “sparring and boxing like Christians.” A gentleman might engage in one but not, in Aubrey’s mind, in the other. It may well be that he did not want the ship’s hands excited by the violence of bare-knuckled battle, although it is likely that few of the men were strangers to bloody violence or would be as concerned about this distinction as their captain.

The Truelove records a rare fight between women. Many of the crew are ashore, but Maturin has stayed behind to encode some of his secret correspondence for British intelligence. He hears a “confused din not unlike the roar of a bull-fight” and learns that a boxing match is in progress.

Maturin picks up his telescope to see what is going on. He sees “two fine upstanding young women setting about one another with bare fists,” with “violent, wholehearted blows” that are “well given and well received” (p. 173). Before it can come to a conclusion, the match is terminated. The sailors cry out with disappointment, but soon a large feast appears and they seems to forget all about the fight.

O’Brian does not explain the match or its context, a rare occurrence in novels that are so uniformly rich in detail. Thus the women’s match seems to have been part of an entertainment that came before the feast and to have no significance of its own. The islanders and the sailors alike were rooting for one contestant or the other, but the fight was obviously not the main event.

A few hours later, Aubrey recounts the events to Maturin, saying that it was a capital feast and that “the only fighting was in play” (p. 174). But he adds that there was some other, real fighting. Bonden fought an islander and got “his nose knocked sideways,” and Davies, another seaman, was hurt in a wrestling match. The two men show up in the sick bay in due time, where “medical art” did “what little it could” for them (p. 177).

In some ways, this episode does the more than the others to link masculinity to combat. We are told that Clarissa laughed at the women boxers, whereas the men took them seriously. Elsewhere in O’Brian’s novels we find many women with romantic views of battles at sea but shallow grasp of the risks that come with the heroism they claim to admire. Clarissa seems to think women who fight are a joke. Men take battle seriously, even when women fight. They feel that something of their own—their masculinity—is at stake, no matter who wears the gloves. That’s why so many men I see watching a boxing match throw pulled punches of their own, as if it were their fight.

Given the constrained conditions of shipboard life, it is easy to understand why boxing was promoted to boost morale, not just to entertain. Boxing is more than a sport. A boxing match is a war. On land or at sea, boxing gives us a miniaturized version of battle. Sailors love boxing because boxing is combat, and, in O’Brian’s novels, combat is something sailors seek. It is deadly, but it is profitable. They will get a share of any wealth that their ship captures. Men who love war love its unpredictable mix of rewards and punishments. They love boxing for the same reason.

U.S. Navy sailors compete in a "Smokers" boxing match in the hangar bay of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman in the Persian Gulf, Jan. 27, 2008.