Don, I hope you enjoy the Ramage series. It is an interesting and somewhat strange collection of books. The one annoyance I have had with it is that many of the books are not readily available here in the US. I makes for a rather ragged, out of sequence, read but it is always worth it.

A few minutes ago, I just finished "21." It is the first 3 chapters of what would have been O'Brian's next chapter in the Aubrey-Maturin saga. As it is clearly an early draft of the book it is not fair to really criticize it for literary quality. There are repetitions and confusing points which I am sure would have been smoothed out in later edits prior to publication. In it, Aubrey gets to hoist his blue pendant as admiral of a squadron which will head for South Africa. Maturin fights another duel with a neighbor who is the nephew of Aubrey's fleet admiral. Aubrey reunites with his son Sam, who is a papal nuncio to Buenos Aires.

There are indications of a summing up of the overall story, almost as though O'Brian knew he was going to die but was not quite prepared when it did happen. For the first 3/4 of the book the printed text is shown opposite O'Brian's raw manuscript. This is followed by several pages of raw manuscript which I chose not too read as his handwriting is pretty difficult. The book would probably have been a good, likely final, chapter in the saga. In its current form, it acts as a prologue to the real story of what this novel would have been.