I just have to inject into this lovefest for Captain Jack Aubery and his creator Patrick O'Brian that I have tried to get through two different novels featuring this character and I was really disappointed. You folks just have to dust off the novels by C.S. Forrester featuring the entire naval cereer of Horatio Hornblower. As we say down south, O'Brian couldn't take a rag off Forrester's bush. I find O'Brian practically unreadable, while the things you can learn about leadership, initiative and human relations from Hornblower's exploits are terrific. The recent T.V. movies based very loosely on the books Mr. Midshipman Hornblower and Lt. Hornblower showing on the A&E cable network are poor interpretations of these works by one of the greatest writters of this century. You might want to read another Forrester classic, The African Queen. He was, and for my money still is, the best.