The Wine-Dark Sea

The Wine-Dark Sea is the sixteenth novel of the Aubrey-Maturin series by the English writer Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1993. It is the fourth of five novels that make up one long circumnavigation of the globe, a voyage that began with The Thirteen Gun Salute and continued through The Nutmeg of Consolation, Clarissa Oakes and The Commodore.

As the book opens the Surprise is still hunting the American privateer Franklin, and the pursuit carries her south and east into the Pacific until she is off the coast of Peru. That coast is where the intelligence work Maturin has been carrying across half the world is meant to arrive, and the novel follows him from the sea into the mountains, walking the long road over the Andes to keep an appointment that cannot be missed.

Aubrey, meanwhile, has a chase, a hostile ocean and a stretch of hard weather to deal with, and at one point he is close to starvation while trying to work his ship to windward. The book sets the two friends' separate errands against the same stretch of water and the same war.