The Great War has ended. The Emperor Bonaparte has been shipped off to the island of Saint Helena a thousand nautical miles from Cape Town, and sea officers have been washing up on shore: the detritus of a 20 year war.

All of them, scrambling like fiends for a command, begging their high placed friends for any sort of position in active duty. With impressment over, and seamen roving the land looking for work, manning a ship would be a pleasure, but a Captain must have a ship.

Captain Thomas Pullings, a commander highly skilled in navigation, gunnery, and the day to day running of ships great and small, has been land-locked for what seems to have been a decade or more.

But no longer.

Today is the day that the port Admiral's messenger will come thundering into the yard and stop short, giving the door to Tom's sprawling, comfortable cottage in the county of Hampshire, a knock to wake the dead and deliver him from the half-life that is the curse of a Captain without a ship.

Having sailed with "Lucky" Jack Aubrey since before the previous peace, Tom has been lucky in friends, commands, ship to ship actions, and even a bit of trading through contacts still working for the East India Company.

It now seems an old friend of Jack Aubrey's is to hoist a flag of another color and is leaving something of great value in our Captain's hands, an experiment of sorts: The Scourge of the Mediterranean.

I hope you'll join me for what I've wanted to read for so long now; another chance for glory in that amazingly beautiful and dangerous world Patrick O'Brian created for us.