The Romans had no doubt who their greatest intellectual was — the astonishing polymath Marcus Terentius Varro
Yes, the clever Romans did plenty for us, but just who was the cleverest of them all? A tricky question, to be sure, but the Romans were confident about their own answer. The doctissimus was Varro — a man who wrote 620 books, and really is one of the most impressive polymaths that people have never heard of.
Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) was born in the Sabine town of Reate (Rieti) but found his proper education in Rome. There he studied under Lucius Aelius Stilo, the Stoic grammarian and antiquarian, who can perhaps be called the first bona fide scholar of Roman descent. Later he spent time in Athens under Antiochus of Ascalon, the celebrated Platonist and reformer of the Academy. Both proved to be major influences on the intellectual scene of first-century BC Rome (Cicero also studied with both).
[…]
What built Varro’s enduring reputation was his writing. His volume of work remains truly staggering. As Augustine observed, “Varro read so much that we are amazed he had any spare time to write; but he wrote so much that we can scarcely believe he could have read anything”. His output exceeded every other Roman writer, and was scarcely equalled by any Greek writer except Callimachus. He is said to have written 490 books by the time he was 77, which would mean that, in his last twelve years, he wrote almost a book per month. No surprise that he was rumoured to have died with pen in hand.
The sheer breadth of his learning was also astounding: he wrote on the full gamut of human knowledge (with the possible exceptions of medicine and advanced mathematics): the history of Rome, its civilisation, its customs and its people, civil law, Roman literature and drama, philosophy, grammar, the history of libraries, linguistics, tidal motion, sea navigation, Greco-Roman biography, as well as a three-book account of his own life.
But we must now the bad news: over 95 per cent of Varro’s writings do not survive to us, and of over 70 separate works authored by him only one – a three-book treatise on farming (De Re Rustica) – survives in a complete state. Mercifully, we are also able to read several extant books of his fascinating treatise on the Latin language (De Lingua Latina), a work that shows such fervour for its subject that the author completely forgot about his own Latin style.
Varro’s prodigious life-span for a Roman — of ninety years — allowed him to be born ten years before Cicero and outlive him by sixteen. This gave him an unparalleled perspective of the rapidly changing social, political and intellectual narrative of the late-second and first centuries BC. No-one had seen more and learned more than this self-driven scholar.
Although Cicero regarded him as an “amazingly odd” character (mirabiliter moratus), he did bestow lavish praise on Varro for the remarkable contribution of his 41-book Antiquitates: Romans previously wandered around like strangers in a city which seemed alien and confused; but Varro’s rich researches shed new light on the capital, whose reflection in turn revealed to them their own true identity. Cicero’s private letters reveal that he worried greatly about what Varro thought of him: that fact alone is proof that, in the ancient respublica litterarum, Varro really was the apex predator.
David Butterfield, “Varro and wide”, The Critic, 2026-07-21.
October 29, 2026
QotD: The Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro
October 27, 2026
QotD: The outer “zones” surrounding a typical pre-modern city
Diagram of von Thünen’s model from The Isolated State, after Morley (1996), 62. The agriculture ring is subdivided by intensity (intensive, long-lay and three-field), but here I have merged them for simplicity. The agriculture zone is wider because it did, in fact, tend to cover a larger area. The fade in the pastoralism zone is meant to indicate shifts from ranching to transhumance.
Once out of the innermost zone of very high intensity usage, we reach the middle zones of von Thünen’s model, which are devoted primarily to agriculture, falling in degrees of intensity as we move away from the city. This is where you should expect to see rolling seas of wheat and barley, as well as large scale cultivation of things like olives and grapes, as the climate permits. This seems to be what, for instance, Tolkien has in mind when he describes the Pelennor as fair and fertile townlands running down to the Anduin.
(I should note this this zone is subdivided into three groups: intensive agriculture, long-lay agriculture and three-field agriculture. We might discuss those terms further if future posts bring us to discussing how pre-modern farms work, but for now, I don’t want to get too – pardon the pun – deep in the weeds.)
Now, I noted before that for small cities, the horticultural zone might be entirely contained inside the city walls. The reverse is true as well – the larger the city, the further out these zones can get pushed – and this is especially true of the middle zone. As it extends, it tends to create miniature population centers within it (villages) – usually along roads (we’ll get to them).
But for very large cities, the area of grain cultivation can be truly massive. As I’ve noted in an earlier post, a city of around 500,000 would need to pull cereal production from an area of arable land close to the size of the state of Massachusetts. Rome – at nearly a million – imported grain from up and down the entire Italian coast, North Africa and even Egypt. A middle zone that large could contain not merely villages, but other towns and even large cities, whose own land-use patterns would be substantially distorted by the “pull” of the mega-city at the center. […] as a rule of thumb, if the cereal cultivation zone extends more than 20 miles out from the center, you should expect to see smaller market towns within it (because people want a market within a day’s walk).
What does this kind of zone look like? That actually depends a lot on terrain – expect villages surrounded by fields on areas of good, arable land. In a fairly wet environment (like Northern Europe), those villages might radiate out from the city. In arid environments like Egypt or Mesopotamia, the farmland (and thus the peasant population) is densely concentrated along the rivers, because water availability becomes a strong determinant of arability.
One thing Americans specifically tend to get a bit off here is that the farms are not likely to be evenly spaced over the terrain. We are very used to the agricultural landscape created by things like the Homestead Acts (1862-1930), which offered very large chunks of land (often as many as 640 acres) for purchase, creating a lot of very spaced out farms. Peasant agriculture in the pre-modern period doesn’t tend to organize like this.
Instead, peasant agriculture tends to cluster in villages, with fields radiating out from the villages (which in turn, often have their own micro-garden zone and local forests for wood). Part of the reason for this is that farmland within the village is typically not held as big, standalone farmsteads. Instead, it is either held communally, or else each family owns several small plots spread over different ecological zones (the better to be protected from the risk of a year being wet or dry or cold or whatever – if you have a little land everywhere, then probably something will grow somewhere every year. I’ll talk more about subsistence survival strategies in a future post).
In some societies, these peasant villages may also be mixed in with large elite-held (often slave worked) estates, but there’s an important caveat here. The grand estates – like Roman villas and latifundia – generally do not completely displace the local peasantry (in part because they rely on that peasantry to supply surplus labor). The role of the “big man” and these sorts of large market-oriented estates is complex and worth its own post. But in terms of land-use patterns, such estates generally exist within a landscape of smaller farmers, not in a vast sea of other large estates.
The outermost zone in the model is dedicated to pastoralism (“ranching” technically, but I’d like to be a bit more broad). Pastoralism can take the form of enclosed ranching, but can also be mobile in various ways. I won’t describe ranching too much – this human terrain is still much in evidence and well documented. But mobile forms of pastoralism are more foreign, I suspect, to most of my readers. Transhumance – the moving of livestock between seasonal summer and winter pastures (often up the mountain in summer and down the mountain in winter, for instance – this is “vertical” transhumance) is a common form of limited pastoral mobility.
Transhumant pastoralists do tend to have permanent homes at one end of the route (typically the lower winter pastures for vertical transhumance). These may cluster in villages and are likely to plug into the infrastructure network spreading out from the city. I bring this up mostly because this is how you do get the “rolling hills of empty grassland” terrain so common in depictions of fantasy cities: these areas aren’t empty at all, but merely transhumant pastures not currently in use.
(Side note: This fact about pastoralism is especially worth noting: pastures which are regrowing in the “off” season often might look empty and unused to an outsider, but trespassing on such grounds can bring lethal retaliation. Because these pastures are not unused, but in fact engaged in the vital task of regrowing to support the herd in the following season. This is also the case for true nomads as well, by the by. The reason, of course, is that if those pastures are not grown when the herds are migrated back, the pastoralist’s entire pattern of subsistence is disrupted, endangering his survival. This is a not infrequent cause of friction between pastoralists and agricultural peoples who neighbor each other).
Pastoralism exists on the outer edge of the model for two reasons. First, it is very low density. While the goods it produces (wool, milk, meat) are important, it produces them at a very low density. Agriculture can support massively greater population densities than pastoralism, so high population density tends to push the pastoralists out. There’s a political/military dimension to this as well: the concerns of the farmers tend to dominate political thinking in the city (where, you will recall, the political and military elite are), and the farmer’s greater population density tends to allow them to “push” the pastoralists further from the city and onto marginal lands – either economically (buy the land) or militarily (fight the pastoralists and shove them off).
Second, pastoralism has very low transportation costs. This is because the goods produced by pastoralists can, by and large, walk themselves to market. This is called transporting them “on the hoof”, a phrase my students continue to find funny and are surprised to learn is a real term. Major cattle and animal markets are often still located within city centers, but a shepherd can simply walk his animals to market for sale. That greatly reduces transportation costs, which also tends to push pastoralism out to the edges of the economic network.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-12.
October 25, 2026
Planet of the Apes: Part 1 – Beginnings
Feral Historian
Published 26 Jun 2026Let’s begin a look at the Planet of the Apes franchise, starting with Pierre Boulle’s novel that started it all. The book sets up all the themes that get reworked and reimagined through every subsequent take on the story, from the 1968 film to the most recent series of films.
00:00 Intro
01:52 Beginnings
05:09 Essentialism
08:08 Aping
10:02 Iterations
12:15 Endings🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
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October 24, 2026
Everyone has an opinion on Oliver Cromwell
On Substack, Charles Haywood reviews The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton:
If you know anything about Oliver Cromwell — and few do nowadays — you probably have an opinion about the man. Some vilify him; “A curse upon you, Oliver Cromwell, you who raped our Motherland”, the Irish rock band The Pogues sang. Others praise him as an enemy of arbitrary rule and a proto-republican. Ronald Hutton’s new biography of Cromwell’s early life and his climb to prominence makes no final judgment on the man, but it does offer a nuanced view of this complex historical figure. From Hutton’s excellent book we get not just history but the realization, in this desiccated age, that men such as Cromwell always emerge during great turmoil, rising as if from sown dragon’s teeth.
Hutton wisely focuses on his subject, and makes no attempt to tease out the political and social complexities behind the Civil War. He expertly evokes the England of the mid-seventeenth century, both in politics and the natural world. As to the latter, quite often Hutton describes in detail the flora of the region and season, at the same time he narrates a particular historical event, which makes the reader feel more immersed in the story, as if he were there. It also makes the reader a little sad, though. Why? Because it brings to the mind’s eye a lost time and a lost country, before industrialization, liquid modernity, and alien invitees destroyed both the English landscape and England’s ancient culture.
The short version of Hutton’s biography is that Cromwell “was both godly and wily, and the two at times seem to jar with each other”. No doubt this is often true for a godly man called to be a temporal leader. Hutton believes that most Cromwell biographers focus too much on the godliness and too little on the wiliness. This is not really a popular history; it offers extensive notes, and Hutton often refers to controversies among Cromwell scholars of little interest to the casual reader. Nonetheless, it is very readable, so any reader who is willing to put in a little effort will be rewarded.
Until he was forty, Cromwell lived as an obscure provincial, a collateral descendant of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s minister who fell from grace. In his thirties, however, he became a devout Puritan, something about which we know very little. (He kept no archive of correspondence, and while he left voluminous public words, he left no record of his own private thoughts other than letters to others.) Hutton fleshes out what we can know about Cromwell’s life prior to 1640, in the East Midlands, in and near Huntingdon. There was no reason to expect great things from Cromwell; he was on the lower border of the gentry, a man of no importance. In fact, for a time until he inherited money from his uncle, he directly worked the land as a tenant farmer.
[…]
For the next two years, relations between Parliament and King deteriorated, and the countryside began to separate into armed factions. When Charles sought to fund himself by asking for donations from Cambridge colleges, Cromwell returned to Cambridge, apparently on his own initiative, and raised a militia, successfully preventing the dispatch of gold and silver to the King. Soon he was formally commissioned a cavalry officer in the army being raised by Parliament, and so he remained for the entire war, rising ever higher in rank.
From 1642 until 1646, the end of the period covered by Hutton’s book, Cromwell alternated vigorous military activity with political activity. He remained a member of Parliament. In 1645 Parliament, in order to resolve a dispute between the Lords and Commons, forbade members to also be military officers. Such a separation was part of creating the famous New Model Army—but Cromwell alone was given a dispensation. This was meant to be very temporary, meeting an immediate critical need, not an acclamation of Cromwell, who had made plenty of internal enemies. But as it happens, Cromwell’s greatest military successes immediately followed, at the most crucial period of this first phase of the Civil War, and so he continued to both lead soldiers and serve in Parliament. This lucky confluence of events was what ultimately made Cromwell.
October 23, 2026
The Praetorian enforcer for Tiberius Caesar
In Quillette, an excerpt from Guy de la Bédoyère’s new book, Brief Lives of the Ancient World: Rulers, Rebels, and Robbers, on Sejanus, Praetorian Prefect for much of the reign of Tiberius Caesar:
The story of Sejanus is dependent on the accounts of Roman historians, in particular Tacitus, who indulged himself with an unforgettable tale of treachery and dissimulation. His main purpose was to portray Tiberius as a sinister and manipulative tyrant, but he also succeeded in creating an allegory of cynicism at the heart of power.
Shortly after Tiberius’ accession in AD 14, the son of praetorian prefect Seius Strabo — Lucius Aelius Sejanus (born Lucius Seius) — was appointed co-prefect. Like his father, he was an equestrian, Rome’s second aristocratic tier, but had been adopted into the senatorial Aelii clan, hence his name change.
The adoption entitled Sejanus to a senatorial career, but he must have decided that the prefecture of the Praetorian Guard offered him more real power and personal access to the emperor. It also allowed him to avoid the suspicion that surrounded ambitious senators. Tiberius chose a few trusted equestrians to form part of his most intimate circle.
Within a year, Sejanus held the position on his own when his father was promoted to the prefecture of Egypt. Enjoying a trusted pedigree, he quickly inveigled himself into Tiberius’ favour. Sejanus was the first of the praetorian prefects to experiment with the power and influence the position enjoyed, and thereby also with the potential power of the guard as a political force.
Detail from the Praetorian Relief, a Roman marble relief dated to c. 51–52 AD from the Arch of Claudius in Rome.
Sejanus was helped by chance, so often the principal agent in realising ambition. The huge theatre that had been built in Rome by Pompey Magnus in 55 BC burst into flames in the year AD 22. The fire was contained thanks to quick work by Sejanus, who used his position to tackle the emergency. Tiberius heaped praise on Sejanus for averting a catastrophe. The senate voted that a statue of Sejanus be erected on the grounds of the theatre.
In time, the career of Sejanus would expose how dangerous the commander of the guard could become. Tiberius ignored the signs, preferring to take as little interest as possible in the job of being emperor.
Sejanus made his first significant move in AD 23 when he installed all the praetorian cohorts in the Castra Praetoria, a fortified military camp in the northeastern part of the city. Under Augustus, they had been based at several locations in Italy, safely dispersed away from Rome, but may have already been brought into various barracks around the city under Tiberius. Their new dedicated fortress transformed the significance of the prefecture of the guard. The Castra Praetoria, which would remain a permanent feature until the guard’s disbandment under Constantine almost three centuries later, meant that the men were now directly and immediately under Sejanus’ control.
October 20, 2026
Cognitive dissonance made flesh – Homosexual Intifada: A Queer Palestinian Anthology
They say that politics makes unlikely bedfellows, but the alliance-of-convenience between Palestinian extremists and LGBT activists is surely one of the least likely to have a long, happy life. A guest post by Fred Litwin at The Real Story reviews a book that I wouldn’t have believed to be real but apparently is:
As soon as I saw this book cover, I knew I had to write a review. And the dedication alone had me hooked: “For our Ghazzawi kin, surviving siege after impossible siege, teaching life under the most abject genocidal conditions …
For the martyrs, from every river to every sea,
especially those who died illegible deaths
For those whose queerness was erased from the pages of
history & the ancestors queered on their own terms
For the queer living, despite the systems that
attempt to annihilate Palestinians everywhere
George Abraham (he/they), one of the editors of the anthology, writes in his introduction about “writing from within the dying days of western empire and racial capital”. And so this is a hopeful book:
Contextualized within this interconnected settler genocidal regime, it is unsurprising to witness a rise of queer and trans insurgence, both globally and domestically in the US, standing in solidarity with Palestinians against the very regimes that dispose of all of our bodies without hesitation or consequence.
This rising up is leading to something extremely worthwhile – the “genocidal moment is changing our community’s understanding of queerness”. A friend of Abraham’s says that her [their?] homophobic, transphobic parents are “starting to unlearn these harmful views because of this notable queer solidarity”.
It’s too bad it took a genocide to get people to change their minds but “pessoptimistically, it is a testament to the living power of organized people”. I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to think pessoptimistically: Are minds really being changed in Gaza? Is Hamas starting to “unlearn these harmful views” because of the queers marching in western streets?
Unfortunately, the “transphobic attacks” right here in the west are “the ruling class’s efforts to reconstitute the gender binary, which has always been at the heart of its colonial hegemony”. And so the community’s rage and despair leads to what Abraham calls the “Homosexual Intifada”.
We come to think about the ways queer and Palestinian identities might co-resist, pushing each other to horizons of resistance, knowing that our entangled fight is one against an entire world order, and one that carries many universes of grief.
Thankfully, editing this anthology has connected Abraham “with queer Palestinians all over the world, across generations and transnational contexts”. The contributions of the various authors and poets “treat queer Palestinian life on our own terms, give you clarity and precision of language that feels dangerous to the imperial English of our daily lives”.
Clarity? There’s one word that appears only once in the entire anthology: Hamas.
Precision of language? Let’s have a look at the “precision of language” in Homosexual Intifada.
From the poem “Further Thoughts on Living” by Noor Hindi (she/they):
I loved pinning her against the wall and fucking until her screams silenced her shame.
Noor Aldayeh (they/them), a self-described non-binary Syrian-Palestinian lesbian contributed “Arab Lesbianism is Not an Oxymoron”.
Similarly, gender diversity (and what we might define as gender-queerness or transness, acknowledging such labeling as inherently colonial in nature) has an even wider and deeper standing within our history. From intersex ancient deities (see: Astarte) to gender-nonconforming djinn, to medieval androgyny to “cross-dressing” AFABs [assigned female at birth] in early 1900s Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon – beyond binary ideas and manifestations of identities – not only exist but are deeply integral to SWANA history as a whole.
Update: Of course, I didn’t spot the typo in the headline until after the post had gone live …
Singapore’s unique approach to multiculturalism
In the third and final (?) part of Ed West‘s review of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs, he describes the multicultural issue in Singapore and how it was addressed to reduce racial tensions in the city state:
Singapore led the way in becoming the first truly multicultural democracy, but this entailed sacrifices. Because segregation was a major driver of inter-communal tension, so the new Housing and Development Board, as well as providing much needed homes, brought with it the revolutionary idea of neighbourhood quotas. This meant the vast majority of Singaporeans being allocated a flat, on which they had a 99-year lease, in purposefully desegregated housing blocks. The city would never again suffer from race riots.
Parliamentary seats were also reorganised to ensure that every constituency had a representative from each group. “Without this arrangement, the Chinese majority in all constituencies would most likely return Chinese candidates”, he wrote. Voters “preferred one who empathised with them, spoke the same dialect or language and was of the same race. All candidates who have campaigned know this only too well. It was going to be difficult if not impossible for a Malay or Indian candidate to win against a Chinese candidate.”
Lee had a hard-headed approach to multiculturalism, as only someone who was truly multicultural could. As one of the Straits Chinese elite, English was his “master language”, but he spoke Malay well, more like a peranakan — a local-born Chinese — rather than a totok, a recent Chinese immigrant. For his annual speech, which could take up to two hours, Lee would address the audience first in Malay, then Hokkien, and finally in English. Hokkien would later be replaced by Mandarin, even though “for many Chinese Singaporeans, dialect is the real mother tongue and Mandarin a stepmother tongue”.
Lee’s view of multiculturalism also directed his approach to the law. An early experience of defending rioters in 1951 during the “Jungle Girl” disturbances had left him sceptical of the jury system, and he had it abolished in 1969, except for murder trials. Lee saw juries as incompatible with a multi-racial society, but he also believed that many people were too irrational to make such a decision.
He wrote how “a Straits Times court reporter who had watched many jury trials gave evidence … that superstitious beliefs and a general reluctance to take responsibility for severe punishment, especially the death sentence, made Asian jurors most reluctant to convict. They preferred acquittal or conviction on a lesser charge. The reporter said he could predict that whenever a pregnant woman was a member of the jury there would be no conviction on a murder charge, for otherwise her child would be born cursed. After the bill was passed and jury trials were abolished, there were fewer miscarriages of justice arising from the vagaries of jury sentiments.”
Singapore’s tough approach to crime became world famous, and curiously this was partly inspired by his experiences of the Japanese occupation, after which “I did not accept the theory that a criminal is a victim of society”.
He wrote how “punishment then was so severe that even in 1944-1945, when many did not have enough to eat, there were no burglaries and people could leave their front doors unlocked, day or night. The deterrent was effective. The British used to have whipping with a cat-o’-nine-tails or rattan in Singapore. After the war, they abolished whipping but retained caning (with rattan). We found caning more effective than long prison terms and imposed it for crimes related to drugs, arms trafficking, rape, illegal entry into Singapore, and vandalising of public property.”
October 18, 2026
Singapore: The rise of Lee Kuan Yew
At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West continues his review of Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography, detailing the difficult period after the British withdrawal from overseas military commitments “East of Suez”, including the vast naval base in Singapore and the Royal Air Force’s Changi air base:
October 31, 1971, and the British are saying goodbye to their military base in Singapore, the city where the empire endured its greatest humiliation. Three years earlier, an increasingly straitened former imperial power had announced its immediate closure as part of their withdraw east of Suez. For the recently independent city-state, this was a disaster, and prime minister Lee Kuan Yew had done his best to postpone the big day. The city already suffered from high unemployment, and Britain’s military accounted for 20 per cent of Singapore’s GDP, providing 30,000 direct jobs and 40,000 in support.
Yet retreat was inevitable, and when the day came British forces were given a ceremonial send-off, Lee writes in his memoir, the withdrawal carried out with “good intentions, goodwill and good faith”. After 150 years in the Strait, the British were gone, handing over the airbase to the colony they created for the symbolic fee of one dollar.
Lee had cut his teeth in the independence movement, but the city-state could not survive without protection. As with many small countries which had depended on the British, Singapore now shifted its allegiances to its successor state, the United States of America.
The imperial retreat presented a huge financial headache for the former anti-colonial activist, but increasingly a more personal sense of unease. “I feared that slowly but inexorably British influence would decline”, he writes: “and American influence expand. For my generation born and bred in empire, it was not an easy change. I had to come to terms with American power without a British buffer. The British had enforced their will with a certain civility. The Americans were different, as I could see from the way they dealt with South Vietnamese leaders, and even with Thai and Filipino leaders who were not in as parlous a position as those in Saigon. America was a power on the ascendant, with bulging muscles and a habit of flexing them.”
Lee had built up a good relationship with both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and used this to delay the withdrawal for as long as possible. He had less luck in getting the British to help Singapore train their army, something they had done with Malaysia where the threat of communist insurgency necessitated it. Neither were most of the other newly independent states willing to help: Egypt’s Nasser recognised Singapore and sent good wishes, but ignored his requests for military aid. India’s prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri also said no, so he turned to another small post-colonial nation surrounded by hostile neighbours. When a small group of Israelis arrived in November 1965, they had to keep their existence a secret to prevent unrest from the Malay minority. “To disguise their presence, we called them ‘Mexicans'”, he recalls: “They looked swarthy enough”.
The Chinese here traditionally shunned military service, “a historical legacy of the predatory habits of soldiers during the years of rebellions and warlords in China”. As trading people they looked down on the military as a career choices, and he quotes the Chinese saying “a good lad does not become a soldier, good steel does not become nails”.
Lee also had to negotiate the problem of “representation” which mars all multicultural societies. Under the British, the city had been policed by Malays, often recruited from Malaysia itself, as well as the more neutral Gurkhas. Now “we had to find some way to induct more Chinese and Indians into the police and armed forces to reflect their population mix”, otherwise they would not be accepted as legitimate. “We wanted the people to regard our soldiers as their protectors – a reversal from the days when army and police uniforms aroused fear and resentment as symbols of colonial coercion”.
Conscription, unpopular under the British, was reintroduced, and the authorities even set up military cadet corps in all secondary schools, although his colleague Goh Keng Swee reflected that “the Spartan approach to life does not come about naturally in a community that lives by buying and selling”. As with Israel, another small state formed by a market-dominant minority, they were forced to adapt their way of life to survive; yet rather than become the new Sparta, Singapore focussed on becoming the new Corinth, a commercial centre where great fortunes could be made. When the British finally withdrew, RAF Changi Air Base became Changi Airport, a transport hub which came to epitomise the city’s commercial success.
October 16, 2026
Three Heinleins
While I can’t claim to have read every word Robert A. Heinlein published, I’ve read most of his novels and short stories. I started with Starship Troopers in grade school. I was a still-wet-behind-the-ears army cadet and that book rocked my world. It’s still in that small group of early books I’ll re-read every few years. Stranger in a Strange Land was an outlier for me, even though it was the next book Heinlein wrote and it became much more relevant culturally by the time I read it (early 70s) it didn’t speak to me the way Starship Troopers had done. On the other hand The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is another one of my all-time favourites, but it helped that when I read it I was already interested in libertarian ideas. All that said, I pretty much felt obliged to share Derek Ryan Jacobs’ short essay on the three books:
There may be no single author in science fiction more persistently misread than Robert A. Heinlein. Depending on what you read and how you interpret it, he is a fascist militarist, a free-love mystic, or a libertarian firebrand. He writes novels that venerate duty and others that dissolve it, texts that praise hierarchy and others that work to dismantle it. Starship Troopers is cited by conservative politicians for its advocacy of earned citizenship; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is direct rebellion. In between, Stranger in a Strange Land was adopted by communes as spiritual scripture. The contradiction seems total. How could one author plausibly inhabit all these roles at once — much less within a single decade?
0. Introduction
When read together and with care, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress do not reveal an author in philosophical chaos. They reveal an author in methodical experiment. Each novel proposes a different relationship between the individual and the state, a different subgenre framework, and a different set of philosophical tools. But beneath these surface dissonances, all three are working toward the same end: to interrogate the legitimacy of power, and to dramatize the conditions under which agency becomes moral authority. Heinlein does not offer answers so much as simulations. He runs three models. He sets the parameters and variables, and lets the story prove — or fail to prove — the coherence of its system.
It is no accident that these books appeared in the order they did. Starship Troopers came first, a tightly structured martial bildungsroman that argues for citizenship earned through service. Stranger in a Strange Land followed two years later, its spiritual and structural opposite, casting off hierarchy in favor of intuitive communion. Then came The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a revolutionary treatise dressed as a caper novel — neither ecstatic nor doctrinaire, but strategic, and committed to the long work of building something better. Rather than signaling a philosophical evolution, this sequence maps a series of aesthetic transformations. Each novel shifts genre to create a new laboratory and tell a story of outsiders confronting power. And each converges on a shared moral structure: legitimacy requires individual consent, and any illegitimate system is unfit to govern.
[…]
Conclusion — Three Systems, One Standard
It is tempting to treat Heinlein’s bibliography as a contradiction, or a drift, or an ideological muddle. It is none of those things. What Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress reveal — when read in dialogue — is a single philosophical theme rendered in three keys. Legitimacy must be earned. Authority without consent is counterfeit. Freedom without structure is meaningless.
The genre of science fiction gave Heinlein the tools to test that claim. Subgenre let him shift the boundaries, change the stakes, and vary the rules of engagement. But in every world he built, from the Mobile Infantry to the Martian mind to the lunar republic, the same truth holds: agency is a responsibility. And only those who accept its cost are fit to wield its power.
QotD: Niccolao Manucci as a “player character” in history
How do I know that? Well let’s return to the teenage Venetian, suddenly orphaned of his foster father: “I was left alone, sad and anxious, having nothing to console me, nor anywhere to turn in order to recover my things”. Then things go from bad to worse: two other Europeans show up and steal the rest of Manucci’s stuff and coerce him into traveling with them to Delhi. But then somehow the young man scores an interview with the king’s vizier and, using the bits of Persian he picked up along the journey, convinces him to arrest the men who’d tried to abduct him. He parlays the vizier’s friendship into a royal audience, and thence into an offer of employment from the crown prince. In a short while, Manucci is a courtier hanging around the palace in fine clothes paid for by the state, getting tutored in Indian languages and Mughal history and correct deportment. He tells us that the only difficulty in his life was the need to constantly scheme in order to avoid being forcibly converted to Islam, and then interrupts his own narration to give us a few hundred pages of ancient Mughal history.
Are you rolling your eyes yet? Every bit of this story so far, starting from the moment he snuck onto that ship, is literally unbelievable. Irvine certainly seemed to feel that way, if his footnotes and interjections are anything to go by. He evidently flung himself into a centuries-later posthumous cross-examination, looking for any detail in Manucci’s narrative that’s out of place. He doesn’t find any. Worse, he finds numerous corroborating accounts in other contemporaneous sources. But if this story actually happened, then we are left with a nasty trichotomy. One of three things must be true: (1) Manucci is the luckiest sonofabitch alive. (2) Manucci has superhuman powers of persuasion. (3) Manucci is leaving out something important. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a little bit of all three, because Manucci is a player character.
They walk among us. Lately the preferred jargon term has been “agency”. Before that people called them “live players”. In the old days they were referred to as “great men”, but that one’s my least favorite of the descriptors because it implies that they have to be like Cyrus the Great or Napoleon, when in reality they’re often much harder to spot. That’s because, as Samo Burja notes, player characters often deliberately cloak themselves in order to avoid detection by other player characters. These ones you may only notice by their aftereffects, like the lingering gravitational distortion after a singularity has whizzed by, reality warping as they knife through to their destination and then reconstituting itself behind them.
Humanity’s great sages have long known that every so often the planets are in a particular configuration, and a Child of Destiny is born. The real question is why. The fun-ruiners will note that in a world of billions of people, some of them are just going to be 6σ lucky. It is difficult for us even to conceive what it means to be 6σ lucky, and yet, like some bizarre object conjured by a non-constructive mathematical proof, we know such people are out there, somewhere in the wave function. But let’s not be fun-ruiners for a moment and consider the other possibilities. Maybe these individuals are chosen by God, or the gods. Or maybe they are the ones paying for the simulation, and therefore have access to the root login. Whatever their source, they exist. Often they spend part of their lives unaware of their true nature. And then … they awaken.
There was a little while when “NPC” was getting thrown around as a term of abuse, but as I have explained at some length,1 there’s nothing wrong with being an NPC. We come by it honestly. At some point, in the Springtime of your life, you bumped up against the universe, you pushed the boundaries, you pushed your limits. On that day, the universe pushed back. Hard. You learned your lesson, like a little kid who touched a hot stove. NPCs are formed from scar tissue, a fibrous mass of tough lessons about the nature of the world. But, as we have just deduced, there must exist people who, whether by divine ordinance or fluke of probability, had a very different experience on that fateful day. They pushed against the universe, and the universe gave in and gave them everything they wanted. And what lesson does that impart? Something like: “Rules are for the sheep, but you can hack the matrix and get what you want”. Now they are awakened. And the crazy thing is that if you keep getting lucky, not 6σ lucky, but just on-a-roll lucky, the awakened state can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some parts of the world really can be hacked with a little luck and a lot of determination. So there’s a feedback loop that can rapidly amplify mere one-in-a-billion luck into miraculous, reality-altering luck. That’s my attempt at a purely naturalistic explanation of player characters. Or maybe they’re just chosen by God.
Manucci is a slippery one. I only caught him because I read the first part of this book twice: once when I was reading it through casually, and then again as I sat down to write this review and tried to figure out how the hell to convey all this. Again, as with a Gene Wolfe novel, to understand the beginning you must have read the ending. In all the thousands of pages of narration, the one subject Manucci barely touches on is himself. That’s because Manucci is a player character practicing very high-level obfuscation techniques. This sort of misdirection is also the hallmark of a con-man, and what do you know: there is one brief, brief moment when Manucci gets a little too sure of himself and lets slip that he actually was functioning as a super-effective con-man back there in 17th century India. He wove his web of shadows around the Mughal aristocracy, and then he nearly got it around us the readers as well.
So we finally have Manucci pinned down: he is the subtype of player character known as a “guile hero“. You know them from stories: Odysseus, or Locke Lamora, or almost every character played by Kevin Spacey. Manucci is like them, his character class is either rogue or bard.2 At what age was he awakened? Was he already aware of his powers when he crept down that Venetian dock? And what really happened between him and Bellomont? Did he seduce the English gentleman? Or did he suss out his mission and blackmail him with a threat to make it public? Or did he just turn the full force of his personality on the hopeless cavalier and get 6σ lucky on his CHA roll? We shall never know. But if you are asking questions like these, then you now have the correct interpretive lens for what follows.3
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-09-08.
- Twice!
- This is a totally OP and broken build, since as a Venetian he already gets a racial bonus to DEX and CHA.
- And you’re one step ahead of Irvine, who as far as I can tell never figured it out.
October 13, 2026
No wonder the wokies hate J.K. Rowling
The Harry Potter books used to be sacred lore to the woke generation until the author committed the unforgivable crime of defending the rights of women against the encroachment of trans-women. Yet, it doesn’t take a very close reading of the texts to discover so many things that appear to have slipped under the notice of the progressives and form the core beliefs of the fictional world she created:
Amelia crossing paths with Harry Potter and the gang seems much more appropriate than it might have in the past
Potential is largely hereditary, family is most important, the media are lying parasites, the state can’t be trusted with education, and children should be taught armed self-defense.
These are not subversive readings. These are the plot.
The Harry Potter series was the most successful publishing phenomenon of the late twentieth century. It sold half a billion copies. Progressive parents handed it to their children as a parable about tolerance and the courage to stand against prejudice. The movies grossed eight billion dollars. The author became an icon of liberal cultural production and then, by a process that remains opaque to the people who made her famous, a figure of political villainy for holding positions indistinguishable from mainstream liberal feminism circa 2005.
Set aside the author. The books exist independently of whatever J.K. Rowling believes or is believed to believe. Read them for what they actually say. The worldview encoded in the narrative structure, the plot logic, and the moral arc is not the worldview the books were marketed as containing. It is considerably more interesting.
Blood Will Tell
Magic is inherited. This is the foundational premise of the entire fictional world and the premise from which everything else follows.
You are either born a witch or wizard, or you are not. No amount of study, effort, practice, or desire will make a Muggle magical. The reverse is also true: Squibs, born to magical families but lacking the gift, cannot acquire it. They are defective members of magical lineages, pitied and often hidden. Argus Filch, the Hogwarts caretaker, is a Squib. His bitterness and cruelty toward the students is the bitterness of a man who can see the gift in others but will never have it himself.
[…]
Family Carries Everything
Harry survives Voldemort’s killing curse because his mother died to protect him. Not a metaphor. A literal magical mechanism. Lily Potter’s sacrificial love created a protection charm encoded in Harry’s blood that made him impossible for Voldemort to kill directly.
[…]
The Press Are the Enemy
The Daily Prophet is introduced early and is corrupt throughout.
[…]
The State Cannot Be Trusted to Educate Your Children
Dolores Umbridge is a government administrator appointed by the Ministry of Magic to reform Hogwarts.
Her arrival at Hogwarts in Order of the Phoenix is the politicization of education made literal. The Ministry does not trust Dumbledore. The Ministry does not want students to learn Defense Against the Dark Arts. A student body trained in combat magic is a student body that might resist. Umbridge’s curriculum is therefore purely theoretical: no spellcasting, no practical application, only reading approved texts about defensive magic that the students are forbidden to practice.
[…]
The books contain other lessons that the progressive readership tended not to discuss.
House-elves are slaves. They are hereditary servants bound to magical families, forbidden to disobey direct orders, and conditioned to punish themselves for disloyalty. Dobby is freed and becomes a hero. But Dobby is the exception. Most house-elves, including the Hogwarts house-elves, do not want freedom. Hermione’s Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare is played for laughs. The elves reject her knitted hats. They are offended by the offer of liberation. Dobby is a weirdo.
The narrative does not resolve this. The house-elves are not freed after Voldemort falls. The epilogue does not mention them. The implication is that hereditary servitude is acceptable if the servants are happy, and these servants are happy. Whatever else this is, it is not an abolitionist text.
[…]
What The Books Actually Taught
The Harry Potter series is a fundamentally reactionary conservative text dressed in the aesthetic of liberal tolerance.
It teaches that ability is inherited and the argument is only about whether pedigree or demonstrated ability should determine status. It teaches that family is the highest loyalty and the source of the most powerful magic. It teaches that the press serves power and the only response is to route around it. It teaches that the state will capture education to produce compliant subjects and that the answer is to arm the children. It teaches that some people are born for greatness and others are born for service, and the main thing is to get the sorting right.
None of this requires reading against the grain. It requires only reading.
QotD: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wokester avant la lettre
1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.
2. The “Noble Savage” is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.
3. The “General Will” is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were “properly enlightened”. Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation.
4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every “liberation” movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.
5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.
6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda [hypocrisy] (remember the obłuda of communism👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.
7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.
Krzysztof Szczawinski, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-10. (Auto-translated from the original Polish by X)
October 11, 2026
In The Country of the Blind: A Tale of Applied Cliology and Incompetence
Feral Historian
Published 5 Jun 2026Michael Flynn’s In The Country of the Blind gives us a mystery wrapped around an examination of the idea of predictive history. Sort of Foundation with more laughs and cynicism.
I’ve been sitting on this one for some time now, hoping to think of some good b-roll to cut in. But I got nothing, so here it is. For those that listen to these while driving, this one’s for you.
I haven’t found the study I mentioned that isn’t paywalled, but here’s a link so you know which one I’m talking about. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/92…
00:00 Intro
04:50 Results, Not Intentions
10:43 Technopeasants
13:21 Scientific Management
16:33 Back to Now
18:43 Power Structures🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
🔹 and Merch! | feral-shop.fourthwall.com
October 8, 2026
Singapore’s journey from British colony to independent economic star
At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West reviews the autobiography of Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of an independent Singapore and the man most responsible for its amazing economic success:
There are few political memoirs as readable as Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World to First, but then there were few politicians like him. Arguably the greatest statesman of the post-war era, Lee led Singapore out of a failed federation with Malaysia, turning a poor and precarious little nation into a dazzling success story, now twice as rich as Britain, its former colonial ruler.
While many things have been written about Lee, the most interesting are by the man himself, with his early years covered in The Singapore Story, published in 1998. The sequel mixes memoir, analysis on international affairs, his own personal philosophy and a how-to guide to statecraft. As he puts it: “There are books to teach you how to build a house, how to repair engineers, how to write a book. But I have not seen a book on how to build a nation out of a disparate collection of immigrants from China, British India, and the Dutch East Indies …” It’s safe to say that he’s cornered that particular market.
It is a strangely cinematic story, almost fit for Hollywood: a man battling to save his small nation against the odds, who must feel that all is lost but struggles on and ultimately wins. Singapore’s identity, unlike that of most young countries, was not forged on the battlefield with swords and guns, but by markets, driven by a determined belief in economic growth, social order and hard work. Only these goals would allow it to overcome its severe demographic challenges, and avoid the violent fate of many post-colonial societies. Defying what experts thought was the direction of history, it became the most successful, and significant, city-state since the Renaissance.
The situation to start with was desperate, and Lee can be seen crying in black and white video footage from August 1965, when he announces that his city has been kicked out of Malaysia, a rare case of a state achieving independence against its will. As he puts it: “Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it.”
Singapore was poor and cursed by its combustible demography. Twice the size of the Isle of Wight — and roughly the same shape — it nestles at the bottom of the Malay peninsula and to its south, just an hour’s ferry ride, is the giant of Indonesia. Neither neighbour was friendly, and Indonesia’s declared regional policy of Konfrontasi – Confrontation – was not reassuring.
Under Stamford Raffles in 1819, the British had founded Singapore as a trading post out of a collection of villages inhabited by Malays and a long-established community of overseas Chinese. Its position at a choke point was crucial for control of the sea lanes between the Far East and Indian Ocean, and under British rule it flourished as an entrepôt. Free trade was its foundational belief, and its hands-off rulers allowed the Chinese in particular to express their entrepreneurial skills; as its economy grew, Chinese migration increased, and by the time of independence they constituted about three-quarters of the population, with Malays accounting for 15 per cent and Indians the remainder.
Born in 1923 as the eldest of five, Lee was something of a father figure to his three brothers and sister, their actual father being a somewhat irresponsible and distant figure, and he certainly exemplified Adler’s birth-order theory, becoming the conscientious elder sibling to an entire nation.
The great-grandson of Hakka-speaking immigrants, Lee came from the somewhat Anglicised Straits Chinese elite. Often British in their mindset, Lee describes himself as “the last Victorian” and this worldview would shape Singapore’s history. He attended the English-speaking Raffles College, where he met his future wife, Kwa Geok Choo, another lawyer and a formidable individual in her own right; the two often finished first and second in exams.
Lee would have gone on to great things in any case, but he happened to come of age in a notably turbulent period. If worldviews are indeed shaped by the events of an individual’s twentieth year, for the budding young law student it was the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the British Empire’s greatest defeat and humiliation. Lee noted at the time that, whatever happened next, this was the end of European rule.
October 7, 2026
Lessons from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander
As a child, I was a very early fan of C.S. Forester’s series of novels on the career of Horatio Hornblower, so I was a bit wary about reading Patrick O’Brian’s new-to-me stories set in the same period. A friend from Halifax practically forced Master and Commander on me during my first visit to Nova Scotia and I quickly picked up Post Captain, HMS Surprise and a few more in the series. At Athena’s Bridge, Mike Hennelly makes the case that there are valuable leadership lessons that can be learned from O’Brian’s work:
Cover from a later printing than the one I read in 1982.
In the study of leadership, there are many who say that there is nothing to be gained from novels or movies. Their argument is that only the study of reality (real CEOs, real generals, real political leaders) will yield insights of value for the study and practice of leadership. The purpose of this essay is to argue the opposite case. One of the most remarkable literary achievements of the 20th century was Patrick O’Brian’s multi-volume depiction of British naval life during the Napoleonic Wars. Eventually stretching to twenty books, O’Brian gives us the lives of Captain Jack Aubrey and his great friend, Doctor Stephen Maturin. A reviewer from the New York Times stated (rather categorically) that O’Brian’s books are “the best historical novels ever written”. O’Brian’s characters finally appeared in a movie entitled Master & Commander and the film faithfully captures much of the atmosphere and spirit of this maritime world.
O’Brian’s world, both in the books and the movie, is surprisingly faithful to the world of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. He brings to life the nature of the great naval leaders of the time, the victories they achieved and the hardships they endured. As O’Brian himself notes, “I have gone straight to the source for the fighting in this book. I have log-books, official letters, contemporary accounts or the participants’ own memoirs“. What follows is not a review of the movie nor a synopsis of the plot. This is an essay that uses one particular movie to frame a discussion of leadership in realistic, uncertain and risky circumstances. Our focus is the character of Jack Aubrey – created by Patrick O’Brian, visualized by director Peter Weir and brought to life by actor Russell Crowe. An examination of Aubrey’s behavior and attitudes throughout the movie provides a wealth of insight into the mystery that is called leadership.
To begin at the beginning, a consideration of the term “master and commander” brings two curious facts to light. First of all, in the early days of the Royal Navy, this term applied to two people – not one. When English warships fought the Spanish Armada, for example, they had a “master” who was a life-long mariner with the nautical experience to sail the ship and a “commander” (frequently a noble) who was entrusted with the combat performance of the ship. Over time, this phrase was combined and came to describe the responsibilities of a warship’s captain. The second curious fact is that this term (as a job description) is incomplete. When Patrick O’Brian brought the character of Captain Jack Aubrey to life, he did so in a way that clearly shows that the term “master and commander” was an incomplete description of a captain’s responsibilities. HMS Surprise might be a ship (that needed a master to sail her) and she might be a weapon of war (that needed a commander to fight her) but she was also a collection of almost two hundred sailors of all sorts (who needed a leader to direct and influence their actions). To carry out all the responsibilities of a ship’s captain, Jack Aubrey needed to be a “master, commander and leader”. Without the ability to take a random set of landsmen and mold them into a cohesive, disciplined and skilled crew, he would not have been able to sail the ship safely nor would he have been able to exert any combat power.
“She’s a vastly heavier ship. She’s out of our class” (or, how leaders get others to face existential risk)
As the movie begins, it is the spring of 1805 and we are aboard HMS Surprise, a small Royal Navy frigate of 28 guns with a crew of 197 souls. The Surprise is under orders to find the French frigate Acheron and “sink, burn or take her as a prize”. The Surprise is off the coast of Brazil and approaching a fogbank when she is ambushed by the Acheron. Captain Aubrey is energized by the prospect of combat (“straight at ’em, Mr. Mowatt!“) but events soon take a turn for the worse as Surprise‘s rudder is shot away and the British barely escape safely into the fog.
We learn more about Aubrey as he faces a serious leadership challenge after this disastrous encounter with the French. The ship’s officers, somewhat in shock, are discussing the engagement and they observe that Acheron was “more like a ship of the line than a frigate” and “our shots couldn’t penetrate“. Their misgivings are understandable. HMS Surprise, with twenty-eight guns, is about as small as a ship can be and still be called a frigate. The forty-four guns of the Acheron make it far larger and more heavily armed than the Surprise and what this means in combat is that every broadside fired by the Acheron is almost four times the weight of a broadside from the Surprise. Aubrey’s command team assumes that the clear superiority of the French ship means the Surprise will have to abandon her mission and head home. But their misgivings are not in line with the attitudes of a) the British Admiralty, b) the British public and c) their captain. At this point in the war, most Britons and the Admiralty operate under the assumption that their navy should always project an aura of invincibility. This has been a British naval characteristic since the great British sea-victories at Camperdown (1797) and the Nile (1798). Furthermore, we find out that Jack Aubrey’s mental model of an ideal officer is Lord Nelson who was famous for his relentlessly aggressive behavior at sea. One of Nelson’s most famous sayings was “no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy” and that is exactly what Aubrey intends to do to the Acheron. Aubrey quickly disabuses his officers of the idea of abandoning their mission. Positively radiating with decisiveness, he tells them there is not a moment to lose if they are to carry out repairs and catch up with the French.
Aubrey faces two challenges as he attempts to lead his ship into a situation of existential risk. First, he must gain the support of his officers and secondly, he must ensure the willingness of his crew. He addresses these concerns in turn. To gain the support of his officers and bolster their morale, he addresses their concerns with a discussion of battle tactics in a way that provides reassurance. Although the French ship has far more guns, Aubrey explains that the Surprise possesses intangible advantages that level the killing field. He is convinced that the Surprise is more maneuverable than the Acheron and he intends that his gun crews be better-trained and more effective than their French counterparts. Without any further dissent from his officers, the Surprise carries on with its pursuit of the bigger and more powerful enemy ship – which is a testament to the effectiveness of Aubrey’s leadership.
Aubrey’s approach to the crew about the threat of the Acheron is intensely practical in nature. The crew spend much of their time engaged in gunnery drill. Captain Aubrey has very high standards for the ship’s gunnery because he expects his gun crews to be both fast and accurate. Accuracy in naval gunfire is always a challenge because ships are inherently unstable firing platforms, but, in addition, the faster the rate of fire, the sooner a gun crew is exhausted with a corresponding reduction in accuracy. Aubrey’s standards, while achievable, are higher than the standard in naval fleets of the time. His standards require intensive, dangerous training which is the only way to produce highly disciplined and effective gun crews. To keep his crew motivated while they are training so hard, Aubrey gives them a rousing talk (Do you want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? NO!, they roar back. Do you want your children to have to sing “La Marseillaise”? NO!). He also states his expectations in terms that every sailor can grasp – the gun crews of the Surprise must be able to fire two broadsides for every broadside fired by the Acheron. Over time, the crew of the Surprise is welded into a cohesive and effective fighting force; they take pride in their achievements and their confidence grows as they face the prospect of future combat.
