We join Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, captain in the Royal Navy and surgeon/intelligence agent respectively, where we left them at the end of The Thirteen Gun Salute: shipwrecked on a remote Dutch East Indies island. Employing great enterprise, Aubrey secures a new ship and sails for Australia. A penal colony by charter, in fact a grim outpost of legalized slavery, conditions there exacerbate Maturin's Irish temper and nearly provoke a diplomatic crisis. And an excursion into the bush ends in