A chase scene with two tall ships is exciting? Suspenseful? Hell yes. Patrick O’Brian is able, through masterful use of language, to create a chase scene between two ships of the line that lasts for weeks. Probably more exciting than any other chase scene I have ever read or seen on screen.
How can it be an exciting chase? My wife asked me that as I was reading and she interrupted me and I responded that I can’t talk I’m in the middle of a chase. How can a chase over hundreds of miles of open ocean between ships of the line (a 74 gun three deck Dutch Man of war named Waakzaamheid and the 50 gun Leopard) with speeds barely ten knots? O’Brian does it.
» Read more: Desolation Island: The South Atlantic Chase
). Lt. Pullings has followed him to his command as well as his Steward Preserved Killick, his Coxswain Bonden, and Midshipman Babbington. 
The Polychrest crew was close to mutiny. Aubrey knew this and stepped up the raid on the French port by a day in order to stifle the mutiny and to give the Polychrest that crucial element of surprise. O’Brian writes naval battle scenes with such brilliance that the reader is hard pressed to not put the book down until Aubrey and his crew have finished the engagement.