The Dear Surprise is a website dedicated to the Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian and the Age of Sail. It has been online since March 2010. In June 2018 the entire site was deleted (gahhhhhh!!!) and is now in the process of being rebuilt. There were almost 500 articles on the original site so… It’s going to take awhile. If you think of a post you enjoyed and would like to read again, feel free to contact me to request that I add it ASAP rather than in chronological order.
Captain’s note about content: I do not create any of the content of this site (unless otherwise noted). My goal is to curate the vast store of knowledge created by others and spread across the web and put it all in one place. I don’t post a list of links because I want to be sure when people come to my site they will find what they’re looking for. I also don’t want knowledge to be lost should a site go down, as a few exclusive posts were almost lost when this site went down. Luckily I have backups but that could have been a tragedy, not just an annoyance but a genuine loss of historical information. It is my policy to fully attribute all content along with links back to the source. This site is not for profit – it actually costs me a stupid amount of money to run – and its focus is education. More knowledge being available to more people is a good thing.
These sites and people have served as significant inspiration to me:
The Gunroom
The Patrick O’Brian Compendium
The Ships of Jack Aubrey
Gibbons Burke
Tom Horn
Anthony Gary Brown
Michael Schuyler
Kerry Webb
This site is hosted by SiteGround and built on the WordPress platform. Code is poetry.
34° 3′ 8″ N x 118° 14′ 34″ W