My Fourteen Year Project

Fourteen years ago I finished reading the twenty one novels by Patrick O'Brian set during the Napoleonic wars and on various ships commanded by the protagonist Jack Aubrey and his particular friend Stephen Maturin. I decided that interactive maps of the voyages could be a useful addition to the Internet (built with the newly available Google Maps Javascript API).

Today I finished that project:

• Master and Commander
• Post Captain
• HMS Surprise
• The Mauritius Command - HMS Boadicea
• The Mauritius Command - HMS Raisonable
• The Mauritius Command - Dr Maturin
• Desolation Island
• The Fortune of War
• The Surgeons Mate
• The Ionian Mission
• Treason's Harbour
• The Far Side of the World
• The Reverse of the Medal
• The Letter of Marque
• The Thirteen Gun Salute
• The Nutmeg of Consolation
• Clarissa Oakes
• The Wine Dark Sea
• The Commodore
• The Yellow Admiral
• The Hundred Days
• Blue at the Mizzen
• The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey

The slow, sometimes painful, progression through these twenty one volumes has ultimately been incredibly rewarding. Hundreds of thousands of people (492,902 at last count) have visited the site and many have contacted me with support and encouragement.

This site, dated, clumsy and so embarrassingly overdue for a re-write, has been a platform on which I have been able to do a lot of other fun stuff. It is something, despite its flaws, that I am very proud of.

I think it reinforces Jason Robert's assertion that "the amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about".

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