2) I think part of why it stands out so much is that there are incredibly few excellently-made age of sail war films. A few of the black & white and early color era ones are pretty good (The Sea Hawk and such) but those are pretty different in tone. Master and Commander is very nearly unique. You have to switch over to sci fi (Star Trek, maybe Forbidden Planet) to scratch a similar itch. If you want specifically age of sail, with that structure and tone (war, edge-of-civilization exploration with a ship), your options are very limited.

3) I have discovered only very-belatedly that Peter Weir is one of my favorite directors. I had no idea for the longest time that the same guy did The Mosquito Coast, Master and Commander, The Year of Living Dangerously, Dead Poet's Society, Witness, and The Truman Show. Dude just knocked out one quietly-great movie after another, across multiple genres. I've gone back and picked up some others (Gallipoli, The Cars that Ate Paris) and have yet to be disappointed. The remainder of his all-too-short catalogue is high up my to-watch list. I've seen zero duds from him so far.

A detail I loved from both is that the French are treated with respect as formidable adversaries.

There's no love lost in battle but when either side are captured they generally treat each other well[2].

The other detail is the amount that the protagonists get permanently injured; burned, amputated, broken or just lost overboard. That happened, a lot and people just got on with it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_and_Commander

2. Maturin does get tortured in one of the books but we'll gloss over that.

(Incredible movie and very enjoyable novels, recommend Master and Commander and Aubrey Maturin to all HN users)

The Americans drilled daily with live cannon, while the British drilled less often, and without live fire (presumably to conserve powder and balls).

As an unsurprising result, American crews were more experienced at reloading under the duress of cannonade. The sound on the gun decks was so great it would burst eardrums. The smoke made it too hard to see anything a few feet from the portals.

If you've never been near a gunpowder cannon fire, it's hard to comprehend the surreal rupture of reality it causes in your perception. I was to the side, but in front, of one. My world went black, then lightening values of gray. Sound returned. Then people appeared in the fog, moving with their arms out trying to get away blindly from the threat they perceived (that was already over).

Without proper training, new sailors will stumble badly in their first firefight, and each man on the gundeck is crucial to a team. The officers were outside the deck, so they could receive orders. If you can't load your cannon while blind and deaf, your cannon sits quiet a long time.

Britain only became a thing after union in 1707. They had a good ~200 years, what with a great empire and industrialization and then an added bonus with America speaking English and britain being less damaged by WW2 than the rest of europe.

This made it easy to replace underperforming officers with those on the bench

Officers with the actual rank of captain would normally be permanently posted to a ship's command, and only large, prominent, or prestigious warships were captained by captain-rank officers. So it was highly desirable to at least attain that rank. You could get there by achievement on a temporary command which is part of why they were so sought after. Or simply through politics and patronage: the naval officer corps being intimately tied up with both the waning aristocratic and emerging modern nation-state systems.

Officers on the lists were necessarily "gentlemen" in a technical legal-social sense, and were mostly free to pursue their social, family and business interests when not posted to a command. Depending on their resources and connections outside the navy, they could have quite excellent alternatives to a command that was unlikely to make them much money. Or, like younger sons of small or declining holdings would take anything they could get.

Anyway this is what I remember from all the external reading I did trying to make sense of the politics of command in the aubrey-maturin books which is I think the normal way to learn it these days.

The way I understood it is that main incentive was to capture ships, that's on top of the pay; So, like a bonus structure in modern day and age. If you weren't assigned to a ship, you'd still get paid but half of what you'd get on a ship. Since there were eventually more officers than ships, this created a pool of officers eager for assignments and thus "if you won't, there's someone that will" management style.

Now, a bit more complicated what Allen argued about, also from what I understood, is if captains were on fixed wage they'd turn down assignments (which they could since they weren't permanently employed) since reward isn't following the risk and you'd probably get only the worst or desperate captains to accept the job instead of competent which have all the reasons to refuse.

I don't know, maybe I read it wrong, but it makes sense like that at least.

They were able to reject commissions because they weren't technically employed by the navy while unassigned. Officers could turn down a posting and still draw half pay, and in fact they kept their half pay during retirement.

A ship with the weather gage can choose when and how to engage.

> This was technically inferior since the lower gun ports could often be underwater (see image) and because the downwind (leeward) position made it easier to flee if needed.

This is reductive to the point of error. The ports of the lower gun deck MAY be unable to be fired in very heavy seas, but that doesn't affect frigates, or the upper deck of a ship of the line.

Additionally, if a leeward ship attempts to flee from the windward ship, the leeward ship would risk exposing its stern to the windward ship's raking fire. The stern of a ship is the least armored, least armed and also contains the essential steering elements of a ship. A stern raking fire could pierce the hull and fly the entire length of the ship, causing tremendous damage, in addition to potentially crippling a ship's ability to steer.

Finally, the encouragement to engage with the enemy has an advantage the article omits - massive career incentives - it's a chance for British Navy lieutenants and commanders to earn promotion. Many a commander was made post after a successful engagement with the enemy and many a lieutenant was promoted to commander after a successful battle. Beyond glory, a lieutenants would make roughly half what a commander made, and a post captain could rely on additional pay based on seniority and ship. Since promotion to admiral was almost solely due to seniority on the post captains list, naval officers felt urgency to win promotion and to get on the list as soon as possible. An admiral took a share of any prizes won by vessels under his command and was the true way to gain wealth in the Navy.

Finally, Byng's case is an extreme outlier and relying on it to make arguments is dicey at best.