BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : A Rousing Retelling of a Real-Life Maritime Adventure : THE GOLDEN OCEAN: A Novel <i> by Patrick O’Brian</i> ; W.W. Norton $22.50, 285 pages

The 18th- and early 19th-Century voyages of exploration provide the historical foundation of the marvelously civilized Aubrey/Maturin adventure novels of Patrick O’Brian, which have gained a devoted following. A kind of prelude or warm up to those novels, “The Golden Ocean” (first published in 1956) is O’Brian’s rousing novelistic retelling of a particularly colorful chapter in the history of the imperialist wars of the mid-18th Century, British navy Commodore George Anson’s semi-secret mission to harry Spanish colonial shipping and attack its New World stations in Peru and Chile.

Though one gold-laden, Manila-bound Spanish galleon was eventually taken, Anson’s four-year expedition was a strategic washout; a single superficial raid on the Peruvian coast did England’s enemy little damage. The trip’s principal fruits, apart from the prize money earned by its long-suffering survivors, lay in its contribution to the full revelation of the Pacific.

Ravaged by storm, shipwreck, starvation and especially the dreaded sailor’s disease scurvy, the squadron lost four of its five ships and two-thirds of its crewmen. Its hardships and casualties, quickly brought to light in published accounts, became a manual of perils for the prospective venturer around the Horn, a scary primer in all the worst that could befall him.

At least two of those accounts, those of Anson’s chaplain, Richard Walter, and of a young Irish midshipman, John Philips, appear to have supplied O’Brian much of what he needed to paint with charming pictorial realism the life both above and below decks on Anson’s flagship Centurion. The principal historical outlines of the long cruise are retained, but evidently in keeping with an aim of appealing to a younger audience, the darker aspects of the crew’s experience are played down in favor of a robust and exhilarating rendering of the great adventure of it all.

Indeed, if there’s any character in “The Golden Ocean” with heavyweight potential, it’s the sea itself, whose power as a kind of fate is rendered with the Conradian force that shows where O’Brian was headed as a narrative writer:

“The light was fading, and the wind, though still tremendous, was declining with it: yet still squalls hurled out of the darkening sky, from different directions now, and often the high scream reached its intolerable topmost pitch for minutes at a time--blasts that would lift a crouching man into the air. And now the sea that the hurricane had raised caught up with the wind, an enormous hollow sea, racing, scooped into wild irregularities by the squalls, so that the laboring ships had no even motion but ran in mad, jarring lurches--ran straight for the land, a race-horse speed under bare poles and a lee-shore white with five miles’ breadth of murderous surf an unknown length of time away: half an hour, an hour perhaps; not more with this unrelenting wind.”

In a useful autobiographical note prefacing the new “Patrick O’Brian: Critical Essays and a Bibliography,” edited by Arthur Cunningham (from the same publisher), the novelist confides that his “cheerful little ‘Golden Ocean’ ” (designated elsewhere in the critical volume as a “historical novel for children”) was written “for fun . . . in little more than a month, laughing most of the time.”

In “The Golden Ocean,” O’Brian’s protagonist is a young Irish midshipman through whose eyes the life of the ship is seen. Clearly a captain like the rather drab real-life Anson offered the novelist little in the way of inspiration--his retiring manner prompted the saying that he “had been ‘round the world but was never in it.”

Accordingly, O’Brian’s Anson is a benign, distant authority figure, more “iron and oak” than flesh and blood, and, unlike O’Brian’s later fictional captain Jack Aubrey, of only peripheral interest. But the rivalries and friendships, pranks and jokes of the midshipmen’s berth convey a sense of good-humored humanity that engages our sympathy.

Turning from O’Brian’s “cheerful” version of the Anson voyage to the macabre account of its depredations contained in midshipman Philips’ journal, one can’t help regretting that O’Brian didn’t feel free here to deal more fully with the manifest cruelties of 18-Century maritime life right along with its perhaps largely invented glories--as he would do in the Aubrey/Maturin novels to come.