On "Master and Commander"

Just finished reading the first of the twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels, Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian.  One down, nineteen to go.  Fascinating are the extremely long and convoluted sentences that yet somehow work due to their energy, enthusiasm of subject and uniqueness of topic: sentences not unlike this one, meandering leisurely through verbiage and speculation and punctuation; a sentence including (like this one) both a colon and a semicolon.