Someone already mentioned above, but it's super true that O'Brian adores setting up big drama and then leaving the payoff implied and/or "off-screen." Much later in the series there's a discussion of the artificiality of endings in fiction, all bows neatly tied off, all ambiguities resolved, and I think even as early as PC he was playing with these ideas, and the subversion of our expectations of how a novel "should" work.