The original Hornblower tales began with the appearance of a junior Royal Navy Captain on independent duty on a secret mission to Central America, though later stories would fill out his earlier years, starting with an unpromising beginning as a seasick midshipman. As the Napoleonic Wars progress, he gains promotion steadily, despite his initial poverty and lack of influential friends, as a result of his skill and daring. Eventually, after surviving many adventures in a wide variety of locales, he rises to the pinnacle of his profession, promoted to Rear Admiral of the Red Squadron, knighted as a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and named the 1st Baron Hornblower.
There are many parallels between Hornblower and real naval officers of the period, including Joseph Needham Tayler, Thomas Cochrane and Horatio Nelson. The name "Horatio" was inspired by the character in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and chosen also because of its association with contemporary figures such as Nelson. The name Hornblower was probably derived from the American film producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. with whom C. S. Forester had been working prior to writing the first Hornblower novel.
Forester's original inspiration was an old copy of the Naval Chronicle, which described the effective dates of the Treaty of Ghent. Because of the time required to communicate around the world, it was possible for two countries to still be at war in one part of the world after a peace was obtained months before in another. The burdens that this placed on captains far from home led him to a character struggling with the stresses of a "man alone". At the same time, Forester wrote the body of the works carefully to avoid entanglements with real world history, so Hornblower is always off on another mission when a great naval victory occurs during the Napoleonic Wars.
Hornblower is born in Kent, the son of a doctor. He has no inherited wealth or influential connections who can advance his career. In the first five novels by order of publication, it is implied that Hornblower was born in the early 1780s. However, when Forester decided to write about Hornblower's early career in the sixth novel Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, he made his hero about five years older, giving his birthdate as July 4, 1776 (the date of the adoption of the United States Declaration of Independence). This adjustment allows Hornblower to begin his career in wartime. He is given a classical education, and by the time he joins the Royal Navy at age seventeen, he is well-versed in Greek and Latin. He is tutored in French by a penniless French émigré and has an aptitude for mathematics, which serves him well as a navigator.
Described as "unhappy and lonely", Hornblower's chief characteristics are not so much his courage and skilled seamanship as his intense reserve, introspection and self-doubt.
Despite numerous personal feats of extraordinary skill and cunning, he belittles his achievements by numerous rationalizations, remembering only his fears. He consistently ignores or is unaware of the admiration with which he is held by his fellow sailors.
He regards himself as cowardly, dishonest, and, at times, disloyal—never crediting his ability to persevere, think rapidly, organize, or cut to the nub of a matter. His sense of duty, hard work, and drive to succeed make these imagined negative characteristics undetectable by everyone but him, and being introspective, he obsesses over petty failures to reinforce his poor self image. His introverted nature continually isolates him from the people around him, including his closest friend, William Bush, and his wives never fully understand him. He is guarded with nearly everyone and reticent to the point of giving offense, unless the matter is the business of discharging his duty as a King's officer, in which case he is clear, decisive, and almost loquacious.
He suffers from chronic seasickness, especially at the start of his voyages. As a midshipman, he was once sick at the sheltered harbor at Spithead, the embarrassing rumour of which follows him throughout his career. A voracious reader, he can discourse on both contemporary and classical literature. His skill at mathematics makes him both an adept navigator and an extremely talented whist player. He uses his ability at whist to supplement his income during periods of inactivity in the naval service.
He is tone-deaf and finds music an incomprehensible irritant (in a scene in Hotspur he is unable to tell the British national anthem). He is philosophically opposed to flogging and capital punishment, in many cases when called for by the Articles of War, yet as Captain and Lieutenant had to call men to account knowing that such harshness would be the result. Hornblower possesses a hyper-developed sense of duty, yet on occasion he is able to set it aside for his more humane concerns, to the extent that, in Hornblower and the Hotspur, he contrives an escape for his personal steward who would otherwise have been hanged for striking a superior.
Hornblower's early exploits are many and varied. Joining the Royal Navy as a midshipman, he fends off fire ships which interrupt his first (disastrous) examination for promotion to lieutenant. Still only an acting lieutenant, he is given command of the sloop Le Rêve, which blunders into a Spanish fleet in the fog, resulting in Hornblower's capture and imprisonment in Ferrol. He is finally confirmed as a commissioned lieutenant while still a prisoner of war, a state he will endure again later in his career at the end of Ship of the Line and detailed in Flying Colours—along with his daring escape from the heart of France, which earns him a sentence of death from a trial held in absentia from Napoleon—and a rather flattering reward offer for his capture. In the first captivity, his self-sacrificing, difficult and daring rescue of surviving sailors from a shipwreck hanging on a harbour entrance and rocky breakwater under extremely hazardous storm conditions, and his honourable adherence to the parole he had given, is rewarded by his Spanish captors by his release. His captivity leaves him with a fluent knowledge of Spanish, which proves highly useful in several further adventures.
As a junior lieutenant, he serves under Captain Sawyer, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia on a trip to the Caribbean, during which he begins his long friendship with William Bush. Returning to England, Hornblower is demobilised after the peace of Amiens, causing him great financial distress — he resorts to making a living as a professional gambler, playing whist with admirals and other senior figures for a modest income.
In 1803, he is reactivated and confirmed as commander of HMS Hotspur when hostilities resume against Napoleon. After gruelling service during the blockade of Brest, he finally is promoted to captain and recalled to England. Once there, he meets the secretary of the Admiralty and post rank is conferred immediately when Hornblower agrees to take part in a clandestine operation that eventually leads to the resounding British victory at the Battle of Trafalgar that costs Nelson his life.
Hornblower then organises Nelson's funeral procession along the River Thames and has to deal with the near-sinking of the barge conveying the hero's coffin. Later, he secretly recovers sunken gold and silver from a sunken ship on the bottom of Marmorice Bay within the Ottoman Empire with the aid of pearl divers from Ceylon, narrowly escaping a Turkish warship at the end. Upon unloading the treasure and refitting, his ship, HMS Atropos, is taken away from him to be given to the King of the Two Sicilies for diplomatic reasons. On his return to England, he finds his two young children dying of smallpox.
He later (in the time line, but presented in first novel written) makes a long, difficult voyage in command of the frigate HMS Lydia, round the Horn to the Pacific, where he supports a madman, El Supremo, in his rebellion against the Spanish. He captures the Natividad, a much more powerful Spanish ship (Bush refers to it as a "ship of the line", but Hornblower believes this is stretching a point) but then has to reluctantly cede it to El Supremo to placate him. When he finds that the Spanish have switched sides in the interim, he is forced to find and sink the ship he had captured—adding injury to insult, as he'd given up a fortune in prize money to maintain an uneasy alliance with the insane revolutionary. On his return voyage, he and his well-connected passenger, Lady Barbara Wellesley, the fictional younger sister of Arthur Wellesley (later to become the Duke of Wellington) become dangerously attracted to each other, resulting in a kiss that is interrupted by Lady Barbara's maid Hebe—when she is sent away, Hornblower is reluctant to re-enter the moment, and perceiving herself rejected, Barbara's temper flares. She leaves the Lydia two days later, and Hornblower fears the worst for his career having offended the daughter of an earl and sister of a marquis.
After these exploits, he is given command of HMS Sutherland, a seventy four gun ship of the line. While waiting at his Mediterranean rendezvous point for the rest of his squadron—and its commander—to arrive, he carries out a series of raids against the French along the south coast of Spain. He learns that a French squadron of four ships of the line is loose, having slipped the blockade. He decides that his duty requires that he fight at one-to-four odds to prevent them from entering a well-protected harbour. In the process, his ship is crippled and, with two-thirds of the crew incapacitated, he surrenders to the French.
He is sent with his coxswain, Brown, and his injured first lieutenant, Bush, to Paris for a show trial and execution. During the journey, Hornblower and his companions escape, and after a winter sojourn at the chateau of the Comte de Graçay, navigate down the Loire river to the coastal city of Nantes. There, he recaptures a Royal Navy cutter, the Witch of Endor, mans the vessel with a gang of slave labourers and escapes to the Channel Fleet.
Hornblower faces a mandatory court-martial for the loss of the Sutherland, but is "most honourably acquitted." A national hero in the eyes of the public, he is awarded a knighthood and made a Colonel of Marines. When he arrives home, he discovers that his first wife Maria had died in childbirth and that his infant son has been adopted and cared for by Lady Barbara. As she has been widowed by the death of her husband, Hornblower's former commander, Admiral Leighton, they are free (after a decent interval) to marry. Barbara is more beautiful, cleverer and far richer than the poor Maria (whom Hornblower had more pitied than loved). Thereafter, he lives (uncomfortably) as a country squire in Kent.
Freedom from this purgatory comes when he is promoted to commodore and sent on a mission to the Baltic Sea, where he must be a diplomat as much as an officer. He foils an assassination attempt on the Russian Czar and is influential in the ruler's decision to resist the French invasion of his vast country. He provides invaluable assistance in the defence of Riga against the French army, where he meets Carl von Clausewitz.
He returns ill with typhus to England, yet soon after his recovery goes off to deal with mutineers off the coast of France. After taking the mutinous ship by trickery, he sets up the return of the Bourbons to France, and is created a peer as Baron Hornblower, of Smallbridge in the County of Kent.
When Napoleon returns from exile at the start of the Hundred Days, Hornblower is staying at the estate of the Comte de Graçay. He leads a Royalist Guerrilla movement; after capture by the French, he is about to be shot under an earlier warrant for his execution when he is saved by news of Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.
After several years ashore, he is promoted to Rear Admiral and appointed Commander-in-Chief of the West Indies. He foils an attempt by veterans of Napoleon's Imperial Guard to free Napoleon from his captivity on Saint Helena, captures a slave ship, and encounters Simón Bolívar's army. He retires to Kent and eventually becomes Admiral of the Fleet.
His final, improbable achievement occurs at his home, when he assists a seemingly mad man claiming to be Napoleon to travel to France. That person turns out to be Napoleon III, the nephew of Hornblower's great nemesis and the future president (and later emperor in his own right) of France. For his assistance, Lord Hornblower is created a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. At the end of his long and heroic career, he is wealthy, famous, and contented; a loving and indulgent husband and father; and finally free of the insecurities and self-loathing that had driven him throughout his life.
Forester provides two different brief summaries of Hornblower's career. The first was in the first chapter of The Happy Return, which was the first Hornblower novel written. The second occurs mid-way through The Commodore, when Czar Alexander asks him to describe his career. The two accounts are incompatible. The first account would have made Hornblower about five years older than the second. The second account is more nearly compatible with the rest of Hornblower's career, but it omits the time he spent as a commander in Hornblower and the Hotspur. There are other discrepancies as well; in one account of his defeat of a Spanish frigate in the Mediterranean, he distinguished himself as lieutenant and in another he is a post-captain with less than three years seniority. It appears that these discrepancies arose as the series matured and accounts needed to be modified to coincide with his age and career.
C. Northcote Parkinson, more famous for his invention of Parkinson's Law, has written a 'biography' of Hornblower, detailing his career as well as personal information. The biography sheds light upon what really happened to Captain Sawyer on H.M.S. Renown (including a confession that Hornblower pushed Captain Sawyer down the hatchway), as well as subsequent careers of Lord Hornblower's descendants, ending with the present Lord Hornblower's emigration to Apartheid South Africa in the late 1960s. According to Parkinson, Hornblower in later life became a director of P&O, Governor General of Malta (1829-1831), Commander in Chief at Chatham (1832-1835) a Viscount (in 1850), and an Admiral of the Fleet, dying aged 80 on 12 January 1858.
The novels, in the order they were written:
In chronological order (including short stories):
Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, Lieutenant Hornblower, and Hornblower and the Hotspur were compiled in one book, variously titled Hornblower's Early Years, Horatio Hornblower Goes to Sea, or The Young Hornblower. Hornblower and the Atropos was replaced by Hornblower and the Hotspur in later UK editions of The Young Hornblower.
Hornblower and the Atropos, The Happy Return, and A Ship of the Line were compiled into one omnibus edition, called Captain Hornblower.
In the U.S., Beat to Quarters, A Ship of the Line, and Flying Colours were compiled into one book, called Captain Horatio Hornblower.
Flying Colours, The Commodore, Lord Hornblower, and Hornblower in the West Indies were presented as a third omnibus edition called Admiral Hornblower to fill out the series.
Commodore Hornblower, Lord Hornblower, and Hornblower in the West Indies were also compiled into one book, called The Indomitable Hornblower.
Three short stories by C. S. Forester about Hornblower were published in 1940 and 1941. The stories are:
Another short story "The Point And The Edge" is included as an outline only in Forester's The Hornblower Companion (1964).
Two final stories "Hornblower and the Widow McCool" (a.k.a. "Hornblower's Temptation") (1967) and "The Last Encounter" (1967), are often included with the unfinished novel Hornblower and the Crisis.
|Name of Ship||Rate of Ship||Guns||Main Armament||Hornblower's Rank||Book||end of commission|
|HMS Justinian||3rd rate||74||32lb||Midshipman||Mr. Midshipman Hornblower||Transferred to Indefatigable|
|HMS Indefatigable||5th rate||44||18lb||Midshipman, later acting Lieutenant||Mr. Midshipman Hornblower||Made Prize Master|
|Marie Galante||Captured Merchant Brig||none||Midshipman||Mr. Midshipman Hornblower||Ship sunk|
|HM transport Caroline||Transport Brig||none||Acting Lieutenant||Mr. Midshipman Hornblower||Quarintine ended, returned to Indefatigable|
|La Reve||Sloop||2||1 lb swivel guns||Acting Lieutenant||Mr. Midshipman Hornblower||Captured by Spanish|
|HMS Marguerite||5th rate||36||18 lb||1st Lieutenant||The Hand of Destiny||Paid off|
|HMS Renown||3rd rate||74||24lb||Lieutenant||Lieutenant Hornblower||Paid off|
|HMS Retribution||Sloop-of-war||18||9lb||Acting-Commander||Lieutenant Hornblower||Paid off, Peace of Amiens begins|
|HMS Hotspur||Sloop-of-war||20||9lb||Commander||Hornblower and the Hotspur||Made Post(promoted to Post Captain)|
|HMS Atropos||6th rate||22||9lb||Junior Post-Captain||Hornblower and the Atropos||Ship given to the King of the two Sicilies|
|HMS Lydia||5th rate||36||18lb||Senior Post-Captain||The Happy Return/Beat to Quarters||Paid Off, crew transferred to Sutherland|
|HMS Sutherland||3rd rate||74||24lb||Post-Captain||A Ship of the Line||Destroyed after battle with French Squadron|
|Witch of Endor||Cutter||10||6lb||Post-Captain||Flying Colors||Picked up by HMS Triumph, sent home with despatches under command of Bush|
|Augusta||6-gun||yacht||Post-Captain||Hornblower and his Majesty|
|HMS Nonsuch||3rd rate||74||32lb||Commodore of the First class||The Commodore and Lord Hornblower||Contracts Typhus and is sent home|
|Lotus and Raven||Sloops||9lb||Commodore||The Commodore||Contracts Typhus, sent home|
|Clam||Cutter||Commodore||The Commodore||Used to take Hornblower home after contracting Typhus|
|Harvey and Moth||Bomb-ketches||Commodore||The Commodore||Contracts Typhus, sent home|
|Porta Coeli||Brig||18||6lb||Commodore||Lord Hornblower||Transfers to Flame|
|Flame||Brig||18||6lb||Commodore||Lord Hornblower||Made Governor of Le Havre|
|Crab||Schooner||2||Rear-Admiral, Commander-in-Chief||Hornblower in the West Indies||Transfers his flag back to Clorinda|
|HMS Phoebe||5th rate||36||18lb||Rear-Admiral, Commander-in-Chief||Hornblower in the West Indies||Assignment as Commander in Chief is over|
|HMS Clorinda||5th rate||36||18lb||Rear-Admiral and Commander-in-Chief||Hornblower in the West Indies||Assignment as Commander in Chief is over|
|HMS Roebuck||5th rate||36||18lb||Rear-Admiral and Commander-in-Chief||Hornblower in the West Indies||Assignment as Commander in Chief is over|