The Hornblower Saga, by British writer/historian C. S. Forester, is widely considered one of the best military-fiction series ever written. I certainly agree with that assessment. Forester wasn't very good at writing characters, but his descriptions of action, and of how sailing warships worked, are so powerful and vivid that they carry the series all by themselves.
The Hornblower Saga is set in the Royal Navy during the Age of Sail, mostly during the Napoleonic Wars. Horatio Hornblower, a young man of good birth and education but no prospects, chooses to make a career of the Navy and joins up as a midshipman, an officer of the lowest rank. From there, the books in the series trace Hornblower's life and naval career during and after the wars.
- MR. MIDSHIPMAN HORNBLOWER is a collection of ten short stories that follow Hornblower's experiences as a midshipman. The first story is set aboard the ship of the line HMS Justinian. The rest are all set aboard the large frigate HMS Indefatigable. The stories take Hornblower through his first taste of combat, his first command of a prize ship, captivity in a Spanish prison, and more. The book ends with him obtaining his promotion to lieutenant. Most of these stories sound like pure fiction. It was something of a surprise to me to learn, several years after reading this book, that while Hornblower himself is a fictional character, Sir Edward Pellew is a real historical figure with a phenomenally distinguished war record.
- LIEUTENANT HORNBLOWER picks up the story several years later, when Hornblower is junior lieutenant aboard the ship of the line HMS Renown. Though Hornblower is central to the story, he's not the primary viewpoint character. Instead, the story centers on Lieutenant William Bush, and sees Hornblower through Bush's eyes. The main story follows Renown through a voyage to the West Indies and an assault on a Spanish stronghold on the island of Haiti. Matters aboard the ship are vastly complicated by the fact that the captain is mentally unstable and getting more so. One of the ways his insanity shows is as paranoia against his officers ... and officers in the old Royal Navy were horribly vulnerable to malicious actions by an ill-intentioned senior.
- HORNBLOWER AND THE HOTSPUR begins as Hornblower is promoted to commander and takes command of the sloop of war HMS Hotspur, just before the end of the Peace of Amiens. Hotspur becomes part of the Channel Fleet, blockading the French fleet based at Brest. The routine of life on blockade duty is broken by gales, raids on French territory, and other sorts of actions. During this time Hornblower makes a name for himself as a daring, skilled, and intelligent officer. This is probably my favorite of the Hornblower books; Hornblower and many of the people around him are fairly well-developed characters, and Forester manages to include the whole spectrum of experiences that a Royal Navy ship's captain might have: planning, combat, writing reports, fighting bad weather, shipboard discipline, dealing with the politics of the fleet command, and so on. Toward the end of the book, the fictional Hornblower again takes a peripheral part in a real engagement: the British interception and capture of the Spanish Flota (treasure fleet) in fall 1804.
- Hornblower leaves Hotspur when he's promoted to Captain. After a brief interlude he takes command of the slightly larger sloop HMS Atropos, in HORNBLOWER AND THE ATROPOS. He's then posted to the Mediterranean, where Atropos is assigned a salvage mission. Nothing is ever easy for Hornblower, though, so this is not an ordinary salvage mission. A treasure ship has sunk within Turkish territorial waters. Hornblower's assignment is to recover a large amount of silver from the wreck without letting the Turkish authorities find out about it. Afterwards he's assigned to convoy duty, and assists in capturing a large Spanish frigate.
- In BEAT TO QUARTERS, Hornblower moves up to command of a frigate, HMS Lydia, and voyages to the Pacific with orders to foment a rebellion in Spain's Central American colonies. But events don't go as planned: after capturing a large Spanish ship, the fifty-gun Natividad, and turning her over to the rebels, Hornblower finds that Spain has changed sides, and he must now defeat the very rebels he so recently supported. Even worse, he has to also play host to an English noblewoman, Lady Barbara Wellesley, who has commandeered the Lydia to take her back to England. While this is #5 in the series sequence, it's actually the first Hornblower novel that Forester wrote. It's among the weakest in terms of characterization, but among the best in the descriptions of sailing warships and combat in the age of sail. The long duel between the Lydia and the Natividad makes excellent reading.
- SHIP OF THE LINE is set a couple of months after the end of BEAT TO QUARTERS. Hornblower's success in the Pacific has brought him command of a seventy-four-gun ship of the line, HMS Sutherland. With two other ships of the line he heads for the Mediterranean, and for several months this small squadron wreaks havoc along the south Spanish coast. Hornblower's part in this consists mainly of a rapid-fire series of actions that leave the local French forces reeling: captures of ships, cutting-out expeditions, an attack on a French army marching along a coastal road. By the end of this concentrated flurry of action, you understand very well why Napoleon feared and hated the Royal Navy more than any other fighting force he faced. This novel ends with Hornblower surrendering Sutherland to the French after a savage fight with four French ships of the line off Rosas Bay on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.
- FLYING COLOURS starts with Hornblower watching from his prison in the Rosas Bay fortress while the British Mediterranean Fleet finishes the job of destroying the French ships he'd fought in the Sutherland. Then it follows Hornblower through his time as a prisoner. Ever eager for useful propaganda, Napoleon intends to try, convict, and execute Hornblower for piracy, although Hornblower's actions were all well within the rules of war. But on their way to Paris for the trial and execution, Hornblower manages to engineer an escape for himself, his coxswain/servant Brown, and the crippled Bush. The three find refuge with a sympathetic French ex-nobleman, where they plan to escape from France and return to England.
- COMMODORE HORNBLOWER takes place in 1812. After a period of shore leave, Hornblower is made Commodore, given command of a squadron of six ships, and sent to the Baltic to fight against French attacks on Russia and Sweden. After an encounter with a French privateer, Hornblower uses his squadron to aid the Russian defenders of a coastal town named Daugravgriva against a powerful French army. The story of Napoleon's disastrous campaign against Russia is told secondhand, through despatches from the main front. In the course of this novel Forester works in some background on the development of naval gunnery, as Hornblower's squadron includes two "bomb-ketches," small ships armed with huge mortars that are far more powerful and accurate than regular naval cannon.
- LORD HORNBLOWER takes place a year later. After a year on sick-leave (he'd been infected with typhus), Hornblower returns to active duty and is given orders to recapture a mutinous brig, HMS Flame. After doing so, Hornblower gets caught up in great events: the invasion of France, the surrender of Napoleon, his return from exile, and the brief campaign which ends at Waterloo.
- ADMIRAL HORNBLOWER IN THE WEST INDIES jumps ahead ten years, to Hornblower's time as a Rear Admiral commanding the British naval forces in the West Indies. Hornblower faces slave-runners, pirates, and a plot to free Napoleon from exile, and also gets involved in Bolivar's revolution against Spain. This novel has a strongly episodic feel to it, which is explained by the fact that most of the material was originally published as several short stories, which were later integrated into a single book.
- The eleventh and last book, HORNBLOWER DURING THE CRISIS, is an anthology. The main part is a fragment from a novel Forester was working on when he died, titled "Hornblower During the Crisis." It fits between HORNBLOWER AND THE HOTSPUR and HORNBLOWER AND THE ATROPOS in the series continuity. After leaving Hotspur, Hornblower assists in the brief capture of a French brig. While aboard the brig, he takes the French captain's papers, including a precious prize: an original signature by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Hornblower's fertile imagination then spawns a plan to forge a despatch from Bonaparte, and use it to lure the French and Spanish fleets into a decisive battle. That's as far as the actual story goes; story notes fill in what Forester had in mind for the rest of the novel. Two short stories round out the book. "Hornblower's Temptation" is set during Hornblower's time as a lieutenant on Renown, and concerns his dealings with an Irish rebel and deserter captured by the Channel Fleet. "The Last Encounter" is the very last of all the Hornblower stories. Set in 1848, it concerns Admiral of the Fleet Hornblower's encounter with Louis Napoleon.
