History Literature / HoratioHornblower

* CoolGun: Lady Barbara gives Hornblower a pair of ebony handled, double barrelled, rifled percussion pistols, which he muses must have taken some craftsman months in rifling and handmade caps alone, in ''The Commodore''. Which is set in ''1812''. [[DescriptionPorn Nearly two pages are dedicated to describing them.]]
** Which also happened to be a minor but noted anachronism, among other [[ArtisticLicenseHistory historical inaccuracies]], well more numerous than the series average, in that book: Percussion caps and locks were not invented in real life for another decade.

* LastStand: The end of ''Ship of the Line''. Hornblower ends up facing four French Ships-of-the-line alone when the rest of the squadron is becalmed, and he can't very well retreat and let them escape the blockade. He makes them pay dearly, crippling three of them and even scuttling one, despite being vastly outnumbered and shot to pieces. He ''does'' surrender, but only when he's wrung everything out of his ship and crew, and he's outraged to read in a French newspaper that he had only "lightly" damaged the French ships when he saw himself that blood was running down the sides.

* UriahGambit: At the climax of ''A Ship Of The Line'', Admiral Leighton, husband to Lady Barbara whom Hornblower is in love with, orders him to attack four french ships at once. Hornblower at time mentally calls this moral courage as he sees it as his duty and was going to do it anyway. In the following book a couple of lines hint that Leighton had covered up giving this signal implying he had much more sinister motives for giving the order.

* VillainousBreakdown: El Supremo, after being turned over to the Spanish.

* WhatYouAreInTheDark: Hornblower and the stacks of (likely counterfeit) banknotes he finds in a secret compartment of an Irish rebel's sea chest. He ultimately puts them back and has the chest thrown overboard because while he would be credited for discovering it, a fellow officer's career would be ruined.

* UriahGambit: At the climax of ''A Ship Of The Line'', Admiral Leighton, husband to Lady Barbara whom Hornblower is in love with, orders him to attack four french ships at once. Hornblower at time mentally calls this moral courage as he sees it as his duty and was going to do it any. In the following book a couple of lines hint that Leighton had covered up giving this signal implying it had much more sinister motives for giving it.

* AuthorityEqualsAsskicking: Zig-zagged. While Hornblower did lament with envy the physical prowess of many of his men, and once specifically his inability of enforcing discipline with the simple expedient of a fist to the face, he ''was'' an accomplished sword fighter leading and surviving numerous close-quarter scuffles from the front, culminating in a Nelson-style double boarding action in ''Lord Hornblower'', not quite long after [[spoiler: his quite-literal disarming of a would-be assassin in a single slice in the previous novel, ''The Commodore'', with considerable discretion and surgical precision]].

* BadassArmy: The Royal Navy.

** While Hornblower is Commander-in-Chief of the West Indies squadron, a wool merchant of Venezuelan descent forges Hornblower's signature, poses as a Royal Navy officer and seizes a Dutch transport carrying Spanish field guns, which he gives to Simon Bolivar's army. Hornblower realises that those guns secured the victory for Bolivar in [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carabobo the Battle of Carabobo,]] which determined the fate of Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador and Peru. Hornblower himself captures the merchant's abandoned private yatch (a former Navy brig-sloop), then, through verbal trickery, avoids surrendering it or starting a war with the Spanish and Dutch naval officials.

** ''Crisis'' includes a court-martial against the ''Hotspur's'' replacement captain for running the ship aground on a mild day.

* A [[Series/HoratioHornblower TV miniseries]] from 1999 to 2003. Adapted from ''Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, Lieutenant Hornblower'', and (very loosely) ''Hornblower and the Hotspur'' by way of "Hornblower and the Widow [=McCool=]".

** He has his men dance the hornpipe during a long battle specifically because it will keep morale up. The narration goes on to describe how the battle would become legendary because of it. It also describes how one man kept dancing even after someone's brains were smashed out by a cannon ball and blown onto him.

* DirtyCoward: Seaman Grimes, from ''Hotspur''. More sad and pathetic than evil, though.

* AuthorityEqualsAsskicking: Usually subverted. Hornblower might be a brilliant captain, but more than once he thinks that he couldn't match the men's physical capacity for backbreaking work or brawling. However, there are a few occasions where he does fight hand-to-hand (particularly when he's a young man).

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: Readers following the series in chronological order rather than publishing order may scratch their heads when the opening paragraph of ''Beat to Quarters'', the first published book, suggests that Lt. Bush has only just gotten to know Captain Hornblower in the last few months.

* InHarmsWay: Hornblower sometimes does this because he's ashamed of his private fears.

** Subverted. Hornblower is usually unlucky in the matter of prize money, and thinks the whole system makes captains less effective. He doesn't mention this in front of others, though, and is aware [[HypocriticalHumor that his views would likely be different once he won a prize]]. It does in ''Ship of the Line'', when he takes nearly a dozen prizes, and escapes back to England in ''Flying Colours'' with ''The Witch of Endor'', a Royal Navy cutter captured by the French a year earlier.
** Played straight by the French at the beginning of ''Flying Colours''. They even strip the gold off of his sword and the brasswork from the ''Sutherland''. They even gorge themselves on the unappetizing rations.

* ByronicHero: Hornblower is an honorable, dutiful, and humble man who acts with great courage under fire. However, he's also a brooding, melancholic mess whose view of himself is often actual self-loathing, often shocked that people might care about him. Underneath his stoic facade is a world-class worry wort, and his courage under fire (in spite of his fears) is matched only by his cowardice in matters of the heart. He's also tone-deaf and never gets over seasickness, much to his humiliation.

** In ''Hotspur'', his ship is being fired upon by shore artillery. He hears noise aloft, and a howitzer shell falls to the deck at his feet. He takes a fraction of an instant to realize that there's about a quarter-inch left on the fuse before he hurries to extinguish it. When he stands up, he sees everyone on the deck staring at him, and realizes he's about to become ShroudedInMyth.