Literature / Horatio Hornblower

"I recommend Forester to everyone literate I know."

— Ernest Hemingway

A series of stories about a British naval officer set during The Napoleonic Wars and probably C. S. Forester's most well-known work. The eponymous character, Horatio Hornblower, starts as an overaged midshipman at the start of the French Revolution. Though unprepared, shy, and awkward, his knack for innovation and a sense of determination propel him to attempt many daring and improbable feats. While most who meet him recognize him as a daring and intelligent officer, Hornblower can only view himself with "a sort of amused contempt" at best, and vicious self-loathing at worst, thanks to constantly overanalyzing and criticising his motives.

Fighting the eccentricities of the Royal Navy and his own temperament as much as the French and other enemies, Hornblower rises through the ranks with difficulty, worrying about his poverty, the many ways his career could be ruined, and the constant possibility of violent and painful death; meanwhile he conducts his missions to the utmost of his considerable ability. His career is detailed in twelve novels (written out of chronological order) and several short stories, and he rises from seasick midshipman to Lord and Admiral.

The books also describe the mechanics of sailing wooden warships in exquisite detail, but Forester does go to the trouble of (occasionally) explaining the jargon to his readers, which may make them more accessible to the average reader than the Aubrey-Maturin series.

There is an ongoing debate about whether the character of Horatio Hornblower was inspired by the career of any real-life officers with suggestions including Thomas Cochrane and James A Gordon.

Novels

Listed in chronological series order with publication dates.

• Mr. Midshipman Hornblower: 1950. A collection of short stories about Hornblower's first years at sea. It later became the basis of the A&E-ITV series starring Ioan Gruffudd.
• Lieutenant Hornblower: 1952. Narrated from the point-of-view of Lieutenant Bush. A captain's madness imperils the ship during a dangerous mission in the Caribbean. Adapted into the A&E miniseries.
• Hornblower and the Hotspur: 1962. Hornblower's first independent command, mostly on blockade duty. The final book (loosely) adapted by A&E.
• Hornblower and the Crisis: 1967. The last published book, unfinished due to C.S. Forester's death. It would have dealt with the Battle of Trafalgar. Also includes two short stories—"Hornblower and the Widow McCool" and "The Last Encounter."
• Hornblower and the Atropos: 1953. Hornblower commands the Atropos as they recover treasure in the Mediterranean.
• The Happy Return (UK) / Beat to Quarters (US): 1937. The first published novel. Hornblower travels to Central America to fund—and then fight—a local tyrant while transporting Lady Barbara Wellesley.
• A Ship of the Line: 1938. Hornblower takes command of the Sutherland and fights various battles up and down the French and Spanish coasts.
• Flying Colours: 1938. Hornblower, Bush, and coxswain Brown escape from imprisonment in France.
• The Commodore (UK) / Commodore Hornblower (US): 1945. Hornblower commands a squadron of ships to aid Russia in their fight against Napoleon.
• Lord Hornblower: 1946. Hornblower returns to France to deal with mutineers and Napoleon's attempts to regain power.
• Hornblower in the West Indies: 1957. Hornblower becomes an admiral during peacetime and has several adventures in the Caribbean.

Short Stories

Of somewhat dubious canonicity (see Canon Discontinuity). Three of them were published in magazines, while the last two were included with the uncompleted text of Hornblower and the Crisis. All of them were compiled for The Hornblower Addendum, only available on e-readers.

• "The Hand of Destiny" 1940. Newly-promoted Lieutenant Hornblower must mediate between abused seamen and their tyrannical captain; also, one version of the battle with the Castilla.
• "Hornblower and His Majesty" 1940. Hornblower is tasked with taking George III on a naval outing while an American ship lurks in the fog during The War of 1812.
• "Hornblower's Charitable Offering / The Bad Samaritan" 1941. Hornblower and the Sutherland try to help the inmates of a Spanish prison island. Originally intended as a chapter in A Ship of the Line.
• "Hornblower's Temptation / Hornblower and the Widow McCool" Published in Crisis. Hornblower must guard an Irish rebel slated for the rope.
• "The Last Encounter" Published in Crisis. An encounter between a retired Hornblower and a French visitor on a mission.

Adaptations:

• Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951). Starring Gregory Peck in his prime in the titular role. Virginia Mayo played Lady Barbara Wellesley. The film at imdb.com Adapted from The Happy Return, Ship of the Line, and Flying Colours.
• A series of TV movies 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".
• Two radio plays were produced. The first, broadcast in 1952 and 53, cast Michael Redgrave as Hornblower. The second was broadcast on BBC Radio in 1979 and 1980, with Nicholas Fry playing the role.

Notable for inspiring modern works such as:

• Several novels set in the same time period:
  • Dudley Pope's Ramage series. It's actually mentioned that Ramage and Hornblower were junior officers on the same ship for a time (Pope and Forester were friends).
  • Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series.
  • Alexander Kent's Bolitho series.
  • The Sharpe series of novels and TV movies, starring a soldier in the Napoleonic wars, is very much a land-based equivalent of Hornblower; Bernard Cornwell has confirmed this more than once. In one of the books there's a subtle reference to the hero of another Forester story, Death to the French, which implies that the protagonist served under Richard Sharpe prior to the events of that novel.
• A lot of Science Fiction, to the point where David Langford has written an article about the "Hornblower in Space" genre.
  • A little-known series called Star Trek has been described as "Horatio Hornblower Recycled In Space". The rumour has it that both captains best known in the mainstream culture, Captain Kirk and Captain Picard, are based on the two different sides of Hornblower's character — fans of both can easily pick out the influences in certain scenes, and Patrick Stewart was handed a stack of the novels as character prep.
  • The Hugo and Nebula nominated science fiction work, The Mote in God's Eye.
  • Lois McMaster Bujold credits Hornblower as one of the inspiratios for her Vorkosigan Saga.
  • Science fiction writer A. Bertram Chandler based his John Grimes character on Hornblower, even making Hornblower a distant relative.
  • Honor Harrington - A Space Opera novel series by David Weber with a female version of Horatio Hornblower. The HH initials are not a coincidence. Author David Weber actually hangs a lampshade on this in the sixth book when he shows the title character reading one of the Hornblower books.
  • In a way, David Drake's RCN series, which are Aubrey/female-Maturin IN SPACE! Sci-fi.
  • The Gaunt's Ghosts series of Warhammer 40,000 Tie In Novels, being based on Sharpe, are thus in turn based on Hornblower.
  • Temeraire is "Hornblower with dragons" twice removed, as it was influenced by Aubrey-Maturin and its human protagonist still shares similarities with Hornblower.

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These stories provide examples of:

• Abandon Ship: Hornblower's first independent command, a midshipman sailing a small prize ship back to England, ends when it sinks due to a shothole and a cargo of rice.
• Abnormal Ammo: In Commodore Hornblower, Hornblower ends up rallying a group of Russian defenders in a brief gun battle. So panicked are the defenders that one of them forgets to remove the ramrod from his musket after reloading, firing it directly at the enemy.
• Accidental Truth: Hornblower lies about Napoleon's death to a group of former Imperial Guard to dissuade them from their attempt to free Napoleon. Hornblower is about to resign his commission, having betrayed his honour, when he learns of Napoleon's actual death. Appropriately enough, the chapter is titled "St. Elizabeth of Hungary", whose Miracle of the Roses is told at the end of the chapter.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: A minor example occurs at the end of Lieutenant. Hornblower and Bush decide to spend their hundred pounds' prize money in the Red Light District of Kingston. At the start of Hotspur, Hornblower loses the big wad of cash he wins off the admirals at whist in Lieutenant for less frivolous reasons when he has to finance both a wedding and the commission of his new ship (which was the real prize of that night anyway).
• Afraid of Blood: When not keyed up and busy in the heat of battle, Hornblower doesn't do well with blood. When he's forced to watch his men dying long before his own ship can return fire, he has to fight not to throw up in front of everyone. He nearly faints when watching a surgeon treat an amputated limb, and just imagining the slaughter of a ration bullock ruins his appetite for beef.
• A God Am I: El Supremo, who is Hornblower's primary ally and later the primary villain in Beat To Quarters.
• Allergic to Routine: Hornblower. Of course, naval life is explicitly very routine, long periods of boredom interspersed with wild activity. Many of Hornblower's daring and innovative schemes arise out of a desire to break the monotony of patrolling on blockade service.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Lieutenant Hornblower is narrated from Bush's POV. When the insane Captain Sawyer falls down the hold and is conveniently incapacitated, Bush knows both Hornblower and Midshipman Wellard had the motive and opportunity to push him, but if anyone askes directly Hornblower calmly says that Sawyer must have tripped and fallen. Hornblower takes charge of the investigation, further complicating things, and the court of inquiry won't even touch it because they prefer to say he died in battle rather than reveal he went insane first. Wellard dies offscreen near the end of the book, so the only person who really knows the truth is Hornblower.
  • In Hotspur, Hornblower and his lieutenants discuss the prize system, then the midshipman orders a man to start casting the lead to check depth. Which makes Hornblower's group remember they were sailing towards the shore, and they all realize they could've run aground out of sheer carelessness. Hornblower isn't sure if the middie did it deliberately, and can't, of course, outright ask him.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: The first book's title, as seen above. "Beat to quarters" is the era's Red Alert phrase. Because clearly Americans won't be interested in this "happy return" stuff.
• Anachronic Order:
  • The books start in the middle of Hornblower's career, go to almost the end of it, and then jump back to the very beginning, jump ahead a little and then a lot before returning to near the beginning. The publishing order is Quarters, Line, Colours, Commodore, Lord, Midshipman, Lieutenant, Atropos, West Indies, Hotspur, Crisis (unfinished). In chronological order, these are books 6-10, 1-2, 5, 11, 3-4.
  • The short stories, too, are scattered all over his career. The two included in Crisis take place in 1799 and then the 1850s.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Lieutenant Hornblower is the only novel or short story narrated from the perspective from someone other than the title character, namely through Mr. Bush. It demonstrates his sturdy, uncomplicated character and although he's not as innovative as his younger friend, he's able to see Hornblower more clearly than Hornblower sees himself.
• Anyone Can Die: Hornblower himself, obviously, makes it to the end of the series. There are no guarantees against anyone else being killed or seriously injured.
• An Arm and a Leg: During the climax of Ship of the Line, Lt. Bush loses a leg.
• Artistic License – History: The Commodore, as Forester admitted later, was written with a closer eye on the present day (1945) than 1812 and he was unsure what British forces were engaged in Riga at that time. His description of the bomb-ketches is also inaccurate; the type of vessel he described hadn't been in use since the 1780s and were crewed by marines, not naval officers.
• Artistic License – Medicine: In The Commodore, the reference to flea bites after Hornblower's implied tryst with the Countess was originally meant to be how he contracted typhus. Forester realized that the incubation period wasn't quite that long, however, and decided that it happened some time during the siege. (The reason it wasn't edited to reflect this is likely because the novels were originally published as magazine serials and collected into book form later.)
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Zig-zagged. Hornblower envies the physical prowess of many of his men, and once he specifically laments his inability to enforce discipline via the simple expedient of a fist to the face. However, he commands the loyalty of his officers and men because they know how damn good he is when the guns are firing.^note There's a certain amount of Truth in Television in this: military officers in wartime tend to gain notice and promotion depending largely on how well they do commanding in battle. Hornblower is also 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 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.
• A Taste of the Lash: As per the standard discipline of the Royal Navy, a flogging occurs in the first chapter of the first book. Hornblower himself avoids this punishment as much as he can, believing that it makes good men bad and bad men worse. (Although he considers this a rationalization of his unpardonable squeamishness.)
• Author Avatar: According to his biography, C. S. Forester came up with Hornblower and The Happy Return during a one day cruise of the Bay of Fronseca in the motor launch with photographer Barbara Sutro, while on a freighter heading for England while escaping a paternity suit by a fading opera singer. He envisioned Hornblower as himself as he wished he had the courage to be.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: This seems to be Hornblower's main method of gambling, seamanship, and war. In one incident, Hornblower challenges a man known to be a better shot then he to a Duel to the Death with the understanding that there will be one pistol randomly loaded, neither will know which one and the contestants will choose it unknowing and fight at point blank. Thus giving a fifty-fifty chance (better than his odds, Hornblower figures, than in any fair fight). Not knowing that the captain, not wanting to lose either midshipman, arranged for both guns to be left unloaded.
• Badass Bookworm: Hornblower is a seadog who uses math skills and meticulous research.
• Badass Army: The Royal Navy. In this time period, the British Navy was supreme on the world's oceans; no one else could even come close. This is lampshaded in Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies: the Royal Navy is so feared by other nations that Captain Carl Ramsbottom's fake proclamation of a Royal Navy blockade is enough to shut down seaborne commerce along the Venezuelan coast.
• Bad Mood as an Excuse: Hornblower, when he's stressed out, has an unworthy tendency to take out his feelings on Bush—whose devotion and admiration for his captain makes it impossible for him to stand up for himself. Hornblower usually regrets it quickly, but it's still gratifying to the reader when he snaps at Freeman in Lord Hornblower to no effect.
• Bad to the Last Drop: Hornblower's supply of coffee tends to run short early in a voyage. The usual Royal Navy substitute is burnt toast in hot water, which obviously doesn't do much except look like coffee if you squint. In Atropos, the only thing that makes the mudir's diplomatic facade flicker is the coffee that Hornblower serves him.
• Batman Gambit: Hornblower is pretty good at guessing what the response of enemy captains is during battles. In Hotspur, for instance, he plays the Loire captain's cleverness against him; in Atropos he bluffs the Castilla into thinking that he has allies close at hand by signaling empty ocean.
• Battle Butler: Brown was originally Hornblower's coxswain, became his servant at first as a ruse because he's a good man in an escape attempt, but he stays in the position afterward, then became his coxswain again.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: You'd think the, say, Spaniards would give the British Navy all possible assistance when trying to retake crucial military positions. Nope. Heck, everyone outside the British Navy seems slightly or greatly incompetent, and a good deal of the people within. With the honourable exception of the Russians in Commodore.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Flying Colors ends with Hornblower getting everything he's wanted; wealth, fame, prestige, a title, and the way clear to marry Lady Barbara. However, the first four things are part of a propaganda package laid on by the government, and the last is possible by the death of their spouses. He starts hating it before the end of the book.
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • Usually inverted. Forester deliberately keeps Hornblower out of the way of most of the major historical events of the time (for example, the first book has Hornblower way out in the Pacific in 1808 to keep him out of the Peninsular Wars), particularly tensions with America. This loosened as the books went on, although Hornblower doesn't become Admiral until peacetime.
  • It's mentioned several times that as a midshipman he served with Captain Pellew on the Indefatigable, and was present at the sinking of the larger Droits de l'Hommes in 1797. Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, which details his career as a midshipman, ends after his release from a Spanish prison in 1797, several months before the battle.
  • The interception of a Spanish treasure flotilla in Hotspur was a real battle, which Hornblower ends up not joining in because he has to stop a fictional French ship from warning the real Spaniards.
  • In (the unfinished) Hornblower and the Crisis, he becomes a spy and helps lure the enemy into the Battle of Trafalgar with a false message.
  • In Hornblower and the Atropos, Hornblower is put in command of Horatio Nelson's funeral procession up the Thames from Greenwich to Whitehall. Unbeknown to everyone but him and the crew, the lead barge gets holed below the waterline thanks to an accident just before they pick up the Body (which is always referred to with a capital "B" in the many, many plans), and disaster is narrowly averted thanks to some frantic (albeit cleverly concealed) bailing. Later, Hornblower realises he's left his pocket-watch hanging on one of the coffin handles, and has to sneak into the Admiralty to retrieve it prior to the state funeral which takes place the following day.
  • Thanks to Forester's creation of a fictional Wellesley named Barbara, whom Hornblower romances and eventually marries, he becomes The Duke of Wellington's brother-in-law.
  • In The Commodore, it is implied that his actions were essential to foiling the French attempt to take Riga.
  • There is one short story that takes place during the War of 1812, where Hornblower has a brush with an American ship. Since he's commanding a barely-armed yacht to take the King on a day trip, he evades battle.
  • 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 the Battle of Carabobo, which determined the fate of Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador and Peru. Hornblower himself captures the merchant's abandoned private yacht (a former Navy brig-of-war), then, through verbal trickery, avoids surrendering it or starting a war with the Spanish and Dutch naval officials.
  • In the short story "The Last Encounter", taking place in 1848, an elderly Hornblower assists a man claiming to be Napoleon Bonaparte — who Hornblower knows is long dead — in his passage back to France to run in the election for president. Hornblower views him as a harmless madman and helps him out of amusement. At the end, the man is revealed to be Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (the original Boney's nephew), who wins the election — and several years later, stages a coup and crowns himself as Emperor Napoleon III. ^note  Boney's son is regarded as "Napoleon II", although in actual fact he was never officially acknowledged as the Emperor.
• Berserk Button: In The Happy Return, interrupting Hornblower during his morning walk, which is as solitary as he can manage it on a crowded warship. When Lady Barbara sends her maid up to invite Hornblower to breakfast, the rest of the crew try very hard to prevent it. It sets of an explosion of bad temper when she reaches him and a command that she never interrupt his walk again, and in fact forbids them from coming up on deck while he's on his walk.
• Big Damn Heroes: Near the end of Lieutenant. After the Spanish prisoners escape confinement and capture the Renown — capturing Buckland and nearly killing Bush — Hornblower gathers his crew from the three prize vessels and crashes one of them into the Renown, sweeping across the deck and retaking the ship.
• Blatant Lies: Napoleon's propaganda announcement decrying Hornblower as a pirate in Flying Colours.
• The Black Death:
  • In the Noah's Ark story, Hornblower is sent to pick up supplies from the Algerian city of Oran on the very day it's struck by plague. Normally this would mean he and his men would have to be quarantined there for three weeks since the last case, but he has the novel idea to ride it out on the supply ship he was provided.
  • In The Commodore, as the Napoleon's Prussian forces retreat from the aborted siege of Riga, they leave behind plague victims. Hornblower is told by (actual historical figure) Essen that the Russian army has plague in its ranks too (there is also typhus, which Hornblower comes down with at the end of the book).
• The Bore: One way Hornblower copes with the stress of impending action is to make his junior officers play whist with him and then treat them all to exacting and long-winded criticisms of their play.
• Boring Return Journey: In The Happy Return (Beat to Quarters in the US), after his exploits in the Pacific of defeating a larger Spanish warship twice and helping defeat the insane warlord he originally supported and meeting Lady Barbara in between, the return trip is so uneventful everything is skipped between leaving the area and arriving in Saint Helena.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Lady Barbara teases Hornblower with this by imitating his standard, ambiguous response of "ha, h'm."
• Bowdlerise: Done in-universe in Hotspur, when Bush has to resign himself to calling the hapless midshipmen from the Naval Academy "young gentleman" rather than swearing at them, in view of Hornblower's preferences.
• But I Read a Book About It: Hornblower considers constant research both a duty and a pleasure. It enhances his Badass Bookworm status. This is particularly pronounced in the Midshipman stories, where young Hornblower encounters things in reality he had hitherto only known from literature and sometimes compares the two.
• British Stuffiness: When Lady Barbara suggests to Bush that he's fond of Hornblower, it takes him a moment to reconcile such a sentimental notion in his "sturdy English mind."
• Broken Ace: Hornblower is near-universally adored by his underlings and respected by his brother captains for his brilliance and continual success. Hornblower considers them to be Horrible Judges Of Character because he completely despises himself.
• Boxed Crook: Doctor Claudius, in Hornblower and the Crisis. Claudius is a Church of England clergyman who, disappointed at his failure to gain promotion in the church, turned to forgery.
• Byronic Hero: 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 worryguts, 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.
  • As to his weakness in matters of heart, he was also quite the infamous adulterer as a literary character back in the day, cheating on both of his wives with the same woman, and dallying with a Russian countess while barely married for months to his second wife. Indeed, the language the narrator uses when describing his reactions to such relevant occasions is also, quite frankly, swooning.
• Call-Forward: At the end of Hornblower and the Atropos, Collingwood mentions that the Lydia will be needing a new captain soon.
• The Cameo: Many examples of Historical Domain Characters popping up this way, ranging from various politicians and military leaders, to the American frigate USS Constitution, stated to be on her way to the Barbary Coast to deal with the Corsairs under the command of an unknown officer named Edward Preble.
• Captain Smooth and Sergeant Rough:
  • Hornblower is well-read and profoundly dislikes the brutality of war (including that inflicted by the Navy's own policies). Bush considers it right and proper to bellow at the junior officers and sees nothing wrong with floggings and such, more in common with the views of the time.
  • In Ship of the Line, Hornblower watches one of his petty officers apply an order with his fist and considers that he himself wouldn't have the physical strength to enforce discipline that way.
• Canon Discontinuity: C. S. Forester himself discouraged reprinting of the short stories The Hand of Destiny, The Bad Semaritan and Hornblower and His Majesty because of the continuity snarl The Hand of Destiny caused (the capture of the Castilla and the powder burns to Hornblower's hand). All three were included in a very rare biography of C. S. Forester, but can be found here.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': In Commodore, Hornblower hears an odd thumping from on deck and comes out to try and see what it's about without actually asking before he decides that dammit, he's a commodore and he can ask any kind of trivial question without having to feel self-conscious—then when he calls Bush to ask, he realizes the noise was from Bush's wooden leg and has to come up with an excuse after all.
• The Captain: Guess who. Bush is eventually promoted captain at the end of Flying Colours, in keeping with the odd custom of complimenting distinguished captains by promoting their first lieutenants (mostly out of the inability to promote the captains themselves).
• Catchphrase: "Ha... h'm." Lady Barbara's teasing compels him to stop after he marries her.
• Card Games:
  • Hornblower is himself a great fan of the game of whist, and will often play it to pass the time during stressful situations, such as during a Stern Chase, giving him something to think about other than things he currently can't control. He also supports himself by whist during the Peace of Amiens, working for a gambling establishment as a permanent fourth player. Forester often describes the games in great detail.
  • In Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, Hornblower finds an opportunity to challenge his tormentor to a duel when the latter angrily implies that Hornblower is cheating (in front of officers from another ship) and then pointedly refuses to apologize.
• Cardboard Prison: Admiralty House's jail, which has a thatched roof, of all things. A marine awaiting court martial for defying an order escapes at the end of Hornblower's tenure as Commander-in-Chief. Hornblower muses that while the marine escaped the jail, he was still on Jamaica, and his white face and uniform would stick out like a sore thumb, especially with the standing reward of £10 for returned prisoners, meaning he only added more charges to original crime. Hornblower later finds him in a military band in Puerto Rico, and discovers Lady Barbara paid a merchant captain to free him.
• Casual Danger Dialog: The protracted discussion between Bush and Crystal in Beat to Quarters, where they academically debate how the Natividad's officers are laying their guns... while they are shooting at the Lydia. Hornblower, who is trying to concentrate (and slightly envious of their nerves), eventually tells them to knock it off.
• Central Theme:
  • There was zero glamour at all involved in the reality of Wooden Ships and Iron Men—living conditions were barely tolerable even without the hideous brutality of combat.
  • The sometimes-torturous isolation and monumental responsibility imposed on ship's captains (even in the books when Hornblower wasn't commanding a ship). Especially prominent in the first book, where Hornblower invokes all sorts of tropes to keep his crew loyal on an extended mission.
• The Chains of Commanding: This is a major theme throughout the series. In one book, Hornblower compares being in command to being a Valkyrie because with a few strokes of a pen, ordering some men but not others on a mission, a commanding officer becomes a "chooser of the slain". Hornblower is always aware that implementing some novel and daring action against the enemy will get some of his men killed (and that it could get him killed, too). He also has to cope with being the man responsible for anything that goes wrong—whether it's his own mistake, his subordinates', or the Admiralty's. Hornblower also suffers from the intense isolation that comes with command and his own need to pose as an impeturbable stalwart even though he privately fears death and dismemberment, and torments himself with guilt when he fails to live up to his impossibly high standards for himself.
• Characterization Marches On: Hornblower is also a lot more ill-tempered and choleric in the first book published than in the books first in chronology, although that can be rationalized by being older and more cynical. (Forester also sets Atropos immediately before the first book, establishing that the death of his children has happened very recently.)
• Character Tics:
  • Lieutenant Mound's habit of putting his hands in his pockets in Commodore. Or rather, the way he continually starts to do it before remembering that he's in the presence of the Commodore and shouldn't. Hornblower eventually orders him to put his hands in his pockets because it's driving him to distraction.
  • As a young man, Hornblower's movement is always described as awkward or ungainly. Bush actually recognizes him from the back because of the gangling way he's walking into the wind.
  • Whenever he's thinking over some new plan, he paces back and forth with his hands clasped behind his back, with one hand twisting and turning inside the other. Anyone who sees him like this soon spreads the word that something exciting will happen soon.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The abandoned forts along the Turkish coast in Hornblower and the Atropos. Well-known to be abandoned. Until the Atropos is done hauling several loads of silver and gold out of a British wreck.
  • The set of double barrelled, rifled, percussion pistols Lady Barbara gives Hornblower at the beginning of The Commodore. One is stolen by his Finnish interpreter, Braun, who attempts to assassinate both Czar Alexander and the King of Sweden at a banquet to avenge the conquest of Finland; he chose Hornblower's, which were likely the only of their kind in Eastern Europe, because they were very accurate, wouldn't misfire, and had two shots. Hornblower puts everything together (after remembering seeing the pistol in Braun's waist while embarking the boat to the palace which he forgot in the excitement), and stops him in time. He also retrieves the stolen pistol.
• Child Soldiers: Midshipmen and powder boys. The typical midshipman starts at about twelve years old.
• Cigar Chomper: Hornblower, at least in the earlier novels. In The Happy Return, he is so overjoyed he almost forgot to hide it at El Supremo's offer to supply him with several hundred cigars rolled in El Supremo's "domain" in Nicaragua of Havana tobacco, and reflects to himself that the last cigar he had was a rather mild Virginia cigar, and in The Commodore, Lady Barbara includes several boxes of Jamaican cigars in the supplies she gives him for his mission in the Baltic, which Hornblower smokes after most meals.
• Cliffhanger: Ship of the Line ends with Hornblower surrendering his ship to the French and Bush with his foot shot off by a cannonball.
• Comeback Tomorrow: Midshipman Hornblower can't remember the French for "go to the Devil" while talking to the French supply ship's captain until he goes into the cabin. Then he says "allez au diable" to himself.
• Conscription: Unfortunately, C. S. Forester seems to have fallen for the modern misconception that the vast majority of seamen on British ships were conscripts dragged from their homes and family-supporting livelihoods by press gangs or criminals given a pardon if they join the King's service.^note  The actual practise of impressment was strictly limited to homebound merchant crews and only during wartime, with exemptions for East Indiamen and coal ships. The admiralty, in fact, hated impressment more than anyone, including those affected (who, being legally limited to merchant sailors, considered it an occupational hazard), and only used it because there was no other viable option. Criminals were offered a pardon in exchange for service, although more often than not they were rejected by the Navy, for obvious reasons. Aside from there only being two instances of actual press gangs (in which the officers responsible were severely punished), any officer who pressed a tradesman, farmer, or anyone with an exemption was in deep trouble. Hornblower (illegally) presses outbound East India Company sailors who were legally exempt in Ship of the Line, and he also presses French prisoners he'd promised freedom in Flying Colours.
• Continuity Drift: The Anachronic Order causes this, as the most evident changes in the series timeline occur when Forester jumped back to Hornblower's midshipman days. Hornblower's marriage to Maria goes from Childhood Friend Romance to their first meeting as adults, when Hornblower is in her mother's lodging house. Hornblower's birthday is Retconned, making him five years younger, and the length of his and Bush's acquaintance is changed to have started when they were both young lieutenants.
• Continuity Nod: Atropos in particular contains frequent references to events from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower and Lieutenant Hornblower, the books written immediately prior. It's almost as though it's making up for references that would have been spread out through The Happy Return through Lord Hornblower had the books been written in chronological order.
• Corrupt Quartermaster: In Hornblower and the Atropos Captain Hornblower discovers that some of the salt beef the Victualling Yards sent to his ship (the Atropos) is inedible. The superintendent of the Victualling Yards asks that the barrels of bad beef be returned to him, apparently so he can palm them off on some other unfortunate ship's crew. Hornblower considers the possibility that he has some kind of financial interest in doing so, and punishes him by having the word "Condemned" branded on the barrels to warn any other ship they might be given to.
• Counterfeit Cash: Hornblower, tasked with sending a man's belongings to his widow, finds a stack of counterfeit bills hidden in a sea chest in Hornblower and the Widow McCool, plus a list of Irish rebels and a propaganda note for printing. He puts it back and has everything thrown overboard, as revealing it and the secret compartment would ruin a fellow officer's career. He later finds out the sailor did not have a wife, meaning the chest and an encrypted poem would probably be destined for a rebel hideout.
• Court-martialed:
  • Lieutenant Hornblower has a court of inquiry, which investigates whether a full court-martial is needed, over Captain Sawyer's fall down the hatchway and subsequent removal from command. They decide against it in order to cover up Sawyer's insanity.
  • Flying Colours ends in one for the loss of the Sutherland at the end of the previous book, as the loss of a ship incurs an automatic court-martial no matter the circumstances. Since he lost his ship by taking out four French ships in a heroic and doomed action, then escaped custody (causing the French to tie up manpower and resources searching for him) and recaptured a British cutter taken by the French as a prize, the government exonerates him and turns him into a propaganda piece.
  • Crisis includes a court-martial against the Hotspur's replacement captain for running the ship aground on a mild day. See Ambiguous Situation, above.
• Cowardly Lion: Hornblower dreads death and mutilation in battle and believes his subordinates would lose all respect for him if they ever knew the truth about his pretense at iron nerve. He continually does his duty and more in spite of his vivid imaginings, however. Lieutenant Hornblower offers the reader some perspective about that "truth" when Bush observes him pacing nervously before the battle and doubts his courage. When Hornblower's unhesitant action and clear thinking save the ship during battle, however, Bush is entirely satisfied and it's part of why he includes Hornblower in the expedition ashore.
• Cunning Linguist: Hornblower is fluent in French and Spanish and makes good use of both over the course of his career, although his accent isn't good enough to pass for a native speaker.
• Cutlass Between the Teeth: Young Longley holds his dirk clamped in his teeth in imitation of proper swashbuckling tales whilst on a cutting-out expedition, though he doesn't injure himself while doing so.
• David vs. Goliath: The Hotspur versus the Loire. Hornblower doesn't actually destroy his enemy, but he does evade the larger ship and manages to fire into her unopposed with some very cunning maneuvering, rather than being chased away from his station observing Brest.
• Dead Man Walking: Short story "Hornblower and the Widow McCool" is about Hornblower, the junior lieutenant of the Renown, being saddled with the grim task of guarding an Irish rebel who is slated to hang. The other officers (and even Sawyer, who is still in his right mind here) all express sympathy towards young Hornblower in an understated British way for having to do such a morbid job.
• Dead Sidekick: Hornblower sees the loss of several protégés: Wellard in Lieutenant Hornblower, Longley in Ship of the Line, Mound in The Commodore, and finally, Bush himself.
• Death by Childbirth: Maria, giving birth to Richard, their third child.
• Death of a Child:
  • Hornblower has to sit and watch his first two children die of smallpox.
  • Longley, a Plucky Middie in Ship of the Line, is shot dead in the Sutherland's desperate Last Stand.
• Death of the Hypotenuse: Admiral Leighton and Maria Hornblower die in Flying Colours, and Marie Ladon is killed in Lord Hornblower.
• Death Seeker: In the very first Midshipman story, Hornblower feels that getting shot dead in his duel would be equally as desirable as victory, because both outcomes mean he doesn't have to deal with his tormentor anymore.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • England in the 1800s was chock-full of racism, sexism, classism, and general disdain for anyone not white and British. Take a shot every time you see the word Dago or Frog! Then get a new liver.
  • One of the faults Hornblower finds with himself is his distaste for A Taste of the Lash.
  • Some now-discredited medical beliefs are noted here and there. In Lieutenant Hornblower, Buckland suggests that bathing in tropical heat might injuriously "check the persperation." Hotspur has a nod to the old idea that night air is dangerous when Hornblower feels guilty for opening a window while his newborn son is in the room. The first written book specifically points out that it would be several more decades before nursing became an acceptable profession for women so that readers will understand Hornblower's shock when he finds Lady Barbara doing so.
• Deus ex Machina: Played with by having the DXMs usually be actual historical events. If the series was an entirely original work, people would doubtless complain about the author pulling them from his unmentionables.
• Didn't Think This Through: In Lieutenant Hornblower, Acting-Captain Buckland decides to carry out the orders to attack a Spanish privateering fort by sailing Renown up a channel and just firing at the fortifications on both sides. The ship's cannons can't reach the necessary elevation, they run aground, and it's all they can do to escape without being set on fire. Bush reflects that in hindsight, taking a wooden ship into a situation where red-hot cannonballs can be fired into her was not the best idea.
• Dirty Coward: Seaman Grimes from Hotspur throws a spoke in Hornblower's plans by begging to be taken out of them. He is more sad and pathetic than evil, though; Hornblower privately thinks it's not an unreasonable way to feel, but showing it is not acceptable.
• The Ditherer: Acting-Captain Buckland in Lieutenant. He's incredibly reluctant to take any action that he'll have to claim responsibility for later and continually hunts for the safest way out. It takes a lot of prodding and wheedling from Hornblower (and even Bush, after a while) for him to commit to a decision.
• Downer Ending:
  • At the end of Atropos, Hornblower has to give up his ship to the King of Sicily because the man is a full-grown Royal Brat who would turn against England on a whim. Then, when he returns to England with at least the assurance that he rates a ship of the line, he finds his son and newborn daughter dying of smallpox.
  • Ship of the Line with the sinking of the Sutherland and Hornblower and his crew captured by the French.
  • Lord Hornblower has Hornblower succeed in his mission and he was raised to the peerage because of it, but Bush, the closest person Horatio had to a friend, dies in the process. Then when Napoleon escapes from exile and Horatio tries to escape, he fails, and in the process loses his mistress. Only news of the Battle of Waterloo saved him and the Comte de Gracay from execution.
• Dramatic Downstage Turn: Though he often employs tone and body language for effect, Hornblower does this quite by accident after successfully challenging the Loire when he hangs up the speaking trumpet and turns to Bush—in the eyes of the crew, who have just sent a much more powerful ship running home by his clever maneuvering, the two gestures take on a "highly dramatic quality."
• Dramatic Irony: Hornblower spends a good portion of Commodore worrying about Napoleon's unstoppable advance into Russia. Any moderately knowledgeable reader knows that did not work out so well.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Hornblower's ruse flying the French tricolour in Ship of the Line, and later when Hornblower himself dresses as a Dutch customs officer in his escape from France.
• Drink-Based Characterization: Contrary to the common English stereotype, Hornblower prefers to drink coffee rather than tea, or at least whatever passes for coffee depending on supplies (in one book, the coffee is described as being made with crushed burnt bread, with enough sugar to mask the taste.) Coffee was enormously fashionable in England for many years, and London in particular was lousy with coffee-houses in the 1700s. Tea was also more expensive than coffee, and Hornblower—who is always having to pawn things to complete his ship and rarely gets prizes—can barely afford jam most of the time.
• Driven to Suicide: Seaman Grimes in Hotspur. When he realizes that he's going to be ostracized by the crew and hideously punished under the Articles of War (which stipulated hanging or "flogging round the fleet" for shirking from duty), he hangs himself in the captain's cabin. Hornblower finds his body there after returning from the semaphore expedition.
• Duel to the Death:
  • An accepted practice at the time the books take place, which allows Hornblower to challenge a bullying midshipman during his first voyage. He asks one gun be loaded and the other not so as to compensate for his dubious aiming skills. The captain has neither loaded to put a stop to the duel and prevent the loss of either midshipman. However, challenging an immediate superior is illegal (for obvious reasons).
  • One takes place in Atropos between McCullum the salvager and Eisenbeiss, the self-styled chamberlain of His Serene Highness, which results in McCullum being severely wounded and nearly scuttling the ship's mission before it even reaches their destination. Hornblower is incensed, though after talking to McCullum about the salvage operation, he soon comes to wish Eisenbeiss' aim had been better and instead killed McCullum.
• During the War: Set during the Napoleonic Wars.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: 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. It also refers to Hornblower being naturally talkative and curbing it out of necessity, while later stories make this more nuanced by establishing him as eager to talk about what interests him, but quick to clam up if he's made self-conscious about it (which usually happens immediately).
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The short story "The Last Encounter" is set after Hornblower's retirement at the rank of Admiral with his son grown and successful, comfortably settled with his wife Barbara. Hornblower being Hornblower, he quickly adds some reservations to his present state of contentedness, but at least this time they're worries about external forces of war and politics rather than the "pitiless self-analysis" he employed during active service.
• Embarrassing First Name: Hornblower thinks his first name is pompous and ludicrous. He prefers not to use it and signs his personal correspondence with a discreet 'H.'
• Embarrassing Nickname: His first wife Maria calls him "Horry", much to his dismay. In the midst of a battle, an unidentified member of Hornblower's crew refers to him as "Old Horny", but the officers are unable to figure out which sailor said it.
• Enemy Eats Your Lunch: Midshipman Simpson does this to all of the other midshipmen on the Justinian, helping himself right off their own plates.
• Everybody Knew Already: Hornblower's sea sickness, which he goes out of his way to keep secret from his men. It takes him years to figure out that his officers and crew are plainly aware of it, and simply choose not to comment on it out of respect.
• Exact Words: Captain Courtney, in "The Hand of Destiny", agrees not to flog the mutineers for a week if they do their duty. They do, including a successful capture of a Spanish ship, but Courtney still gloats to Hornblower that he plans to flog the fifteen men the instant the week is up. (This may actually violate his promise, as he'd promised not to flog for "past actions", but Courtney takes it as a loophole all the same.)
• Execution by Exposure: In The Happy Return (Beat to Quarters in the US), the preferred execution method of Hornblower's mad ally, El Supremo is to tie people to stakes to die of thirst. He considers it an elegantly simple method of execution. Hornblower is appropriately disgusted but can't object as he has orders to support El Supremo's rebellion against the Spanish in South America. Problems arise when his crew find and try to release one of the victims.
• Fair for Its Day: Invoked with Hornblower's general worldview. He can be quite racist at times, as well as sexist, but he also expresses some anti-slavery sentiments, is disgusted with the brutal discipline of the Navy, and empathizes with pressed sailors. The irony being that while readers recognize Hornblower as being ahead of his time, he himself is embarrassed by his "weakness." (Interestingly, though the older Hornblower seems more bigoted, the books with a younger Hornblower were written a couple of decades later—so this could also be C.S. Forester moderating Hornblower to bring him in line with changing attitudes.)
• A Father to His Men:
  • Sir Edward Pellew. He generally leaves Midshipman Hornblower to do what he will because it has excellent results, and when Commander Hornblower is under his command again Pellew writes a very warm letter addressed to "my dear Hornblower" with an invitation to submit plans and suggestions—a high mark of esteem. He also makes sure to put Bush under Hornblower's command again in Lord Hornblower because he knows they're friends of long service.
  • Admiral Collingwood also treats Hornblower very well in Atropos. At the end, he clearly hates having to take Hornblower's ship away from him and tries to soften the blow by fast-tracking him into a new command. (This is Truth in Television; Collingwood was universally beloved by his men.)
  • Hornblower shows this to a much lesser degree, but as he gets older he becomes more and more aware of the youth of his junior officers and frequently considers that they're at the right age to be his sons. As such the burden of ordering them into perilous situations weighs more heavily and he realizes that commodores he'd considered pompous when he was a young officer were probably hiding their worry too.
• Fictional Country: Seitz-Basau, one of many tiny Germanic states absorbed by Napoleon's empire, seems to have been invented for Hornblower and the Atropos. Little is said about it other than that its young prince is a distant relative of George III and he had to rapidly ennoble his doctor, the only person in his court who refused to surrender to Napoleon.
• Food Porn: Usually, Hornblower dines on brine meat, weevily biscuits, and burnt-bread coffee. Whenever he gets to eat something more palatable, it's described in great detail. Particularly notable is Pellew's dinner in Hotspur, which goes on for pages and describes the steak-and-kidney pie, wines, fresh veg, and cheeses in increasingly overwrought language.
• Forgets to Eat: Hornblower has a habit of not realizing he's just spent twelve hours steering his ship through battle only on the strength of his breakfast. (Bush tries to remind him when at all possible—when he was a senior lieutenant and Hornblower was junior, he pulled rank to do so.)
• Genius Bonus: In-universe, Hornblower first recognizes his new ship, the Atropos, by the figurehead of a lady holding a pair of shears.^note Atropos was one of the Greek Fates and was responsible for cutting the life-threads of mortals when their time was up.
• Genre Savvy:
  • Hornblower is acutely aware of how his every move will appear, which is strange, because this is the book that started the genre. Hilariously, he has trouble believing anyone could like him, despite evidence to the contrary. Even when he does believe it, he finds some way to make himself rationalize or downplay it.
  • In Hotspur, shore artillery fires upon Hornblower's ship. 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, and hurries to extinguish it. When he stands up, he sees everyone on the deck staring at him, and realizes he's about to become Shrouded in Myth.
  • He has his men dance the hornpipe during a long battle in Beat To Quarters/The Happy Return: because it will keep morale up. The narration tells us 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.
• Glad You Thought of It: In Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, Hornblower conceives and carries out a complex scheme to capture a Spanish slave-runner ship and make it look like the idea came from his flag captain.
• Good with Numbers: Hornblower is very good with numbers; one book says that trigonometry was a plaything to him when he was the age of the midshipmen he's tormenting with navigational study. This makes him an excellent whist player and navigator.
• Guile Hero: Horatio steps into this role at different points over his career, but the guiliest would probably be Lieutenant Hornblower. He is the least senior lieutenant out of five, but he sets the tone for what the senior lieutenants do after Sawyer's fall and persuades or maneuvers Buckland to implement all of his subsequent ideas.
• Hand Rubbing: Bush isn't obsequious like most of the examples on that page, but he does rub his hands together when he's pleased a lot.
• Hates Small Talk: Played with. Hornblower hates unnecessary words, is somewhat shy, and confines his remarks to "ha, h'm" whenever possible. However, he does this because he is inclined to be chatty and doesn't trust himself with any small talk lest he go too far.
• Having a Gay Old Time:
  • Horatio's men occasionally refer to him as "Old Horny" or simply "Horny."
  • Done deliberately a couple of times when Hornblower considers the "nice" calculations required for a tricky bit of navigation. In Hornblower's time, the word meant "precise" (though the word was already shifting to its modern meaning of "pleasant," as readers of Northanger Abbey know).
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Horatio sacrifices the Sutherland at the end of Ship of the Line in order to keep the French from breaking the blockade around the coast of Rosas. He knows full well that his ship and most of his crew will be lost, but it's his duty to stop them.
  • Bush blowing up the powder barge.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Hornblower and his Number Two, William Bush. In Commodore, Hornblower even thinks that Bush is better than a wife—this is after Hornblower has entered his second marriage, to a woman he actually loves—because he's so good at reading Hornblower's mood. (And frankly he's much more perceptive than Hornblower always gives him credit for.)
• Hidden Depths: When he meets Admiral Collingwood, Hornblower finds it interesting to contrast Collingwood's gentlemanly manners, genuine consideration, and cabin flowerboxes with Collingwood's reputation from Trafalgar.
• Historical Character's Fictional Relative: Lady Barbara Wellesley, Horatio's second wife, is a fictional sister of The Duke of Wellington.
• Historical Domain Character: A number of real-life Royal Navy officers from the time appear in the novels — mostly as cameos, but some of them have a more significant role. The most prominent example is Captain Sir Edward Pellew (later Admiral Lord Exmouth). Hornblower also encounters George III, Lord Palmerston, the Prince Regent (who knights him) and Louis-Naploeon Bonaparte, among many others. The Other Wiki has a comprehensive list.
• Historical In-Joke:
  • In Flying Colours, Hornblower sees an American ship and thinks it inevitable that they'll have to give up their neutrality soon — the only question is if they'll fight Napoleon or if they'll decide to have another go at the British.^note As it happens, by the time the novel is set, the Americans had already fought the French, with unofficial British support, in the Quasi-War of 1798 to 1800. More famously, however, they would fight the British in the later War of 1812.
  • Hornblower and the Hotspur features a cameo of USS Constitution, one of the US Navy's first six frigates, on its way to the Barbary Coast. Hornblower seems doubtful the Americans will be successful, but wishes them luck. Commodore Edward Preble would become famous for his blockade of Tripoli during the First Barbary War, which featured, among other things, a daring boarding action to burn the captured USS Philadelphia and an overland Marine expedition from Egypt to lay siege to the city with a mercenary army.
  • The plot of Commodore Hornblower is about Napoleon's plan to invade Russia. Wonder how that one will go.
  • "Hornblower's Charitable Offering" has Hornblower briefly muse on the recent notion, proposed by some quixotic engineers, that bombs could be floated in the water to attack passing ships, which would make what he's doing—sailing blithely up to an unknown raft—much more dangerous. In other words, he's contemplating naval mines.
  • In "Hornblower and His Majesty", a highborn toff complains to Hornblower about the prospect of universal suffrage—which Hornblower, who was only recently made a peer, doesn't see as that bad an idea. (He doesn't voice this, being uncertain in this conviction, and allows the man to assume that anyone else with a 'Sir' in front of the name will naturally agree with another Sir's opinion.)
  • Basically any well-known historical event can be seen that way. Such as when Hornblower is involved in the build-up to a certain naval action off Cape Trafalgar in 1805 in "Crisis".
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Deconstructed, as Hornblower is profoundly aware of the difference between the right thing to do and the logical thing to do. On several occasions, he's actually dickered over courses of action, then justifiably angsted afterward.
  • Played straight in a couple of Midshipman stories, where he feels obligated to request staying aboard the Justinian rather than transfer to the Indefatigable, even though it would basically kill his career before it started, and when he refuses to take credit for stopping a privateer to punish himself for losing his damaged prize vessel (a loss that Pellew casually waves off).
  • In West Indies he gives an ex-Colonel of Napoleon's Imperial Guard his "word of honour as a gentleman" that Napoleon had died on St. Helena, believing it to be a lie, in order to prevent said Colonel from breaking Napoleon out of exile. His ship then goes into port, and Hornblower is about to confess to the local British Governor and resign his commission when the Governor casually mentions that Napoleon has died after all.
  • In West Indies, a marine coronet player refuses an order to play a specific note because he felt it was the wrong note for the melody, which gets him arrested and sentenced to hang. This happens at the very end of Hornblower's tenure as commander-in-chief, meaning he is unable to overturn the sentence. Lady Barbara has the marine smuggled to Puerto Rico.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: When a disobedient marine escapes custody in West Indies, the governor decides to hunt him like a fox. He's unsuccessful because Lady Barbara paid a ship's captain to smuggle him to Puerto Rico.
• I Can Still Fight!: In Lord Hornblower, Hornblower loses his temper when Bush and his other officers suggest that he take it easy after his medical leave for the case of typhus that knocked him out at the end of Commodore, but he apologizes for the outburst a moment later.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: There are a handful of gun-handling failures throughout the series. At one point, Hornblower narrowly remembers to put his fllintlock on half-cock before putting it into his belt, which would likely have blown his genitals off.
• Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: In Commodore, Hornblower realizes, with amusement, that Mound is modeling his aloof, cool-under-fire attitude on Hornblower's own.^note Irritation doesn't actually happen, but the trope named 'imitation' doesn't apply to fiction.
• Improbable Age: Inverted, since Hornblower, when the series begins, is improbably old to be a beginning midshipman. He is in his late teens, while his messmates went to sea at age 12 or thereabouts.
• Improvised Sail: Hornblower and his crew(s) must improvise sails and masts several times in different stories. Notable examples:
  • Beat to Quarters: During the first fight between Hornblower's frigate Lydia and the enemy Natividad, both ships lose a mast and the associated sails to enemy fire. When darkness and bad weather force them to break off the battle, both crews must jury-rig their ships with replacement masts and sails before re-engaging the next day.
  • Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies: the packet ship carrying Hornblower and his wife back to England gets caught in a hurricane and is nearly sunk. With all the masts gone and the ship kept afloat only by her buoyant cargo, Hornblower and the remaining crew must improvise a mast and sails in order to reach land before they die of hunger and thirst.
• Indy Ploy: Hornblower has to make plans up as he goes along to get out of the various scrapes he gets into.
• In Harm's Way: Hornblower sometimes undertakes dangerous tasks because he's ashamed of his private fears.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: William Bush of all people, although a downplayed instance as he's hardly waifish. His blue eyes are often described as being frank and honest, and his straightforward character contrasts with brown-eyed Hornblower's guile (especially in Lieutenant). Hornblower himself thinks of Bush's eyes as looking incongruous in Bush's weatherbeaten face.
• In-Series Nickname: "Horny" Hornblower, as well as the various other real-life officers with nicknames.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Bush is a hardass who brooks no incompetence, thinks everyone is better off for a good dressing-down, and doesn't question the Navy's draconian discipline, but he takes the first watch after he and his men have gone over a day without sleeping, gives nearly all his pay to his sisters and mother, and extends subtle kindness to Wellard after he's beaten without cause.
• Kavorka Man: Hornblower has no opinion of his looks—he thinks his first child will be getting a bad deal if it has his looks or his personality, he's rather skinny and ungainly when young, and as he gets older he ruefully contemplates his increasingly thin hair and decreasingly thin figure. Still, women fall in love with him with astonishing rapidity. The first description of him is with a face "neither handsome nor ugly," however, and Lady Barbara considers him to be good-looking, so it's possible he's as bad at evaluating his looks as much as any other aspect of himself. Covers consistently portray him as fairly handsome, and he's been played onscreen by the likes of Gregory Peck and Ioan Gruffudd.
• La Résistance: Hornblower leads one during Napoleon's Hundred Days after escaping his exile in Lord Hornblower.
• Last-Second Term of Respect: Hornblower and the Atropos]]'' Hornblower repeatedly reminds Dr. Eisenbeiss to address him as "sir," with Eisenbeiss either forgetting to do so or delaying a beat before remembering to do so.
• Last Stand: 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.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The fourth book wasn't completed by Forrester before his death, and has two short stories, from Hornblower's lieutenant days and retirement, added to it. This means that if you flip to the wrong page, you now know Hornblower marries Lady Barbara.
• Lightning Bruiser: Bush in Lieutenant Hornblower, who is described as immensely strong and lightfooted, and generally not someone you want to meet at the wrong end of a sword.
• Long-Running Book Series: Eleven books published from 1937 to 1967, and multiple short stories? Hornblower's a busy man.
• Loophole Abuse: In Ship of the Line, Hornblower deliberately sets a course that will not put him in sight of Admiral Leighton's flagship and allow him to pass by in the night, delaying a rendezvous so he can continue acting independently for a while longer. Leighton, however, sees through it and warns him off doing it again.
• Lost Episode: The short stories, namely The Hand of Destiny, Hornblower and His Majesty and The Bad Samaritan. Because of the Continuity Snarl caused by The Hand of Destiny and Hornblower and the Atropos, Forester discouraged their reprinting. They were printed in the quite rare biography of C.S. Forester and later found and uploaded by a fansite (now no longer online). They were also compiled in the Hornblower Addendum for e-readers.
• Lots of Luggage: Subverted in the first (written) novel. Hornblower starts to lecture Lady Barbara on the impracticality of all the luggage she's bringing aboard, but she irritates him by saying everything she needs for the journey is in one chest and the rest can be packed away wherever.
• Made of Explodium: Black powder. This was Truth in Television; as the books note, men who worked in the powder stores even had to wear slippers because a spark from a nailed shoe could send them sky-high.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: As a character trait. As midshipman and lieutenant, obviously, he's the subordinate who gets delegated to, but even after he reaches command rank he tends to undertake tasks and expeditions that most captains would delegate. On one occasion it's mandated to get around the problem of Mr Bush being junior to a borrowed lieutenant who's acting as a subordinate on a mission, but Hornblower does it at several points without such issues. He hates relying on other's assessments or abilities and fear of being a coward also impels him to do things himself whenever possible. That's why he gets soaked to the skin personally clambering around a harbor boom in Commodore instead of just letting his young lieutenants do the recon and report back, among other things.
• Master Actor: Hornblower can put on the appearance of a scowling, bloodthirsty tyrant as easily as putting on a hat; he can conceal his fatigue and human doubts behind an imperturbable mask just as easily. (Bush is generally not fooled.) He's also able to perfectly convince Maria that he loves her, and while this is helped by his long absences at sea, she never suspects for two decades that he's been faking it.
• Meaningful Look:
  • In Lieutenant, Hornblower gives a few of these to his fellow officers and Wellard in the aftermath of Captain Sawyer's fall. To the lieutenants, they mean "don't worry, there is no evidence to implicate us in a crime." To Wellard, it's more ambiguous—Bush thinks it could be telling the kid to get to it before Buckland vacillates, but it could also mean that a secret (about you-know-what) is still safe. It's also mentioned (before Sawyer's fall) when Hornblower is clearly avoiding these to prevent any appearance of collusion.
  • In Commodore, Hornblower can't order Mound to follow him out of the Czar's reception as it would arouse suspicion, instead giving the lieutenant a Look with as much meaning as he can put into it so that Mound will help him foil Braun's attempt to assassinate the Czar.
• Meaningful Name: Inverted. Horatio Hornblower is absolutely tone-deaf, unable, on at least one occasion, to recognize even "God Save the King."
• Mentor Archetype:
  • Pellew, though more in the TV series than in the books. He still calls Hornblower his best midshipman from the Indefatigable when he's commanding an inshore squadron in which Hornblower is a commander, and even late in his career Hornblower looks back on his time under Pellew's command fondly.
  • Admiral Cornwallis is this to an extent in Hotspur. He gives Hornblower some advice about boldness on one side and foolhardiness on the other, largely gives him free reign to exercise his active and innovative tendencies, and tries to include him in a little prize money. He gives Hornblower the promotion to post-captain at the end.
• Military Maverick: Hornblower's need for mental stimulation pushes him into being one of these. He deliberately reaches a rendezvous point at night so he can "miss" it and continue to independently raid, he cuts up the stern of his ship so he can place guns there for a single crucial battle, and he may or may not have pushed a dangerously insane captain down a ladder to save the ship.
• Music for Courage: While catching up to and taking fire from the larger, more powerful, and captained-by-a-ruthless-killered Natividad, Hornblower stages a hornpipe contest among the crew so they don't lose heart from being under fire long before they can fire back.
• Must Have Caffeine: Hornblower is an avid coffee drinker... when he can get it. Usually it's an infusion of burnt bread ends.
• Mutual Kill: The Sutherland and the four French ships at the end of Ship of the Line.
• My Girl Back Home: Despite not actually loving Maria, newlywed Hornblower is surprised to realize he does miss her. Books set later in his life subvert this since he's grown to dislike her quite a lot. Played straight with Lady Barbara, since they both love each other.
• Napoleon Delusion: In "The Last Encounter", a man claiming to be Napoleon turns up at Hornblower's door, requesting the use of a carriage so he can return to France and run in the Presidential elections. Hornblower obliges, viewing him as a crazy man and humours him largely for his own amusement. Said man is later discovered to be Napoleon III, Bonaparte's nephew, which makes this trope an odd combination of using Exact Words to exploit it.
• Narrative Profanity Filter: Always in place for words more serious than damn or hell. We're left to imagine what sort of curses the sailors are saying. In one notable scene in Atropos, we are told that the ferryman expresses his appreciation for Horatio's help by swearing an "oath", and then several more "oaths", and in The Happy Return Hornblower is in a situation where none of the fifty five oaths he has ready will be enough.
• Naval Blockade:
  • Hornblower and the Hotspur involves the British blockade of the French port of Brest and Hornblower's deeds during the blockade.
  • Ship of the Line is also about adventures in blockading, this time along the Spanish coast.
• The Navigator: Hornblower's facility with math usually allows him to claim a greater skill in navigation than the actual navigators on his ships. The first book written opens with his success at not only taking his ship safely around Cape Horn (a very difficult feat) but then sailing it from there to Central America and making his exact intended landfall without once sighting coast (a damn near impossible feat).
• Nerves of Steel:
  • Hornblower has these, even if he thinks otherwise.
  • Bush as well; he never thinks about it at all.
  • Brown, (Hornblower's coxswain/servant from the The Happy Return forward) is only seen to be human once: when he nervously informs Hornblower of his intention to be married. Hornblower is jealous of the man's imperturbability.
• Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer: Inverted. Hornblower doesn't tell his men his plans so it looks better if he succeeds. It works.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Nearly, in Commodore. It isn't actually Hornblower's fault that the Admiralty gave him a translator with a hugely murderous grudge against the Czar, but that's certainly where the blame would have fallen.
• Nicknaming the Enemy: Frenchmen are always referred to as Frogs, and the Spaniards are called Dagos. Napoleon is often called "Boney".
• Noble Fugitive: The German Prince serving as a Plucky Middie in Hornblower and the Atropos.
• No Name Given:
  • In general, you don't see a lot of first names (although you can find the full names of historical officers fairly easily).
  • His Serene Highness the Prince of Seitz-Basau is never actually given a name. While he's serving on the Atropos, everyone just calls him Mr. Prince.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: In "The Bad Samaritan," two French prisoners escape from an island that the Spanish are using as a POW camp and are picked up by the Sutherland. Both are utterly emaciated because the Spaniards are cruelly apathetic about actually feeding them, but one says that there is one kind of food which is always available and that there are much fewer of them now than started out. Hornblower has to take a moment to be horrified at the idea of this happening in the enlightened 19th century.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: The Turkish mudir in Atropos, who asks for Hornblower to guard the bay from "pirates" and lets Hornblower think himself quite lucky that he's being given time to carry out his secret salvage operation. Hornblower only realizes when he sees the abandoned forts being manned that the Turks probably have telescopes, too, and have just been letting him to do the work so they can come in and claim the gold once he's done.
• Obnoxious In-Laws:
  • Mrs. Mason; Hornblwer's mother-in-law. Hornblower compares living with her after his first child's birth to serving under Captain Sawyer (a crazy paranoid captain).
  • "His Nibs", the Marquess Wellesley, who outdoes Horatio in the realms of sarcasm.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Royal Navy might be the greatest enemy besides Napoleon. During the Peace of Amiens, they refuse to confirm his promotion to commander and then put him under pay stoppage for months because he has to "repay" the commander's salary he drew, forcing him to pawn or sell anything valuable he owns and support himself entirely by playing whist. In Hotspur they send a letter saying that he's been using too much stuff, and Cornwallis makes a point of saying that he's going to scold them for trying to give this reprimand to a captain on the front lines of blockade duty.
• Officer and a Gentleman: It takes Hornblower some time after his promotion to captaincy to achieve the gentleman part, as he rarely has any prize money with which to supplement his pay.
• of the Week: Although some of the novels have a central, unified plotline, others (like Ship of the Line) chronicle a series of adventures connected only by Hornblower's being posted in a particular spot. This is because they were printed in magazines first, with the next issue containing the next chapter, and collected into novels only after the story's completion.
• Oh, Crap!: Numerous.
  • One particularly large one happens during the incident mentioned in Chekhov's Gun, once Hornblower realizes the Czar, with whom he is supposed to form an alliance, is about to be shot by Hornblower's own aide with Hornblower's own pistol. Cue giant flashing CAREER DEATH alert.
  • Bush in Lieutenant Hornblower when he realizes that the Reknown has run aground while being fired at by multiple shore batteries. The third-person narration breaks into an "Oh my God!"
  • In Hotspur, Hornblower, Bush, and Prowse all experience a moment of horror when they hear a midshipman order a man to start casting the lead to check depth, having been so caught up griping about other captains getting prizes their ship had opened the way towards that they forgot they were sailing towards the shore.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten:
  • Hornblower can never let himself live down the fact that he was seasick in a ship anchored in Spithead on his first day as a midshipman, even though that is probably the least likely thing anyone who knew him as a midshipman would remember next to taking a Spanish galley with one boat, boarding a fire ship to steer it away from the fleet, the cutting-out of the Papillon....
  • Buckland's fate in-universe. Despite the Renown's success on Samana, all that will be remembered is that he was taken prisoner in his bed when the captured Spaniards attempted to take the ship. Bush reflects on the illogicality of this, knowing that Buckland (for all his wavering) would have fought just as Bush if he'd been able.
• Overly Polite Pals: One Midshipman story has Midshipmen Hornblower and Kennedy going through a variation as Kennedy relays a message to Hornblower that the Captain needs to speak to him. The two take turns addressing each other formally and bowing politely in jest (it's midway through a very uneventful watch), and they only cut it short when one of the Lieutenants notices.
• Painting the Medium: Hornblower thinks of Bush as having little imagination. Lieutenant follows Bush instead of Hornblower, and there's a profound lack of Hornblower's usual metaphors and similes, especially when compared to Atropos. Forester even lampshades the usual borderline Purple Prose narrative style in Lieutenant several times by using elaborate metaphors and pointing out how Bush does not think in this way.
• Pants-Positive Safety: They don't wear holsters, so the standard place to put a pistol is shoving it down your belt (which as noted above, can be really dangerous if done carelessly).
• Parental Substitute: Inverted. While Bush is described as being older than Hornblower, the novels are contradictory as to how much of an age gap exists between them, with the earlier-published novels implying a larger age difference than later novels. In A Ship of the Line Bush is described as loving Hornblower like a son, even if Hornblower is too out-of-touch with his own emotions to realize it. This differs from Lieutenant, where Bush is described as feeling a Big Brother Instinct towards Hornblower.
• Parenthetical Swearing: In a tense Stern Chase, Hornblower gets impatient with Master Prowse's pessimistic updates on the relative position of their sloop and the more powerful frigate and says "I'm glad to see you carrying out your duty" in a tone that equates to "Damn your duty." (He can't actually say the latter because it would be against the Articles of War, even if it's sarcastic.)
• Patriotic Fervor: Bush. He's disturbed when he finds himself edging close to "red Revolutionary" notions (mainly in feeling admiration for a junior officer, Hornblower) and despairs of what England would think if the Renown was captured by the Spanish prisoners. In Commodore, rather darkly, he wants to call a surgeon for the botched suicide of a turncoat so that they can hang him, which Hornblower - who knows Bush as a kindly man - is horrified by.
• Performance Anxiety: In "The Examination for Lieutenant", Hornblower is about to go down in flames in front of the board before a fire ship appears in the harbor, and he helps Captain Foster steer it away. After it's all over, Foster makes a point of telling him that he was about to fail and it was lucky for him a crisis appeared. (He is later given the promotion for his actions that night.)
• Plucky Middie:
  • There are several capable young midshipmen. The probability of their death increases proportionally with Hornblower's opinion of their value as future officers.
  • Hornblower himself gets to be one in Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. (He's one of the ones who survives.)
  • Others, like Midshipman Simpson, are just the opposite. At 33 and having failed so many times that he's more than halfway to an automatic promotion to Lieutenant at age fifty (something of an Epic Fail by itself - most passed on their first or second attempts after only three or four years at sea), he would have better served the Navy as an Ordinary Seaman.
• Plunder:
  • 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 that his views would likely be different once he won a prize. His luck changes 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, which to Hornblower says a lot about how bad conditions in Napoleon's empire have become.
• Poor Communication Kills: Examined due to the extremely slow pace of communication at the time. In The Happy Return, much of the book is driven by Hornblower's orders to support an uprising against the Spanish in Central America, specifying that he was not to be in sight of land before he got there. Because he follows this instruction, he doesn't learn that England and Spain formed an alliance until after he captures the only Spanish warship in the area and gives it (along with other materiel) to the rebels... forcing him to go out and fight the battle all over again or have his career ruined just for following orders to the letter. It's also noted that his new orders are numbered, meaning that several copies had been sent in case one failed to reach its destination.
• Popcultural Osmosis: You've probably encountered the tropes this series popularized long before you ever heard of the series itself.
• Posthumous Collaboration: Several other authors have written their own conclusions to Crisis.
• Post-Victory Collapse: During the prisoner uprising in Lieutenant Hornblower, Bush is so full of fighting madness that he has no idea he's incurred nine wounds trying to fight his way through the Spaniards and is thoroughly confused when he ends up flat on the deck after trying to join Hornblower's counter-charge from the prize vessels.
• Potty Emergency: Hornblower uses this as an excuse to get out of a reception line at a Russian event so he can go and stop Braun from assassinating the Czar. He even dances from one foot to the other in his anxiety to get away, which adds to the veracity of his excuse.
• Precision F-Strike: "The Lydia, so graceful and willing when under sail, was a perfect bitch under tow." One of the few times anything worse than "damn" is ever included.
• Privateer: There are numerous encounters with them. The ship's entire mission in Lieutenant Hornblower is to incapacitate a Spanish privateer base in Haiti.
• Professional Gambler: During a temporary peace with France, Hornblower is in financial straits due to the Royal Navy forcing him to "repay" the salary he drew as commander by placing him under pay stoppage. To keep himself alive, he hires out to an innkeeper to play whist with the other guests.
• Protagonist Title: The series as a whole. Individual books vary. Also, The Commodore was changed to Commodore Hornblower in the States.
• Purple Prose:
  • Invoked in Beat to Quarters when Hornblower thinks of the morning light on the ocean as "argent and azure," and then realizes he's used the exact same mental phrasing every day for the past two weeks.
  • Subverted in Lieutenant Hornblower, where the narrator describes at length how a block-and-tackle arrangement looks and what a poet might see in the "spider lines cleaving the perfect blue" just to point out how Bush would never see it as anything beyond a couple of ropes.
• Put on a Bus: This happens a lot by necessity given the nature of paying off and switching commands, but noticeable especially after Ship of the Line, where the rest of Hornblower's crew besides Bush and Brown remain in the prison at Rosas, including semi-prominent characters like Gerard and Polwheal. (Although Gerard's name does get mentioned again when Bush takes his nephew into the Nonsuch as a midshipman, and again when Hornblower appoints his son as flag lieutenant.)
• The Quiet One: Hornblower is naturally inclined towards shyness (although his introduction in The Happy Return refers to his natural talkativeness) and maintains a deliberate reserve beyond what would be typically expected of a captain, and despises what he calls "unnecessary words."
• Real Award, Fictional Character: In Flying Colours, while disguising Hornblower as a Dutch customs officer, the Comte de Graçay gives him his late son's Legion of Honour, saying that no one achieves the rank of colonel in Bonapartist France without receiving the Legion of Honour. The Comte de Graçay mentions that he does not care about a trinket of the tyrant, but he would like to have this memento of his son returned when most convenient. At the end of that novel, Hornblower becomes a Knight of the Order of the Bath; as the story is set when that order only had one class, he becomes Sir Horatio Hornblower, KB.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Admiral Lord Collingwood, Hornblower's superior in Hornblower and the Atropos. Gentlemanly and courteous, he quickly recognizes Hornblower's value. When he has to tell Hornblower to hand over his ship, he's clearly reluctant and does as much as he can to soften the blow, promising to recommend him to command of a ship-of-the-line. In Real Life, Cuthbert Collingwood was beloved as A Father to His Men.
• Recycled In Space: Got recycled as Honor Harrington and others, as seen above.
• Red Herring: When Hornblower and his secretary are taken hostage by pirates, he quickly realises the pirates are illiterate when they ask him to write a ransom note for them. It seems like he might write fake pardons or an arrest warrant when he is released to deliver the message, but instead he returns with a mortar and destroys the pirates' cave.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: One midshipman in Happy Return appreciates the invitation to Hornblower's table because the ratmongers of the lower decks have been pricegouging lately, and is promptly mortified to have made such a remark to his captain. Hornblower simply expresses surprise at how high rats are going for compared to when he was a midshipman. (Midshipman Hornblower could never actually bring himself to eat rat, but he's familiar enough to feign it as a ploy to make himself more human in their eyes.)
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • In Atropos, Hornblower scares away a Spanish ship bigger then his by sailing towards it to while signalling to his nonexistent backup.
  • Hornblower takes two Spanish ships in separate Midshipman stories by this method as well. In "The Spanish Galleys", he storms a galley with a jolly-boat crew (though it helps that much of its "crew" are oarslaves, with only a dozen or so officers). In "Noah's Ark", he has his men hide themselves as a guarda-costa ship approaches his tiny supply vessel that can't possibly win in an engagement, then ambushes the Spanish when they board.
• Retcon: Hornblower's age in Beat to Quarters, set in 1808, is given as 37, and his exact birthdate is stated by Word of God as June 11, 1771. Mr. Midshipman Hornblower changes it to July 4, 1776, so his career could start just before the French Revolution instead of peacetime. Lieutenant establishes that Bush and Hornblower met as young men, contrary to statements in The Happy Return. There's also the story of how he received powder burns on his hand and the capturing of the Spanish ship Castilla. Forester overwrote the events of the short stories in the novels; later discouraged their reprinting. See Series Continuity Error below.
• Reverse Arm-Fold: In Lieutenant Hornblower, the officers on the quarterdeck are described as walking "with their hands clasped behind them as a result of the training they had all received as midshipmen not to put their hands in their pockets."
• Riddle for the Ages: In Lieutenant, how did Captain Sawyer fall down the hatchway? Did he slip, or was he pushed? If it was the latter, who pushed him? This is the only Hornblower novel not to be told from Hornblower's perspective, and in the story itself, he — a witness of the incient — begins an investigation of the incident with the only other witness being his assistant. By the end of the book, the other man is dead, and Hornblower himself never reveals the answer. A non-canonical 'biography' of Hornblower, The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower by C. Northcote Parkinson, resolves this with a letter opened a century after Hornblower's death in which he admits that he killed Sawyer.
• Royal Blood: Rumoured to be the case of General Hooper, Governor of Jamaica during Hornblower's tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the West Indies Squadron.
• Royally Screwed Up: Practically all non-British nobility, royalty, and other civilian leadership. Examples that embody this trope include The Marquis of Pouzauges from Midshipman and "El Supremo"^note admittedly only "royal" in his own delusional mind from Quarters. Worst of all, these are England's allies.
  "...England still had allies — Portugal under an insane queen, Sweden under a mad king, and Sicily, here, under a worthless king."
  • George III by 1810, who is actually featured in the short story Hornblower and His Majesty.
• Running Gag:
  • Not in the series, but on this wiki; Honor Harrington is frequently described as Horatio Hornblower IN SPACE!
  • Bush rubbing his hands together when pleased.
  • Hornblower's seasickness when setting out to sea after a long period on land.
  • Ha, h'm.
• Ruthless Modern Pirates: Hornblower is captured by some in West Indies. His description of them, poor, barely educated people using stolen fishing boats to attack larger merchant ships and using cutlasses, "the machete of the Caribbean", sounds remarkably similar to Somali pirates.
• Seadog Peg Leg: Bush loses a leg at the end of Ship of the Line, and has a wooden leg for all subsequent appearances.
• Secret Test of Character: Hornblower suspects that Collingwood is giving him one in Atropos by ordering him to make some tricky maneuvers in the squadron. As he succeeds, Collingwood proceeds to treat him quite well.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Hornblower is a broody, self-loathing mess when he's not being a brilliant naval captain and can't stop thinking about the prospect of death and mutilation in battle even if he never shirks from it. Bush is a stolid and stoic Lightning Bruiser who's unfazed by hardship but also lacking in Hornblower's genius. It's also noted that Bush has much more physical strength and endurance than Hornblower, who is usually described as gangly and prone to tire.
• Series Continuity Error: How Hornblower received the powder burns on his hand and, subsequently, the capture of the Spanish ship Castilla. Even which hand is burned is inconsistant. In Beat to Quarters, he mentions his right hand was burned during the Castilla's capture while he was a lieutenant, yet in the short story The Hand of Destiny, which details the capture while he's a lieutenant, it's his left hand that's burned, and Hornblower and the Atropos, in which he's a post captain in command of the 20 gun Atropos, he aids in the capture of the Castilla in a completely different action from what's described in The Hand of Destiny, and doesn't receive a powder burn to his hand.
• Sex for Solace: While spending the winter at the Comte de Gracay's manor after escaping exection, Hornblower's brain is "racketing itself to pieces" with the genteel captivity and worries of success, death, and court-martial until he starts an affair with Marie. It relieves his Cabin Fever immediately, but also fills him with shame because he's seducing the daughter-in-law of the only man in France who would shelter three British fugitives.
• Sherlock Scan: Bush, surprisingly, does one in "The Bad Samaritan" when he points out all of the strange aspects of the French escapees picked up by the Sutherland— their clothes are much too ragged, they're far too thin, and their sunburn too deep for men coming from normal prison conditions.
• Shoot the Dog:
  • During one battle, Hornblower orders a gun's crew to stop trying to lift a cannon off of their mate's leg and clear away sail wreckage instead; being forced to give that order gives his voice a hysterical edge.
  • One particular scene in Ship of the Line switches to the POV of the hot and weary Italian conscripts marching on a coastal road, going out of its way to tell the reader that these are just ordinary men who have been taken far from home by the war. When they see a pretty ship offshore, they're quite happy to benignly watch it and even wave to it. Then, the ship — Hornblower's Sutherland — opens fire. (After he's slaughtered or dispersed most of the soldiers he has the cannons turned on the pack animals, and he reflects disdainfully on the fact that his men are less willing to shoot animals than people.)
  • When the leader of the mutineers tries to swim for it in Lord Hornblower, Hornblower makes the cold-blooded decision to shoot him because the danger that the man will escape and raise another mutiny outweighs the objection to shooting someone unarmed and fleeing.
• Shout-Out: Hornblower shares his first name with Lord Nelson.
• Shower Scene: As a captain, Hornblower is known to his crew for taking a daily shower by having a couple of sailors at the pump with a hose—even in the Baltic where the water is freezing, and an incident partway through has him moving around the deck without any clothes on for about half an hour. The first time this habit appears chronologically is in Lieutenant Hornblower, where it's described in great detail.
  • More appropriate to the trope, Lady Barbara imitates him, though with some modesty.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The books are exceptionally well-researched in terms of understanding naval matters and the period. It's relatively easy to miss that this was written as historical fiction.
  • Remember the bit in Hotspur where Hornblower arranges for Doughty's escape to the U.S.S. Constitution at Cadiz? Not only was the ship actually there in that October, she took on new crew just a few days after the October 5th action that Hornblower was there to participate in.
  • The Marquess Wellesley really was as much of a snob as one scene depicts him.
  • In Beat to Quarters, Hornblower notes the lack of this in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
• Significant Birth Date: Post-Retcon, Hornblower was born on July 4, 1776. Occasionally remarked on by individuals who find his views to be dangerously republican (for instance, the idea that a republic could be a legitimate form of government.) Otherwise, it's not significant at all — he never had much dealings with the Americans, other than being under orders to respect their particular sensibilities in the aftermath of the War of 1812, even during his tenure as Admiral and C-in-C of the (peacetime and much-reduced) British naval forces in the West Indies, at the dawn of the Pax Britannica.
• Silent Snarker: Hornblower, sometimes, because in certain circumstances it would violate naval protocols. When Mr. Prowse is acting as The Eeyore in Hotspur, for instance, Hornblower bites back a retort that maybe they should just surrender, because the Articles of War stipulate that you do not mention the possibility unless it's imminent and unavoidable.
• Smart People Play Chess: A variant; the card game whist is treated this way. Hornblower plays in a highly mathematical way, matching his skill with navigational math and calculation of risks, rewards, and tricky pieces of seamenship. The Comte de Gracay and his daughter-in-law Marie are also skilled players, with the differences in their playstyles noted when Hornblower plays them. Bush is not good at it and knows it, not having the strategic or mathematical thinking to enjoy it. Jack Simpson proves his ignorance by going at whist no differently than he would twenty-one or a similar chance-based game.
• El Spanish "-o":
  • There are a number of occasions where British sailors and officers gamely attempt to communicate with Spanish, French, or Italian people (either their prisoners or their erstwhile allies, depending on whether or not Britain is at war with those countries at the time) by speaking slowly and adding vowels to the ends of their words. It generally doesn't work.
  • Admiral Leighton and his officers try to communicate with a Spanish cavalry officer with a mix of the French and Latin they learned as schoolboys.
  • Although Hornblower usually doesn't do this, he resorts to a hodgepodge of French and Spanish with o's and a's tacked onto the end to communicate with Sicilian harbormasters when he takes Atropos there to be refitted after a grueling battle.
• Spirited Young Lady: Although she's out of the 16-25 age bracket, Lady Barbara Wellesley fits all the other qualifications. She's traveling without a male companion, doesn't mind the tiny accommodations, and is basically described as being so capable that it aggravates Hornblower, who thinks that a properly feminine woman should at least be a little incompetent. His opinion changes significantly by book's end.
• Squick: In-Universe, Hornblower has a little bit of this when he cuts a wedding cake with his sword because his sword had cut other things before.
• The Strategist: Hornblower always comes up with clever schemes.
• Stealth Insult / Snark-to-Snark Combat: Hornblower's conversation with his brother-in-law Richard Wellesley in The Commodore. Hornblower will have a translator, but it will be his problem how the translator is rated on the books, to which Richard adds, "I believe that's what it's called". Hornblower calls him by his Christian name, which he is entitled to use as brother-in-law, and calls Richard a "master of all trades" just to annoy him by insinuating the Marquess was in a trade. Wellesley makes an equally snarky comment, and Hornblower gives up, deciding it that trying to out-snark Richard is too difficult because he's so good at it.
• Stepford Snarker: Condemned Irish rebel Barry McCool is calmly sarcastic throughout the period Hornblower is guarding, although never insulting to Hornblower. But even he finds himself unable to speak of his impending execution in plain terms.
• Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: At the end of Hotspur, Hornblower decides to let his steward Doughty, under arrest for striking a bullying superior, escape to an American ship that happens to be in the same port. Hornblower arranges a series of perfectly harmless coincidences so that Doughty is unrestrained (because an official is coming aboard and the new steward can't handle it), unguarded (Hornblower has to deal with said official), and makes sure the watch's attention is directed forward (timing a French ship's drills so they know how good the enemy crew is). When Bush notices Doughty's absence, Hornblower puts him off until it's certain that Doughty is irretrievable and only then does he take himself to task for his "carelessness." (He is also considerably stressed out during and after this that someone will realize what he's up to, along with the moral implications for the flagrant breach of duty.)
• Stern Chase: Hornblower engages in some literal ones.
  • In The Happy Return, he pursues the 50-gun Natividad with his smaller frigate Lydia to recapture or sink it from under El Supremo's forces. The enemy's long-range guns allow them to take potshots before he can, so he puts his best gunner with the bow chasers and has a hornpipe competition on deck to keep spirits up.
  • In Hotspur, he dogs a French frigate that's trying to warn a flotilla of Spanish treasure ships of the British squadron lying in wait for them. It's the kind of work that his little sloop seems made for, being smaller and nimbler so that the French ship can't shake him unless it turns and fights, which its mission doesn't allow. After twelve hours it has to flee back to harbor.
• Stiff Upper Lip:
  • Horatio acts like he has one, even if he's panicking on the inside. This is also one of Bush's key traits—at one point he muses that having to endure injustice (such as being beaten without cause) in a world that is essentially unjust is an important part of growing up.
  • At one point, Bush is about to commit the enormous gesture of patting Hornblower's shoulder, but catches himself just in time.
• Stuff Blowing Up: In Hotspur, Hornblower sets off a huge explosion in a French powder magazine on the coast of Brest that rains heavy debris on the retreat. Later he witnesses a ship get blown to bits by a howitzer shell.
• Superstitious Sailors:
  • In The Happy Return, Lady Barbara is so despondent at the lack of wind to get them home that one sailor sticks his clasp-knife into the mainmast, which is guaranteed to get a breeze into the sails.
  • Bush is absolutely convinced that gales happen on the day of the equinox because night and day are of equal length. Hornblower bites his tongue because his own view, which is that gale conditions are just more common at the start of spring and autumn, would be met with the "tolerant and concealed disagreement accorded to children and madman and captains."
  • Finns were suspected of being able to do magic by many British sailors. Hornblower forgets this until he offhandedly mentions Braun's nationality to Bush, who warns that they shouldn't reveal that to the crew (and looks rather uneasy himself).
• Supporting Protagonist: Lieutenant Hornblower is told from the point of view of Lieutenant Bush. This is done to show how Bush feels about Hornblower, and also to leave it ambiguous whether Hornblower pushed the mad Captain Sawyer, causing him great injury.
• Take a Third Option: Hornblower tries for this in "Hand of Destiny", suggesting that Courtney pack off the mutineers with a prize crew rather than flog them or let their actions go unpunished. Courtney rejects it, however, accuses Hornblower of being in sympathy with them and would have brought disciplinary action if one of the aforesaid mutineers hadn't shot him in the knee.
• Tap on the Head:
  • Averted in one of the Midshipman stories. During a cutting-out expedition, when stealth is key, Hornblower has to silence an epileptic sailor and thumps him quite hard with the boat's tiller; he is almost certain that he he killed the man by doing so. The boat is later set adrift somehow during the fight, meaning that even if he wasn't killed by the hit, he would have certainly died at sea.
  • Other instances of this, such as sandbagging the dock sentries in Hotspur during the attack on the semaphore, strongly imply fatality rather than a nap for however long the plot dictates.
• Tempting Fate: Near the end of "Midshipman", Hornblower attends a banquet where a toast is made to the hope of the Spanish fleet leaving Cadiz. Hornblower is also ordered to convey a Duchess to England in a small sloop. Guess what fleet he sails right into the middle of?
• Ten Paces and Turn: In the first (by order of events) story "The Even Chance", Horatio ends up in a duel with another midshipman. It's actually no paces and turn; since his opponent is a better shot, Hornblower creates the "even chance" by having one pistol loaded and the other empty, chosen blindly, and firing at point blank range.^note Hornblower was at the time so miserable that he considered his own death equally as desirable as victory. Neither is wounded. Later on, the captain tells Horatio that he had arranged for both pistols to be unloaded, not wanting to lose either. He then says that while proving you have the courage to fight a duel is good, having the sense to not get into any more is even better, and has Horatio transferred to another ship so that he doesn't butt heads with the other midshipman anymore.
• That's an Order!: Lieutenant Bush does this to his then-junior Hornblower several times in Lieutenant so that Hornblower will pause his incessant activity long enough to drink and eat, and later asks Acting-Captain Buckland to make "get some sleep" an order too.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • The sailor's traditional blasphemous prayer when they're about to be hit with a broadside. "For what we are about to receive..."
  • When Hornblower realizes that the rowboat he, Bush, and Brown are in is about to go over a dam, his reaction is an uncertain "H'm."
• Title Drop: Flying Colours is one of the few books not named after Hornblower's ship or rank, but the phrase is still worked in when Hornblower, fearing that he will faint in front of a firing squad, hopes that he can remain standing and die "with colours flying." Later, when he has escaped and faces the prospect of a mandatory court-martial for losing his ship, he decides to "fly his colours to the last" and responds to an English ship's inquiry in an entirely routine, yet fantastically unbelievable, manner. (That is, he gives the ship's name—in French hands for a year—and his own, knowing full well he's been reported dead.)
• Took a Level in Badass: At the beginning, Hornblower's a gawky midshipman who gets seasick even in harbor. At the end of the series, he's an ennobled, decorated, wealthy war hero and at the top of his profession.
• 21-Gun Salute: Hornblower encounters a megalomaniacal would-be Central American despot who demands a 23-gun salute in The Happy Return. (21 is usually the max, reserved for heads of state). Hornblower agonizes and then decides that since a 21-gun salute is the upper limit, a 23-gun salute is meaningless.
• Two-Part Trilogy: The first book published, The Happy Return (or Beat To Quarters) was a stand alone adventure. The next book, Ship of the Line proceeded directly into Flying Colours via a Cliffhanger ending.
• Unbuilt Trope: Even in what's arguably the flagship of the Wooden Ships and Iron Men genre, Hornblower is a brilliant captain, and a frequently self-doubting man who struggles to believe that people actually like him.
• Unreliable Narrator: Hornblower excoriates himself for his cowardly feelings and how he's secretly terrified in battle. However, narration during battles tends to be clear and only harried about dealing with tactical and shiphandling problems; it's usually in hindsight or anticipation that Hornblower thinks about the danger. This is particularly true with the howitzer shell in Hotspur when his narration explicitly points out that there's no time to think before he dives for it without a mention of the "bloody rags" he envisioned once he'd dealt with it.
• Unstoppable Rage: In "The Spanish Galleys", Hornblower's success is due in large part to how morally outraged he and his men are by witnessing the hellish condition that the galley-slaves are kept in.
• Unwanted Harem: Marie (not Maria) points out that he is a very easy man for women to love but a man who finds it hard to love in return. She's mostly right.
• Unwanted Spouse: Horatio essentially marries Maria out of guilt because he can't bear to hurt her feelings when she throws herself at him. He spends as much time as possible avoiding her at sea and finds writing letters to her to be a chore.
• Uriah Gambit: 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 of the line at once. At the time, Hornblower 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.
• Vehicular Turnabout: Frequently, a ship is boarded and turned against its order. In Flying Colours, Hornblower, Bush, and Brown steal a ship that had been captured from the British in the first place.
• Villainous Breakdown: El Supremo goes stark raving mad (not that he was all that stable to start with) after his rebellion fails and he is captured by the Spanish.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: Don't know a halyard from a hawse-hole, a maintop from a mizzenmast, or a sea-anchor from a sea-cucumber? Good luck!
• War Is Hell: Forester goes out of his way to describe what happens to men who are hit by cannonballs, then what happens to them when they visit the surgeon, and then the funeral. Not to mention the weevils and bad water.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Hornblower, irritated that he's being imposed on to transport a lady while also doing battle, asks what the hell Lady Barbara is even doing in this part of the world and persists until she prods him back by asking if he wants to know the first name of her governess too.
  • Once spring arrives in Flying Colours, Hornblower's affair with Marie ends abruptly because it's time for him, Bush, and Brown to make their escape from France. Marie is completely calm and observes that although he is easy to love, he seems to find it very hard to love in return—a statement that he finds rather unsettling.
• What You Are in the Dark: In the short story "Hornblower's Temptation", Hornblower finds a stack of (likely counterfeit) banknotes 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.
• Wooden Ships and Iron Men: The books are a fairly pure distillation of this trope, most adaptations somewhat less so.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • The French officers at the start of Flying Colours are all very sympathetic towards Hornblower, their prisoner, for his action in disabling three-fourths of their own squadron. It's also mixed with pity since they know Napoleon is going to haul him off to Paris and shoot him on trumped-up charges.
  • Lieutenant Hornblower ends with Hornblower winning a significant sum of money from a group that includes two admirals, at a game that lasts from evening till three in the morning. They pay his winnings while saying they're still indebted to him for his skillful playing, and then place him in command of a sloop by sunrise.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: In Hornblower in the West Indies, Hornblower meets a colleague he not seen since the defense of Riga in 1812, chronicled in Commodore, which the narration states occurred twenty years prior. West Indies takes place in 1821-23 and crucially involves Napoleon's death in 1821, only a decade after Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
• You Don't Want to Catch This: The turncoat privateer in Commodore poses as the captain of the ship he's just captured and claims that they're infected with smallpox to keep Nonsuch away. It almost works, but Hornblower calls his bluff since the yells from belowdecks sound more like shouting for help than overloud fever rambling.
• Your Costume Needs Work: Admiral Hornblower (Ret.) privately concludes that the man claiming to be Napoleon is a fraud and/or madman because the man is too tall, has the wrong accent, and dresses like a (wet) dandy rather than in any way to call to mind the tyrant, who Hornblower knew died two and a half decades earlier. The man turns out to be Napoleon III, Napoleon's nephew.

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