Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C.S. Forester.
Title: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower.
Author: C.S. Forester.
Genre: Fiction, literature, adventure, war lit, historical fiction, naval fiction.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1950.
Summary: The year is 1793, the eve of the Napoleonic Wars, and Horatio Hornblower, a 17-year-old boy unschooled in seafaring and the ways of seamen, is ordered to board a French merchant ship and take command of crew and cargo for the glory of England. Though not an unqualified success, this first naval adventure teaches the young midshipman enough to launch him on a series of increasingly glorious exploits. This novel, in which young Horatio gets his sea legs and proves his mettle, tells of Hornblower first command, dealing with seizing his first ship, and then his first land invasion, fleeing and pursuing ships of war, trying to take his examination for Lieutenant (with an unforeseen and violent interruption), a run-in with the bubonic plague and consequent quarantine, and finally the captivity by the Spanish that earns him his promotion.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My Review:
♥ ...he began to feel that life in the Navy, although it seemed to move from one crisis to another, was really one continuous crisis, that even while dealing with one emergency it was necessary to be making plans to deal with the next.
♥ He was so intent on enforcing his will upon these men, so desperately anxious to retain his liberty, that his face was contracted into a beast-like scowl. No one looking at him could doubt his determination for a moment. He would allow no human life to come between him and his decisions.
♥ So might Adam have looked back at Eden; Hornblower remembered the stuffy dark midshipsmen’s berth, the smells and the creakings, the bitter cold nights, turning out in response to the call for all hands, the weevilly bread and the wooden beef, and he yearned for them all, with the sick feeling of hopeless longing. Liberty was vanishing over the horizon. Yet it was not these personal feelings that drove him below in search of action. They may have quickened his wits, but it was a sense of duty which inspired him.
♥ His interest was so caught by the procedure that the little tremblings which had been assailing him ceased to manifest themselves; Hornblower was of the type that would continue to observe and to learn on his deathbed. By the time the Indefatigable had reached the point off the mouth of the river where it was desirable to launch the boats, Hornblower had learned a good deal about the practical application of the principles of coastwise navigation and a good deal about the organization of a cutting-out expedition - and by self analysis he had learned even more about the psychology of a raiding party before a raid.
♥ This was fear, the fear that stripped a man of his manhood, turning his bowels to water and his limbs to paper. Yet his furiously active mind continued to work.
He had been resolute enough in dealing with Hales. Where he personally was not involved he had been brave enough; he had not hesitated to strike down the wretched epileptic with all the strength of his arm. That was the poor sort of courage he was capable of displaying. In the simple vulgar matter of physical bravery he was utterly wanting. This was cowardice, the sort of thing that men spoke about behind their hands to other men. He could not bear the thought of that in himself - it was worse (awful though the alternative might be) than the thought of falling through the night to the deck.
♥ “Poverty brings strange bedfellows,” said Bracegirdle. “And wars strange duties.”
♥ Hornblower wondered who they were, who it could have been that the Royalists should seize and kill at such short notice, and he decided that they must have been petty officials of the Revolutionary government - the mayor and the customs officer and so on - if they were not merely men against whom the émigrés had cherished grudges since the days of the Revolution itself. It was a savage, merciless world, and at the moment he was very much alone in it, lonely, depressed, and unhappy.
♥ Hornblower looked back at the darkening coast of France. This was the end of an incident; his country’s attempt to overturn the Revolution had met with a bloody repulse. Newspapers in Paris would exult; the Gazette in London would give the incident five cold lines. Clairvoyant, Hornblower could foresee that in a year’s time the world would hardly remember the incident. In twenty Years it would be entirely forgotten. Yet those headless corpses up there in Muzillac; those shattered redcoats; those Frenchmen caught in the four-pounder’s blast of canister - they were all as dead as if it had been a day in which history had been changed. And he was just as weary.
♥ Soames was dead, and acting-lieutenant Hornblower would take his place. Fighting madness, sheer insanity, had won him this promise of promotion. Hornblower had never realized the black depths of lunacy into which he could sink. Like Soames, like all the rest of the crew of the Indefatigable, he had allowed himself to be carried away by his blind hatred for the galleys, and only good fortune had allowed him to live through it. That was something worth remembering.
♥ There can be no mental torture like that of a captain whose ship is in peril and he not on board.