SOURCE: Grainger, John D. “Who Was Hornblower?” History Today 49, no. 10 (October 1999): 32-3.

C. S. Forester's fictional sailor of the Napoleonic Wars, Captain Horatio Hornblower, was an immediate success when he first appeared in 1937, in The Happy Return. Sequels continued his story as he found love, promotion and worldly success. The books are still in print, and have been newly adapted into television films.

A recent biography of Admiral Sir James Gordon has claimed that he provides the ‘matrix’ for Hornblower's career (Bryan Perrett, The Real Hornblower, 1998). It appears, however, that the author's clinching argument for his theory is that Hornblower's absence from a particular campaign (on the Potomac in 1812) is proof of its correctness. It is perhaps better to consider Hornblower's fictional career more widely and look at Forester's methods and sources.

Forester was a skilled amateur sailor, experienced both at sea and in inland waters, and the books have stretches of jargon-laden, yet fully convincing, passages. For example, Hornblower and the Hotspur is set in the blockade of Brest just after the outbreak of war in 1803, and is a highly effective re-creation of life aboard a sloop in one of the most difficult operations of the naval war, a picture of dangerous inshore navigation, winter, gales, hunger, danger and thirst.

Forester did his research well: the detail is convincing, the appearance of historical characters is never out of place. Hornblower is made brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, and of the Marquess Wellesley, the Foreign Secretary, but the former never, and the latter only once, appears in the stories. Forester used historical situations, but without disconcerting the reader by his hero's intrusion into well-known events.

Forester was once asked by a historian about his sources for his account of the siege of Riga in The Commodore, and in reply claimed to have invented everything himself. But there is too much detail for such a disclaimer to convince.

Part of his method is to choose relatively unfamiliar events. Of the great battles of the wars Hornblower is present only at St Vincent, and even then he was captured before the action started. In the Russian campaign, Forester avoids the well-trodden path of the Grand Armée. Riga was a side-show. At the end he permits Hornblower to persuade the Prussians to change sides, an actual historical event. But he puts the event in an informal context, before the Convention of Tauroggen which formalised the Prussians' desertion only after five days of negotiations.

It is the character of Hornblower, uncertain, introspective, horribly self-conscious, intelligent, inventive, which carries the reader along. Forester evolved the character on a slow sea voyage, during which he also explored the Gulf of Fonseca in Central America in a small boat, which became the setting for much of The Happy Return. But many of his hero's exploits were based on actual events, and these reveal just which historical characters went to make up the stories. One of these men is well known; the other is less famous, but more interesting.

Thomas Cochrane, later Earl of Dundonald, was notoriously unconventional. Court-martialed more than once for disobeying orders, he must have been a terror to have under command. The irascible Admiral St Vincent complained that the whole family were ‘mad, romantic, money-getting, and not truth-telling’; Admiral Keith, a fellow Scot, called Cochrane ‘wrong-headed, violent and proud’. In 1809, after his disobedience at the battle of the Basque Roads brought victory, he was placed on half pay for four years. In 1814, after less than a year's re-employment, he was at last dismissed from the service after conviction for a share-selling fraud, of which he was probably innocent.

The lower ranks saw things differently. The sea-going novelist Captain Marryat remarked that he ‘never knew any one so careful of the lives of his ship's company’, and Captain Brenton, the Navy's historian, emphasised his care for planning his enterprises so as to ensure ‘little loss’, and pointed to his personal reconnaissances in small boats. This was a trait also in Hornblower, who, even as a Commodore, scrambled onto a sea-lashed log boom to judge its strength. Yet Hornblower was also depicted as self-consciously fearful of making a fool of himself, not a quality obvious in Cochrane. Cochrane later commanded the Brazilian, Chilean and Greek navies, and wrote copiously of himself and his exploits in his Autobiography, not deeds which we would expect of Hornblower.

Some of Cochrane's exploits became Hornblower's. At Rosas in north-east Spain, Cochrane carried out a spectacular raid; at Rosas, Hornblower fought one ship against four and was captured after seriously damaging the enemy. During this raid Cochrane bombarded a French artillery train from the sea; Hornblower bombarded a French regiment, including a detachment of artillery, from the sea. Forester, though, added murmurs of protest from his crew as they shot at the mules—a distinctively twentieth-century touch.

Forester was a man of his time; his books are contemporary, even when set in the past. In The Commodore (written during the Second World War and published in 1945), Hornblower is in the Baltic. He has a Finnish clerk, and Finland had been conquered by Russia, which itself is about to be attacked by Napoleon. Hornblower realises how fortunate it was that Britain had not come to the aid of Finland in its agony; and the modern audience would be expected to recall the Winter War of 1940, equate Napoleon with Hitler and recall that Churchill had allied with Stalin against Germany, declaring that, if Hitler invaded Hell, he would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil. Forester's next book, Lord Hornblower, was conceived amid the collapse of the Nazi empire, and is set in the period of the fall of Napoleon.

An episode of The Commodore gives the clue to the other sailor some of whose exploits became Hornblower's. Hornblower entertains Tsar Alexander, incognito, on his ship. Hornblower glows with pride at the abilities of his free-born English sailors, while resenting that they have to perform as entertainers for an autocrat. Then the Tsar is given a meal fit for an English sailor: pea soup, rum and weevilly biscuits.

This is based on an incident in the career of Captain Sir Home Riggs Popham, who entertained Tsar Paul, Alexander's father, on his ship in 1799. Popham was in Russia on a diplomatic mission and so pleased the Tsar that he knighted him. Popham gave the Tsar a meal on board his ship, but he would never have provided weevilly biscuits. It would have been a sumptuous dinner served on the best silver.

Again Hornblower was quite distinct from the sailor involved in the original event. Popham was an insinuating man, avid for riches, litigious, a chancer, a ‘dasher’, in contemporary slang. He presumed on the bare acquaintance of the powerful for his own ends, exploiting others without scruple. He was also a superb navigator, a careful surveyor, an ingenious commander, and notable in treating his men well. In war, he preferred guile to gore, and captured more ships by this means than most captains ever did by force.

Some of these characteristics can be seen in Hornblower. In the first scene of The Happy Return, he makes a precise landfall to the admiration of his lieutenants, after a voyage out of sight of land from Cape Horn to Central America. Hornblower was avid for wealth, but more scrupulous than Popham, around whom hung a suspicion of corruption, and who tarnished his reputation by taking service with the Ostend Company, an Austrian interloper in the East India trade.

The episode of Popham with the Tsar does not appear in many history books: Forester's research is again demonstrated. It had been done years before. In preparation for a canal voyage, he had bought three bound volumes of the Naval Chronicle, a journal published between 1790-1820, with many details of naval warfare and people. Popham appears frequently in those books. He had a knack of performing notable exploits in unusual places. He had the ear of the Duke of York, the Army's commander-in-chief, corresponded prolifically with the secretary of war, Henry Dundas, and had access to prime minister William Pitt. He was inventive, suggesting ingenious ways of combatting the threat of a French invasion in 1803-05; and he perfected the system of naval signalling by multiple flags which is still used. He commanded the expedition to retake the Cape of Good Hope in 1806; from there he went, without authorisation, to capture Buenos Aires, an adventure which took place at the time Hornblower was in the Pacific to provoke a war for independence in Spanish Central America.

Popham faced a court martial when he returned from South America; Hornblower faced a court martial on his return from France. Both were acquitted. The two careers were only two years apart by this time, despite a difference of seventeen years between their dates of birth; but, as Forester admitted in his Hornblower Companion, Hornblower's promotion was unusually speedy.

The parallels between Popham's career and that of Hornblower are clear, and in the end they became nearly identical. Popham was commander-in-chief of the West Indies station in 1820-22, the very post Hornblower had at the time. But Popham died in 1822; Hornblower lived another thirty-five years.

To press these equivalences too far, however, devalues the fiction. Take the episode with the Tsar. It was peculiar enough in itself; Forester transformed it into an episode of comedy and irony. He achieves several things: he reduced the importance of the meeting, for it would be ludicrous to portray such an episode as decisive in the achievement of an Anglo-Russian alliance; he fits it neatly into his story; and he shows how a novelist can use his imagination upon an historical event to adapt it to his own purposes.

There is no obvious direct historical parallel for the Hornblower character. Royal Naval captains were rarely introspective Hornblower types. Hornblower is an original. Yet his exploits were culled from those volumes of the Naval Chronicle which Forester had read. The whole, the character and the transformed events, must be taken as products of a novelist's imagination, mixed with personal experience and contemporary allusions. Compared with that, detecting a particular career as a ‘matrix’ for Hornblower's is neither important nor convincing.