Mr Midshipman Hornblower

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Hornblower yells that God was on the mainyard, that puts Finch into action and they both jump to the mainyard, then meets with Midshipman Bracegirdle, then descends to deck to safety. The Frogs are the French and the Lobsters are the (red-coated) British regiment landed to support them.

I was equally charmed and repelled by Forester's vulnerable, volatile midshipman; but what remained constant were my curiosity to see what became of him and the pleasure I found reading about his adventures. Indeed, its three hundred pages are split into ten chapters, many of which are more or less self-contained stories.

The fact that each story in this volume only took up only twenty or so pages also meant that it suffered, in my mind, in comparison with the television movies - Kitty Cobham, for example, does not come to life in the book in the way that she does on-screen. However, an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the city forces Hornblower, Tapling and his boat-crew to take refuge aboard the transport ship Caroline and remain in quarantine for three weeks until they are clear of infection. His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The galleys are fought off and Hornblower, in command of the jolly boat, helps capture one of them, which gains him promotion to Acting-Lieutenant. The book's story continues with Hornblower's life through his promotion to Lieutenant (while he's in a Spanish prison as a prisoner of war).

Then Midshipman Bracegirdle, after he and Hornblower set up the gun emplacement, invites Hornblower to help him blow up the bridge. I loved to see him overcome his sense of inadequacy and learn to juggle all the tasks of navigation, keeping authority over his seamen, and keeping watch on the prisoners. Now that I have run out of Patrick O’Brian’s series and dabbled with several Alexander Kent’s Bolitho as a poor substitute, I took a chance to go back to the series from my youth that really turned me on to reading.At this time the convoy was becalmed and all the ships were in tow by their boats to try to make for the Mole when they see a couple of galleys making for the convoy to engage some of the ships. This was the end of an incident; his country's attempt to overturn the Revolution had met with a bloody repulse. This book is a good series, then, of short and stirring adventures that introduce the unseasoned youth that would later become the man of experience, the midshipman that would later become the admiral.

As the fog lifts, Hornblower finds that he is in the midst of a Spanish fleet of not less than ten ships of war.After Indefatigable comes into port at Gibraltar, Acting-Lieutenant Hornblower reports to Santa Barbara where he and others are to take their examination for lieutenant.

Za tuzemskou edicí stojí shodný tým jako za "aubreymaturinovkami" čili kvalita překladu i publikace je na nejvyšší úrovni (snad jen "námořnické aye, aye" dnes již netřeba překládat; nejen cílovka ví která bije). He deals with topics you don't necessarily expect to see in this genre, from Hornblower's deep depression at the beginning of the book, to the rat gambling, to the slave galleys of Spain, to the fraudulent Duchess offering to hide his despatches in her undergarments. Their enemies and even battles are similar, but the key difference is that while Forester focuses on the British Navy, Cornwell focuses on the British Army. As with similar men in the past (Drake, Cook, Bougainville and Scott), his primary weakness is a predilection to action over administration, a temptation to take the greatest risks onto himself. Upon entering the tier, Hornblower finds Styles part of a rat fight in which he has his hands tied and tries to kill rats by biting them, and others bet on the outcome.He is given the slightest of character flaws and he occasionally fails, but his fairly consistent successes and need to chastise himself for his failings could get a bit tedious for some readers.