50 Fun Facts About Horatio Hornblower

Which science-fiction franchise's creator drew on Horatio Hornblower when shaping its starship captains?

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was influenced by Hornblower while creating both James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard.

C. S. Forester gave Horatio Hornblower a birth date matching the adoption of which historic document?

The Declaration of Independence was adopted on 4 July 1776, the birthday Forester chose so that Hornblower would begin his naval career in wartime.

Which Hollywood star played the title role in Raoul Walsh's 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower?

Gregory Peck was borrowed from producer David O. Selznick for the part, and the film became the most popular Warner Bros. release of its year.

Which card game does Horatio Hornblower play for money to survive poverty during the Peace of Amiens?

Whist suited his gift for mathematics, and his skill at the table so impressed a Lord of the Admiralty that it helped confirm his promotion.

Lady Barbara, Hornblower's second wife, is the fictional sister of which real British general?

The Duke of Wellington, then plain Sir Arthur Wellesley, gains an invented younger sister who boards Hornblower's frigate as a passenger in Panama.

What cargo swells with seawater and bursts apart the first prize ship Hornblower ever commands?

Rice soaked up the leak so quietly that no water showed in the hold until the swelling grain began to break the French prize Marie Galante apart.

Whose Thames funeral procession must Horatio Hornblower organise as his first duty aboard HMS Atropos?

Lord Nelson's coffin nearly sinks into the river when the ceremonial barge carrying it springs a leak and the crew must bail frantically.

Which US president mistakenly called Hubert Humphrey 'Hubert Horatio Hornblower' in a 1980 convention speech?

Jimmy Carter made the slip while accepting the Democratic nomination, in a line meant as a tribute to Hubert Horatio Humphrey.

To save money, the 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower reused a ship set from which Disney adventure?

Treasure Island supplied its Hispaniola set as Hornblower's frigate, and the crew rocked the whole heavy ship instead of moving the horizon backdrop.

What did the Apollo 17 astronauts name Horatio in 1972 as a tribute to Horatio Hornblower?

A lunar crater close to the landing site was given the name, putting Forester's sea captain on the map of the Moon.

Which actor played Horatio Hornblower in the ITV television films that ran from 1998 to 2003?

Ioan Gruffudd starred in all eight films, and the series won the 1999 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries.

The first name of Horatio Hornblower was inspired by a character in which Shakespeare play?

Hamlet supplied the first name, while the surname came from Arthur Hornblow, a Hollywood producer who was Forester's friend and colleague.

News of which battle saves Hornblower from a French death sentence at the end of Lord Hornblower?

Waterloo comes just in time: Hornblower had been captured leading Royalist guerrillas against the returned emperor and condemned by a military tribunal.

What unlikely weakness for a naval hero has troubled Hornblower since his first day as a midshipman?

Seasickness strikes him at the start of every voyage, and he was even ill in the sheltered anchorage of Spithead.

Which soldier hero did Bernard Cornwell create as a land-based answer to Horatio Hornblower?

Richard Sharpe exists because Cornwell loved the Hornblower books as a child and found no similar series about the Napoleonic Wars on land.

Which future children's author did Hornblower's creator urge to write about being an RAF pilot?

Roald Dahl was a young diplomat in Washington when Forester asked about his flying days, which prompted him to write his first story.

Which British prime minister is on record as finding C. S. Forester's hero Horatio Hornblower admirable?

Winston Churchill praised the hero, and Ernest Hemingway said he recommended Forester to every literate person he knew.

What is the highest rank Hornblower reaches after retiring to his English country estate?

Admiral of the Fleet crowns a career that began at seventeen with no inherited wealth and no influential friends to push him forward.

Which C. S. Forester novel, written before he created Horatio Hornblower, became a 1951 John Huston film?

The African Queen appeared in 1935, two years before the first Hornblower novel, and reached cinemas in the same year as the Hornblower film.

What false news about Napoleon does Hornblower give Count Cambronne, only to learn later it was true?

That he had died was a desperate bluff to stop a rescue ship reaching St Helena, yet Hornblower returned to port to find the exile really was dead.

Which 1937 novel, published in America as Beat to Quarters, was the first to feature Hornblower?

The Happy Return opens with Hornblower already a captain, so Forester later wrote prequels tracing his rise from midshipman.

Which novel in C. S. Forester's naval saga was left unfinished when Forester died in 1966?

Hornblower and the Crisis breaks off as its hero agrees to a spying mission, with a one-page summary of the ending drawn from the author's notes.

Which real Royal Navy officer captains HMS Indefatigable when the young Hornblower joins the frigate?

Edward Pellew, a real frigate captain of the era, soon trusts the new arrival with command of a captured French prize.

Which title does the megalomaniac rebel Don Julian Alvarado use when Horatio Hornblower comes to arm him?

El Supremo believes himself divine; a real ruler of the era, Paraguay's dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, was popularly known by the same name.

Which frigate does Horatio Hornblower command on his secret voyage round Cape Horn to the Pacific coast?

HMS Lydia carries only 36 guns, yet Hornblower uses the frigate to seize a 50-gun Spanish warship in a night boarding.

What interrupts Hornblower's examination for lieutenant at Gibraltar just as he is about to fail it?

Fire ships sent by the enemy break up the exam; Hornblower helps avert disaster, the board never reassembles, and he must wait for a later one.

The supposed Duchess of Wharfedale in Mr. Midshipman Hornblower turns out to belong to which profession?

An actress in disguise, she hides Hornblower's secret dispatches under her clothes when their ship blunders into a Spanish fleet in fog.

Why does Hornblower insist on going back to a Spanish prison after a British frigate picks him up?

He had given his parole not to escape, so honour sent him back, and the Spanish later freed him in recognition of his bravery in a shipwreck rescue.

Which landlady's daughter does Hornblower marry in Portsmouth despite doubting she is the right wife?

Maria Mason dotes on him, and though her hero-worship grates at first, Hornblower warms to her and becomes a good husband.

Which disease do Hornblower's two young children catch, with fatal results, at the end of Hornblower and the Atropos?

Smallpox strikes while he is travelling home from the Mediterranean, just after his repaired ship was handed over to the King of the Two Sicilies.

Which 74-gun ship does Horatio Hornblower surrender after fighting four French ships of the line at once?

HMS Sutherland disables or heavily damages all four opponents before Hornblower, his ship dismasted, is forced to strike his colours.

Aboard which ship does Hornblower serve under the paranoid Captain Sawyer on a Caribbean mission?

HMS Renown is seized by Spanish prisoners during the night, and Sawyer is killed in the fighting as Hornblower retakes the ship.

Which captured Royal Navy cutter does Horatio Hornblower seize at Nantes to sail home in Flying Colours?

Witch of Endor is manned with a commandeered gang of galley prisoners for the dash out of the harbour to the blockading British squadron.

What disguise do Horatio Hornblower and his companions wear to steal a ship from the harbour at Nantes?

Dutch customs officers in French service was the pose, in uniforms sewn for them during a winter spent hidden in a nobleman's chateau.

Down which French river do Hornblower and two companions escape by boat towards the port of Nantes?

The Loire first wrecks them, capsizing a stolen boat in rapids, before a second boat built over the winter carries them to the coast.

Which honour does the Prince Regent bestow on Horatio Hornblower after his celebrated escape from France?

Order of the Bath knighthood came with a paid sinecure as Colonel of Marines, leaving the once-poor captain financially secure at last.

Horatio Hornblower buys an estate in the fictional village of Smallbridge, set in which English county?

Kent is also his birthplace, and the village later supplies his title when he is created Baron Hornblower of Smallbridge.

Which ruler does Horatio Hornblower save from an assassin's pistol at a court function in The Commodore?

Tsar Alexander I is nearly shot by Hornblower's own secretary and interpreter, a Finnish refugee armed with a pistol stolen from his master.

Which disease leaves Horatio Hornblower gravely ill and hallucinating at the end of The Commodore?

Typhus lays him low after the siege of Riga, and some editions stop there while others add a chapter in which he gets home for Christmas.

Which Prussian officer, later a renowned military theorist, meets Hornblower during the siege of Riga?

Carl von Clausewitz appears as a German officer in Russian service, one of several real figures Forester wove into the Baltic campaign.

Which loyal friend and former first lieutenant of Hornblower is killed leading a raid on the Seine?

Captain Bush dies in an unexpected explosion while destroying barges, and his viewpoint had earlier told the whole of the novel Lieutenant Hornblower.

Which French port does Hornblower capture after a mayor's assistant secretly offers to surrender it?

Le Havre falls to just half a battalion of Royal Marines, and Hornblower finds himself the military governor of a French city.

In Hornblower in the West Indies, the hero meets the army of which South American liberator?

Simón Bolívar has his cause helped when a rich English yachtsman, posing as a Royal Navy blockader, hijacks a shipment of Spanish artillery.

Which American network showed the Hornblower television films in the United States?

A&E showed the films under the title Horatio Hornblower, and several of them were renamed for American viewers.

To which American frigate does Hornblower's steward flee to avoid hanging for striking a superior?

USS Constitution lies in Cádiz harbour when Hornblower quietly connives at the escape, unable to accept a hanging he is bound to enforce.

In the unfinished last novel, Hornblower plans to trick which French fleet commander with forged orders?

Villeneuve was to receive fake orders from the emperor, copied by a condemned forger, luring his ships out to defeat at Trafalgar.

Warner Bros. first bought the Horatio Hornblower film rights as a vehicle for which swashbuckling star?

Errol Flynn was never cast, perhaps because his 1948 Adventures of Don Juan had failed financially and he was growing harder to work with.

Which friend of Hornblower, played by Jamie Bamber, became a recurring character in the television films?

Archie Kennedy was among the changes the films made to Forester's stories, as were recurring roles for the seamen Matthews and Styles.

Whose Aubrey–Maturin novels began when an American publisher wanted more fiction like Horatio Hornblower?

Patrick O'Brian was commissioned by an editor at J. B. Lippincott who thought he could write more novels in the Hornblower genre.

Which future screen Dracula played a Spanish captain in the 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower?

Christopher Lee plays the captain of the big Spanish warship the hero boards at night, seven years before Dracula made him famous.