Horatio Hornblower
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50 free Horatio Hornblower trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Horatio Hornblower is the model for almost every fictional sea officer who came after him. C. S. Forester's hero is brave, brilliant at navigation and mathematics, and privately convinced that he is a coward, which is why readers have followed him from the midshipmen's berth to the top of the navy for generations. This quiz covers the whole saga: the novels and the order they were written in, the ships he commands, his friends, wives and enemies, and the real history woven through the plots. It also takes in the 1951 Hollywood film, the television films of 1998 to 2003, and the writers and creators the books went on to inspire. Some questions are for anyone who has met Hornblower once on screen; others are for readers who know every voyage. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so you will pick up the stories behind the stories as you play.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which science-fiction franchise's creator drew on Horatio Hornblower when shaping its starship captains?
Star Trek
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was influenced by Hornblower while creating both James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard.
Q 02C. S. Forester gave Horatio Hornblower a birth date matching the adoption of which historic document?
Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence was adopted on 4 July 1776, the birthday Forester chose so that Hornblower would begin his naval career in wartime.
Q 03Which Hollywood star played the title role in Raoul Walsh's 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower?
Gregory Peck
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.
Q 04Which card game does Horatio Hornblower play for money to survive poverty during the Peace of Amiens?
Whist
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.
Q 05Lady Barbara, Hornblower's second wife, is the fictional sister of which real British general?
Duke of Wellington
The Duke of Wellington, then plain Sir Arthur Wellesley, gains an invented younger sister who boards Hornblower's frigate as a passenger in Panama.
Q 06What cargo swells with seawater and bursts apart the first prize ship Hornblower ever commands?
Rice
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.
Q 07Whose Thames funeral procession must Horatio Hornblower organise as his first duty aboard HMS Atropos?
Lord Nelson
Lord Nelson's coffin nearly sinks into the river when the ceremonial barge carrying it springs a leak and the crew must bail frantically.
Q 08Which US president mistakenly called Hubert Humphrey 'Hubert Horatio Hornblower' in a 1980 convention speech?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter made the slip while accepting the Democratic nomination, in a line meant as a tribute to Hubert Horatio Humphrey.
Q 09To save money, the 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower reused a ship set from which Disney adventure?
Treasure Island
Treasure Island supplied its Hispaniola set as Hornblower's frigate, and the crew rocked the whole heavy ship instead of moving the horizon backdrop.
Q 10What did the Apollo 17 astronauts name Horatio in 1972 as a tribute to Horatio Hornblower?
A lunar crater
A lunar crater close to the landing site was given the name, putting Forester's sea captain on the map of the Moon.
Q 11Which actor played Horatio Hornblower in the ITV television films that ran from 1998 to 2003?
Ioan Gruffudd
Ioan Gruffudd starred in all eight films, and the series won the 1999 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries.
Q 12The first name of Horatio Hornblower was inspired by a character in which Shakespeare play?
Hamlet
Hamlet supplied the first name, while the surname came from Arthur Hornblow, a Hollywood producer who was Forester's friend and colleague.
Q 13News of which battle saves Hornblower from a French death sentence at the end of Lord Hornblower?
Waterloo
Waterloo comes just in time: Hornblower had been captured leading Royalist guerrillas against the returned emperor and condemned by a military tribunal.
Q 21Which 1937 novel, published in America as Beat to Quarters, was the first to feature Hornblower?
The Happy Return
The Happy Return opens with Hornblower already a captain, so Forester later wrote prequels tracing his rise from midshipman.
Q 22Which novel in C. S. Forester's naval saga was left unfinished when Forester died in 1966?
Hornblower and the Crisis
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.
Q 23Which real Royal Navy officer captains HMS Indefatigable when the young Hornblower joins the frigate?
Edward Pellew
Q 14What unlikely weakness for a naval hero has troubled Hornblower since his first day as a midshipman?
Seasickness
Seasickness strikes him at the start of every voyage, and he was even ill in the sheltered anchorage of Spithead.
Q 15Which soldier hero did Bernard Cornwell create as a land-based answer to Horatio Hornblower?
Richard Sharpe
Richard Sharpe exists because Cornwell loved the Hornblower books as a child and found no similar series about the Napoleonic Wars on land.
Q 16Which future children's author did Hornblower's creator urge to write about being an RAF pilot?
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl was a young diplomat in Washington when Forester asked about his flying days, which prompted him to write his first story.
Q 17Which British prime minister is on record as finding C. S. Forester's hero Horatio Hornblower admirable?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill praised the hero, and Ernest Hemingway said he recommended Forester to every literate person he knew.
Q 18What is the highest rank Hornblower reaches after retiring to his English country estate?
Admiral of the Fleet
Admiral of the Fleet crowns a career that began at seventeen with no inherited wealth and no influential friends to push him forward.
Q 19Which C. S. Forester novel, written before he created Horatio Hornblower, became a 1951 John Huston film?
The African Queen
The African Queen appeared in 1935, two years before the first Hornblower novel, and reached cinemas in the same year as the Hornblower film.
Q 20What false news about Napoleon does Hornblower give Count Cambronne, only to learn later it was true?
That he had died
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.
Edward Pellew, a real frigate captain of the era, soon trusts the new arrival with command of a captured French prize.
Q 24Which title does the megalomaniac rebel Don Julian Alvarado use when Horatio Hornblower comes to arm him?
El Supremo
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.
Q 25Which frigate does Horatio Hornblower command on his secret voyage round Cape Horn to the Pacific coast?
HMS Lydia
HMS Lydia carries only 36 guns, yet Hornblower uses the frigate to seize a 50-gun Spanish warship in a night boarding.
Q 26What interrupts Hornblower's examination for lieutenant at Gibraltar just as he is about to fail it?
Fire ships
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.
Q 27The supposed Duchess of Wharfedale in Mr. Midshipman Hornblower turns out to belong to which profession?
An actress
An actress in disguise, she hides Hornblower's secret dispatches under her clothes when their ship blunders into a Spanish fleet in fog.
Q 28Why does Hornblower insist on going back to a Spanish prison after a British frigate picks him up?
He had given his parole
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.
Q 29Which landlady's daughter does Hornblower marry in Portsmouth despite doubting she is the right wife?
Maria Mason
Maria Mason dotes on him, and though her hero-worship grates at first, Hornblower warms to her and becomes a good husband.
Q 30Which disease do Hornblower's two young children catch, with fatal results, at the end of Hornblower and the Atropos?
Smallpox
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.