Name: The Hornblower Companion
Author: C. S. Forester

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It is richly illustrated with many full-page maps by Samuel H. Bryant (dates unknown), each depicting the nautical arena of action connected to a specific Hornblower novel or episode. Each map is accompanied with a wry essay by Forester, in which he reflects on Hornblower’s international adventures and their connections with not only the relevant history but also Forester’s own strategic choices (in the guise of Hornblower’s ‘biographer’). For example, discussing the Spanish port of El Ferrol in Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950), Forester writes: ‘Hornblower, of course, made instant use of the opportunity presented to him, smoothing not only his path to freedom, but also the path of the novelist who undertook his biography.’

Written by C. S. Forester as a retrospective guide to his celebrated naval hero, The Hornblower Companion includes a series of maps by Samuel H. Bryant charting the maritime theatres of Hornblower’s adventures during the Napoleonic Wars. These maps transform the historical seas of the Atlantic and Mediterranean into a coherent narrative geography, tracing the movements of a fictional sailor whose influence would extend far beyond historical fiction – including, famously, as an inspiration for Star Trek.

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The first novel in the Hornblower series was titled The Happy Return and published in 1937. Its author, C. S. Forester (1899–1966), was an Englishman born in Cairo, who relocated to the US during the Second World War, where he remained for the rest of his life. Although Forester wrote in a wide variety of genres, his tales of the British Naval Officer Horatio Hornblower, and his globe-trotting adventures during the Napoleonic Wars, have proved his most enduring and influential legacy. This companion volume was written by Forester himself some years after the publication of what proved to be the final Hornblower novel, Hornblower in the West Indies (1957).

The Hornblower series was wildly successful in its own right, but also spawned several film, television, and radio adaptations, most recently a popular UK ITV drama starring Ioan Gruffudd, produced between 1998 and 2003. However, one facet of the legacy of Forester’s creation has had a particularly profound influence on popular culture. In 1964, the year The Hornblower Companion was published, Gene Roddenberry (1921–91) pitched his idea for a new science fiction television series with a document titled ‘STAR TREK IS…’. One of the phrases he used to efficiently communicate his vision for the show was simply ‘Hornblower in space’.

[Hornblower was] without question, Gene’s favourite literary character, he read Hornblower when it was first published in the United States in 1939 and continued to reread the novels until a few weeks before his death. Ironically, Forester wrote several science-fiction stories and at least one SF novel. He died the same year Star Trek went on the air.

Captain James T. Kirk to the series’ production team. In a production memo Roddenberry writes: ‘Our audience likes Kirk best of all when he is at his toughest and then they like contrasting cabin scenes where we learn in private that he is not as tough as he pretends. […] The best guide is still C. S. Forester’s Captain Horatio Hornblower.’190 As scholar Stefan Rabitsch remarks, ‘whatever Star Trek is, it is also a story-world that is modelled on the British Golden Age of Sail’.

Map of the Gironde River in south-western France, September 1794