Beat to Quarters!

Our book today is C. S. Forester’s 1937 canon-shot of a Napoleonic sea-novel, Beat to Quarters (published in England as, sigh, The Happy Return), the book that introduced the character of Captain Horatio Hornblower to the world and single-handedly re-invigorated a sub-genre that had been quiescent for a century.

The story is taut. Hornblower’s ship, the thirty-six gun frigate Lydia, has been at sea for months under secret orders the captain has communicated to no one: he’s to penetrate the waters of Spanish America and give aid to a rebel in Panama into on overthrowing the Spanish, and while he’s about it, he’s to find and destroy the Natividad, a Spanish warship of twice his firepower. From the first chapter, Forester stresses Hornblower’s stoical tendencies – tendencies which certainly serve him well when contemplating, for the thousandth time, these madcap commands:

Those orders were the usual combination of the barely possible and the quite Quixotic, which a captain on detached service might expect to receive. Only a landsman would have given those opening orders to sail to the Gulf of Fonesca without sighting other land in the Pacific – only a succession of miracles (Hornblower gave himself no credit for sound judgment and good seamanship) had permitted of their being carried out.

Hornblower’s tasks are complicated further when he’s forced to take on board Lady Barbara Wellesley, sister to the future Duke of Wellington … and finds himself falling in love with her (and thinking clinical, unkind thoughts about his dumpy Spanish wife back in England). And Forester piles plot-strand after plot-strand on top of these, filling his quick-paced book with adventure and bringing it all under the hand of his supremely competent commanding officer – although the centerpiece of the novel is still the confrontation between the Lydia and the Natividad, an action Hornblower begins by having his men dance the hornpipe as the ship is towed into fighting range:

In later years it was a tale told and retold, how the Lydia towed into action with hornpipes being dance on her main deck. It was quoted as an example of Hornblower’s cool courage, and only Hornblower knew how little truth there was in the attribution. It kept the men happy, which was why he did it. No one guessed how nearly he came to vomiting when a shot came in through a forward gunport and spattered Hall with a seaman’s brains without causing him to miss a step.

Forester in this book is a master of narrative balance, playing off his action scenes with quieter moments, and providing a moment for readers to catch their breaths from time to time. Even during the Lydia‘s storm-tossed return home around Cape Horn, there’s one unpredictable morning of clear calm:

There was an excruciating pleasure in filling her lungs with pure air after days of breathing the mephitic vapours of below decks. She caught Hornblower’s eyes and they exchanged smiles of delight. In all the rigging the sailors’ clothes, spread hastily to dry, were gesticulating as though with joy, waving a thousand glad arms and legs in the sparkling air.

Beat to Quarters sold like cotton candy at a state fair. On both sides of the Atlantic, it ran through edition after edition. It was adapted into a very good movie starring Gregory Peck, and it prompted Forester to write both sequels and prequels, eventually dramatizing the whole of Hornblower’s professional life, from lowly midshipman to nobleman (it was also adapted into an addictively good A&E TV series starring Ioan Gruffudd, who manages to overcome the burden of being even better-looking than Peck to become even more effective than Peck in the role). By any measure, the whole Hornblower enterprise was a stunning publishing success – the only thing it couldn’t have anticipated was a rival half a century later, but that’s what it now has: fans of nautical fiction must declare their loyalties in an unending War of the Roses between Forester’s Hornblower novels and the Aubrey & Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian, with partisans on both sides crying up strengths and weaknesses as if the two captains were going to war with each other instead of Napoleon. O’Brian’s 1969 novel Master and Commander also (eventually) sold well, also spawned many follow-up books, and also inspired a very good movie, but the two series are famously different: where Forester is stately and informative, O’Brian is headlong and immersive. Where Forester is deliberate, O’Brian is discursive. Both series provide plenty of joys for their readers (and O’Brian’s books amply demonstrate that he himself got plenty of joy out of Forester’s books before he wrote his own), but re-reading Beat to Quarters refreshed me on just how good Forester is even without the rhetorical flourishes O’Brian uses and sometimes over-uses.

So read Master and Commander, by all means, but read Beat to Quarters too. There’s room enough in the broad sea for both captains.