Hornblower and the Crisis Read online

  C. S. Forester

  HORNBLOWER AND THE CRISIS

  An unfinished novel

  Introduction by Bernard Cornwell

  Contents

  Introduction

  Hornblower and the Crisis

  Hornblower and the Widow McCool

  The Last Encounter

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  Hornblower and the Crisis

  In 1793, at the tender age of just seventeen, Horatio Hornblower was forced to find his sea legs as a midshipman. After suffering his first bout of seasickness, the hapless doctor’s son quickly rose through the ranks to become Admiral of the Fleet Lord Hornblower. In between, Hornblower must sail back and forth along the coasts of Europe and the Americas, repeatedly engaging or eluding the mighty ships of Napoleon and Spain. His heroic exploits in the French revolutionary war and his many other adventures in service of his country have made the name Horatio Hornblower into legend.

  C. S. Forester was born in Cairo in 1899, where his father was stationed as a government official. He studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital, and after leaving Guy’s without a degree he turned to writing as a career. His first success was Payment Deferred, a novel written at the age of twenty-four and later dramatized and filmed with Charles Laughton in the leading role. In 1932 Forester was offered a Hollywood contract, and from then until 1939 he spent thirteen weeks of every year in America. On the outbreak of war he entered the Ministry of Information and later he sailed with the Royal Navy to collect material for The Ship. He then made a voyage to the Bering Sea to gather material for a similar book on the United States Navy, and it was during this trip that he was stricken with arteriosclerosis, a disease which left him crippled. However, he continued to write and in the Hornblower novels created the most renowned sailor in twentieth-century fiction. He died in 1966.

  Bernard Cornwell is the bestselling author of the Sharpe series of novels.

  Introduction

  ‘In a moment they would slide down the slippery slopes of sentiment, which would be unbearable.’ ‘They’ were Hornblower and Bush, and the sentence tells us we are back in the beguiling company of Horatio Hornblower. Bush, of course, had died in Lord Hornblower, one of the saddest moments of the saga, but his reappearance in Hornblower and the Crisis tells us that Forester was again plugging the gaps in his hero’s long story. The book was published in 1966, the year of Forester’s death. It is the shortest of the Hornblower books and contains three stories, set at different times during Hornblower’s career and all written at different times. The final story, ‘The Last Encounter’, is a nicely ironic squib, a wry footnote to the Napoleonic era. ‘Hornblower and the Widow McCool’ takes us back to the early days of Hornblower’s career when he was a junior lieutenant aboard HMS Renown, while the longest tale, which gives the book its title, was the last Hornblower adventure Forester wrote. He was working on it when, in 1964, he suffered a crippling stroke, and the story remained unfinished.

  Forester did leave some notes from which the tale’s ending can be constructed. I have a feeling that he regretted not sending Hornblower to Trafalgar, though he had good reasons for avoiding that fleet action. Forester was always fascinated by the theme of a ‘man alone’, a man who must make difficult decisions without the benefit of a superior’s orders, and by placing Hornblower under Nelson’s command he would have lost that revealing strand in the stories. So Hornblower, unlike Bush, missed Trafalgar, yet in the 1960s Forester looked back to that climactic fight. He plainly wanted Hornblower to be involved, but not in any way that would make a nonsense of the career he had already described in the previous ten books.

  One of the joys of writing historical novels is to explore the mysteries of the past and to offer an explanation for them. One mystery is why the French fought Trafalgar at all. They had no need to, and the Spanish had even less. It was, for the combined Franco-Spanish fleet, a disaster, and an entirely avoidable one. The object of the French naval campaign in 1805 was to clear the English Channel for Napoleon’s invasion of Britain, an invasion that the Emperor had already celebrated by the erection of a giant triumphant column in Boulogne (it can still be seen, though now it stands in memory of Napoleon’s army). The strategy was for Admiral Villeneuve to lure Nelson’s fleet across the Atlantic by pretending to attack British possessions in the West Indies, and that part of the scheme worked brilliantly. Nelson duly chased Villeneuve across the Atlantic and found the French and Spanish fleets were gone. But the combined fleets, instead of returning to the Channel, had retreated to Cadiz. Napoleon, by then, had already abandoned his invasion plans and was leading the army to its great victory at Austerlitz instead. So the threat to Britain was over and Villeneuve’s job now, insofar as he had one, was to preserve the French and Spanish fleets. Instead he took them to sea and encountered Nelson off the shoals of Cape Trafalgar, and that was the virtual end of French and Spanish sea power.

  Why did Villeneuve do it? The usual explanation is that he knew he was in disgrace and that Napoleon had sent another admiral to take command of the combined fleets. Villeneuve was thus facing an Emperor’s revenge for failure, and he knew that revenge would be vicious. Indeed, it is most probable that the admiral was murdered on Napoleon’s orders when he returned from his imprisonment in England after Trafalgar. Villeneuve undoubtedly feared Napoleon’s revenge and so made his fatal decision to go to sea. Ostensibly he was taking his fleet into the Mediterranean, but was there, at the back of his mind, the hope for a battle, victory and redemption? If so, it was a vain hope, and once he sighted Nelson’s fleet Villeneuve’s courage failed and he tried to put back into Cadiz – but too late.

  Forester offered another explanation for Villeneuve’s decision to put to sea. It is, in typical Forester fashion, an ingenious one. Forester was always a most elegant plotter, and enough of the tale was written for us to see his cleverness at work, but alas, the stroke meant that we could never read the ending.

  Cecil Scott Forester was sixty-seven when he died. He had been born in Egypt to British parents in 1899. His real name was Cecil Lewis Troughton Smith and he was raised in Britain, where, as a child, he was an avid reader, usually the first step in the making of a writer. In 1917, before his eighteenth birthday, he volunteered for the British army, fully expecting to fight on the Western Front, but he was rejected as medically unfit. He was a skinny, short-sighted six-footer who enjoyed sports, but the army’s physical examination revealed a dangerously weak heart. So instead of serving as a soldier, Forester entered Guy’s Hospital as a medical student – an experience as unhappy as it was unsuccessful – but Forester’s ambitions were already fixed on writing. His first efforts failed, but he persevered and in 1924, with Payment Deferred, enjoyed his first success. The filming of that novel introduced Forester to Hollywood and, more crucially, California. During the Second World War he moved to the United States at the request of the British government, who wanted him to produce articles and stories that would encourage American support for the British war effort. It was sophisticated propaganda, and Forester was good at it. He also liked living in the States and most of the Hornblower books were written in California, where, with his second wife, he remained until his death in 1966. By then he had become one of the world’s most popular authors with almost sixty novels to his name and, even if he had never dreamed up Hornblower, he would be famous as the author of The African Queen, The Gun, Brown on Resolution and Hunting the Bismarck.

  Hornblower is, of course, Forester’s supreme creation. As the hero of a novel series he is rivalled only by Sherlock Holmes, and he has provoked numerous imitators, including Patrick O’Brian, Alexander Kent, Dudley Pope and myself. Even the TV series Star Trek owes its
origins to Hornblower. When the programmes were first pitched to NBC Television they were described as Hornblower in deep space, and when I suggested the Sharpe series to a publisher I said it would be Hornblower on dry land. C. S. Forester casts an extraordinarily long shadow, and though he has many imitators, he has no rivals. Hornblower was a creation of genius, a flawed hero of utter decency and, I am sure, a self-portrait of the man who gave him to us, Cecil Scott Forester.

  Hornblower and the Crisis

  1

  Hornblower was expecting the knock on the door, because he had seen through his cabin window enough to guess what was happening outside.

  ‘Water-hoy coming alongside, sir,’ reported Bush, hat in hand.

  ‘Very well, Mr Bush.’ Hornblower was disturbed in spirit and, irritated, had no intention of smoothing Bush’s path for him.

  ‘The new captain’s on board, sir,’ Bush was perfectly well aware of Hornblower’s mood yet was not ingenious enough to cope with it.

  ‘Very well, Mr Bush.’

  But that was simple cruelty, the deliberate teasing of a nearly dumb animal; Hornblower realized that such behaviour really gave him no pleasure and only occasioned embarrassment to Bush. He relented to the extent of introducing a lighter touch into the conversation.

  ‘So now you have a few minutes to spare for me, Mr Bush?’ he said. ‘It’s a change after your preoccupation of the last two days.’

  That was neither fair nor kind, and Bush showed his feelings in his face.

  ‘I’ve had my duties to do, sir,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Getting Hotspur into apple-pie order ready for her new captain.’

  ‘Y-yes, sir.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter about me, of course. I’m only a back number now.’

  ‘Sir –’

  Even though he was not in a smiling mood Hornblower could not help smiling at the misery of Bush’s expression.

  ‘I’m glad to see you’re only human, Mr Bush, after all. Sometimes I’ve doubted it. There couldn’t be a more perfect first lieutenant.’

  Bush needed two or three seconds in which to digest this unexpected compliment.

  ‘That’s very good of you, sir. Very kind indeed. But it’s been all your doing.’

  In a moment they would slide down the slippery slopes of sentiment, which would be unbearable.

  ‘Time for me to appear on deck,’ said Hornblower. We’d better say goodbye, Mr Bush. The best of luck under your new captain.’

  He went so far towards yielding to the mood of the moment as to hold out his hand, which Bush took. Luckily Bush’s emotions prevented him from saying more than just ‘Goodbye, sir’, and Hornblower hurried out through the cabin door with Bush at his heels.

  There was instantly plenty of distraction as the waterhoy was laid alongside the Hotspur; the side of the hoy was covered from end to end with old sails in rolls and with substantial fendoffs of sandbags, yet it was a ticklish business, even in the sheltered waters of this little bay, to pass lines between the two ships and draw them together. A gangplank came clattering out from the hoy to bridge the gap between the two decks, and a burly man in full uniform made the precarious crossing. He was very tall – two or three inches over six feet and heavily built; a man of middle age or more, to judge by the shock of grey hair revealed when he raised his hat. The boatswain’s mates pealed loudly on their calls; the two ship’s drummers beat a ragged ruffle.

  ‘Welcome aboard, sir,’ said Hornblower.

  The new captain pulled a paper from his breast pocket, opened it, and began to read. A shout from Bush bared every head so that the function would take place with due solemnity

  ‘Orders given by us, William Cornwallis, Vice Admiral of the Red, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Commanding His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels of the Channel Fleet, to James Percival Meadows, Esquire –’

  ‘D’ye think we have all day?’ This was a new stentorian voice from the deck of the hoy. ‘Stand by to take the hoses, there! Mr Lieutenant, let’s have some hands for the pumps.’

  The voice came, appropriately enough, from the barrel-shaped captain of the hoy. Bush signalled frantically for him to stay quiet until this vital ceremonial was completed.

  ‘Time enough for that tomfoolery when the water’s all aboard. The wind’ll shift within the hour,’ roared the barrel-shaped captain quite unabashed. Captain Meadows scowled and hesitated, but for all his vast stature he could do nothing to silence the captain of the hoy. He roared through the rest of his orders at a pace nearer a gallop than a canter, and folded them up with evident relief now that he was legally captain of HMS Hotspur.

  ‘On hats,’ bellowed Bush.

  ‘Sir, I relieve you,’ said Meadows to Hornblower.

  ‘I much regret the bad manners displayed in the hoy, sir,’ said Hornblower to Meadows.

  ‘Now let’s have some sturdy hands,’ said the barrel-shaped captain to no one in particular, and Meadows shrugged his vast shoulders with resignation.

  ‘Mr Bush, my first lieutenant – I mean your first lieutenant, sir,’ said Hornblower hastily effecting the introduction.

  ‘Carry on, Mr Bush,’ said Meadows, and Bush plunged instantly into the business of transferring the fresh water from the hoy.

  ‘Who’s that fellow, sir?’ asked Hornblower with a jerk of his thumb at the captain of the hoy.

  ‘He’s been my cross for the last two days,’ answered Meadows. Dirty words unnecessary to reproduce interlarded every sentence he uttered. ‘He’s not only captain but he’s thirty-seven-sixty-fourths owner. Under Navy Office contract – can’t press him, can’t press his men, as they all have protections. Says what he likes, does what he likes, and I’d give my prize money for the next five years to have him at the gratings for ten minutes.’

  ‘M’m,’ said Hornblower. ‘I’m taking passage with him.’

  ‘Hope you fare better than I did.’

  ‘By your leave, sirs.’ A hand from the hoy came pushing along the gangplank dragging a canvas hose. At his heels came someone carrying papers; there was bustle everywhere.

  ‘I’ll hand over the ship’s papers, sir,’ said Hornblower. ‘Will you come with me? I mean – they are ready in your cabin when you have time to attend to them, sir.’

  His sea chest and ditty bag lay forlorn on the bare cabin deck, pathetic indications of his immediate departure. It was the work only of a few moments to complete the transfer of command.

  ‘May I request of Mr Bush the loan of a hand to transfer my dunnage, sir?’ asked Hornblower.

  Now he was nobody. He was not even a passenger; he had no standing at all, and this became more evident still when he returned to the deck to look round for his officers to bid them farewell. They were all engrossed in the business of the moment, with hardly a second to spare for him. Handshakes were hasty and perfunctory; it was with a queer relief that he turned away to the gangplank.

  It was a relief that was short lived, for even at anchor Hotspur was rolling perceptibly in the swell that curved in round the point, and the two ships, Hotspur and the water-hoy, were rolling in opposite phases, their upper works inclining first together and then away from each other, so that the gangplank which joined them was possessed of several distinct motions – it swung in a vertical plane like a seesaw and in a horizontal plane like a compass needle; it rose and fell bodily, too, but the most frightening motion, instantly obvious as soon as he addressed himself to the crossing, was a stabbing back and forth motion as the ships surged together and apart, the gap bridged by the plank being now six feet and then sixteen. To a bare-footed seaman the passage would be nothing; to Hornblower it was a rather frightening matter – an eighteen-inch plank with no handrail. He was conscious, too, of the barrel-shaped captain watching him, but at least that made him determined to show no hesitation once he decided on the passage – until that moment he studied the motions of the plank out of the tail of his eye while apparently his attention was fully taken up by the various activ
ities in the two ships.

  Then he made a rush for it, got both feet on the plank, endured a nightmare interval when it seemed as if, hurry as he would, he made no progress at all, and then thankfully reached the end of the plank and stepped clear of it on to the comparative stability of the deck. The barrel-shaped captain made no move to welcome him and while two hands dumped his baggage on the deck Hornblower had to make the first advance.

  ‘Are you the master of this vessel, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Captain Baddlestone, master of the hoy Princess.’

  ‘I am Captain Hornblower, and I am to be given a passage to England,’ said Hornblower. He deliberately chose that form of words, nettled as he was by Baddlestone’s off-hand manner.

  ‘You have your warrant?’

  The question and the way in which it was asked rather pricked the bubble of Hornblower’s dignity, but he was roused sufficiently by now to feel he would stand no more insolence.

  ‘I have,’ he declared.

  Baddlestone had a large round red face, inclining even to purple; from out of it, from under two thick black eyebrows, two surprisingly bright blue eyes met Hornblower’s haughty stare. Hornblower was determined to yield not an inch, and was prepared to continue to meet the head-on assault of those blue eyes indefinitely, but he found his flank neatly turned.

  ‘Cabin food a guinea a day. Or you can compound for the passage for three guineas,’ announced Baddlestone.

  It was a surprise to find he had to pay for his subsistence, and Hornblower knew his surprise was apparent in his expression, but he would not allow it to be apparent in his words. He would not even condescend to ask the questions that were on the tip of his tongue. He could be quite sure that Baddlestone had legality on his side. The Navy Office charter of the hoy presumably compelled Baddlestone to give passages to transient officers, but omitted all reference to subsistence. He thought quickly.