Rich glanced astern to where Espanola’s mountains were fast sinking into the sea. There was a magnificent rainbow across them, adding fresh richness to their superb green summits towering above the blue, blue sea. He caught his breath a little at the sight, and felt a fresh twinge of regret at leaving the Indies behind. He had to think very hard about the solid realities of the island to allay that twinge. He shook off his momentary depression. He was on his way home.
About the Author
Cecil Scott Forester became immensely popular with readers of fiction in the early years of the Second World War and has remained so ever since. He was born in 1899 in Cairo, where his father was a government official in the Egyptian service; educated in England at Alleyn’s School and Dulwich College, he went on to study medicine at Guy’s Hospital. Like Somerset Maugham, he never completed his medical training and left Guy’s without a degree to take up writing as a career.
His first novel, a crime story entitled Payment Deferred, was published in 1926 and was subsequently both dramatised and turned into a film. Novels and short stories appeared regularly from that date. With his first wife he went inland voyaging in England, France and Germany, and accounts of their cruises appeared in book form; he also wrote books on historical subjects and did a regular script-writing stint in Hollywood.
The first of his ‘Hornblower’ novels The Happy Return-appeared in 1937. Two sequels-Ship of the Line and Flying Colours-quickly followed. These three books were issued in 1939 in one volume with the title Captain Hornblower, R.N. It was the publication of this trilogy which greatly widened Forester’s readership, putting him into the best-seller class. The robust and challenging adventures of the Napoleonic war hero were magnificent reading for the beleaguered British of the early 1940s. More than this, Horatio Hornblower was not at all a typical hero; he was a splendid leader and a superb seaman, but he was full of introspection and self-doubts, and would often have relapsed into cowardice were it not for his sense of duty and his fear of being thought foolish. He was a very human hero, and someone with whom everyone could identify.
Hornblower provided his creator with material for six more novels, short stories and the unfinished Hornblower and the Crisis. In The Hornblower Companion Forester described at length and with all his accustomed clarity, the manner in which this fictional character was created and developed; it is an unusual and fascinating account of the novel-writing process, from a born story-teller.
Forester continued to write on other subjects about other historical periods and unfailingly produced work of the highest quality: his technical knowledge of the sea, ships and of warfare was faultless as was his background research into any country about which he wrote. Forester himself explained how a snatch of conversation or a piece of casual reading can float to the surface of the creative artist’s mind from the sub-conscious, to provide an idea, or a sequence of ideas which will carry a novel forward, or can in fact be developed into a complete novel. Forester’s wide reading and his enquiring and analytical mind were the background to his careful craftsmanship.
Several of Forester’s novels have been made into films: by far the most successful of these was The African Queen, from the highly characteristic novel included in this volume. Seamanship is here, but seamanship of a peculiar sort as the resourceful cockney engineer and the strait-laced missionary pursue their crazy and adventurous course down an African river at the start of the First World War in an effort to ‘do their bit’-a hilarious and breathtaking tale, moving and unforgettable.
Forester’s style reflects the man himself-straightforward, honest and wise. The reader’s factual knowledge is often increased as some skill or process is lucidly explained; equally his knowledge of people is widened, as a character takes shape and as his, or her, motives are clarified.
Winston Churchill, on one of his many wartime journeys, had been given a copy of Captain Hornblower, R.N. for some rare leisure reading. Staff officers were confused by his signal of thanks for the book, thinking he was referring to the code-name of an operation. Many thousands of readers have endorsed his verdict: ‘Hornblower is admirable’, he telegraphed, ‘vastly entertaining’. The same can equally be said of all the work of C. S. Forester.
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