This book is the sixth of the Hornblower saga. He is now in command of the Sutherland that has been ordered to assist in the Mediterranean in the hope of harassing Bonaparte's souther shores. Many of the Hornblower exploits, as outlandish as they often seem, are actually based on the true accomplishments of Lord Cochrane whose biography I read several years ago. Sometime the adventures take an amusing turn. The captain and a group of volunteers take the captain's barge ashore after spying a French coastal vessel slowly making its way along a seemingly impregnable inland waterway. They successfully surprise the small ships' crew by swimming naked, armed only with cutlasses strapped around their waists, out to the ship in the middle of the canal. They banish the crew to the ship's dinghy and set the ship afire. They discover upon swimming back to the shore that the enemy have destroyed their clothes so they are forced to march through some fields and across the beach in a rather uncomfortable state. The image created of nine swarthy seamen being piped back aboard the Sutherland is just too preposterous to be a complete fiction. I suspect this tale is based on one of Cochrane's real feats.
