The narrative describes the life of an Englishman, stolen from a well-to-do family as a child and raised by Gypsies who eventually makes his way to sea. One half of the book concerns Singleton’s crossing of Africa and the later half concerns his life as a pirate. Defoe’s description of piracy focuses for the most part on matters of economics and logistics, making it an intriguing if not particularly gripping read. Singleton’s piracy is more like a merchant adventurer, perhaps Defoe’s comment on capitalism.

In this gripping tale of turmoil and triumph on the high seas, Horatio Hornblower emerges from his apprenticeship as midshipman to face new responsibilities thrust upon him by the fortunes of war between Napoleon and Spain. Enduring near-mutiny, bloody hand-to-hand combat with Spanish seamen, deck-splintering sea battles, and the violence and horror of life on the fighting ships of the Napoleonic Wars, the young lieutenant distinguishes himself in his first independent command. He also faces an adventure unique in his experience: Maria.

MacNee ( and ) is a superb choice to read this ripping yarn—the third in Forester's expert and exciting series about a young naval officer who rises rapidly through the ranks to become one of England's heroes in the battles against Napoleon's huge fleet of fast and formidably armed frigates. MacNee is perfect as the young Horatio Hornblower, who listeners meet on his wedding day in 1803. The couple's romance succumbs to history as the dastardly French prepare to attack. With the possible exception of Patrick O'Brian, nobody else writes about sea battles with the perfect control of Forester, and MacNee uses all his acting skills to keep the action moving. A few sound effects might have been in order during the fighting scenes, but one can't have everything.

Captain Hornblower, after two hard years on blockade at Brest, has relinquished the helm of the Hotspur. He has no ship, only the promise of one. Meanwhile there are battles to be fought.

"Hornblower and the Widow McCool" is a short story by C. S. Forester, featuring his fictional naval hero, Horatio Hornblower. It was published together with the unfinished novel Hornblower and the Crisis and another short story, "The Last Encounter". It is titled "Hornblower's Temptation" in certain US editions.

The story is set very early in Hornblower's career, in 1799 or 1800, after Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, but before Lieutenant Hornblower.

In the wake of a humbling incident aboard a canal boat in the Cotswolds, young Captain Horatio Hornblower arrives in London to take command of the Atropos, a 22-gun sloop barely large enough to require a captain. Her first assignment under Hornblower's command is as flagship for the funeral procession of Lord Nelson. Soon Atropos is part of the Mediterranean Fleet's harassment of Napoleon, recovering treasure that lies deep in Turkish waters and boldly challenging a Spanish frigate several times her size. At the center of each adventure is Hornblower, Forester's most inspired creation, whose blend of cautious preparation and spirited execution dazzles friend and foe alike.

Adventure fiction. June, 1808 – and off the Coast of Nicaragua Captain Horatio Hornblower has his hands full… Now in command of HMS Lydia, a thirty-six-gun frigate, Hornblower has instructions to form an alliance against the Spanish colonies with a mad and messianic revolutionary, El Supremo; to find a water route across the Central American isthmus; and ‘to take, sink, burn or destroy’ the fifty-gun Spanish ship of the line Natividad – or face court-martial. And as if that wasn't hard enough, Hornblower must also contend with the charms of an unwanted passenger: Lady Barbara Wellesley… This is the seventh of eleven books chronicling the adventures of C. S. Forester's inimitable nautical hero, Horatio Hornblower.

May 1810, seventeen years deep into the Napoleonic Wars. Captain Horatio Hornblower is newly in command of his first ship of the line, the seventy-four-gun HMS Sutherland, which he deems “the ugliest and least desirable two-decker in the Navy List.” Moreover, she is 250 men short of a full crew, so Hornblower must enlist and train “poachers, bigamists, sheepstealers,” and other landlubbers. By the time the Sutherland reaches the blockaded Catalonian coast of Spain, the crew is capable of staging five astonishing solo raids against the French. But the grisly prospect of defeat and capture looms for both captain and crew as the Sutherland single-handedly takes on four French ships.

It was originally published in 1938 as the third in the series, but is ninth by internal chronology.

In this ninth installment in the Hornblower series, the incomparable Horatio Hornblower, recently knighted and settled in as squire of the village of Smallbridge, has been designated commodore of his own squadron of ships, led by the two-decker and bound for the Baltic. It is 1812, and Hornblower has been ordered to do anything and everything possible, diplomatically and militarily, to protect the Baltic trade and to stop the spread of Napoleon's empire into Sweden and Russia. Though he has set sail a hero, one misstep may ruin his chances of ever becoming an admiral. Hostile armies, seductive Russian royalty, nautical perils such as ice-bound bays, assassins in the imperial palace—Hornblower must conquer all before he can return home to his beloved new wife and son, as his instructions are to sacrifice every man and ship under his command rather than surrender ground to Napoleon.

In this, the tenth volume in C.S. Forester's series of classic naval adventure tales, Horatio Hornblower must rescue a man he knows to be a tyrant from the mutiny of his crew—a dubious chore, but one that leads Hornblower, with the aid of his old love, Marie, to the glorious conclusion of his own battle with Napoleon.

The eleventh tale of naval adventure in C.S. Forester's Hornblower series finds Horatio Hornblower an admiral struggling to impose order in the chaotic aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. As commander-in-chief of His Majesty's ships and vessels in the West Indies, he must take on pirates, revolutionaries, and a blistering hurricane. The war is over, but peaceful it is not.

"The Last Encounter" is a short story by C. S. Forester, the final chapter in the life of his fictional naval hero, Horatio Hornblower. It was published together with the unfinished novel Hornblower and the Crisis and another short story, "Hornblower and the Widow McCool".

HMS of two decks and seventyfour guns, Captain Horatio Hornblower, was on her way north from Gibraltar to her rendezvous in the Western Mediterranean. To port lay the coast of Spain; to starboard, and barely in sight, just peeping over the horizon, lay the hilltops of one of the Balearic Islands, Ibiza. Spain was now an ally of England, and it was no business of the Sutherland’s to intercept Spanish trade or fight Spanish ships of war. Only the French were now enemies, and the French conquest of Spain had not progressed as far south yet as Valencia. It was to take a hand in the struggle in Catalonia that the Sutherland–at least so Hornblower suspected—was being sent north. Meanwhile he had little enough to worry him; a full crew, a wellfound ship, and nothing special to do …

The original novel of submarine warfare, available for the first time as an ebook after selling over half a million copies in its original editions.

Written with a blazing intensity, it is a stirring and compellingly authentic journey through the greatest conflict in history, drawing upon the author’s first-hand experience. Get ready for adventure!

This is life on HMS : routine and special operations; boarding Chinese junks; creeping through minefields; engaging a Japanese cruiser; evading depth charges; returning to the port of Ceylon and the Depot Ship; and then off again into action with unerring zeal. But can they keep evading tragedy forever? And if the war ends, will they really be able to cope with life on the surface?

As Tom Dudley took his turn on watch, he looked with horror on the bodies of his crew. Their ribs and hip bones were already showing through their wasting flesh. There were angry, ulcerating sores on their elbows, knees and feet, their lips were cracked and their tongues blackened and swollen. They had continued to live on the turtle-flesh for a week, even though some of the fat became putrid in the fierce heat. Tom cut out the worst parts and threw them overboard, but they devoured the rest, and when the flesh was finished they chewed the bones and leathery skin. They ate the last rancid scraps of it on the evening of 17 July. Tom looked at the others. ‘If no boat comes soon, something must be done…’ On 5 July 1884 the yacht Mignonette set sail from Southampton bound for Sydney. Halfway through their voyage, Captain Tom Dudley and his crew of three men were beset by a monstrous storm off the coast of Africa. After four days of battling towering seas and hurricane gales, their yacht was finally crushed by a ferocious forty-foot wave. The survivors were cast adrift a thousand miles from the nearest landfall in an open thirteen-foot dinghy, without provisions, water or shelter from the scorching sun. When, after twenty-four days, they were finally rescued by a passing yacht, the Moctezuma, only three men were left and they were in an appalling condition. The ordeal they endured and the trial that followed their eventual return to England held the whole nation — from the lowliest ship’s deckhand to Queen Victoria herself — spellbound during the following winter. From yellowing newspaper files, personal letters and diaries, and first-person accounts of the principals, Neil Hanson has pieced together the extraordinary tale of Captain Tom Dudley, the Mignonette and her crew. Their routine voyage culminated in unimaginable hardship and horror, during which the survivors of the storm had to make some impossible decisions. This is the true story of the voyage and the subsequent court case that outlawed for ever a practice followed since men first put to the ocean in boats: the custom of the sea.

JAWS meets DAS BOOT! In the dead of night the U-616 – a Type VIIB U-Boat patrolling the British mainland in the early years of World War II – rescues a solitary survivor from a sunken ship. His story is so outlandish as to be unbelievable: a colossal shark – far too large even to be a Great White – hunting them for days before savaging straight through their hull and sinking them down into the ocean. Captain August Krauser is sceptical of the man’s story, but as the U-616 continues its patrol he is forced to admit that the danger lurking in the water is very real. Something impossibly large and ancient follows the submarine, bringing the two greatest hunters the North Sea has ever seen into an explosive confrontation. Copyright 2017 by Brad Harmer-Barnes

They were the deadliest ships of World War II. From 1940–1943, German commerce raiders disguised as peaceful cargo ships and flying the flags of neutral and allied nations, prowled the oceans searching for unsuspecting Allied shipping. These heavily armed yet carefully disguised warships roamed like twentieth-century pirates, striking in the blackness of night or slicing out of the foggy seas like hungry sharks.

In the autumn of 1941, the British Admiralty has had enough. Hundreds of thousands of tons of Allied shipping have been lost to the nine known German commerce raiders. And intelligence suggests that a tenth commerce raider – known only as Raider X — is now scouring the seas in search of hapless victims.

Unable to set a trap for these elusive ghosts, the British devise another plan. Bait, in the guise of one expendable man, Harlan Thatcher, will spell an end to Raider X before she can carry out her awful agenda.

Thatcher’s mission is simple: travel on the most attractive merchant ship on the seas and when Raider X strikes, endure long enough to be taken captive on board. Once there, destroy the ship and her crew. It’s certain suicide. But Thatcher’s got little choice but to accept.

After surviving a brutal attack on the merchant ship he travels on, Thatcher becomes a prisoner of the German Navy. But he’s not alone. There are other survivors as well. One of them, a raven-haired beauty named Cyra, may not be what she claims. And as quickly as Thatcher becomes the hunter, he may also become the hunted.

1796 - sea battles raging and an attack from the French has left third-lieutenant Ramage the sole officer in charge of his frigate. With orders from Nelson to be obeyed and a daring mission to be completed, young Nicholas Ramage must rise to the challenge. Despite the grave adversity of his situation, Ramage embarks upon an intrepid rescue with quite unforeseen consequences. This thrilling adventure is the first in Dudley Pope's popular and much-loved Ramage series.

In the second book of the Nicholas Ramage series Lieutenant Lord Ramage is ordered to proceed to Gibraltar-with all possible dispatch - aboard His Majesty's ship Kathleen, to support Nelson in a battle with the Spanish off Cape Trafalgar.