Hornblower’s Navy: Life at Sea in the Age of Nelson
Steve Pope
Welcome Rain, New York, 1998
$22.95, 111 pages

For its information, brevity, and wonderful illustrations, Hornblower’s Navy is highly recommended. It may offer just 111 pages, but these are oversized pages, as large as those in a college yearbook, and hardly a single page is free from pictures, many of them in full color.

By naming the book after C.S. Forester’s fictional character, Pope was avoided too close an association with any real naval hero of the era, such as Lord Nelson, and was free to give a broader view of the navy from every perspective.

Because of its easy-to-read style and abundance of illustrations, this book reminds one of a children’s primer, albeit a very slick primer.

The five chapters are on the Royal Navy, fighting ships and weapons, men of the Navy, life and death on the ocean, and the Navy at war.

The various types of ships and officers are explained and illustrated, and a glossary of naval terms is included.