C. S. Forester – The Happy Return

The Happy Return (published 1937) is a Horatio Hornblower novel written by C. S. Forester.  It is the sixth book in the series chronologically, but the first by order of publication.

June 1808, somewhere west of Nicaragua, a site suitable for spectacular sea battles.  The Admiralty has ordered Captain Horatio Hornblower, now in command of the thirty-six-gun HMS Lydia, to form an alliance against the Spanish colonial government with an insane Spanish landowner; 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.  A daunting enough set of orders, even if the married captain were not distracted by the passenger he is obliged to take on in Panama: Lady Barbara Wellesley.