Today is C.S. Forester’s birthday. (Thanks to Margaret Muir, who pointed it our on Facebook. Otherwise, I would have missed it.) Cecil Louis Troughton Smith, who wrote under the pen name of Cecil Scott “C.S.” Forester was born on August 27, 1899. While Forester wrote over fifty books, he will probably always be best remembered for his creation of Horatio Hornblower, the Georgian naval officer who rose from midshipman to admiral over a dozen novels and short stories.
Alaric Bond, author of the Fighting Sail series of novels, wrote an article for the June 2012 issue of Reflections, the C S Forester Society magazine, on the influence C.S. Forester had on his writing. The article is reproduced below with his permission.
An Unlikely Sea Daddy
For me it all started with a slightly gruff and remote frigate captain. He was a man who lived his life bitterly aware of his own inadequacies, and in constant fear that one of his real, or imagined, weaknesses would expose him as the fraud he supposed himself to be. It was a wonderfully complex, yet understandable character and the fact that he shared a world that I then considered Nelson’s was an added bonus, although if Hornblower had appeared in any other time or genre he would probably have been almost as compelling.
The old saying goes that success is the best revenge. 
There were several recent news accounts related to the 
Updates to two sets of recent posts: After considerable delay the container ship 
Commercial sail has not yet returned, but there are interesting niche players who are doing what they can to change that. The sailing brigantine 
Last week it was announced that the wreck of
I am very fond of William Faulkner’s maxim, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” What brought this to mind was 
If you are anywhere near New York harbor this Thursday, Redhook is the place to be. 
Starting a day earlier than planned,