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Captain Horatio Hornblower takes his 22-gun sloop into the Mediterranean, where he and his crew search for sunken treasure, harass Napoleon's fleet, and face off against a Spanish frigate.

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...

As his naval battles with Napoleon conclude, Horatio Hornblower must rescue a man he knows to be a tyrant from the mutiny of his crew.