C. S. Forester wrote warfare tales of Horatio Hornblower.
A Ship of the Line is an historical seafaring novel by C. S. Forester . It follows his fictional hero Horatio Hornblower during his tour as captain of a ship of the line . C. S. Forester . Two of the Hornblower books , A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours , were jointly awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1938 . Flying Colours is a Horatio Hornblower novel by C. S. Forester , originally published 1938 as the third in the series , but now eighth by internal chronology . It describes the adventures of Hornblower and his companions escaping from imprisonment in Napoleonic France and returning to England .