On this board, it seems to be either Hornblower, or Aubrey/Maturin. Since the OP mentioned Hornblower, I identified the other one as my source.
There’s a line in one of the O’Brian books that cracked me up — and I’m laughing thinking about it, and it’s been a decade or more since I read it.
Maturin is visiting his favourite squeeze somewhere in India but has to return to the ship (or something), so tells her or a servant:
“Call me an elephant.”
Too bad O’Brian didn’t follow it up with the reply. (Nor did he have anyone say “Walk this way.”)
There are also the Thomas Kydd (by Julian Stockwin), Nathaniel Drinkwater (by Richard Woodman), Alan Lewrie (by Dewey Lambdin) and Nicholas Ramage (by Dudley Pope) series.
I’ve always liked the Bolitho stories much better than Aubrey/Maturin.
My favorite O’Brien scene:
Jack: This coffee has an odd taste.
Stephen: I attribute that to the excrement of rats, my brother.
Jack: I thought is was familiar.
I had hopes that Lewrie would be a Naval Flashman, but he cleans up his act and tries for Hornblower status. He keeps cats.. Edwin Thomas’ Martin Jerrold almost makes Flashman status. There are only three books; his publisher didn’t like them.
Alexander Kent wrote WWII stories as Douglas Reeman as well. Both his naval series seemed to me to become the same Bonanza plot; the Good Bad Guy is bad, but saves the day at the last.
Who wrote the sail to steam transition? I recall an eighty year old Admiral sitting in a chair on the quarterdeck, bitching “Twenty five ships, and not a sail among them!”? 
Oh, and how could I forget the Richard Delancey series by C. Northcote Parkinson*. If you’re having a severe Forester/Hornblower jones, look into this series – it’s really the closest in feel to the Hornblower books. Parkinson also wrote The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, which is well worth reading.
*yes, the same guy who wrote Parkinson’s Law, which was all I knew about him when I picked up his naval books. He was a Naval Historian, so the Parkinson’s Law book was the aberration, not his naval books.
I’ll second that. Don’t pass it up if you’ve read the Hornblower series.
I remember reading three or four of a series set in the pre-dreadnought era. The hero was an insanely insubordinate lieutenant, who was hated by all his superiors.
The climax of one story, as I recall, was a new island emerging from the ocean directly under a Russian battleship, grounding it permanently. :dubious:
Fairly well written, but not Forrester or O’Brien calibre. If I remember, I’ll poke around tonight and try to find out the author’s name.
Maybe the island was Ferdinandea!
Concerning “prize” ships: suppose Captain Jack Aubrey manages to capture a French warship-which contains a paymaster ( thousands of gold francs on board). Does he have to split with his commanding officers? Aubrey (and captains like him) were motivated by patriotism-but a little prize cash was welcome.
Thousands of francs or not, there is a system of sharing. The captain gets the biggest share, but by no means a majority stake, and a full quarter of it gets shared among the crew. The gold francs are nice, but the warship itself is worth a packet and the Navy will “buy it in”, admittedly for less than a new ship would have cost them but not for chump change either, and to a crewman getting paid in shillings even ten or twenty pounds would be a hell of a bonus for a job well done. If they don’t piss it away on their next shore leave, a few prizes could set a man up in a retirement cottage when the war was over.
Wouldn’t the reply be “Truly you overestimate your endowment, sahib!”
[QUOTE=Malacandra]
… The gold francs are nice, but the warship itself is worth a packet and the Navy will “buy it in”, admittedly for less than a new ship would have cost them but not for chump change either,…
[/QUOTE]
This would I think be another reason for the meritocracy and need for demonstrable ability for naval officers. A small mistake by a Cardigan might lose a few men, but a stupid mistake by a naval officer can lose an expensive ship, even when there’s no warfare involved. Bad weather and rocks are always a risk.
I don’t know if this is who you had in mind, but V.A. Stuart wrote a series of novels about captain Philip Hazard set in the period where steamships started taking over. I’ve only read one of them.
the “V”, it turns out, stands for “Vivian”, making this a rare case of a naval series writtehn by a woman (I don’t count Honor Harrington)
A nit-picky correction to a common mistake. The title and lyric of this song is “Heart of Oak,” singular, not Hearts.
That would work, too.
Why an elephant was in my pyjamas. . . . Nope. That one doesn’t work.
Found it! The Halfhyde series by Philip McCutchan.
The volcano one is Halfhyde’s Island.
Thanks, Rocketeer!
If I understand correctly (from a very limited reading of RN history), one of the requirements for an RN officer was literacy. This put commissions out of reach of most of the people below the middle class, like farm laborers, as few would have access to schools.
For many of the continental European navies, the officers had to have multiple generations of nobility (iirc, in ancien regime France, it was four generations since ennoblement); this applied to both the navy and the army. The Revolution made the French Army and Navy much more egalitarian, although I’m sure that limited literacy (probably more limited than in Britain; France had a smaller middle class) and influence still counted. The limitation to the nobility was probably most severe in Spain, Prussia, and Russia (these were probably the countries with the smallest middle classes)
On further reading… make that 8 and above sometimes. However, I hold an admittedly unprovable and heretical opinion, probably unique, that a four-year-old boy is too young to be sent to sea to become an officer. Which happened.
There was the custom of putting a child on the ship’s book when he was quite safe at home in order to give him time at sea when he did later join as Midshipman.