The Lindsay Brothers

Category: 100 Extraordinary Adventures

Horatio Hornblower

Extraordinary
Adventure
79

In the grand tradition of almost all good adventure literature coming from Britain let me introduce to you a man by the name of Cecil Scott Forester. Called C.S. by his audience. His real name was Cecil Louis Troughton Smith. C.S. Forester was the author of several novels, but perhaps his most famous and most influential book is actually a series of books about a character with the unfortunate name of Horatio Hornblower.

Here he is amused at the fact that he looks like the old guy from the American Gothic painting.

The novels span many years of Horatio’s life and his many adventures and it is here that I must confess that I have not read the novels, though I do suspect they’re very good as they are often cited as influences or recommendations by other famous authors. For instance, Hemingway (Ernest not Muriel) once said “I recommend Forester to everyone literate I know.” Which is a clumsy way of putting it, but who am I to rewrite Hemingway? And Winston Churchill was also quoted as saying “I would rank Horatio Hornblower at or around 80 on a list of the greatest adventure stories in any genre.” Which is a tad made up, but true to the spirit of Churchill and so I will allow it.

Forester is also cited by Nicholas Meyer and Gene Roddenberry for Star Trek’s captain Kirk, so there!

My experience with Captain Hornblower comes from a Television series that aired in the early 90s on A&E. It stars an actor whose first name is Ioan (pronounced rather reasonably as yo-un) and whose last name is Gruffudd (which is inexplicably prounounced like Griffith). It is needless to say very good. Although a tad on the episodic side, the films are overflowing with the little touches that make Horatio’s world believable.

You may recognize Ioan Gruffudd from the hit blockbuster Titanic where he was credited as Some Guy # 4

It begins with Horatio coming onboard as a midshipman and promptly getting seasick. He’s a quiet lad who keeps to himself, but is devoted to duty and honor. Soon the Napoleanic wars have started and Hornblower shows himself to be both brave and intelligent. He can’t really help but be promoted even though he actually tries not to be. This of course does not sit well with the officers who have more seniority than him and are being left behind. Horatio is only 17 and is still a little wet behind the ears and so does not instantly triumph, but instead has to deal with enemies both foreign and domestic.

Here's a helpful map to help you better understand The Napoleonic Wars. You're welcome.

Again the best parts are the attention to detail. In the way the ladder is built into the ship itself. The code of battle. The honor of a duel. And of course there is the great sailor talk: belay, focsle, main top gallant, larboard, starboard, and groovy. C.S. Forester was not a one hit wonder either. He’ll pop up on our list again. Though I’ll let you wait and see when and where. The Hornblower series is available on Netflix or Amazon or Itunes, but one word of warning, A&E never completed the series so eventually you’ll have to take Hemingway’s advice and actually read some Forester for yourself. That is, if you want to know how everything turned out.

Next up … 78!

January 10, 2011
The Gold Bug

Extraordinary
Adventure
80

Edgar Allan Poe is famous for many things, including marrying his 13-year-old cousin, contracting mysterious diseases, and dying young while in the midst of insanity. He also sometimes wrote stuff. He is best known for sappy chick-lit tales featuring disembodied hearts, black cats, ravens, mummies, and Usher.

Poe was very into R&B

Occasionally, he would confound his critics with unexpected bursts of grand adventure, full of mind-boggling puzzles, exotic locations, long-dead pirates, and buried treasure. Then he would go back to writing about handsome strangers with smoldering eyes and luscious hair. The Gold Bug is one such departure.

Nowadays we think of buried pirate treasure as an old fashioned sort of adventure plot, since all the pirates have been dead for more than 100 years. In Poe’s day, piracy was on the wane, but still relevant to its audience, sort of like how everyone still likes Die Hard.

Next Century's Classic Literature

What makes The Gold Bug so much fun is the way in which its hero finds the last stash of Captain Kidd. Basically he stumbles across an invisible treasure map while beachcombing. If you think it is difficult to stumble across something invisible, you’d be right, unless there was also a gold scarab beetle sitting nearby.

I have read the story many times and it is still unclear to me whether the scarab is a real beetle or a gold artifact. The characters in the story talk about it as if it is an actual insect with a strange coloration, which they capture by wrapping it in a scrap of parchment that they conveniently find nearby. It is only later, while studying the bug near the fire, that invisible ink on the paper is revealed.

Easily mistaken for a real insect

In fact, the Gold Bug itself plays virtually no role in the plot, other than that it also allows them to find the treasure map. Perhaps the title is one of those “symbolic” things that English teachers are so obsessed with. “Bug” as in “sickness.” The Virus of Greed and all that stuff.

The map contains a fiendish cryptogram, which the characters dissect in riveting fashion, while basically schooling the reader on how to solve those word puzzles in the newspaper. It translates to a riddle, which involves a trip to the seaside cliffs, the discovery of a particular tree, which happens to have a skull nailed to one of the branches high up.

Here they must solve one more puzzle in order to find the treasure’s location, and as to whether or not they succeed, I will leave to you to discover. It’s a short story and readily available online, so stop your complaining. It is best if you don’t think about the fact that trees tend to grow over time, so maybe Captain Kidd wasn’t as clever as he thought.

The story is oft-imitated. One can see its influence in dozens of works from popular culture, of which The DaVinci Code and National Treasure may be the most recent examples. It is also fascinating for its discussion of cryptography, which was a relatively new art to the literary public of Poe’s day, who up to that point had been sending secret messages using the Ovaltine decoder ring.

Poe himself seemed to have an obsession with cryptograms. He possessed an almost supernatural ability to decipher them. He once challenged a magazine’s readership to stump him with a code in any language with any character set, and despite many insane, complex submissions, not a single one could best him.

But he stunk at Sudoku

The story’s one deficiency is its glaring and blatant racism. It is definitely a product of its time, and it treats the lone black character as a ridiculous fool, complete with phonetically rendered speech and derogatory names. Were Hollywood ever to make The Gold Bug into a movie, I foresee a great many rewrites in which this character is changed to a bumbling robot played by Robin Williams.

Or something.

Next up, #79.

January 7, 2011
Rambo: First Blood Part II

Extraordinary
Adventure
81

In the film Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke has a classic scene as a one-man band. He plays the drums and the accordion and the cymbals all by himself, and it comes out to a quaint little song. He charms the ladies and impresses the kiddies with his musical abilities and it almost seems possible that this could really be done. Rambo II is just like that, except for instead of Dick Van Dyke, it’s Sylvester Stallone, and instead of drums, it’s rocket launchers. A few of us may remember First Blood and some will even argue that it is a better movie. That is not our business. Our business is adventure and taking that into account (if I could get a tad intellectual here) First Blood is wholly and completely pwned by Rambo: First Blood: Part Deux.

Not many people want to accept the fact that Dick Van Dyke was an expert in guerilla warfare — a man who's the best, with guns, with knives, with his bare hands. A man who's been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land, to eat things that would make a billy goat puke. I mean literally part of the training was watching a billy goat puke and then eating whatever it was that made the goat do so.

There was a lot of discussion in the 1980s about who was a better action star. In one corner you have Sylvester Stallone and in the other you have Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is maybe not complete luck that Arnold seems to have won, but the reason that there was a discussion at all is due almost entirely to Rambo. The Rocky films, good as they might be (and some of them are), are not the all-out bullet-eating fight fest that Rambo is. The thing about Stallone is that he always wanted to position himself as some sort of intellectual. Not without merit mind you. I remember my high school French teacher was sort of baffled when she learned that in France he has actually achieved the status of an intellectual. She said that she didn’t associate books and literature with … well with Rocky. Until I reminded her that Sylvester Stallone WROTE Rocky.

Quite obviously this is a picture of Donald, Julie and two other people.

Because he has a little bit more emotional depth, Stallone is probably better suited to Rambo 1 than Arnold. But truthfully either one of them could have done well with Rambo 2. That is because the real star of Rambo 2 is the action. And while it is actually true that Stallone wrote Rocky, it is also equally true that he did not write Rambo II. No, that honor goes to none other than James T. Cameron of Titanic fame. Now some of our younger readers might not know this, but before Cameron became a romance writer and the author of such sweeping tearjerker movies as Avatar and Titanic, he was actually pretty good at thinking up reasons to have things explode. There is a rumor (I suspect generated by Cameron himself) that he really only wrote the action and not the story for Rambo II. And I accept this rumor as fact because the action is by far the best part.

Merely the goofiest picture of James Cameron I could find.

Let me make this clear, though, because by now we have had a lot of gory stories make our list: I do not condone violence. Unless fictional people are pretending to be tortured by plastic knives in a movie from the eighties and Rambo is there and has the power to stop them. In which case I condone it. Besides, Rambo II only has a body count of 58. This is much lower than Rambo 4, which had 83.

Next up … 80

January 3, 2011