Dude, I know so much less than you. Believe me. Whenever somebody in the books talks about lee winds and shores, I have to do a little diagram with my hands and wiggly and so forth in order to figure out why Bush is having, like, a mental breakdown.

And yeah. It's certainly possible that Forester changed his mind between books -- the characterization of the H/B relationship changes a whole hell of a lot as you move through the publication, and I think I read somewhere that he even givestwo different versions of Hornblower's career so wtf.

This's where I was pulling the stuff about young men fromin LtH:

With only three and four years' seniority as lieutenants, respectively, the two young men (and with young men's confidence in their own immortality) could face the dangers of West Indian service with some complacence.