Lieutenents Bush and Horatio Hornblower are promising young officers in His Majesty's Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars in 18th century England. They know their enemy is the French, but what happens when their own captain is their enemy? Mutiny is an offense punishable by hanging in the strict rules of the Navy, so Bush and Hornblower must decide whether to do nothing about their insane captain or risk death by staging a mutiny.

Anyone who likes a good adventure story. Fans of "Pirates of the Caribbean" might like this as well, since it takes place during the same time.

Read the next in the series (there are a total of 11 Horatio Hornblower books)

I was given a chronological list of the Hornblower series to read, starting with "Mr. Midshipman Hornblower" and this one next. It startled me at first because the narrator is not Horatio, as it is in "Midshipman". But I think this effect works well, using Lieutenant Bush (the narrator) as a nice foil against HH. Rather like Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes.

That being said, when I first started reading these novels, I thought they would be all about the glory of the British Navy and would shy away from difficult issues--but this book blew that expectation away by dealing with what must have been a critical debate point at the time: if a captain is cruel, possibly insane, don't the crew members have a right to mutiny? It's a sensitive question; sounding dangerously rebellious especially because twenty years before the events of this novel, the Colonies in North America had answered that question with a resounding "yes."