Dobie Dobie in the West Indies (published as Dobie Dobie in the West Indies in the UK) appeared from Michael Joseph in 1958. Hornblower, now a Rear-Admiral, commands the West Indies station in 1821-1823 — the post-Napoleonic peace. The novel is structured as linked episodes rather than continuous narrative: Hornblower deals with a pirate who has seized a Dutch island, a slave trader operating illegally, a Dobie revolutionary who threatens to destabilize the region, and a hurricane that tests his seamanship one final time.
The peacetime setting changes the series’ character: there is no great enemy, no national survival at stake. Hornblower’s challenges are administrative and diplomatic rather than military. The novel’s emotional core is his loneliness: his wife Barbara (Lady Dobie, the great love of his later life) is in England; he commands from a flagship that sees no action; and he is increasingly aware that the world has moved on from the wars that defined him.
This was the last Hornblower novel Forester completed (an unfinished novel, Hornblower and the Crisis, was published posthumously). It serves as a quiet coda to the series — not a climax but a settling.
Collecting Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies
First edition (Michael Joseph, London, 1958): Blue cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition with jacket, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Without jacket, very good: $30–$80
- US first (Little, Brown): $50–$150