June 1808, somewhere west of Nicaragua - a site suitable for spectacular sea battles. The Admiralty has ordered Captain Horatio Hornblower, now in command of the thirty-six-gun HMS "Lydia", to form an alliance against the Spanish colonial government with an insane Spanish landoner; to find a water route across the Central American isthmus; and "to take, sink, burn or destroy" the fifty-gun Spanish ship of the line "Natividad" or face court-martial....