I found a couple of Forester novels last weekend and finished the first last night. Brown on Resolution has nothing to do with the Hornblower books, but is instead the story of a single British sailor who survives the sinking of his ship in WW I by a German cruiser and succeeds in delaying the cruiser's departure from the Galapagos Islands - specifically Resolution Island in time for a British battlecruiser to locate it and sink it.
It was published in 1929, ten years before the first Hornblower novels, but the style is the same, and the personalities and characters are well-drawn and enjoyable to follow. The only thing that bothered me was that the two plots of the story never really meshed, so while I really enjoyed the back story of Brown's mother Agatha, it was a little disappointed that father and son never met, nor even knew of each other, at the book's end.