A great deal has been written about the British Royal Navy frigate hmsIndefatigable and her first captain, Sir Edward Pellew, including three biographies, many accounts of actions in which the ship engaged and a number of works of historical fiction. In this last category the best-known example is the series of Hornblower novels by the twentieth-century author C. S. Forester, who chose Pellew's Indefatigable as the ship on which his eponymous antihero, Horatio Hornblower, served the majority of his time as a midshipman. This book presents an examination of the lives and careers of seventeen of the young gentlemen who would have been Hornblower's historical shipmates aboard hms Indefatigable; the volunteers, midshipmen and mates alongside whom he would have lived, berthed and fought.

Captain Sir Edward Pellew, later Admiral Lord Exmouth, is still highly regarded as a gifted and audacious sea officer. In a long and successful career he served as Commander in Chief of both the East Indies station and the Mediterranean Fleet, was feted as the victor of the Bombardment of Algiers and rose to the rank of Admiral of the Red and Vice Admiral of the United Kingdom. Notwithstanding these notable achievements, Pellew is most widely remembered as the quintessential frigate commander and captain of the 44-gun rasée hms Indefatigable.

Pellew captained the Indefatigable for just over three years, from December 1795 to March 1799. It was a successful command by any measure and during this time the ship took numerous prizes and fought several notable engagements. The Indefatigable's most famous action was unquestionably the dramatic Droits de L'Homme engagement when, on 13 January 1797, the Indefatigable, together with her consort the 36-gun frigate Amazon, took on a French 74-gun ship of the line and ran her on shore following a brutal twelve-hour engagement fought at night in the teeth of a ferocious storm on the lee shore of Audierne Bay on the Breton coast.

The Droits de L'Homme engagement is regarded as one of the most emblematic frigate engagements of the French Revolutionary Wars, but, despite being cited in almost every contemporary and modern naval history of this period, little has been written about the Indefatigable's officers and crew.