Five Naval Heroes Or A Man And His Rep III

See:

A Man And His Rep
A Man And His Rep II
Brands

Five naval heroes are:

Horatio Nelson
Horatio Hornblower
Jack Crawford
John Paul Jones (and here)
Dominic Flandry

Other sf naval series characters have been mentioned in the combox.

We mix historical and fictional figures because history, legend and fiction mix. While reading about fictional heroes, we should never forget that they have real life counterparts.

We mix sea and space because of a literary tradition that sees the latter as an extension of the former, e.g., see A Later Period, although it is arguable that this is implausible.

Dominic Flandry is a space naval hero whose exploits change future history, e.g., even his opening adventure on Starkad saves the Terran fleet and thus also Terra itself. For this reason, I compare Flandry with a real historical hero:

"Crawford's actions shape future history and give the expression 'to nail your colours to the mast' to the English language."
-Bryan Talbot, Alice In Sunderland (London, 2007), p. 42.

Crawford's life has some superb interactions between the living legend and the real man:

because he refused to play the hero, a stand-in replaced him at his official parade of honour;

he refused a lucrative offer to play himself in re-enactments of the Battle of Camperdown;

he criticized the pottery bearing images of his heroic deed;

 
but, like Hornblower, he did attend Nelson's funeral - and walked in the procession.

Invoking Virgil, we might imagine that the soul destined to be born as Flandry was also present. (Aeneas, ancestor of Romulus, met Caesar in Hades just as the Fourth Gospel projected Christ as the Word back to the Beginning.)

Whitehaven, the town where I lived for my first two or three years, is proud of its association with John Paul Jones because he attacked it! Time changes perspectives:

"'If an Englishman of around 1600 had found out about the American Revolution, he probably would have thought it a tragedy; an Englishman of 1950 would have had a very different view of it. We're in the same spot. The messages we get from the really far future have no contexts yet.'"
-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), AN EPILOGUE, pp. 109-110.

We are indeed in the same spot. In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, Americans must accept that the Terran Empire will have its Admiralty Center in the Rockies and Englishmen must accept that Britain will have become a mere Mayoralty.

Pardon by the town and port of Whitehaven in 1999

John Paul Jones was given an honorary pardon in 1999 by the Port of Whitehaven for his raid on the town, in the presence of Lt. Steve Lyons representing the US Naval Attaché to the UK, and Yuri Fokine the Russian Ambassador to the UK. The US Navy were also awarded the Freedom of the Port of Whitehaven, the only time the honour has been granted in its 400-year history.^[34]
The Pardon and Freedom were arranged by Gerard Richardson MBE as part of the launch of the series of Maritime Festival. Richardson's of Whitehaven is now the honorary Consulate to the US Navy for the Town and Port of Whitehaven. The Consul is Rear Admiral (retired) US Navy, Steve Morgan and the Deputy Consul is Rob Romano.^{[35]
-copied from here.}