Forester provides two different brief summaries of Hornblower's career. The first was in the first chapter of "The Happy Return", which was the first Hornblower novel written. The second occurs midway through "The Commodore", when Czar Alexander asks him to describe his career. The two accounts are incompatible. The first account would have made Hornblower about five years older than the second. The second account is more nearly compatible with the rest of Hornblower's career, but it omits the time he spent as a commander in "Hornblower and the Hotspur". There are other discrepancies as well; in one account of his defeat of a Spanish frigate in the Mediterranean, he distinguished himself as lieutenant and in another he is a post-captain with less than three years seniority. It appears that these discrepancies arose as the series matured and accounts needed to be modified to coincide with his age and career.