h, and, worse yet, many a man had been
forced into the service against his will, seized at night by the
press-gang, cudgeled into insensibility and carried on board to wake up
later and find himself destined to serve at sea. The food was chiefly
salt beef, and in most respects the men were treated little better than
so many cattle. As a result they might be hardy, but they were also as
surly and vicious a lot as could be found anywhere.

The poor boy had a hard time growing accustomed to such companionship.
He had longed for the glory of the sailor's life without knowing
anything about its wretchedness, and now he saw all these horrors spread
before his eyes. His uncle, believing that the best way to bring him up
was to let him entirely alone to fight his own battles, paid little or
no attention to him, and the boy, brought up in the country home of a
clergyman in Norfolk, was very homesick, and often longed for the people
and the comforts he had left; but he had a stout heart, and before a
great while had conquered this homesickness and set about to see what
work he could find to do.

At first both officers and men regarded Horatio as simply a sickly boy
and totally unfit for life at sea, but it was not long before he
managed, in a quiet way peculiarly his own, to make a name and place for
himself on board the _Raisonnable_.

The story got around that when he was a small boy he had one day escaped
from his nurse and run off into some dense woods near his father's
house. He had lost his way and finally, coming to a brook too wide for
him to cross, had sat down on a stone on one bank and waited. It was
some time after dark when his distracted family found him.

"I should think you'd have been frightened to death," his grandmother
was reported to have said.

"What's that?" asked the boy.

"Why, fear at being alone, and the dark coming on."

"Fear," said he, "I don't know what you mean by that. I've never seen
it."

His uncle told the story one day to another officer, and within a week
young Nelson had been christened "Dreadnaught."

When he was still a very new midshipman he went for a cruise in the
polar seas. One afternoon some of the men were allowed on the arctic
shore, and Nelson started on a little expedition of his own. The first
any one else knew of it was when another midshipman happened to glance
across the field of ice, and caught sight of the huge white body of a
polar bear within a few yards of Nel