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He was severely reprimanded by his captain for “conduct so unworthy of the office he filled.” When asked what motive he had in hunting a bear, he replied, still trembling from the excitement of the encounter, “Sir, I wished to kill the bear that I might carry the skin to my father.”

The expedition finally worked its way out of the ice and sailed for home.

Horatio’s next voyage was to the East Indies, aboard the Seahorse, one of the vessels of a squadron under the command of Sir Edward Hughes. His attention to duty attracted the notice of his senior officer, on whose recommendation he was rated as a midshipman.

After eighteen months in the trying climate of India, the youth’s health gave way, and he was sent home in the Dolphin. His physical weakness affected his spirits. Gloom fastened upon him, and for a time he was very despondent about his future.

“I felt impressed,” he says, “with an idea that I should never rise in my profession. My mind was staggered with a view of the difficulties I had to surmount and the little interest I possessed. I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition. After a long and gloomy revery in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden flow of patriotism was kindled within me and presented my king and my country as my patrons. My mind exulted in the idea. ‘Well, then,’ I exclaimed, ‘I will be a hero, and, confiding in Providence, I will brave every danger!'”

In that hour Nelson leaped from boyhood to manhood. Thenceforth the purpose of his life never changed. From that time, as he often said afterward, “a radiant orb was suspended in his mind’s eye, which urged him onward to renown.”

His health improved very much during the homeward voyage, and he was soon able to resume duty again.

At nineteen he was made second lieutenant of the Lowestoffe; and at twenty he was commander of the Badger. Before he was twenty-one, owing largely to his courage and presence of mind in face of every danger, and his enthusiasm in his profession, “he had gained that mark,” says his biographer, Southey, “which brought all the honors of the service within his reach.”

Pleasing in his address and conversation, always kind and thoughtful in his treatment of the men and boys under him, Nelson was the best-loved man in the British navy,–nay, in all England.

When he was appointed to the command of the Boreas, a ship of twenty-eight guns, then bound for the Leeward Islands, he had thirty midshipmen under him. When any of them, at first, showed any timidity about going up the masts, he would say, by way of encouragement, “I am going a race to the masthead, and beg that I may meet you there.” And again he would say cheerfully, that “any person was to be pitied who could fancy there was any danger, or even anything disagreeable, in the attempt.”

“Your Excellency must excuse me for bringing one of my midshipmen with me,” he said to the governor of Barbados, who had invited him to dine. “I make it a rule to introduce them to all the good company I can, as they have few to look up to besides myself during the time they are at sea.” Was it any wonder that his “middies” almost worshiped him?

This thoughtfulness in small matters is always characteristic of truly great, large-souled men. Another distinguishing mark of Nelson’s greatness was that he ruled by love rather than fear.

When, at the age of forty-seven, he fell mortally wounded at the battle of Trafalgar, all England was plunged into grief. The crowning victory of his life had been won, but his country was inconsolable for the loss of the noblest of her naval heroes.

“The greatest sea victory that the world had ever known was won,” says W. Clark Russell, “but at such a cost, that there was no man throughout the British fleet–there was no man indeed in all England–but would have welcomed defeat sooner than have paid the price of this wonderful conquest.”

The last words of the hero who had won some of the greatest of England’s sea fights were, “Thank God, I have done my duty.”