But when he went below decks he found the picture very different. Everything there was dirt and gloom, foul odors and general misery. The cat-o'-nine-tails was the favorite punishment for sailors. Many a back was deeply scored with the lash, 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 Nelson.