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Tenerife. Something else about his character is also revealed — that deep love of home and of his family, for the picture that inspired him to disobedience was of a snow-white polar-bear skin shining out against the sombre browns of wood and leather in his father’s study.
    The two bomb-ketches having finally extricated themselves from the ice, more by luck than anything else (for the wind shifted favourably into the north-north-east), returned to England in the autumn of 1773 and paid off. In a time of inactivity for the Navy Nelson might well have found himself, along with so many others, relegated once again to such tedious duties as aboard the guardship at the Nore, but he was lucky in two things - his uncle’s influence and the fact that a squadron was fitting out for the East Indies station. The squadron was under the command of Commodore Sir Edward Hughes in the Salisbury , and under him was Captain George Farmer in the 20-gun frigate Seahorse . Farmer had served with Maurice Suckling as a midshipman, so it was natural enough for one old friend to help another over the matter of finding a berth for his nephew. Nelson was lucky not only in Suckling’s influence but in the spheres to which that influence managed to send him. Having experienced the West Indies and the Caribbean world, he had known the Polar ice and was now to see the East from which Britain and so much of Europe drew its wealth and its luxuries. He was lucky also in his captain, George Farmer, a strict disciplinarian, and in the master, Mr Surridge, who unlike so many others took a real interest in teaching the youngsters their duties and was also a first-class celestial navigator. Years later Nelson was to say of him that he was ‘a very clever man and we constantly took lunar observations’: these, the most difficult of all astronomical observations in the days before the predigested tables of today, involved a considerable knowledge of trigonometry. George Farmer later went on to meet a heroic death in battle against a French frigate in 1779 when, his own ship having been set afire, he refused to leave her after all the ship’s company had done so, and went down sitting on the anchor flukes after a last exhortation to his men, ‘Conquer or die ! ’ Apart from the influence of these two officers, Nelson was also lucky in having with him Thomas Troubridge who was his own age but who had entered the Navy two years later than him, having been educated at St Paul’s School. Troubridge was to be one of Nelson’s lifelong friends, one of those who formed the ‘Band of Brothers’ who during the long struggle with Napoleon helped give England the mastery of the seas.
    A frigate like the Seahorse fulfilled much the same functions as a destroyer in twentieth-century navies. She acted as the eyes of the fleet and was built for swift sailing and easy manoeuvrability, being, as a contemporary writer described her, ‘a light nimble ship’. Originally the term ‘frigate’ had been applied to fast, undecked vessels - propelled by oars as well as sails - and used throughout the Mediterranean. It was the French, however, who had first applied the word to full-rigged, three-masted vessels, carrying between 20 and 40 guns, used for cruising and scouting purposes. They had come into their own during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) and were to play an immensely important part in the Napoleonic Wars, when on more than one occasion Nelson was to regret their scarcity or, indeed, their absence. When communications were entirely visual, and the sighting of an enemy fleet depended on these fast outriders of fleet or convoy, the frigate enjoyed a position of importance out of all proportion to its actual firepower. For a young officer, to serve in a frigate was to learn all the niceties of sailing and to enjoy in the ease of her handling and the speed of her advance the greatest delights of sail.
    After calling at Funchal in Madeira, where there was already a