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British community established, mostly engaged in the wine trade, the Seahorse sailed down via the remote islands of Amsterdam and St Paul. They were in the Tropic of Capricorn, the ship scudding before the steady wind and the long swell, in rough but exhilarating sailor’s weather. Nelson’s health must have improved during his few years in the Navy for Mr Surridge, the master, who had taken a fancy to his keen and intelligent pupil, later recalled that he was ‘a boy with a rather florid countenance, rather stout and athletic’. The colouring was undoubtedly due to the long days of wind and sun, for Nelson had a fair skin, but his physical build can only be attributed to the healthy life and exercise of recent years. Rated midshipman on the master’s recommending him to Captain Farmer, Nelson for the first time knew the exhilaration of being allowed to tack the ship in fair weather under the keen eyes of the officer of the watch. The memory of that first moment of being in authority, of seeing the sheets hauled, the great sails fly, thunder and then come to rest, as the Seahorse drew away on her new tack, will have stayed with him for ever.
    After altering course northward for India, with Madras the first port of call, they made for the Hoogly River, then Madras again, and from there on to Bombay. Nelson was now in the world from which England drew so much of her wealth, and it was ships like the one in which he sailed which made the transport of that wealth secure and possible. One could but wish that a Conrad had been aboard to depict the Bombay scene as it was then, or at Bushire which they reached on 25 May. For nearly two years he was in the East, learning the sailor’s trade, becoming familiar with the pattern of a world that was the far side of the moon to quiet Burnham, and indulging no doubt like any young man on ‘runs ashore’ into hot foreign ports, where the very unfamiliarity of everything bred an indifference to conventional rules of behaviour. Many years later in Naples he confided to a lady that he had once sat down for an evening of cards with a cheerful party in the East Indies, and had come away £300 better off. Reflecting next morning, probably with a headache, that if matters had gone differently he might have been ruined, he resolved never to play again. It was a resolve from which even Emma Hamilton in that far distant future could hardly break him.
    He saw many places; among them the thriving town and naval station of Trincomalee, where the pearls from Tambalagam were beyond a midshipman’s pocket, but not the observation that it was ‘the finest harbour in the world’. He did not escape from the East unscathed, and in the December of 1775 he was struck down by a ‘malignant disorder’. He was for a time semi-paralysed and very nearly died, indeed would most probably have done so if the surgeon of the Salisbury had not advised an immediate return home on the first available ship. In March 1776 a cadaverous, fair-haired midshipman climbed haltingly up the gangway of the frigate Dolphin. He was taken under the care of her captain, James Pigot, who showed him such attention that Nelson was convinced that, but for him, he would long since have been dead. The illness was almost certainly malaria, at that time one of the greatest scourges of the East India station, from the after-effects of which he was to suffer nearly all his life. From now on, whether from this or other and later fevers, from wounds and manifold injuries, he would nearly always live with pain.
    The Dolphin was six months on the return voyage, six months during which he slowly began to rebuild his health, watching the light move across the deckhead in the cabin where he lay, sunrise and sunset, and the dark of night broken only by a lamp’s pale glow if a visitor looked in on him. He heard the pound and scuffle of bare feet on the upper deck, the shouts and orders, the cries of blocks and tackles, and then felt the change