In his early manhood we have his own account, both explicit and implied in many casual unpremeditated phrases, of the motives which governed his public conduct in an episode occurring when, scarcely yet more than a youth, he commanded a frigate in the West Indies,--the whole singularly confirmatory, it might better be said prophetic, of the distinguishing qualities afterwards so brilliantly manifested in his maturity.

But beyond these, it is only by the closest attention and careful gleaning that can be found, in the defective and discontinuous collection of letters which remains from his first thirty years, the indisputable tokens, in most important particulars, of the man that was to be.
The external details of this generally uneventful period can be rapidly summarized.

He was born on the 29th of September, 1758, the fifth son and sixth child of Edmund Nelson, then rector of the parish of Burnham Thorpe, in Norfolk, a county which lies along the eastern coast of England, bordering the North Sea.

His mother, whose name before marriage was Catherine Suckling, was grandniece to Sir Robert Walpole, the famous prime minister of Great Britain during twenty years of the reigns of the first two Georges.

Sir Robert's second brother was called Horatio; and it was from the latter, or from his son, that the future hero took his baptismal name, which, in a more common form, was also that of Sir Robert's younger son, the celebrated letter and memoir writer, Horace Walpole.
Of the eleven children borne by Nelson's mother in her eighteen wedded years, only two lived to grow old.