Nelson’s Arctic Voyage

Peter Goodwin

Adlard Coles 

£25

14 year old Horatio Nelson shouldn’t have been part of this first Royal Navy polar expedition – his captain had orders to accept ‘none but effective men’. Aristocratic influence overrode good sense and the future hero behaved with teenage stupidity, sneaking out onto the ice at night to try and kill a polar bear. The two ships HMS Racehorse and HMS Carcass, were former bomb vessels, converted to act as ice-breakers and survey platforms.   The actual expedition lasted 3 ½ months and fills about a third of the space in this book. I found it readable and exciting and accept that I may have been a little bit teenage myself when I was tempted to skip the extremely thorough detail of the preparations.