In March 1896, the American naval historian Alfred Mahan, was hard at work on his great two-volume Life of Nelson, when he learned that a collection of Nelson's papers had been sold to the British Museum by a descendant, Lord Bridport. Writing to the British naval historian, J.K. Laughton, Mahan said, ‘I am reasonably sure that no letters of Nelson's own will throw new light on his character, though they might possibly throw new light on incidents.’ Had he known what the Bridport Papers actually contained, he might have been less dismissive.

Among the Bridport Papers, now housed in the British Library, are nine volumes of ‘pressed copy’ letters of Nelson's correspondence while Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean in 1803–5. A survey of those volumes has revealed that some 20 per cent – over 400 – individual letters have never been published before in any form, not even as brief extracts in biographies. Moreover, as the letters have been transcribed, it has emerged that they contain material that is of great assistance in understanding Nelson's actions and relationships during his time in the Mediterranean. So, after all, they do throw new light on aspects of his character and, if Mahan had seen them, he would certainly have made use of them in his biography.

The Nelson Letters Project

The survey of the Bridport volumes was conducted as part of the Nelson Letters Project. Originally commissioned in 1991 by the Royal Naval Museum, and co-sponsored since 2001 by the National Maritime Museum, the Project's aim has been to review all the archives known to contain Nelson letters, private as well as public, in order to locate and record any unpublished material. When the Interim Report, was published in 2001, it was estimated that some 550 unpublished letters existed. By the time the most recent report was made, in August 2004, that figure had risen to 1,300.

Material has been located in over thirty archives as well as numerous single letters owned by private collectors. One reason why it has been possible to spread the net so wide, in such a relatively short space of time, is that the Project is probably the first major work of Nelson scholarship to make extensive use of online catalogues – the National Register of Archives in the UK and the National Union Catalog in the USA.