[2] His father had been an able seaman, rising to the warrant officer's rank of gunner by the time his sons entered the Royal Navy.

It was aboard Pique, a captured French ship formerly named Pallas, that he would take part in the blockade of Saint-Domingue in 1803, serving off Cape Francois.

A boat from the Pique, commanded by Lieutenant Nesbit Willoughby, was dispatched to capture the French frigate Clorinde as she fled the rebellious Haitians led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

[1] Pique later took part in an abortive attempt to capture Curaçao, which in 1804 had been retaken from Britain by a Dutch-French force.

After nine years in the Caribbean, Morrell found himself in the Mediterranean in a succession of ships including HMS Termagant, from which he beheld the fall of Genoa in 1814, one of his last naval actions during the Napoleonic Wars.

At the end of hostilities, Britain turned to Arctic exploration to employ its navy and to attempt to discover a shorter route to the resource-rich Pacific.