Arthur Fleming Morrell (10 November 1788 – 13 September 1880) was British officer of the Royal Navy, an explorer, and Commandant of Ascension Island, who saw service spanning the end of the Napoleonic era and well into the Victorian era. Early life Arthur Morrell was born in 1788 in Stoke Damerel, Devon, the second son of a Royal Navy lieutenant, John Morrell. 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. Career Royal Navy Morrell's brother was John Arthur Morrell, who became a commander and served aboard during an 1806 attack on Naples, then held by Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte. Morrell joined the Royal Navy at the age of about twelve or thirteen as a first class volunteer. He served first on , a 38-gun fifth rate ship in the Channel fleet that took several French ships as prizes during the years Morrell served on her. He then moved to the Caribbean on board , and was by now a master's mate. 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 as she fled the rebellious Haitians led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Morrell was part of the crew that brought Clorinde under a British flag to Jamaica. 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 , 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. Arctic exploration In 1818, Morrell took part in a "perilous voyage of discovery" to Spitsbergen, in search of the Northwest Passage, in what was one of the earliest voyages of Arctic discovery. The voyage was unsuccessful, but Morrell would later be awarded the Arctic Medal, 1818–55. Captain David Buchan commanded HMS Dorothea, while Morrell served as first lieutenant. The Dorothea was accompanied by , commanded by John Franklin.