He wears whiskers and a stovepipe hat as he stares proudly from the pages of the journal that he kept during 40 years at sea.

The self-portrait is the only known likeness of George Hodge, ordinary seaman, and one of the very few pictures of a humble sailor in Nelson’s navy. While officers and admirals were immortalised in oils, most sailors lived, and died, out of sight.

Hodge’s journal records the ships he served on, the oceans he sailed, the ports he visited and the actions in which he fought, between 1790 and his retirement from the sea in 1833. It includes everything from the lyrics of sea shanties to a picture of the first ship on which he served. His spelling may have been erratic - apparently he was self-educated – but his paintings were filled with naive charm.

Hodge’s naval career spanned an era when Britannia really did rule the oceans. He saw action in the Napoleonic Wars and the American War of 1812, from the West Coast of Africa to the Great Lakes. His watercolours include one of HMS Tremendous, forlorn in storm-tossed seas after an encounter with the French, and his own ship the Lancaster, all flags flying during a review off the Cape.

Times Archive, 1807: Ship News, Sheerness

The Centinel gun-brig came down from Chatham to man the Elizabeth and Marlborough, of 74 guns, which are ordered to be got ready with all possible expedition

• Admiralty Office, 1800

• Sackett's Harbour, 1814

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• Below the waterline of British history

The 7½in-high journal was still in Hodge’s family in the 1880s but its subsequent history is unknown until it was bought by an American collector, J. Welles Henderson, a lawyer, from a London bookdealer 20 years ago.

Mr Henderson, who founded a maritime museum in Philadelphia, died last year, and more than 600 items from his collection are being sold tomorrow by Northeast Auctions in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Hodge’s volume is expected to fetch up to $50,000 (£26,750).

The 500-page journal opens with the words: “George Hodge his Book Consisting of Difrint ports & ships that I have sailed in since the year 1790. Aged 13 years.”

Hodge, who was born on Tyneside, started out as a cabin boy on the colliers transporting coal to London. In 1794 he was taken prisoner by the French after a voyage to a Baltic port but was sent home in a cartel sloop.

He was seized again in 1797, but was again returned home – only to spend months on the run from the press gang.

The next year he was pressed into service on the HMS Lancaster. For nine years he served along the West African coast and made voyages to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and the East Indies.

In 1808 he transferred to the 74-gun HMS Marlborough, which did blockade duty at ports around Europe. On the outbreak of war with America in 1812 the Marlborough was sent to Bermuda and Hodge took part in raids on Oswego, New York, and blockaded the US naval base at Sackets Harbour.

Finally, in 1815, he returned to Britain and at Greenwich was paid for seventeen years, four months, two weeks and two days’ service with the Royal Navy. After leaving the Navy he returned to sea with the merchant fleet, ending his career at sea in 1833.

Hodge was a talented amateur artist as well as a skilled seaman. In his self-portrait he wears a sailor’s neckerchief and a smart, blue jacket but the journal gives no clue to the rank he held.

A spokesman for the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, Hampshire, said that journals kept by ordinary seaman were exceptionally rare. This one records everything from the meaning of signal flags to incidents on board ship including the deaths that were inevitable when sailors had to climb the rigging in all weathers. An entry for December 26, 1812, reads: “A fresh breeze a strange sail in sight. Fell from the for top mast Mathew Donelson and was drownded.”

Another entry reads: “July 19 light breeze at 5am picked up body of John Carter and buried him on the Isle of White.” On Christmas Day in 1806 he writes: “Employ’d in wartering ship and seting up the riger . . . fish for dinner.”

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