AS a child, Max Adams thought he was descended from Lord Nelson and avidly read up about the great British naval hero. But in the year marking the 200th anniversary of his greatest victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, the writer and broadcaster is more involved with the man who was his second in command, Newcastle-born Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood.

The former head of Durham University's archaeology unit spent three months travelling in the US and Europe investigating his life and naval career.

He believes that he's been unfairly neglected by historians, who've concentrated on Nelson's exploits at the expense of Collingwood, who took command of the British fleet after Nelson's death at Trafalgar. He became a forgotten hero and one Adams is determined to restore to his rightful place in history.

"There was a certain amount of prejudice against him in the navy, partly because he was a provincial Northerner, although he was better educated than many of his peers," says Adams, 43, who lives in Gateshead.

"He was resented in the profession because he had what everyone else wanted - Nelson's friendship, and there was jealousy. He was a hero of Trafalgar but never set foot in England again because he was in the business of stopping Napoleon conquering the Mediterranean, running a fleet of 80 ships and keeping diplomatic links with 30 countries.

"Basically, he was keeping Napoleon at bay and it killed him. He didn't die on his ship. He was on his way home when he died, which is rather tragic. He never saw his family for the last seven years of his life."

His short, illustrated book about Collingwood is being published in the North-East, through Newcastle Libraries, on March 22. In the summer, the tale goes national with the publication of Adams' full biography through Weidenfeld and Nicolson. And tomorrow, he'll present a half-hour documentary about the naval man on ITV Tyne Tees.

'I'VE known about Collingwood for a long time because, as a lot of children are, I was brought up to believe I was descended from Nelson. So I read about him and the name of Collingwood was familiar," he says.

His family link with Nelson proved to be no more than some distant connection with the naval hero's cousins. "It was pretty flimsy and it wasn't until I moved to the North-East ten years ago that I came across him again," Adams continues.

"Tyne Tees asked me to do some five-minute shorts on North-East heroes. I looked for a book about Collingwood and found that the last one was written 40 years ago and was long out of print."

Having "a bit of a thing about neglected people, the underdog thing", he wondered how someone who was Nelson's best friend and commanded the fleet at Trafalgar was so little known.

He did find the Collingwood influence in Patrick O'Brien's fictional books about British naval commander Jack Aubrey at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Russell Crowe played the character in the film of one of the series, Master And Commander.

"I was interested in naval history and got into reading the novels. Then I re-read them and saw the character is substantially based on Collingwood. O'Brien leaves a trail of clues. Quite a lot of Jack Aubrey anecdotes are Collingwood stories," claims Adams.

Three years ago, he won a £75,000 fellowship from the Churchill Memorial Trust for someone in the North-East to research a maritime project, which "sounded like a really good excuse to go hunting for Collingwood". He visited the US, Minorca, Antigua, Corsica and Sicily in search of the his past.

BORN on The Side in 1748, Cuthbert Collingwood was christened and married in the cathedral and briefly attended the Royal Grammar School. He was sent to sea at the age of 13 after his father's business collapsed. "If that had been worth anything, he'd have been expected to carry on in the business," says Adams. "There was only one profession you could go into that required no money - and the navy was it. Living on The Side, he was familiar with ships and the sea.

"It took him 14 years to become a lieutenant. He won promotion and became a good friend of Nelson. Things began to move quicker for him because Nelson had political interests and towed him in his wake."

He was distraught when Nelson was killed. "My heart is rent with the most poignant grief", he wrote. But there was little time for grieving as he had to take command of the fleet.

While Nelson's last words to Hardy are famous enough, less well-known is that almost the last thing he said was to send his love to Collingwood.

Although he had a house in Morpeth, Collingwood was only at home for five years in a naval career of more than four decades. Adams visited the places in Europe where he was stationed and lived. "He's better known in Minorca that he is here," he says.

"The house he bought or rented for the last years of his life is now a hotel and the owner has constructed a sort of shrine to him. In a lot of places, it's Nelson that people remember. Even if they're Collingwood's stories, they're attributed to Nelson. They think every good story must be a Nelson story and, because his history finishes with Trafalgar, no-one looks at what Collingwood did after that."

Adams admits that taking a back seat to Nelson was partly his own fault. Nelson "wrote his own press", he feels. He wanted to be a hero and behaved in a heroic, tragic, flawed manner that people expected of such people. Collingwood, while adoring Nelson, wasn't the slightest bit interested in publicity.

He married and had two daughters he doted on. When he was made a baron after Trafalgar, the government forgot to draw up papers for the title to continue and so it didn't pass to his children.

Adams has been in contact with his great, great, great niece, Susan Collingwood Cameron, who lives in Northumberland. "She's a very keen enthusiast about him and champions his cause. Now her children are becoming a bit more enthusiastic about the admiral," he says.

Apart from another author writing a small local book, he found himself the only person researching Collingwood as the Battle of Trafalgar anniversary approaches. Six biographies of Nelson are being published this year, in which he suspects Collingwood will be given "the Sherlock Holmes/Dr Watson" treatment and classed as Nelson's sidekick.

He's remembered in the North-East through the monument at Tynemouth, cenotaph at St Nicholas's Cathedral and a small bust over the doorway at Milburn House, where his house was. Next month an exhibition is being staged in South Shields in his memory.

ADAMS will be helping remember Collingwood by participating in a reconstruction of the journey taken by a letter he wrote at Trafalgar. This was taken from Cadiz to Falmouth by sea, and then to London. He'll be crewing on the square rig tall ship - ironically called the Lord Nelson - that will make the same two-and-a-half week voyage later this year.

"I thought I should be on it and see what it's like to sail on one of those ships. It's interesting but scary. I've sailed before but not anything remotely like that," he says.

With the biography and TV programme, which will also be seen on the History Channel, he hopes Collingwood will emerge from Nelson's shadow. "The thing that strikes me most about him is, regardless of his naval exploits and brilliance as a commander, he comes across as a decent, humane man," says Adams.

"He deserves to be known. Everyone should be taught about him at school because he was a caring, decent Englishman. An extraordinary bloke really.

"Not that he would have been remotely interested in people writing about him. His duty was to his country and once he had beaten Napoleon he could go back to his garden at Morpeth, warm his backside by the fire, gossip and teach his daughters to shoot."

* Trafalgar's Forgotten Hero is on ITV Tyne Tees tomorrow at 7.30pm.