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By Root 1508 0

producing eleven children in seventeen years. Little Horatio claimed to remember no more about her than that she "hated the French." Most widowed fathers remarried as quickly as possible, but Edmund Nelson remained single and brought up his family on small resources and tight discipline. Horatio escaped home at the age of twelve to become a midshipman, thanks to his uncle, who paid for his commission. He traveled to the West Indies, the Arctic, India, and the Mediterranean and did not see his father or his siblings for six years.3 Starved of affection since childhood, he fell desperately in love with nearly every woman he met. Neither good-looking, well-connected, nor rich, he was snubbed by genteel young English ladies, and he had no chance with his grande passion, the belle of Quebec town, Mary Simpson. As he grew up, he was increasingly attracted to young married women with a maternal gleam in their eye. While stationed in the Caribbean, he became infatuated with the beautiful young wife of the elderly commissioner of Antigua, declaring, "Was it not for Mrs. Moutray, who is very very good to me, I should almost hang myself at this infernal hole," and extolling her: "her equal I never saw in any country." His desires piqued by days of flirtation with her, Nelson sailed for the Caribbean island of Nevis. There he met John Herbert, a rich planter and president of the island council, and developed a crush on his niece and housekeeper, Fanny Nisbet, a widow with a young son.

A fractious only child, Frances Herbert Woolward had enjoyed a leisured childhood in Nevis, but in 1779 her father died, leaving her nothing, and she was forced to accept the marriage proposal of the doctor who had attended him, Josiah Nisbet, ten years her senior. The newlyweds traveled to England. Most Nevisians who moved to England did so in the hope that the cold climate would cure their sufferings from lead poisoning, caused by drinking rum that had been distilled in lead pipes, and Josiah Nisbet was probably similarly afflicted. She quickly fell pregnant, but Dr. Nisbet sickened, probably with syphilis, and died in 1781, hallucinating wildly in his final months.4 Left a widow at twenty-one, with a son, Fanny had no choice but to return and become her uncle's housekeeper.

Two years later, Nelson arrived. Touched by her bruised sadness and impressed by her fortitude after losing both father and husband in quick succession, Nelson began to enjoy Fanny's company. She had the mature, maternal air he loved, and he admired her petting her young son, imagining her doing the same to him and their brood of children. He was enjoying just another pleasant crush—but he had no idea that the Herberts saw him as the answer to their prayers. Herbert wanted his disillusioned niece and her son off his hands, and she was desperate to flee the stultifying routine of her life as his housekeeper. Any man with reasonable prospects would have done. Fanny knew her youth was fading. In the excitable young captain, she saw her last chance of escape from growing old as her uncle's servant.

To Nelson, Nevis was a romantic paradise. More than three thousand feet high, Mount Nevis towered over thirty-six square miles of lush vegetation, fruit trees, and hot springs. According to A Description of the Island of Nevis, dedicated to John Herbert and compiled in consultation with Dr. Nisbet, the island was “altogether pleasing and agreeable.”5 Sugar cane grew thick on the rich volcanic soil, and the Herberts, owners of the Montpelier Plantation, were the island's first family. The beauty hid the misery and pain of ten thousand beaten, abused slaves. Nevis's population was small, with only a thousand whites, and out of every five people who came to Nevis, free or as a slave, three were dead before the end of five years, and few white inhabitants lived past fifty. Fanny had no chance of meeting new men. Since most women married before twenty, she was old. The white population was in decline, and because English servants were unwilling to travel out, most women had more domestic work