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By Root 1467 0

and aware that there were few choices for a poor girl but prostitution. He had worried that his sister Anne had been exposed to insult when she worked as a lacemaker's apprentice in London. Nelson's attitude toward prostitution was pragmatic. Whenever a ship came ashore, traders arrived to set up stalls on the deck, and hundreds of prostitutes flocked on board, rowed out in "bum boats" and then taken down by the men to their hammocks in the huge orlop deck where they all slept. The officers went onshore to meet expensive courtesans or local actresses. As Nelson knew, in the ranks of the men there was no dividing line between "virtuous woman" or wife and prostitute: many men married women who came on board ship or entered into alliances with the hundreds of prostitutes in Greenwich, who looked after their money, checked their lottery numbers, and cared for them when they returned.

Real life in the navy was nothing like the dignified oil paintings. Most of his men were no more than seventeen, while many were as young as thirteen, high on their rations of a gallon of beer a day, pimply adolescents starved of female company, unable to write home, their only possessions the clothes they were wearing when they had been seized by the press gang. They were often drunk, the ship resounded to the sound of the cows, sheep, and hens packed into cages, women dressed as men worked as sailors (without anyone guessing), men with a little money and seniority took prostitutes as "wives" for the journey, and sex was not always consensual: in the Caribbean, plantation owners sent out their slaves to work as prostitutes. Having ruled over a ship that was at times a floating brothel, menagerie, pub, and shopping center, Nelson was less hypocritical than the average eighteenth-century man. When he had an affair with the singer Adelaide Correglia in the Italian port of Leghorn between 1794 and 1796, he demanded his superiors acknowledge the importance of the intelligence about ships' movements that she gave him. Rather than goggle at Emma as an ex-courtesan or joke about her background, he accepted her as he saw her: a woman who had made a great turn in life.

"Ten thousand most grateful thanks are due to your ladyship for restoring the health of our invaluable friend," St. Vincent wrote skittishly to Emma. "Pray do not let your fascinating Neapolitan dames approach too near him, for he is made of flesh & blood & cannot resist their temptation." Emma did not need any warnings. She was determined to monopolize Nelson's attentions.

While Nelson recovered his health, Emma planned her most spectacular party ever to celebrate his fortieth birthday. She spent thousands of pounds on food, decoration, and entertainment so opulent that even Nelson worried it might make him vain. On September 29, the Palazzo Sessa played host to eight hundred Neapolitan dignitaries and select English guests, and nearly a thousand more joined them for dancing. "Such a style of elegance as I never saw, or shall again probably," wrote an utterly impressed Nelson to his wife. Emma adorned the courtyard with elaborate arrangements of flowers, lights, and candles and a column inscribed with "Veni, vidi, vici." Every ribbon and button bore a picture of Nelson, and one of the English travelers composed a new verse to be added to "God Save the King," which began "Join we great Nelson's name/First on the roll of fame."

Under the twinkling lights in the courtyard, Nelson and Emma were obviously absorbed in each other. Josiah began to suspect that Lady Hamilton had been kind to him only in order to win his stepfather. He was equally horrified that nobody seemed to object to his stepfather's obvious infatuation. Used to the culture of the cicisbeo, in which young married women had platonic male friends to squire them around, the Neapolitans thought Nelson just another of Emma's cicisbeo and quite naturally so, since he was a British naval captain and she was the wife of the British envoy. Sir William was equally sanguine, believing it was yet another of his wife's passing flirtations