Relax into this Caribbean isle’s sleepy charm

By Samantha Weinberg

updated 3:21 p.m. ET Aug. 8, 2007

I’m sitting on the sloping lawn of the Montpelier Plantation Inn with a rum punch in hand, watching the sun slink gracefully into the sea below as a tiny hummingbird hovers above a giant hibiscus flower just feet away. I feel for a fleeting instant at peace with the world. A frog croaks nearby, and as I turn to look for it, the sun completes its dive, gone for another day.

Watching the stars find their twinkle in the darkening sky, I wonder what it must have been like for Fanny Nelson to see the sun set on Nevis for the last time. I don’t know if this tiny Caribbean island does this to everyone, but I have become obsessed by Fanny, a young widow who in 1785 fell in love with the man destined to be Britain’s greatest ever naval commander: Lord Horatio Nelson.

I read her biography before I traveled to her home island of Nevis, one of the Leeward Islands on the northern arc of the Caribbean, and felt an immediate sympathy for her as well as a kind of kinship – as a woman, as a wife, as someone who crossed an ocean without knowing what was waiting for her on the other side (I came from England to Nevis, and she the opposite).

I have come to the island to follow in her ghostly footsteps around the five remaining plantation inns; while they didn’t all belong to her family, they were places, I imagined, she visited. Maybe her spirit, I thought when I planned my trip, will be lurking somewhere in the houses among the stone sugar mills and polished wooden planter’s chairs, or even under the old silk-cottonwood tree where, on March 11, 1787, she and Nelson exchanged marriage vows. The tree, a little more gnarled and crooked perhaps, still stands amid the ruins of the old Montpelier great house on the southern slopes of Nevis Peak across a grassy lane from the Montpelier Plantation Inn, where today you can dine by candlelight in the sugar mill built by Fanny’s uncle, John Herbert.

As I change for dinner in my room at the inn, I look again at the painting of Fanny on the cover of her biography: a delicate face with a long, straight nose and large, dark, rather sad eyes.

It was painted in England 11 years after she left Nevis for a cold, lonely and ultimately tragic life as a Nelson’s wife. She never returned, and I can only imagine that at her lowest points – when all of England was talking about her famous husband’s public affair with a married woman or when the same woman gave birth to Nelson’s only child – she must have dreamed of Nevis and its spectacular sunsets. I imagine that it gave her, as it did me, a sense of peace.

Walking into the dining room of Montpelier, I feel that I am stepping into Fanny’s life. There is something genuinely old-fashioned and whimsical about the plantation inns of Nevis, and it’s not just their pillars and shutters and well-polished floors. I sit at the bar chatting with Kaddy, the smiling cocktail maestro, and try to work out what it is.

“Nevis is a quiet island,” he tells me. “There’s no cinema, no clubs, no hard drugs and pretty much no crime. You see the streets on Sunday, and there are no people; most everybody’s in church.”

The next day I walk to Fig Tree Church about a mile from Montpelier. The winding main road I stroll along is hemmed by painted wooden houses with filigree eaves, airy verandas and riotous color in their front gardens. I am hoping to get a look at the Nelsons’ marriage certificate, but instead find myself swept up in what I mistake to be a wedding. Hundreds of people are milling around the church. Women wear silk dresses and large hats, and big gold earrings glint in their ears. The men look more somber in dark suits and ties. Everyone appears to be chatting for all they are worth. As I later learn, they are engaged in the favorite Nevis pastime of “looking news” (that’s gossip to most of us). On an island with no cinema, drama is found around each corner.

Brooke Slezak In 1787, Fanny Nisbet and Lord Horatio Nelson wed near Montpelier Plantation. Today, the restored plantation is a romantic inn.

It is only after I’ve had a long conversation with a charming man about the weather, the upcoming Cricket World Cup and Fanny, inevitably, that I spot the knot of people in the graveyard. A pastor preaches into a microphone while a yellow bulldozer is poises for action behind him. The happy gathering in Fanny’s old family church is not a wedding after all, but what I can only describe as “funeral festivities.”

From what I’d read, the church then, as now, was an important focal point of life — somewhere to meet, something to dress up for. But the planter families’ center of social activity was still the great houses, the settings for dinners, balls and garden parties that lasted all day. There were close to 20 of those mansions in Fanny’s day, solid testaments to the extraordinary sugar wealth of 18^th-century Nevis. The profitability of sugar was dependent on an unpalatable practice: slave labor. In Fanny’s time, the number of slaves outweighed the rest of the population by six to one. She would have had her own slave maid, slave cooks and gardeners with names like Daphne, Mingo, Chocolate and Cato, all people originally from Africa.

During my visit later that afternoon to Old Manor Hotel, the largest of the five plantation inns that have remained on Nevis, I am confronted with this past. “That’s the slave-breeding center,” explains TC, a vermillion-haired grandmother from northern England who moved out to Nevis 15 years ago and now conducts colorful island tours. “If they wanted, for example, a household slave, they’d put a lighter-skinned man and woman together; for field workers who needed to be strong and hardy, they might cross a Mandingo man with a Bahari woman. The birthing rooms were upstairs. Gives me the willies, it does.”

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