British sea captain, noted as perhaps the greatest of all time and beloved hero of the British.
He was the sixth of eleven children born to Edmund and Catherine Nelson. His father was the village rector, and while his family was refined and educated, they were quite poor. When his mother died, her brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, took Nelson with him to sea. As a member of the British Navy, Nelson was sent on a dangerous scientific expedition to the Arctic during 1773. He was ambitious and patriotic and determined to prove himself equal to his kinsmen. In 1777, he became a lieutenant and took part in the war against the American colonies that was raging in the West Indies. Just a few years later, at age 20, he was put in command of a frigate, and in 1783, he returned to England at the end of the American Revolution. The following year he was sent to the West Indies on a lonely and difficult mission.
Nelson was unemployed for a period of approximately five years beginning in 1787. He felt the Admiralty was prejudiced against him for reasons unknown, but after the execution of King Louis XVI of France in January 1793, he was put in command of the Agamemnon. He was the naval commander in the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and won crucial victories during the battle of the Nile in 1798. In his most famous battle, Nelson fought on the sea while Wellington on the land routed Napoleon at Waterloo.
In 1785, while visiting the island of Nevis, he met Frances Nisbet, a widow with a young son, Josiah, and they were married in March 1787. Nelson was known for his extended love affair with Emma, Lady Hamilton, while both were married. Emma bore him a daughter, Horatia, and in 1801-02, he instructed her to purchase and decorate an elegant country house near London for his second ‘family.’
During the early 1770s, Nelson contracted a fever, most likely malaria. He was sent home from his post in the Indian Ocean. He fell into a depression but eventually recovered and returned to his post with great enthusiasm. Nelson died aboard ship during the battle of Trafalger on 21 October 1805.
Link to Wikipedia biography