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Coffin in the Cabin. Pope knows his sea lore well, and though a few pages may make heavy weather for a landlubber, he has captured the salty flavor of the times as effectively as his hero's ships made prizes of their foes. Nelson the hypochondriac, querulously insecure and suffering so strong a death fixation that he sailed for years with his coffin in his cabin (it was not there when needed at Trafalgar) becomes agreeably human. Of his last minutes at home with his mistress Lady Hamilton and their "adopted" daughter, Pope writes: "Upstairs Nelson ... went quietly to the bedside of his daughter, conceived aboard the Fondroyant in the warm Mediterranean more than five years earlier. The little man knelt. Resting his head in his hand, he said a quiet prayer, and tiptoed out of the room and out of Horatia's life forever."
Five weeks later, dying amid the thunder of the guns, the reek of black powder and the 'tween-deck stench of a 40-year-old wooden ship of the line, prophetically named Victory, Nelson bequeathed his beloved Emma and Horatia "as a legacy to my Country." But his country betrayed him. Lord Nelson's womenfolk lived out their lives in degrading poverty. The admiral's final and most famous signal as his fleet was entering battle, "England expects that every man will do his duty," did not work in reverse.
* Legend has it that ten years later, after a comparable British victory at Waterloo, the banking House of Rothschild got the word by carrier pigeon within hours, made a killing on London's Stock Exchange.