On a making tide - David Donachie

Horatio Nelson is our most famous military hero. His statue dominates the capital, he has adorned our currency, his last words have passed into folklore, and HMS Victory, his flagship at Trafalgar, is the centrepiece of our naval heritage. On a Making Tide and Taken at the Flood (volume 2) will tell the story of our greatest military genius and his long-running love affair with Emma Hamilton; a love that transgressed class, position and social convention and which threatened them both with ruin.

Starting with Nelson?s arrival at Chatham aged 12 to join his first ship the Raisonable (moored next to his last, the Victory) and with Emma rejecting life as a domestic servant, On a Making Tide takes their story to 1798 and the battle of the Nile, the triumphant victory which secured Nelson?s fame. Following both his exceptional career and Emma?s spirited progress, it is a story of talent and character overcoming tradition and expectation; of a society on the cusp of the liberal 18th and conservative 19th centuries and the fate of two people caught in the middle of the change.