NEVIS AS A WEST INDIAN HEALTH RESORT. 
By N. Darneti Davis, C.M.G. 
Famed as the birth place of Alexander Hamilton, the master builder of the 
Constitution of the United States ; statesman, soldier, lawyer and publicist ; 
the island of. Nevis is also identified with the glorious name of Nelson, from 
the fact of that hero’s murriage there with the widow Nisbet, the bride being 
given away by Prince William Henry, afterwards King William the Fourth. 
It was when in command of the Boreas, on the Leeward Islands’ station, that 
Nelson displayed such zeal in enforcing the Navigation Laws against American 
vessels, that he made himself very unpopular with the colonists, whose com- 
merce was affected by his patriotic action and his deep sense of duty. On one 
occasion he was arrested at Nevis by the islands’ Provost Marshal, and was 
required to give bonds for £10,000 for his release. Then it was that he foretold 
that he should one day have a Gazette all to himself. 
Honour has been done to Nevis by the American author, Gertrude Atherton, 
who, in The Conqueror ; the subject of which is the career of the brilliant 
Alexander Hamilton; and, in The Gorgeous Isle, which describes Nevis in its 
palmy days, has given pictures of West Indian lifein the times when the 
Colonies of the American Mediterranean, as the late Professor Angelo Heilprin 
called the Caribbean Sea, were a source of wealth to the parent State. 
As The Gorgeous Isle is being dramatised by its author, the former glories of 
the West Indies will ere long be revived on the London stage—for Nevis was 
for some years the seat of the Government of the Leeward Islands, where 
lived the Governor-in-Chief, and where gathered many of the planter 
families of the Leeward group. 
One attraction Nevis had for its neighbours in its healing waters, which 
have long been known to fame, though for many years they have been little 
used, 
The first English writer who bore testimony to the virtues of the waters of 
Nevis was an ancestor of the present Secretary of State for the Colonies. Later 
on, Captain John Smith, renowned in Virginian history, wrote of their healing 
properties. Both the forementioned authorities are quoted by Sir Hans Sloane, 
who himself visited the island in 1687, when on his way to Jamaica, as the 
personal physician of the second Duke of Albemarle, then going as Governor to 
the latter island. The following extracts from Harcourt, John Smith, and Davies 
of Kidwelly will suffice to illustrate how much the springs were appreciated in 
the seventeenth century. 
The first English account of the healing nature of the waters of Nevis is to be 
found in A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana, published in London in 1613, and 
written by Robert Harcourt, of Stanton Harcourt, who, according to Anthony 
& Wood, had a “ geny inclining him to see and search out hidden regions. ” 
Harcourt was a warm admirer and supporter of Sir Walter Ralgeh in the 
