Frederick Creighton Wellman (January 3, 1873, near Kansas City, Missouri – September 3, 1960, Chapel Hill, North Carolina) was an American physician specialising in tropical medicine, scientist, author, playwright, teacher, artist and engineer.
[4] He also appears to have studied at the Chicago Theological Seminary for a Bachelor of Divinity degree with a thesis entitled Physical obstacles to evangelization which was completed in 1895.
[5] In 1896 he took up a post in Portuguese West Africa as a medical missionary for a British charity, in the travelling with his first wife, Lydia Jeanette Isely (1869-1948), where he remained for nine years.
[8] As Elsie was a minor, and Wellman had travelled state lines over with her, the Dunns reported him to the police so soon after they got to New York, they fled to London living for a time in Bloomsbury as husband and wife.
This period is recounted in Escapade a memoir Elsie wrote under her pseudonym of Evelyn Scott[9] While in Brazil Wellman completed the manuscript of his novel Blind Mice, which was not published until 1921.
At the shop, helped by his ability to speak Portuguese and his reporting of the manager's embezzlement,[4] he gained promotion to auditor and then to superintendent which meant that the couple to move to Natal, where Creighton “Jigg” Scott was born on October 26, 1914.
[10] The family, now including Elsie's mother, relocated to a sheep ranch located in an isolated rural area where the couple both began to compose poems and prose, for publication at home in the United States.
They abandoned the ranch in 1917 to move to Villa Nova where Wellman had gained a position in a manganese prospecting with the International Ore Corporation and in 1919 they went back to New York to get medical treatment for Elsie.
In 1922, the couple were living in Bermuda and were hosts to the artist Owen Merton who encouraged Wellman to take up watercolors while at the same time carrying on an affair with Evelyn.
In Paris, Wellman studied art and lived as a successful artist, embarking on an affair with a woman known as Madame Elise which ended when his lover suddenly died.
[4] Wellman then returned to America with his son Creighton to legally dissolve their common-law marriage relationship with Evelyn, he achieved this through some form of divorce proceedings in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1928.