Simon Taylor (sugar planter)

Patrick married Martha, the daughter of a successful white Jamaican sugar merchant, George Hanbury Taylor and Mary of Caymanas, Jamaica.

In 1771, he bought another sugar estate in St. Thomas, called Holland, containing 430 acres (170 ha) of sugarcane, and including 400 enslaved Africans.

Taylor chose to live on the outskirts the capital Kingston, and bought a property named Prospect Pen, which he made his home.

[11] In the late 1790s was the first known time that Taylor thought of leaving Jamaica for the United States with his slaves, and later mentioned that he should move to the banks of the Mississippi, following the Louisiana Purchase.

[12] Taylor campaigned in favour of retaining the Atlantic slave trade, and he was bitterly disappointed when the British government voted to abolish it in 1807.

[11] Grace was also a "doctress", who used the hygiene and traditional herbal remedies employed by obeah women, to nurse Taylor back to health when he became ill with a fever.

Grace was a contemporary of a successful group of Jamaican doctresses, such as Cubah Cornwallis, Sarah Adams, and Mrs Grant, the mother of Mary Seacole.

In addition, Jamaican law at the time forbade planters from passing on significant amounts of property to their "mulatto" offspring.

[20] The elder Simon would in later years complain about the extravagance of his nephew and namesake in Britain, but he was reluctant to encourage him to return to Jamaica, after the death of John.

[20] Maria, Lady Nugent, the governor's wife, wrote that Taylor had mulatto mixed-race children with slave women on every one of his estates.

[21] Taylor made a trip to Port Royal, dogged by serious illness, by then determined to return to Britain to die there surrounded by his nephew and nieces.