Feeds:
Posts
Comments

By Any Other Name…

20/02/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

I’m back in full writing harness after a few days away in the Weald of Kent, visiting the likes of Hever Castle and Chartwell as well as making the obligatory jaunt over to Calais to pick up some cheese and one of those nice French apple tarts (and, yes, possibly the odd bottle of wine or two as well…). It was the first time I’d been to Chartwell, the home of Sir Winston Churchill from 1922 until his death, and although the house itself wasn’t open, a couple of exhibition areas were. One of them included a copy of a memo written by Churchill in 1945, shortly before he left office, in which he embarks upon a gloriously full-blooded Churchillian rant on the subject of foreign place names:

I do not consider that names that have been familiar for generations in England should be altered to study the whims of foreigners living in those parts…Constantinople should never be abandoned, though for stupid people Istanbul may be written in brackets after it. As for Angora, long familiar with us through the Angora Cats, I will resist to the utmost of my power its degradation to Ankara.

With the surrender of Germany still some days away and the war against Japan still in full swing, the Prime Minister warmed to his theme.

You should note, by the way, the bad luck which always pursues peoples who change the name of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the traditions and customs of their past…If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn Livorno, and the BBC will be pronouncing Paris Paree. Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names.

One wonders what Churchill would have made of the recent transformation of Peking into Beijing, Bombay into Mumbai and Calcutta into Kolkata. My attitude to such things is a bit more relaxed than Winston’s (perhaps because when I was only nine my home town changed its name from Llanelly to the Welsh version, Llanelli), but even so, it took me quite some time to realise that Chennai was not some sort of vast Indian version of Milton Keynes that had suddenly sprung up from nowhere but was in fact the city I had always called Madras. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realised just how much this question of ‘political (or historical) correctness’ in the selection of names impinges on my own work. For instance, in the fourth Quinton novel The Lion of Midnight, which I’m writing at the moment, a lot of the action is set in and around the city known to its inhabitants as Göteborg; but Quinton would undoubtedly have called it to Gothenburg, as most Britons still do to this day. (Of course, Churchill was quite prescient about this: the BBC and other media, which take such pains to get the spelling and pronunciation of the ‘new’ PC Asian and African names absolutely spot on, balk at applying the same approach to European names, presumably because they know that their audience would revolt if confronted with the likes of Göteborg and ‘Paree’.) On the other hand, Quinton would undoubtedly have called the Kings of both Sweden and Spain in 1666 ‘King Charles’, but I decided that this might cause confusion with the many references to his own king, Charles II, so the Swedish monarch has been rendered as Karl and the Spanish one as Carlos; but then, what to do about earlier Kings of Spain, as readers accustomed to think of the latter as ‘King Philip’ might be confused by ‘Felipe’?

Ultimately, my solution has been to apply a principle of selective inconsistency – to use the name that I think will be most easily recognisable to the majority of my readers, even if it doesn’t necessarily correspond to either absolutely accurate historical or modern practice. But I have much worse to come later in the year, namely my naval history of Wales, Britannia’s Dragon. Believe me, the minefield that is getting the terminology of the modern Third World correct is as nothing when compared with the dilemmas presented by Welsh placenames. Should it be Swansea or Abertawe (or, in the spirit of Derry/Londonderry, both?). Should the river be spelt Towy – probably still the form most familiar to non-Welsh readers – or Tywi, the correct modern (and ancient) version? Should I place Pontypridd in its current administrative region, the county borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf, or in the historical county of Glamorgan? I have a feeling that the somewhat idiosyncratic solutions I’ll be adopting might enrage a few purists with both Welsh linguistic and English historical sensibilities, and will almost certainly have Winston spinning in his grave, but I guess it’s a risk I’ll have to take!

Posted in Historical sources, Naval history, Welsh history | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

“It’s coming home, it’s coming home…”

13/02/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Last week I was speaking to Dutch TV about a documentary they’re planning on the Anglo-Dutch wars, and during the course of that it emerged that the sternpiece of the Royal Charles, captured at Chatham in 1667 and a prominent exhibit at the Rijksmuseum, will be returning temporarily to the UK for an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. This is fantastic news; I’ve seen the sternpiece in Amsterdam several times (here are a couple my pictures of it, taken in the days when I didn’t have a particularly decent camera!), but to have it back home, even if only briefly, will be quite something. The Royal Charles, launched at Woolwich in 1655 as the Naseby, was the ship which brought Charles II back to England at the Restoration in 1660 and served as flagship during the great engagements of the second Anglo-Dutch war. But in 1667 she suffered an ignominious fate during what some regard as the worst British military humiliation of all time. To quote from my forthcoming essay in volume 8 of the Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society:

At about 10 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday 12 June 1667, a squadron of Dutch warships sailed up Gillingham Reach on the River Medway. Ahead of them lay a large chain, stretched taut across the river, blocking their way to the British warships that lay beyond, off the great naval dockyard at Chatham. Most of the British ships were dismasted and virtually unarmed. Lacking the money to send a proper fleet to sea for that summer’s campaign (and believing in any case that peace was imminent), King Charles II had ordered the ships to be laid up, trusting that the chain and the forts guarding the Medway would be sufficient to protect the navy against just such a Dutch attack. But most of the forts were still incomplete, and the largest and most important of them, that at Sheerness, had already fallen to the Dutch two days earlier. Still, the great chain appeared to be an insuperable obstacle, and so it might have proved but for the audacity of Jan Van Brakel, a Rotterdam captain, who volunteered to lead his ship, the Vrede, in an attack on the barrier. Under heavy fire, he attacked the guardship Unity, which protected the chain, and thanks to a supine defence by her inadequate crew, he took her without a serious fight. This allowed the fireship Pro Patria to sail directly at the chain, which broke on impact (according to the Dutch) or else sank under its own weight (according to the English). Beyond one last and easily negotiated barrier of undermanned guardships lay the most seaward of Charles II’s great ships, the Royal Charles. Only 32 of her 82 guns were still aboard, and she had virtually no crew embarked. The men ordered in haste to tow her to safety up river simply turned and fled when they saw that they were too few, and too weakly armed, to resist the approaching Dutch. A small prize crew quickly took possession of the ship, striking her British colours and replacing them with the tricolour of the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

The Royal Charles was taken back to the Netherlands and laid up at Hellevoitsluis; she had too great a draught to serve in the Dutch navy. In 1673 an operation to rescue her seems to have been contemplated, with the Earl of Ossory appointed to command it, but Charles II allegedly countermanded the order the night before Ossory was due to set out. In any case the Dutch had no further use for their prize and she was broken up that year, only the sternpiece being retained.

The fact that the sternpiece has been treated so reverently in the Netherlands is one of the best proofs of the very different treatments of the Anglo-Dutch wars in Britain and the Netherlands; this turned out to the principal theme of my phone conversation with Suzanne from Dutch TV. It is not difficult to see why. The Dutch effectively won the wars, certainly the second and third if not the first, and their victories are a key part of the mythology of their ‘golden age’, which lasted from roughly until 1580 to 1690. Thus ‘the Battle of Chatham’, as they term it, is their equivalent of Trafalgar, De Ruyter their equivalent of Nelson. As I wrote in my book Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649-89:

In Britain…the Dutch wars are usually regarded as an embarrassing epoch of naval mediocrity, sandwiched between the more memorable (and successful) eras of Drake and Nelson. The names of the Dutch navy’s largest warships are and always have been redolent of the seventeenth century:  De Ruyter, Tromp, De Zeven Provincien. Conversely, the Royal Navy has had no warship named after a battle of the age since the destroyer Solebay was broken up in 1967, none after a seaman since the frigate Russell went to the scrapyard in 1985. There has not even been a HMS Blake since the cruiser of that name was scrapped in 1982, and there has never been a HMS Pepys. The ever diminishing size of the fleet, and rampant ‘political correctness’ in the naming of British warships, means that such illustrious names are unlikely ever to go to sea again under the white ensign. Moreover, the largest surviving relic of a British warship captured by the Dutch, the sternpiece of the Royal Charles, is a prized exhibit at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. What has often been suggested as the largest surviving relic of a Dutch warship captured by the British, supposedly the figurehead of the 50-gun Stavoren, captured in 1672, adorns the side wall of a pub in Suffolk. 

(The pub is the Red Lion at Martlesham. In fact, the figurehead is of early eighteenth century date, though as the pub has existed since Tudor times, it is possible that the current figurehead, below left, replaced that of the Stavoren. There is clearly an English tradition of placing naval relics in pubs: another figurehead, allegedly from the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690, stands outside the Star Inn at Alfriston, Sussex, below right.) 

This question of how different nations always see the past through prisms, exaggerating their triumphs and diminishing their defeats – just as individual human beings do – was thrown into focus recently by the wonderful story that France has plans for a ‘Napoleonland’ theme park. (See M M Bennetts’ hilarious take on it all – blog post of 7 February.) Amidst all the inevitable scoffing from we rosbifs, though, there might be some food for thought. At least Napoleonland will have the good grace to give a prominent profile to both Trafalgar and Waterloo, and the French do have some ‘form’ in being prepared to own up to their own reverses. (Of course, cynics might say that they have plenty to own up to.) It is difficult to imagine an English ‘Hundred Years War’ theme park giving similar prominence to the Battle of Castillon, 1453, a defeat as decisively terminal in that war as Waterloo was for Napoleon. But the French have even created a small museum at Agincourt, or Azincourt to give it its proper name, manned – when I was there last – by a justifiably grumpy and somewhat embarrassed middle-aged Frenchwoman; French magnanimity only went so far, though, as she spoke virtually no English despite the fact that almost all of her visitors had ‘GB’ plates on their cars.
So let’s magnanimously welcome back the Royal Charles sternpiece, at once an embarrassing reminder of a catastrophic British defeat and the finest surviving relic of the Anglo-Dutch wars. I, for one, am delighted that its presence here ought to give a welcome boost to the public profile of the Anglo-Dutch wars, hopefully leading to enhanced public awareness and understanding as a result.

Posted in Naval history | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

The Art of Male Multi-Tasking

06/02/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

It’s a very odd and hectic time at the moment. I’m simultaneously completing the final edits of ‘Quinton 3′, The Blast That Tears The Skies, ahead of its UK publication on 17 April, while also writing number 4, The Lion of Midnight, keeping a weather eye on the US publication of The Mountain of Gold on 17 February, and continuing the research for Britannia’s Dragon. (In fact, when this post goes ‘live’ I hope to be in the new Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum, getting on with work for the latter). Then there’s a book review, a conference paper, two talks, and the imminent arrival of the proofs of my essay in the latest Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society, all to be done within the next few weeks. Fortunately I’ve never found it particularly difficult to juggle a lot of things simultaneously and can work very quickly, but all of the above has caused me to make a few fairly random reflections on my working methods and on the nature of what authors do.

The first lesson- Don’t say ‘yes’ to so many commitments. Something that seemed like a good idea six months ago invariably comes back and bites one on assorted parts of the anatomy. And double-check the deadline: misreading ’2 February’ as ’28 February’ several months ago has caused not a little angst here in the Lair over the last couple of weeks.

The second lesson – Don’t assume a project is completed until the hard copies of it turn up on one’s doorstep. I’d blithely assumed that all of the edits on Blast had been put to bed; the same thing happened on The Mountain of Gold. The consequence of this is…

The third lesson – Always factor in time for the unexpected that’s bound to crop up.  If it doesn’t, great, take a few days off and congratulate yourself on the brilliance of your time management. But if it does…

The fourth lesson – I suppose I’d always assumed that writing was an entirely solitary profession, where one delivered one’s inherently perfect manuscript to a grateful publisher with a heavenly choir singing in the background. Well, it’s true that it’s largely solitary up until the time when the first draft is completed. From then on, though, the author becomes simply part of a team, all of whom are working towards the same goal, the success of the book, and it’s essential to flick an internal switch and go into ‘team player mode’. The critical readers, the agent, the publisher’s editor, the other publisher’s editor…everybody will have their say, and it’s important to react to this input positively. Apparently Patrick O’Brian reacted badly to any criticism whatsoever, so his editor, Richard Ollard, had to handle him with kid gloves; and much as I love O’Brian’s work, one of the biggest influences on my own, it has to be said that some of the books in the series could have done with rather more rigorous editing. In my case, I still remember the horror I felt when the major edits of Gentleman Captain arrived with suggestions to delete whole swathes of treasured text and to add new passages. But that editor’s input was undoubtedly wholly well-founded, and her changes made the book vastly better than it might have been. Which leads into…

The fifth lesson – A book is therefore a product of compromise, but that doesn’t mean surrender (on the basis that ‘these people have been doing this sort of thing much longer than me, they must be right’). With The Mountain of Gold, one of my editors wanted the deletion of three scenes. I was prepared to go to the wall over one of them, and in the end we compromised: I got to keep the scene I was prepared to spill blood for, while the other two went (to be replaced by newly-written scenes that, again, tightened the narrative and thus made it a much better book). So honour was satisfied.

The sixth lesson –  Not even ‘the team’ has a monopoly of wisdom. At dinner last night, a friend who’d read Mountain of Gold said that it would have been really useful to include a map of the River Gambia, and that he’d only realised the ship was sailing east when he read my description of Matthew Quinton watching the sun sinking through the windows of his stern cabin. I suddenly thought: yes, now I come to think about it, I really wish I’d included a map. Other readers have balked at some of the nautical language that I take for granted, although I hope not to quite the same extent as O’Brian did, so there’s a running debate on whether or not to include glossaries in the Quinton books. I’ve resisted thus far, hearing my previous incarnation as a History teacher of 30+ years say countless times ‘If you don’t know what something means, go away and look it up!’. But I can see the counter argument, too, and would welcome readers’ thoughts on whether such an addition would be useful.

Anyway, that’s enough reflection for now. After all, writing a weekly blog is another commitment to add to those I listed at the beginning, and I really must get back to the ‘day job’ proper!

Posted in Naval historical fiction | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

A Broadside More

30/01/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Cheating this week, I’m afraid…a fairly major work crisis, so no time to write a proper blog! But it’s all for a good cause, and there’ll be some exciting news about the ‘Quinton Journals’ coming soon. In the meantime, here’s a little ditty published in 1665. In fact, this serves a double purpose rather neatly – as well as saving me time, it provides a superb insight into the sorts of mentality, language and anti-Dutch xenophobia that form the backdrop to both The Mountain of Gold and The Blast That Tears The Skies. ‘Hogen Mogen’ was an English nickname for the Dutch, derived from the translation of ‘High Mightinesses’, the form of address used for the States-General of the United Provinces. However, it seems that the author had very little idea of what he was writing about. The action he describes bears little resemblance to the Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665, which forms the climax of The Blast That Tears The Skies, and his references to ‘Trump’ clearly refer to Admiral Maarten Tromp, who was killed in 1653 not long after (probably apocryphally) tying a broom to his mast to indicate he had swept the Channel, rather than to his son Cornelis, who was present at Lowestoft. The author is clearly also a rabid Cavalier who praises by name the two royal admirals, the Duke of York and Prince Rupert, but omits any similar mention of the former Parliamentarians, notably the Earl of Sandwich and Sir John Lawson. This tension between the two rival camps, deriving from the bitter legacies of the civil war, is a major plot theme in The Blast…

Posted in Historical sources, Naval history | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Old Order Changeth

23/01/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

I spent last Saturday afternoon at the new Caird Library in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, having been invited to a special ‘bloggers’ preview’ at the end of the library’s first week with a properly restored full service following a very long hiatus. As I’ve been using the ‘old Caird’ for about thirty years, I thought I’d devote this post to a review of the new facility in comparison with the old. Much more information about the library – one of the world’s greatest resources for the study of naval and maritime history – and pictures of the new facility can be found in the Caird’s own blog.

Aesthetically, there’s simply no comparison between old and new. One approached the old Caird by way of a splendid rotunda which contained a bust of Sir James Caird upon a pedestal. One approaches the new by the sort of narrow, functional back stair one would find as the fire escape of a provincial hotel; poor old Sir James is now stuck out of the way on a landing. One entered the old Caird by splendid wooden double doors which opened onto a carpeted aisle with large glass-doored bookcases on either side, leading to a small number of large tables. The new Caird has the look and feel of a small university library, with single rows of double-sided tables down the middle and low bookcases along the sides. The tables of the old library allowed an individual researcher copious amounts of space for handling large manuscripts; the individual spaces in the new one seem to be less generous than many school desks (certainly far less generous than the individual space available at, say, the National Archives and the British Library), and one can easily envisage cases of  ’elbow- room rage’ as researchers working on large items encroach slightly into their neighbour’s precious space.

In a way, though, all of this sums up the crucial difference between the two libraries. The old Caird was clearly designed as, and essentially remained, a reading room for a small elite band of gentlemen-scholars, not too different from the ambience of the West End clubs they frequented. (On one occasion many years ago I was engrossed in study of a particularly interesting manuscript when I became aware of a presence at my shoulder. ‘And what are you studying?’ asked a familiar voice. It was the Duke of Edinburgh.) The old library simply could not accommodate the increasing numbers of people who wished to use it, particularly after the boom in interest in genealogy. Above all, its lack of storage space meant that large amounts of material had to be outhoused, leading to all sorts of delays and angst. (I remember several occasions when American or other foreign researchers turned up at the issue desk claiming that they only had one day available for study in Greenwich, only to be told that it would take forty-eight hours for the document they dearly wished to see to arrive from storage.) The new Caird is divided into two parts, one area for those who wish to chat as they attempt to unearth Great Uncle Harry’s maritime career and one for individual researchers who wish to work quietly, albeit in uncomfortably close proximity to others. Its substantial on-site storage facilities, which we were taken to see and which are truly impressive, mean that many more documents will reach readers much more quickly – 40 minutes is the target time – and will hopefully lead to fewer tearful scenes of woe. Compared with the ancient, rickety self-service photocopier in the old Caird, the new reprographic facilities are state-of-the-art (notably an impressive book scanner), while both the excellent new online catalogue and the ability to take one’s own digital photographs would have saved me literally weeks, if not months, of work in the past.

Finally, the new Caird has two distinct advantages over its predecessor. Firstly, it has a splendid view over Greenwich Park; secondly, it ought to be quieter than the old, which in latter years was sandwiched between the entrance used by noisy school parties on the one side and the museum’s main public space, Neptune Court, on the other.

So all in all, I’ll always look back fondly on the old Caird but I look forward to working in the new one, a far more appropriate working environment for the twenty-first century. Indeed, I shall have to spend quite a bit of time there in the coming months as I complete the research for Britannia’s Dragon. But a plea and a warning…the reading room would look far better if its bare antiseptic walls were broken up by a few pictures from the museum’s vast collection – and beware of my elbows!

Posted in Historical research, Naval history | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Vanished Empires

16/01/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

‘The Journals of Matthew Quinton’ are set principally during what are known as ‘the Anglo-Dutch wars’, but like most generalisations used to describe historical periods, that label actually conceals a much more complex picture. For one thing, the wars were not exclusively Anglo-Dutch: the second, from 1665 to 1667, also involved France, Denmark-Norway and even the Prince-Bishop of Munster, while the third, from 1672-4, was part of a much larger conflict that the Dutch regard as effectively their second war of independence, fought overwhelmingly against the French.

The same is true of the colonial conflicts that form the backdrop of The Mountain of Gold, the second book in the series. Anglocentric sources have sometimes seen the colonial conflicts of the early 1660s as being primarily between the English and the Dutch, especially in West Africa, but in reality many European powers, including some pretty unlikely ones, were scrabbling desperately to get their hands on slices of colonial action. Much of the action of The Mountain of Gold is set on the River Gambia, but there are allusions to the larger expedition undertaken by Major (later Sir) Robert Holmes in 1663-4 against the Dutch forts on Cape Coast and the Gold Coast. But several of these had only very recently become Dutch; until 1663 several of them had been Swedish and bore Swedish names like Carolusborg. There were a number of Danish outposts, too, and the French had already established Fort St Louis, later Dakar, which features in The Mountain of Gold. Perhaps most bizarrely, the Duchy of Courland – which occupies part of the land area of modern Latvia – held St Andrew’s Island in the Gambia River, although this was sold to the Dutch shortly before the Holmes expedition arrived and conquered it, turning it into James Fort (which later became an important centre of the slave trade). Having made a few slight tweaks to the chronology, I’ve used the Courland element in the book; indeed, the climactic battle takes place on St Andrew’s Island. But this was not the sole extent of Courland’s imperial ambitions: Duke Jakob, a godson of King James VI & I, also acquired the island of Tobago, although this was abandoned to the Dutch in 1666.

Of course the larger nations had also established themselves in north America, not always successfully. New Sweden, established in 1638, was a quite extensive colony along the River Delaware, including parts of the modern states of Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But during the Northern War of the 1650s, the Dutch moved against this colony and overran it in 1655. Their triumph was brief: in 1664 ‘New Netherland’ was conquered in turn by the British, and part of the former Swedish colony was sold to Sir George Carteret, a colleague of Pepys on the Navy Board (and who appears as a minor character in The Mountain of Gold), who named his territory after the Channel Island which he called home, thus establishing New Jersey. Meanwhile Colonel Richard Nicholls had led an expedition to annex the small Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, which was duly renamed New York after Nicholls’ patron, the Lord High Admiral and brother of King Charles II. The Nicholls expedition is recreated in Broadside, an excellent but regrettably little seen documentary in which I participated.

By coincidence, the two effective ‘creators’ of New Jersey and New York both lie buried about five miles apart, just a short distance from where I live in Bedfordshire. Carteret lies in a fairly bland family vault at Haynes church (right), but Nicholls’ memorial (below), in St Andrew’s Church, Ampthill, is spectacular. A florid Latin inscription describing how he removed the Dutch from New York (‘belgis expulsit’) is surmounted by the Union flag and the stars and stripes flanking the actual cannonball that killed him while he was attending upon the Duke of York during the first naval battle of the misnamed third Anglo-Dutch war, the battle of Solebay on 28 May 1672. My geographical proximity to these two memorials to the colonial conflicts of the 1660s was one of the factors that inspired the plot of The Mountain of Gold.

Posted in Imperial history, Naval historical fiction, Naval history | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Of Mountains and Gold

09/01/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

The second Quinton novel, The Mountain of Gold, comes out in hardback in North America on 31 January and in paperback in the UK on 13 March, and in the buildup to both launches I’ll be blogging about some of the background to the book. I’ll also be blogging about the story behind the third book in the series, The Blast That Tears The Skies, which comes out in trade paperback format in the UK on the same day, 13 March.

Two very real aspects of history underpin the plot. The first is the deterioration of relations between Charles II’s British kingdoms and the United Provinces of the Netherlands which would culminate in the outbreak of the second Anglo-Dutch war (1665-7). The conclusion of the first war in 1654 had left many loose ends: the Dutch objected to the English Navigation Act, which banned them from the carrying trade with England’s colonies, and the English were suspicious of Dutch encroachments in America and Africa which seemed to threaten their own expansionist ambitions. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, a new set of imperatives came into play. Many in the court and in Parliament detested the Dutch state’s republican government and its brand of tolerant Calvinism, young Cavaliers were eager for an opportunity to prove themselves in battle, while influential veterans of the Commonwealth’s war against the Dutch, notably George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, were keen to resume what they regarded as the unfinished business of the earlier conflict. The diary of Samuel Pepys, who enters the series as a character in this novel, provides an excellent insight into the attitudes of the time, and the gradual slide into war. In February 1664, for example – during the time period covered by The Mountain of Gold - the merchant Captain Cocke held forth to Pepys in a coffee house: ‘the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must down’.

Set alongside this escalating tension and inexorable drift toward war, in the novel’s plot as in the history of the time, is the legend of ‘the mountain of gold’. Of course, there was nothing new in wild stories of fabulous golden cities and the like, the riches of which would at once solve any nation’s financial problems: witness Sir Walter Raleigh’s search for El Dorado earlier in the century, and the persistence of such myths would later underpin such stories as King Solomon’s Mines. The story goes back to 1648, when part of Parliament’s navy defected to the royalists. In 1651 this force, by now much reduced, was operating on the coast of West Africa, and its commander, Prince Rupert of the Rhine (formerly a dashing cavalry general in the British civil war), heard rumours of the existence of a golden mountain, far up the Gambia river. Rupert proceeded some way upstream with a force that included Robert Holmes, the future admiral, knight and foe of Pepys, who was granted his first command during this expedition and who appears as a major character in The Mountain of Gold. After the Restoration, Rupert persuaded the king to back two expeditions to West Africa. These were both commanded by Holmes and were nominally under the auspices of the newly formed Company of Royal Adventurers, later renamed the Royal African Company, which played a controversial part in the history of slavery. The first expedition, in 1661, was aimed at the Gambia and was explicitly an attempt to find the ‘mountain of gold’; the second, in 1663-4, was a much more ambitious attempt to drive the Dutch from the Guinea coast.

In The Mountain of Gold, Captain Matthew Quinton finds himself thrust into the heart of both the drift to war and the quest for the legendary treasure. While cruising in the Mediterranean he captures a man who appears to be a Barbary corsair captain. In fact this proves to be an Irish renegade, Brian Doyle O’Dwyer, who convinces King Charles II that he – and only he – knows the true location of the fabled golden mountain. Despite his reluctance, scepticism and desire to prevent his brother’s marriage to a suspected murderer, Matthew is given command of an expedition to find the mountain. Combining actual elements of both the Holmes expeditions, the novel sees Matthew and his crew travel up the Gambia river, contending as they do so with the wiles of the enigmatic Irishman, attempts to sabotage their ship, murderous natives and wildlife, and above all the machinations of a mysterious and powerful new enemy.

The US hardcover edition of The Mountain of Gold can be pre-ordered here, the UK paperback edition here – and of course from good independent bookshops too!

Posted in Naval historical fiction, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Happy New History?

02/01/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

First, a very Happy New Year to all! The next few months will be particularly exciting, with The Mountain of Gold being published in North America on 31 January followed by The Blast That Tears The Skies in the UK on 13 March (also the publication date of the UK trade paperback of Mountain of Gold). Meanwhile I’ll be hard at work writing ‘Quinton 4′, The Lion of Midnight, and continuing the research for Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. I’ll be using this blog to build up to the two publication dates by providing some new insights into the plots and historical contexts of both books, and there’ll also be some exciting news about the first Quinton ‘prequel’, Ensign Royal. Watch this space, and my Twitter and Facebook accounts, for further information!

Meanwhile, I’ve recently been reading two particularly thought-provoking books, Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England and Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms: A History of Half-Forgotten Europe. Both have really struck chords with me, and in my opinion, they express truths that really should be taken into account during the current (and rather fractious) debate over the place of History in the English National Curriculum. Essentially, Mortimer’s thesis is that historians are limited and often deceived by their concentration on the extant sources; that they have become obsessed with the analysis of those sources, rather than with the greater truths that lie beyond them; and that ‘primary sources’ are often just as distorted and partial as secondary ones. (I know one historian, a leading authority in his field despite having no formal training, who simply refuses to read secondary sources, stubbornly insisting on working solely from the original manuscripts alone – thereby missing all the insights and broader contexts that can be gleaned from wide reading and also entirely disregarding the vital point made by Mortimer and others that primary sources themselves mark the end of a process, i.e. they are often a reporting of an event that has taken place and are thus immediately subject to selective memory, skewed perspectives, omission, etc.)

As Mortimer writes in The Time Traveller’s Guide,

Academic historians cannot discuss the past itself; they can only discuss evidence and   the questions arising from that evidence…If Medieval England is treated as dead and buried, what one can say about it is strictly limited by the questions arising from the evidence. However, if treated as a living place, the only limits are the experience of the author and his perception of the requirements, interests and curiosity of his readers.

I’m definitely with Mortimer on this. In fact, being able to recreate a living, vibrant past is one of the liberating things about writing historical fiction after spending so many years within the constraints of academic history; it was also something I tried to do in my most recent non-fiction book, Blood of Kings: The Stuarts, The Ruthvens and The Gowrie Conspiracy, where I took a ‘virtual history’ line which argued that the threat to the life of King James Stuart at Gowrie House, Perth, on 5 August 1600, and the potential consequences of his death on that day, were far more important to British history than those of the over-hyped ‘Gunpowder Plot’ five years later.

Norman Davies, meanwhile, makes a similar and equally important point in Vanished Kingdoms, where he also argues that despite the platitudes trotted out in schools and the press, many of the books on which historians depend are often less reliable than the information available on the Internet, including the much-derided Wikipedia.

Historians and their publishers spend inordinate time and energy retailing the history of everything that they take to be powerful, prominent and impressive…Historians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist…Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards….Our mental maps are thus invariably deformed. Our brains can only form a picture from the data that circulates at any given time; and the available data is created by present-day powers, by prevailing fashions and by accepted wisdom. If we continue to neglect other areas of the past, the blank spaces in our minds are reinforced, and we pile more and more knowledge into those compartments of which we are already aware. Partial knowledge becomes ever more partial, and ignorance becomes self-perpetuating.

Essentially, both writers are making the point that our view of the past is badly skewed by artificial boundaries of our own creation, and these desperately limited mindsets are all too apparent in the debate over History in schools. During my many years as a teacher, I taught hundreds of young people to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of primary and secondary sources as this was the principal hoop through which they had to jump to achieve success at GCSE, the most utterly pointless set of examinations imposed on young people by any advanced society; yet all the while, I knew deep down that most of the ‘rules’ which students were expected to master ‘because that’s how historians work’ were either grossly over-simplified or just downright wrong. (My feelings upon the subject might have revealed themselves when I devised and taught the mnemonic BADCRAP as a way of remembering the principles of source analysis; ‘B’ stood for ‘bias’, but I forget what the other letters represented. Perhaps surprisingly, I received no complaints from students or parents with delicate sensibilities during the many years in which I used this system – but then, the exam results that BADCRAP consistently obtained probably insulated me against criticism!)

But those who advocate less emphasis on such a skills-based approach to History are in danger of falling into the trap identified by Norman Davies. Why study an overwhelming diet of British history, when the days of ‘Britain’ as we know it might be numbered if the Scots decide in favour of independence? Why the ongoing obsession with the Tudors and the Nazis, when the seventeenth century (OK, I declare an interest) and Chinese history are arguably more interesting and more ‘relevant’, that dreadful killer word which dominates the entire debate about young people’s interest, or lack of it, in History? So it seems to me that both sides of the debate on school History are trapped within indefensible ideological straitjackets – the one advocating a set of ‘skills’ which perpetuate the delusion that historians exist primarily to analyse sources, rather than to recreate a vision of the past as a living, vital place, the other advocating narratives based on the unthinking assumptions that certain countries, individuals and time periods are innately more important and worth studying than others. Come to think of it, BADCRAP seems like a pretty apposite description of the entire state of the debate.

 

Posted in Historical research, Historical sources | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments »

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 3: Or, Getting It Wrong and Getting It Right

19/12/2011 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

My original intention for this week was to do a ‘straight’ factual outline of the careers of the three most famous ‘tarpaulin’ officers of the Restoration period, the closely inter-connected Sir Christopher Myngs, Sir John Narbrough and Sir Cloudesley Shovell. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that there was a more important theme which their careers revealed. And for once, Wikipedia provides perfectly adequate outlines of their lives, which makes any repetition here superfluous: Myngs, the Commonwealth sea-captain who became an almost legendary ‘quasi-pirate’ in the Caribbean before becoming a knight and a flag officer, dying heroically during the Four Days Battle of 1666 (which will be the subject of the fifth Quinton novel); his protege Narbrough, who commanded a Mediterranean fleet against the Barbary corsairs in the 1670s before dying on a wild goose chase after a fabulous sunken Spanish treasure; Shovell, the protege of both, who became one of the most successful admirals of the long war with France after 1689 before perishing in one of history’s worst and most significant shipwrecks, the loss of the Association in 1707, which triggered the concerted campaign to discover a way of accurately determining a ship’s longitude. 

Writing twenty years ago in my first book, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy, from which this blog takes its title, I unconsciously perpetuated a myth about these three men. Pepys recorded how Myngs boasted of his father being a shoemaker and his mother a hoyman’s daughter, and at the time I accepted this at face value, noting how Shovell had started out as a captain’s servant – effectively the ‘cabin boy’ of popular fiction and pantomime – to Narbrough, just as Narbrough started in the same way under Myngs.

It was only after writing G&T that I got to know north Norfolk really well, spending a fair amount of time in the once-wealthy ports (albeit decayed even by the 17th century) along the coast: Burnham Overy, where Nelson later learned to sail, Wells, Morston (where I’ve done some of my own sailing), Blakeney, Wiveton, Cley, over to Salthouse and Cromer.  Fieldwork in these places revealed a very different story to that painted by Myngs, Pepys – and myself. Myngs, it transpired, was indeed the son of a shoemaker, but a well-to-do one who was based in the city of London, not the backwoods of Norfolk. His mother was the daughter of a well-off landowner who owned several ships based at Salthouse; she was thus only a ‘hoyman’s daughter’ in the sense that her father owned hoys. Christopher Myngs himself inherited a substantial house in Salthouse which still stands. Narbrough was from the tiny, decayed village of Cockthorpe just down the coast from Salthouse; he was probably related to Myngs as another Narbrough lived at Wiveton, even closer to Salthouse.  This Narbrough was married at Salthouse’s glorious church, where 17th century graffito sailing ships can still be seen, carved into the pews, and where the gravestone of Myngs’ daughter Mary is still extant. Shovell, in turn, was also baptised at Cockthorpe, but his father was from a well-off Norwich family and his mother came from the Cley merchant community. Shovell did indeed go into sea under Narbrough, just as Narbrough went to sea under Myngs, but in many respects this was as clear-cut a case of patronage among the well-to-do as the promotion of many of Charles II’s ‘gentleman captains’.

Therefore, it’s clear that tarpaulins like Myngs (and Sir Richard Munden, the subject of last week’s post) emphasised or exaggerated their humble origins, perhaps partly in order to make themselves more appealing to the wider public and to build personal legends around themselves. With the courtly connections and genteel mannerisms of the ‘gentleman captains’ under attack in Parliament and pamphlet literature from the 1660s through to the 1700s, stressing one’s humble background and unpretentious ways became an important means of giving oneself a distinct and populist character. For example, Sir William Booth, who became a friend of and source of naval information for Pepys in the 1680s, claimed that he spent three years sleeping on deck ‘with nothing over him but a tarpaulin, that his seamen might be the better contented to do as he did’ – an implausible claim (and Booth’s whole career reveals a man prone to exaggeration), but one that was clearly intended to impress Pepys, who was known to be sympathetic to the tarpaulins and antipathetic to Booth’s factional rival, the notoriously immoral gentleman captain Arthur Herbert, the future Earl of Torrington.

Thus the tarpaulins were aware of ‘spin’ and ‘image management’ long before modern marketing coined those terms. In fact, many ‘tarpaulin’ officers, like Myngs and Shovell, came from backgrounds that were arguably as respectable as those of many ‘gentlemen’; as I argued in Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, the key difference between the two groups was not social origins but career pattern. This is particularly apparent when one visits an area like north Norfolk, comparatively isolated from the rest of the country, dominated by a few great houses (Felbrigg, Blickling, Raynham), but otherwise characterised by tightly-knit, interrelated and intermarried mercantile communities in which lesser gentry could be found alongside families of humbler status. These tight networks immediately become apparent when one visits the graveyards of, and studies the monuments within, the superb churches that line the north Norfolk coast.

I suppose the moral of this story for historians and novelists alike is simple – nothing beats actual research ‘on the ground’. It’s possible to glean only so much from ‘mainstream’ books or manuscript sources. A sentence on a monument high on a church wall, or a paragraph in an otherwise dubious local history written a century ago by an enthusiastic amateur, or simply looking out over a landscape and suddenly realising the possible connections between person A in village X with family B over in village Y: all of these things can provide insights that one would never have obtained elsewhere, as well as providing real local colour and depth of description in both fiction and non-fiction. Plus of course this sort of fieldwork has the added advantage of justifying holidays in some lovely parts of the world!!

Finally, a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my readers. This blog will return on 3 January 2012.

Posted in Historical research, Historical sources, Naval history | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 2

12/12/2011 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

This week, a couple more ‘tarpaulin’ officers whose lives provided inspiration for the character of Kit Farrell in ‘the journals of Matthew Quinton’. I’ll conclude the series next week with a look at probably the most famous tarpaulins of the age – the closely interconnected Norfolk admirals Christopher Myngs, John Narbrough and Cloudesley Shovell.

The Munden brothers – The careers of Sir Richard and Sir John Munden were particularly remarkable in two respects. First, they were particularly low-born, even for ‘tarpaulin’ officers; their father was the ferryman at Chelsea, although this was actually quite a lucrative employment, given the absence of bridges on that stretch of the Thames. Secondly, they rose to prominence at a time when opportunities for promotion for their kind were becoming ever more limited because of the increasing dominance of the ‘gentlemen captains’. That they were able to achieve what they did can only be a tribute to their own abilities.

Richard was born in about 1640, which would effectively make him an exact contemporary of both Kit Farrell and Matthew Quinton. He served in merchant ships prior to the second Anglo-Dutch war, entering the navy in 1666 as captain of the Swallow Ketch. He commanded a sloop in 1668 and then became master attendant at Deptford dockyard before commanding the Fourth Rate Princess in 1672. In the following year he took command of the Assistance, tasked with escorting outward bound East Indiamen as far as St Helena. Unknown to Munden, the Dutch had captured the island before he got there. He immediately launched an attack, and in addition to recapturing the island he snapped up three homeward-bound Dutch East Indiamen. His success led to a knighthood  and later to another plum command, the large Fourth Rate St David, employed on convoy work in the Mediterranean. Munden died shortly after the ship returned to England in 1680. He was buried in Bromley church, where his monument states ‘having been (what upon public duty, and what upon merchants’ accounts) successfully engaged in fourteen sea-fights … he died in the prime of his youth and strength, in the 40th year of his age’. The post-mortem inventory of his house in Bromley (where there is still a block of flats called ‘Munden House’) revealed an estate worth almost £6000, including shares in four merchant ships, chairs and carpets from Turkey, other materials from India, and a ‘Japan cabinet’. Munden left five daughters and a son, Richard, who later became a general in the army.

Richard’s prominence in the 1670s meant that he was able to promote the career of his younger brother John, who had been born in about 1645 but whose first thirty years of life are shrouded in obscurity. From 1677-80, though, John was his brother’s lieutenant in the St David, subsequently gaining several more lieutenancies before obtaining the command of a fireship in 1688. In 1689 he became flag captain to Lord Berkeley, Rear-Admiral of the Red squadron, and held the same post under Berkeley’s successor Sir Ralph Delaval aboard the Coronation, in which he fought at the disastrous Battle of Beachy Head (1690). From 1691 to 1693 he commanded the Lenox (the subject of Restoration Warship, a superb book by my good friend Richard Endsor, the cover artist of Gentleman Captain), fighting in her at the Battle of Barfleur in May 1692. He commanded various large ships in the latter stages of the Nine Years War and was promoted Rear-Admiral in 1701, when William III knighted him.

In January 1702 Munden took command of a squadron tasked with intercepting a powerful French force expected to sail from Rochelle to Corunna, then on to the West Indies. He cruised off Corunna but the French evaded him during the night and got safely into port. He considered the harbour too well defended and narrow to contemplate an attack. He was court-martialled for negligence on 13 July but acquitted, and returned to his command. However, public opinion had been highly critical of him for not pursuing the French into Corunna harbour, and the privy council was dissatisfied with his acquittal. Queen Anne and her ministers yielded to the public pressure and dismissed him. This is an excellent example of how public opinion had become an important factor in naval policy by about 1700; it had certainly not been so to the same degree in Charles II’s reign, and its increasing importance during the eighteenth century would ultimately lead to such dramas as the execution of Admiral Byng and the Keppel-Palliser court-martial in 1778. Meanwhile Sir John Munden retired to Chelsea, where he was described in his old age as ‘a very plain man in his conversation and dress, of a fair complexion’. He died on 13 March 1719.

Posted in Naval history | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Older Posts »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 271 other followers