J D Davies

I recently watched The Dig, the Netflix film about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial. This has garnered plenty of rave reviews from professional critics and on social media, and I’ve got nothing really to add to the comments others have already made. The acting is first rate; top marks to Ralph Fiennes for nailing the very specific rural Suffolk accent (something which I researched for the Stannard novels) rather than relying on the generic Zummercornorfolk essayed by so many actors who murder English regional accents, but Carey Mulligan is affecting as the terminally ill widow who owns the land where the dig takes place and there’s also a decent turn from Lily James, whose contract must stipulate that she has to appear in every British drama series or film set between 1900 and 1950. Now, we all know that archaeology can be wildly popular (Time Team. That is all.) We also know that it can be sexy, thanks to Tutankhamun and Indiana Jones, although the latter bears as much resemblance to real archaeology as the aforesaid Lily James does to a panda. This, by contrast, is something that The Dig does brilliantly. I took part in a few digs when I was aged around seventeen to nineteen, and the one I remember most vividly involved spending most of one week sitting in a caravan, reading or playing cards, while it poured with rain outside (this, inevitably, was in west Wales in summer) with the only excitement coming when the professionals discovered a small piece of charred wood. Real archaeology is messy, involves a great deal of dodging the weather – in Britain, at any rate – and is often both tedious and frustrating. The Dig conveys these elements well, and also confronts the tensions which can sometimes exist when professionals interact with amateurs, be it in archaeology or, dare one say it, maritime history; the film keeps the snobbish condescension of the former for the latter just the right side of the line, although this element of the story was greatly exaggerated to provide the essential dramatic element of conflict. (In fact the ‘amateur’ Basil Brown, played by Fiennes, became a great friend of the ‘professional’ Charles Phillips.)

As Rick Spilman points out in his own blog, though, at the heart of The Dig is the story of a ship, the likely burial place of the shadowy King Raedwald. True, the hull had been gone for many centuries before Basil Brown stuck his shovel into the earth for the first time, leaving only its ghostly impression behind, but even so, it is the ship, and the astonishing royal helmet found within it, that constitutes the iconic image of Sutton Hoo. This is the inspiration behind the current project to build a replica of the ninety-feet-long vessel, one of the best proofs both that the Vikings, whose heyday was several centuries later, did not have a monopoly on such craft, and that applying the name ‘the Dark Ages’ to the centuries after the fall of Rome is a bit like…well, yes, casting Lily James as a panda. I’ll look forward to seeing the reborn Sutton Hoo ship take to the water!

One final thought on archaeological matters. Back in the olden times when it was possible to do such things, I often attended meetings in the Mortimer Wheeler Room of the Society of Antiquaries in central London. Now he would be a terrific subject for a film or TV series – important digs in many exotic parts of the world, a career as a TV personality, active (and dramatic) service in both world wars, plus a love life that can best be described as ‘colourful’. Interested film producers should form an orderly queue to the left.

Finally, good news for fans of the Quinton Journals – the first draft of the new book in the series is finished! It’s now with Beta Reader One, and I hope to provide more details (including the title reveal) in this blog soon. I’m also giving a talk, inevitably via Zoom, at the event on 6 March to raise awareness of another remarkably important historic ship, the wreck of the London which blew up in 1665. The equivalent event last year, just a couple of weeks before the first UK lockdown began, was the last time I gave a talk to an actual ‘live’ audience…Zoom talks don’t quite cut the mustard in the same way, because with no audience reaction or feedback, it feels rather like talking to oneself! Seriously, though, there’s a terrific cast of speakers covering a fascinating range of topics. Registration details, and plenty of other information about the ship and the finds discovered in it, can be found here.

Time to belatedly post my first blog of 2021. Once again I’m going to avoid all reference to The Thing and will instead provide some blatant escapism, which I think is what we all need. (Think of this blog as the Bridgerton of naval history, if you like.) I can’t quite believe that it’s coming up to the tenth anniversary of the trip I made to Sweden in February 2011 to do research for the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight, but that seems to be a perfectly valid excuse to post some of the photos I took on that trip. I divided it between Kalmar and Gothenburg, arriving at the former’s tiny airport in a turboprop aircraft during a snowstorm – which has to be right up there on the Scariest Experience of Life To Date chart. Why Kalmar? Well, whenever people think of Sweden and 17th century naval history they tend to think of the Vasa, the astonishing flagship of King Gustavus II Adolphus, which is on display in Stockholm. But I knew that Kalmar’s museum contained many relics from the wreck of the huge Kronan, blown up in battle with the Danes in 1676, and having been to the Vasa a couple of times I decided it was high time that I ticked the Kronan off my bucket list. So here, without further ado, are some of the photos I took back then (with a few bonus ones of Kalmar’s stunning castle).

Season’s greetings from the Dante-esque dystopia that is England’s new Covid Tier 4 (twinned with Purgatory and Niflheim; other afterlives are available), and yes, it’s time for my inevitable Review of the Year. So here it is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enough of all that 24/7 excitement and non-stop global travel, so let’s not talk any more about The Thing That Happened in The Year That Shall Not Be Mentioned Ever Again. For me, the writing highlight of 2020 was undoubtedly the publication of Armada’s Wake, the third book of the ‘Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal’ trilogy, which I blogged about here. In many ways I was sad to say goodbye to Jack and the rest of the Stannard family, to the period and to Dunwich, the principal terrestrial setting for the trilogy. Having said that, Dunwich was one of my favourite places long before I ever conceived of these stories, and when the travel rules for the first national lockdown in England were relaxed, it was the first place we went to – partly because although it’s a two hour drive, it’s pretty much the nearest sea to where we live! I’d always conceived the Stannard trilogy as a standalone set of stories which wouldn’t permit of sequels and the like, but who knows what the future will bring? I’ve been working on a number of proposals for new fiction ideas with the idea of sending them to my agent and publisher in the new year, so we’ll see if anything emerges. I decided to take a bit of a break after completing Armada’s Wake, having had at least one and sometimes two book deadlines a year for the last twelve years. ‘Taking a bit of a break’ entailed writing another book, albeit with no contract and no deadline, the title in question being the next story in the ‘journals of Matthew Quinton’. This is currently about three-quarters of the way to completion and is proving to be good fun to write, so I expect to finish it by the end of January if all goes to plan. I’m also still working on my long-gestating book about the Stepney baronets, but can’t complete it until travel restrictions ease and various institutions reopen.

Otherwise, the various talks and conferences I was meant to be attending went by the wayside, although I’m now into a sequence of giving some Zoom talks, which in some ways are preferable to the usual format – above all, the opportunity for people to ‘attend’ from distant locations, including other countries, is surely something that we should all endeavour to maintain as and when circumstances become somewhat more normal again. I’m also contributing essays to a couple of forthcoming books, and hope to be able to announce more about these projects in the new year.

The other major development in my life was my election as chairman of the Society for Nautical Research, which I blogged about here. Some, if not all, of my predecessors probably took office in somewhat more propitious circumstances, and there have been a number of challenges to overcome. But at the moment the society remains very much on an even keel, and that’s due to the hard work and commitment of my colleagues among the officers and on the Council of the society. The highlight of the year for all of us was the recent launch of the society’s podcast, which goes from strength to strength and already boasts an impressive catalogue of topics.

Finally, then, I wish you as merry a Christmas as official government regulations will permit to one and all, and let’s all hope that 2021 brings better times. Until then, I hope you and your families stay safe and well.

Libraries closed…repositories inaccessible…research trips impossible. OK, let’s keep things in perspective – none of this is remotely as important as people’s lives and wellbeing. But there’s no doubt that the pandemic has played havoc with historians’ and authors’ work, and I really feel for those with deadlines for theses or books and no way of completing essential research. Personally, these strictures haven’t affected me too much as I’m not working on a major non-fiction project with a deadline; my book on the Stepney family, referred to previously in this blog, has been a work in progress for some 20 years so a few more months won’t make too much difference. Instead, I’ve been writing the next Quinton novel, ‘the one with pirates in it’, so the research hurdles have been rather lower. (Having said that, it would have been really nice to do a research trip to the Caribbean and claim it against tax. Thanks, Covid.) Many institutions have gone out of their way to help researchers as much as they can, so, for example, it’s been possible to access the indispensable British History Online for free during the last few months, and I’ve also picked up a lot of invaluable material from the British Library website.

Ultimately, though, I’ve had to depend even more than usual on the resources immediately available on my shelves at home, and fortunately several books have come out over the last year or so which have been absolutely ideal for my purposes. For example, the seaborne action in the new book is set aboard Matthew Quinton’s latest command, a Fourth Rate frigate, so what could be more fortuitous than the appearance of a book that provides chapter and verse on a Fourth frigate of the exact period I’m writing about? The Master Shipwright’s Secrets, the latest title from my old friend Richard Endsor, is a remarkable piece of work, based on the discovery of the mathematical plans used in the construction of the Tyger. The book covers all aspects of the building and fitting out of the ship, with no detail being too small. It’s incredibly well illustrated, combining original artwork from the time with the author’s own work. Some of this will be familiar to long-term readers of this blog (have you got parole yet?), including a full-page colour spread of the painting Richard provided for the cover of the first edition of my first novel, Gentleman Captain – the ship that forms the centrepiece was based on the Tyger, the subject of this new book. Richard also covers the service history of the ship. It’s no wonder that the book has garnered some terrific reviews – indeed, it even appears on Youtube! So whenever I need to visualise what a particular shipboard scene would have been like, I only need to get this book of the shelf.

As mentioned above, the new Quinton novel is set in the West Indies, and one of the storylines centres on a hurricane and its consequences. Now, even though I grew up in a notoriously soggy part of the world, hurricanes are well outside both my experience and that of most Brits, so the timing of the arrival through my letterbox of Eric Jay Dolin’s A Furious Sky: The Five Hundred Year History of America’s Hurricanes was absolutely ideal. Eric, the author of the splendid Leviathan, was one of the very first people to provide complimentary blurb for Gentleman Captain, the first Quinton book, and I was chuffed that he sent me a copy of his new title. Eric certainly grabbed my attention from the outset by starting with a vivid account of the experiences of those who found themselves at the heart of Hurricane Audrey, which struck Louisiana in 1957 – a year which has particular resonance with me! Eric goes on to discuss the origin and nature of hurricanes before describing historical examples that are both riveting and frightening, from Columbus’s first encounters with Hurricanes up to Hurricane Dorian in 2019. He interweaves descriptions of individual hurricanes, such as the catastrophic Galveston hurricane of 1900 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 (which caused the destruction, inter alia, of the replica of HMS Bounty) with the lives of individuals who attempted to analyse, understand or cope with them, including Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Morse, and even Ernest Hemingway. All in all, A Furious Sky is a terrific example of how to combine ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ history, examining the impact on real people of colossal forces that are far beyond their control.

Finally, any story set in the West Indies after about 1650 is inevitably going to mention slavery. Quite apart from the linguistic and ‘political correctness’ issues bound up with touching on that issue in this day and age, I needed to be clear about the exact legal status of slavery in England in the period I was writing about. Miranda Kaufman’s Black Tudors was published a while ago but only arrived on my shelves this year, and it’s proved to be ideal for my purposes. (OK, a book called Black Stuarts would have been better still, but you can’t have everything.) The book as a whole is fascinating, casting light on the lives of people who have otherwise been completely overlooked by historians. My favourite character among those unearthed by Kaufman is Jacques Francis, a salvage diver who worked on the wreck of the Mary Rose, and Kaufman’s lively style, founded upon immaculate research, really brings him and all her other examples to life. She amply demonstrates that black people were always present in the British Isles, albeit in small numbers, and local research across the country is bringing to light more and more examples for all pre-Windrush eras. For instance, I grew up thinking that my home town of Llanelli in west Wales was completely monocultural and always had been, but in the early nineteenth century the town had a black barber – a former slave – who was a well respected member of the local community.

So I’ve been lucky in having most of the resources I need for the new Quinton book either on my bookshelves or easily available online. All I’ve got to do now is to get on and finish writing the book!

It’s become something of a cliche to say that 2020 has been a year of tragedies on a global scale. Amid such horrors, it’s perhaps possible for individual losses to be diminished and to have less impact than would usually be the case. Last week, though, I learned the shocking news that my friend, the Dutch naval historian Gijs Rommelse, had died suddenly at the age of forty-three. Such an early death would be tragic in any circumstances, especially as he leaves a widow and a young family, but for the small world of seventeenth century naval history, his death represents an incalculable loss.

I first met Gijs twenty or so years ago when he was studying at the University of London. We hit it off immediately – the ranks of six-foot-something non-English naval historians of the 17th century were and are not large – and we stayed in touch after he went back to the Netherlands. There was also a similarity in our career paths; Gijs, too, forged a career outside the university sector by teaching secondary-age students while researching and writing naval history in his spare time. In that respect, though, I was always astonished (and perhaps a little shamed) by just how productive he was in the time available to him, especially as he had a growing family too. His first book, The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). International raison d’état, mercantilism and maritime strife, a modified version of his doctoral thesis, was published in 2006, and he followed it with a biography of Sir George Downing, a history of the Dutch in the early modern world, a book on ideology and foreign policy in the early modern world, and several other titles in Dutch. A number of these books were jointly authored; Gijs loved to collaborate with others, and it was a pleasure to work with him and Alan James as a co-editor of our book on western naval ideologies, c.1500-1815. The planning session that the three of us had in Amsterdam, where we worked out the themes and overall plan for the book, was a particularly memorable time. He always had a new project in the pipeline, the most notable at the time of his untimely death being a history of the Dutch navy from 1400 to 1815. He was also a good friend of this blog and contributed several guest posts, probably the most memorable of which was his review of the film known in the Netherlands as Michiel de Ruyter and elsewhere as Admiral: Command and Conquer. His workrate was phenomenal, as was his ability to juggle several ambitious projects at any one time – not to mention family life and teaching History to teenagers. He was remarkably modest, always self-deprecating about his command of English (which was actually better than that of many native speakers) and profusely apologetic when asking me if I could check references in British sources for him – his sign off line, ‘thanks ever so much’, was more than just a standard courtesy because I knew he absolutely meant it.

Historians should die in the fullness of their years, leaving a substantial body of work behind them. Gijs certainly achieved the latter in the limited time given to him, but it is a tragedy both for his family and for naval history that he was denied the former. He had so much more to contribute, and for my part I shall miss a good friend who has been taken far too soon.