J D Davies

It’s a big day – the cover reveal for my new book, Sailor of Liberty! The reveal is happening pretty much simultaneously on this website and on that of my wonderful publishers, Canelo, so without further ado, here it is –

I may be biased, but I think it’s a pretty terrific piece of work!

Sailor of Liberty will be published on 19 January 2023 and is available for pre-order – here’s the link to Amazon’s UK site. So what’s it about, you ask? Well…

As the cover makes clear, it’s set in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. For years I’d been of the opinion that in terms of naval historical fiction, this period had probably been done to death. Following in the wake of C S Forester and Patrick O’Brian have come many other series, many of them excellent in their own right, but pretty much all of them written from the British point of view. I knew I didn’t want to go down the same path, especially as so many others had trodden it much better than I could. A few years ago, though, I was in a hotel bar with some other nautical fiction writers during a historical novel conference, and someone made a chance remark about wishing there was something in English but written from the French side. This idea took a long time to germinate, finally doing so thanks to some watering from my agent and publisher, but the more I thought about it, the more the idea grew on me. For one thing, the French navy of 1793 was very much the underdog – undermanned and poorly equipped, riven by political and regional jealousies, and having also lost the vast majority of its experienced commissioned officers due to the French Revolution, yet France somehow had to still put out a fleet capable of at least holding its own against the British. The political background is particularly fascinating. This, after all, was the age of The Terror, the guillotine and (in fiction) the Scarlet Pimpernel, giving way ultimately to the rise of Napoleon, yet the relentless focus on the British experience meant that these perspectives rarely if ever appear in nautical fiction. So although my command of French is only a little more advanced than the traditional opening gambit of the stereotypical Brit in France, namely shouting ‘PARLEZ-VOUS ANGLAIS?’ very loudly and with increasing desperation, I thought this was an avenue I wanted to explore. So then, all I needed to do was to create a hero and a story…

Enter Philippe Kermorvant. Philippe is an outsider, born to a political exile and essentially stateless. He grows up in a land at war, taking to the sea as so many of his ancestors, the Bretons, have done down the centuries. Blooded in America and Russia, a shocking personal tragedy takes him at last to France, the homeland he has never known. But much of France is in revolt against the fragile new republican regime, the Terror is beginning to take hold, the shadow of the guillotine falls over every corner of the country, and Philippe’s birth and background make him suspect to the authorities and even to his own family. Somehow, Philippe has to convince the state’s representatives that he is loyal to the republic in order to achieve his goal of gaining command of a warship. Even if he succeeds, how can a man seen by many as an aristocrat and a foreigner win over unreliable officers and a recalcitrant crew, then mould them into a unit capable of engaging the most powerful maritime fighting force the world has ever seen? All the while he has to battle the demons from his own past, master his feelings for a woman who should be utterly unobtainable, and above all, not make the small, inadvertent mistake, the wrong word or the wrong gesture, that might send him to the guillotine.

I hope your appetite is whetted! If it is, I’ll provide some more teasers for Sailor of Liberty in the run-up to its publication.

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A final word for the readers who have been with me from the start and who often ask if there will be any more Quinton novels set in the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century. At the moment, pretty much all of my time is taken up with Sailor of Liberty and subsequent titles in the Kermorvant series – yes, there will be more, and you heard it here first! But as I’ve mentioned before in this blog, there’s a complete but as yet unpublished Quinton book which takes us to the Caribbean and the enigmatic character of Sir Henry Morgan. When (if??) I find the time, I hope to self-publish this, and will make any announcements about it on this website first. So, like James Bond, Matthew Quinton will return!

Gosh, has it been that long since I last blogged? Oh dear, yes it has…

Sorry for the absence of communication, but it’s been a busy few months both professionally and personally, so I’m afraid things like blogging and social media have fallen by the wayside. Besides, if truth be told there hasn’t really been a lot to blog about – no major new book news, for example, and I haven’t really been doing a lot of serious academic work which might generate spinoff posts as in the past. But all that is changing, and so I’m coming out of hibernation to make two very important announcements!

First of all, until now my ‘Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal’ trilogy, set in the sixteenth century, has only been available in e-book format. But the lovely people at Canelo, my fiction publisher, have decided that the series should be available in ex-tree format too, and the first book, Destiny’s Tide, is being released in a print edition on 9 December – yes, at a perfect time to find a home on your own Christmas list, or to be given as presents to all your family, friends, colleagues and pets! Here’s a link to the Amazon UK site, where you can pre-order it, but if you prefer to buy books from a source that doesn’t think the solution to the world’s problems is to blast 90-year-old actors into orbit, then there are many alternative ways to get hold of your copies (for example, UK readers might want to try out Hive while readers in both the UK and US could also choose bookshop.org, both of which directly support independent high street bookshops). You can find a synopsis of Destiny’s Tide here.

Readers might recall that when the Stannard trilogy was first mooted, I had considerable misgivings about writing something set in the Tudor period. In fact, I’d vowed for many years that I would never, ever, write anything Tudor. Similarly, I also vowed for many years that I would never, ever, write anything set in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. After all, in terms of the naval historical fiction genre this is the traditional stamping ground, the home of those untouchable demigods C S Forester and Patrick O’Brian. The works of these and others, many of them outstanding writers in their own right, suggested to me that the era had been done to death, and any attempt by me to foray into that territory would be doomed to failure. After all, we all know the script. Captain Hercules Perfect, RN, rises from scrawny cabin boy to macho superhero via service in ships manned by the likes of lazy and incompetent captains, sadistic warrant officers, pressed men with either hearts of gold or pungent personal habits, pedantic administrators, and so on and so forth. On land he is a fish out of water and will have one or more disastrous / on-off / purely platonic (delete as appropriate) relationships with women who prove to be unattainable (married) / unattainable (dying of consumption) / all too obtainable (prostitutes). (Again, delete as appropriate.) These passages will be relatively brief because of the insistence of publishers and readers alike that Captain Perfect gets back to sea as soon as possible. There he will, of course, fight the French, who will be perfidious / incompetent / sadistic; at a push the Spanish, who will be sadistic / perfidious / incompetent; and perhaps even the Americans, who will naturally be good ol’ boys. He will have an obligatory meeting with Nelson, who will either pass on some pearl of timeless wisdom or ask him to pass the salt. He will be able to instantly tell the difference between, and assess the condition of, the flying abaft cross dodo bunt and the garboard bowline futtock shroud.

OK, you get the idea, and can hopefully see why I’ve been reluctant to venture into those waters. But finally my agent and publisher convinced me otherwise, so I can now announce that I’ve signed up with the same lovely people at Canelo to write a new series set in the great naval wars of 1793-1815. But as with the Stannard trilogy, I had to reconcile this with my conscience – I didn’t want to write about Hercules Perfect under another name, although now I come to think about it, he would make a brilliant hero in a parody of the entire genre. (Sadly, it’s already been done by Susan Wenger in The Port-Wine Sea.) I think I’ve found a way of doing that and providing a fresh take on the period, and more will be revealed in subsequent blogs!

Some of you may well be saying ‘But what about the Quinton series’? The good news is that there’s a complete new book, written during lockdowns, and yes, this is the one previously mentioned in this blog, set in the Caribbean and featuring Matthew’s encounter with Captain Henry Morgan. The bad news is that it has no publisher, but I’m looking to self-publish it as soon as possible. Quite when that will be is another matter, especially now that I have a contractual deadline for the first book in the new eighteenth-century series, but I’ll provide updates on this blog. The same is true of my long-gestating non-fiction about the Stepney baronets – completion of this was delayed by the closure of key archives during the pandemic, but it’s now back on track and again, in an ideal world I’d like to publish this via self-publishing as soon as possible. As for the prospect of any more Quinton titles in the future, that would depend very much on the reception of both the new self-published story and the new published series. So watch this space!

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus! (Happy Saint David’s Day!)

The coincidence of Wales’ national day being on a Monday, the usual publication day for this blog, proved irresistible, although I shall definitely resist the temptation to refer to the other coincidence of the Wales-England rugby match yesterday. (Oh dear, did I just mention it after all? Sorry about that.)

Seriously, though, I thought this would be an ideal opportunity to provide a little-known account of what St David’s Day was like in the Restoration period. This wonderful source is from the journal of the Dutch traveller William Schellinks,* describing how the day was marked in the year 1662. Thankfully, no such shenanigans take place these days. Well, not that often, anyway.

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On the first of March old style, being St David’s Day, the day of the patron saint of Wales, when, according to custom, all people born in that principality put a leek in the bands of their hats. That is supposed to be in memory of a battle fought and won by them on St David’s Day, in which they wore them as a mark to distinguish themselves from their enemies. So His Majesty and many great lords and gentlemen, common people, and even lackeys, coachmen, porters, and all kinds of riff-raff and layabouts wear one on their hats.

NB the office to fix the leek to the king’s hat on this day is worth 600 guilders.

We saw some countryfolk carry such large leeks on their hats that their heads hung almost sideways because of them. And so on this day the Welshmen are greatly teased by the English, not only by calling after them Taffey, Taffey (sic) or David, David, but also by hanging out all kinds of dolls and scarecrows with leeks on their heads, and as they celebrate the day with heavy boozing (unheard of these days, of course – D.), and both sides, from the ale, strong beer, sack and claret, become short-tempered, obstinate and wild, so it is not often that this day goes by without mishaps, and without one or the other getting into an argument or a blood fight (also unheard of). Thus it happened this year that near Westminster a Welsh nobleman stabbed an Englishman. So too an English cook, who for fun stuck a leek on his hat and addressed, as a fellow countryman, a great lord, a Welshman, who passed by with his suite, who responded in Welsh, which is as different from English as French is from Dutch. When the cook replied sneeringly in English, the lord went for him, the cook fled into his shop and grabbed a spit from the fire and with this attacked the Welshman, who, supported by his servants with their rapiers, all turned against the cook, who was immediately helped by all sorts of rabble, throwing dirt and other things, so that in the end he was compelled to retreat, and, the furore getting greater, he was forced to take to the water, and although he had got help, the mob, fighting furiously, got into the boat, and if His Majesty had not sent help quickly by water, they could easily have been killed.

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Anyway, enough for now – time to find a leek to stick in my hat!

 

(* The Journal of William Schellinks’ Travels in England 1661-1663, translated and edited by Maurice Exwood and H L Lehmann, Camden fifth series volume 1, Royal Historical Society 1993).

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.