Blog Posts

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.

***

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.

***

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.

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!