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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.

Events rather than places this week. Between 1996 and 2005, five major nautical-themed festivals took place in British ports. These combined the presence of ships and boats of all shapes and sizes with artists’ performances, displays and other entertainments, and were undoubtedly hugely successful in raising awareness of the role of the sea in national life (over 200,000 people apparently attended the 1998 and 2001 festivals). Sadly, none have been held since 2005, although smaller scale events have often taken place – one that I particularly enjoyed was the 2016 Weymouth Leviathan festival, the first and to date only festival of nautical fiction, which I blogged about at the time. I was fortunate enough to attend three of the five incarnations of IFOS, namely those at Portsmouth in 1998 and 2001, as well as the one at Leith in 2003. I can’t now remember why I didn’t go to the first one, in Bristol in 1996, or the last, in Portsmouth, in 2005, and also have no idea why it hasn’t been held since. Here, though, is a selection of photos I took at the three festivals I attended. Those from 1997 and 2001 were taken with a non-digital camera, but I’d acquired a digital one by 2003.

 

 

 

 

And finally, some random pictures from Leith in 2003…

The only certainties in life are death, taxes, and the fact that whenever naval history makes the news, somebody is going to get it calamitously wrong. That’s how it’s been here in the UK for the last week or so, where we’ve had the Prime Minister himself intervening in an argument over whether a song with naval associations should be played with or without words, or at all, during a concert without an audience. Just as well he doesn’t have anything more urgent to occupy him at the moment, really… As if that wasn’t enough, we had the curious phenomenon of a seemingly arcane article on Anglo-Saxon naval history in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, not normally a must-read for Fleet Street’s finest, hitting national headlines after gaining considerable traction across the blogosphere.

The cause of all this sound and fury? To take the article first, it had the temerity to suggest that King Alfred the Great, often trumpeted as the founder of the Royal Navy, didn’t, umm, found the Royal Navy. There were naval successes under his predecessors, the authors claim, and a proper naval organisation wasn’t actually set up until the reign of his grandson, Edgar. Now, none of this should really be terribly controversial. I know a reasonable amount about Edgar, having gone into quite a bit of detail about his reign and legacy for my essay on naval ideology, published last year, and a good case can be made for saying that he made impressive and effective use of seapower. Was he the first English monarch to do so? I don’t know, because – to deploy the time-honoured historian’s copout – it’s not my period.

But it seems to me that this little storm in a teacup demonstrates two tedious truisms. One is that historians, and people in general, are obsessed with claiming things as ‘the first’ (often, in the case of historians, in order to make their own reputations and/or rubbish those of their predecessors), and with the idea that The Thing, whatever it might be, had A Founder and began at a precise moment in history. The idea that The Thing came into being gradually, and that many people contributed to its creation, is inherently messier, more difficult, less ‘sexy’, and sells fewer books for historians and writers keen to make their names, than identifying a precise moment when something comes into existence (and if you don’t believe me, compare the first chapter of Genesis with the theory of evolution…)

The other tedious truism is that in this day and age, pretty well any issue, no matter how innocuous, can be weaponised by one side or the other in so-called ‘culture wars’. For example, Alfred the Great has been appropriated as an icon of English nationalism; the boat sent out by Britain First to turn back migrants trying to cross the English Channel has been rechristened to bear his name. The very fact that he is the only English monarch to be awarded the soubriquet of ‘the great’ at once puts him on a pedestal, even though it can be attributed largely to the fact that he had a far superior propaganda machine to most of his predecessors or successors. So any suggestion that Alfred wasn’t, perhaps, quite as great as hazy memories of school history lessons fifty or sixty years ago might suggest is bound to trigger an avalanche of angry messages to newspaper comments sections. It’s depressing, demonstrating yet again that people often prefer myths or downright untruths to actual historical facts, an issue I also encountered with my new novel Armada’s Wake; I talk about this problem in the new issue of the Historical Writers’ Association’s splendid journal Historia.

And so to Rule Britannia, the famous naval anthem traditionally sung at that great British institution the Last Night of the Proms. This year, though, the vastly scaled down, audience-free format of the occasion, together with the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, led to suggestions that Rule Britannia and that other tub-thumping ditty, Land of Hope and Glory, might be inappropriate and perhaps should be dropped. Cue outrage, including the aforementioned intervention by the Prime Minister, but once again, much of the outrage on both sides consisted of frankly ludicrous posturing based on shaky or non-existent historical foundations. So: yes, Rule Britannia contains the word ‘slaves’ in one of its most famous lines, ‘Britons never will be slaves’. But it’s a racing certainty that not one single person who heard it at its first performance, at Cliveden House in 1740, would have associated the word with African slavery. Written at a time of war with France, the line expresses fear of conquest by Catholic, authoritarian France, and the reduction of the British to slaves after the example of the Roman Empire – a context which would have been entirely familiar to Georgian gentlemen (and, yes, ladies) whose education had been dominated by the Classics.

(Incidentally, I’ll lay odds that I’m probably the only person who’s written about this subject who has heard the whole of Thomas Arne’s Alfred – yes, it’s that man again – from which the song is taken, and indeed has a CD of it. The song immediately preceding ‘Rule Britannia’ goes: ‘See liberty, virtue and honour appearing / with smiles and caresses each other endearing / to keep the dear blessing so hardly obtained / let virtue secure what our valour has gained / We can only boast of our national right / when liberty, virtue and honour unite’ – surely as ‘inclusive’ a lyric as anyone could wish for.)

So Rule Britannia might be jingoistic, but it’s not as jingoistic as people often think it is; for example, many sing along to the chorus with the triumphalist words ‘Britannia rules the waves!’, whereas the line actually reads ‘Britannia rule the waves’, so the sentiment is an aspiration, not a statement of fact. Moreover, it’s never been de rigueur for the singing of the words to be part of the Last Night of the Proms. Sir Henry Wood, who created the famous concert series and conducted the Last Night every year from 1895 to 1944, apparently never performed the piece with the words, while the format of the Last Night has changed frequently, having only become relatively ossified in fairly recent years. For example, in 1973 I obtained my first cassette recorder, and decided to experiment with it by recording the conclusion of the Last Night of the Proms, which involved physically holding the microphone in front of the TV. It worked and I still have the cassette, so I still have a record of the dulcet tones of the late, great Richard Baker introducing the full version of Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, currently a regular part of the Last Night repertoire, by saying that it was the first time it had been performed for very many years.

Of course, the misappropriation of history to serve particular political agendas is nothing new, and it’s certainly not confined to the UK (hello, America). Sadly, I suspect we’re only going to get a lot more of it, but historians need to continue to stick their heads above the parapet to point out the unhistorical and, yes, often hysterical distortions of the record by those with ideological axes to grind. Of course, the likelihood is that the heads in question will be blasted to smithereens from both sides; but ultimately, that’s what historians are for.