J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Naval historical fiction

The Art of Male Multi-Tasking

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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!

Vanished Empires

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‘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.

Of Mountains and Gold

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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!

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 1

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In recent posts, I’ve looked at the lives of some of the real ‘gentleman captains’ who became models for my fictional character, Matthew Quinton. Drawn from the aristocracy and gentry, often possessing very little prior experience of the sea, the ‘gentlemen’ became increasingly dominant in the navy of Charles II and Samuel Pepys. By doing so, they gradually restricted the opportunities for ‘tarpaulins’ to rise to command – men like Matthew’s friend Kit Farrell, professional seamen who had either worked their way up through warrant officer posts or had come in from the merchant service. (These career paths often overlapped; like the seamen themselves, ‘tarpaulins’ frequently moved between naval and merchant ships during the course of their careers.) In this and the next couple of posts, I’ll outline the careers of a few tarpaulin officers who provided inspiration for the character of Kit.

Sir John Berry, c.1636-90 – Berry’s background was respectable; he was the son of a Devon vicar. But his father was removed from his living for Anglican and royalist tendencies, so the family fell into poverty and John and his brothers had to seek a living as best they could. He served in merchant ships before moving into the navy after the Restoration. By 1663 he was boatswain of the Swallow Ketch in the Caribbean, and when the command fell vacant, Berry was appointed to it by the governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Modyford, a fellow Devonian who was related to George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, the architect of the Restoration and joint admiral of the fleet in 1666. These connections benefited Berry when he returned to England in the latter year; Albemarle gave him several commands, and in 1667 he went back to the Caribbean as captain of the hired ship Coronation, commanding the squadron which won the Battle of Nevis against the French in May 1667. This success cemented Berry’s reputation. He held several important commands before the outbreak of the third Anglo-Dutch war; when that began he was given command of the Third Rate Resolution, earning his knighthood for his defence of the Duke of York’s flagship during the Battle of Solebay (28 May 1672), and he also served in all three major battles in 1673. In 1676-7 he went to Virginia in command of the Bristol, leading the naval forces assigned to put down ‘Bacon’s rebellion’. So respected was Berry that in 1680-1 King Charles II entrusted him with the naval training of his illegitimate son the Duke of Grafton during a Mediterranean cruise aboard the frigate Leopard.

In 1682 he was given command of the Gloucester, carrying the Duke of York to Scotland, but the ship was wrecked off the Norfolk coast. No blame attached to Berry; quite the opposite, as it was probably only his efforts that saved the heir to the throne’s life. In 1683 he went to Tangier as vice-admiral of the fleet tasked with evacuating the expensive English colony. During the voyage he befriended Samuel Pepys, a relationship that paid dividends in 1686 when Berry was appointed to Pepys’s special commission for rebuilding the navy. In 1688 Berry became rear-admiral of the fleet entrusted with defending against William of Orange’s invasion, but he was staunchly anti-French and anti-Catholic, becoming an active Williamite conspirator and even got involved in a plot to kidnap the admiral, Lord Dartmouth. Berry’s health deteriorated markedly through 1689 and he died on 14 February 1690, being buried at Stepney church.

Berry did very well out of his naval service: at his death he owned a house in Mile End and other property in Middlesex and Kent. Perhaps his greatest failing was a tendency toward immodesty. He was an outstanding seaman, greatly respected by the men, and he lost no opportunity to trumpet his own competence and popularity. Ultimately, though, his career had owed much to those two vital factors for the success of any 17th century naval officer: luck and good connections.

History and Fiction

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I thought I’d take a brief break from my accounts of ‘the real gentlemen captains’ to give my impressions of last week’s conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London, Novel Approaches: From Academic History to Historical Fiction, which continues this week in virtual form. First of all it was great fun, and it was good to meet and to listen to other people with similar enthusiasms to my own – although it was somewhat disconcerting to enter the hall and discover that roughly 80-90% of the delegates were female (one of them asked me at lunchtime if I was feeling outnumbered, which I definitely was!). It was particularly interesting to hear from others with a similar background to my own, i.e. people who started out as academic historians and then crossed over to write historical fiction, notably Alison Weir and Ian Mortimer. There was much discussion of the need to be ‘authentic’, but not entire agreement on what’s meant by ‘authenticity’; some authors clearly go to enormous lengths to ensure that there are no factual anachronisms in their work and that they comply entirely with the known historical record, while others (such as Mortimer, when writing fiction under his alias James Forrester) prefer to be ‘authentic’ in a broader way, to the sense and atmosphere of the period. I’m firmly in the latter camp, but this might be because authors like Mortimer and myself, who have been steeped in academic research on our periods for well over twenty years, possibly have a more instinctive feel for that atmosphere (and for the language of the time, etc) than someone researching a period from scratch, who might be more anxious to avoid making even minor factual errors, to alter the chronology, or to take liberties – up to a point – with the known life stories of real people. From an entertainment viewpoint, undoubtedly the highlight of the conference for me was the contribution by the literary agent Peter Straus, who emphasised the continuing primacy of word of mouth as the best means of promoting a book, the importance of luck (notably lacking in the case of the US edition of The Instance of the Fingerpost, published in the week that Diana died), the notion of the Booker Prize-winning formula (‘myth, love and history’, a la A S Byatt) and the lack of omniscience of publishers; hence the horrified initial reaction of the sales and marketing department to C J Sansum’s stunningly successful Shardlake series, namely ‘hunchbacks don’t sell’ (presumably forgetting what Shakespeare did with Richard III).

However, I think the main thing I took away from the conference was the increased acceptance from all parties that academic history and historical fiction aren’t two sides of a great divide, but are both staging posts in a spectrum – and both, indeed, are simplifications to a greater or lesser degree. Academic history used to like to see itself as a disinterested pursuit of truth; as Simon Schama put it, historians are ‘party poopers’, demolishing the widely accepted myths that the public is comfortable with. (Perhaps therefore historical novelists are ‘party animals’, perpetuating the myths – e.g. Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker with ‘mud, blood and donkeys’ in World War I – and dealing with those things that historians dare not touch because they lie beyond the boundaries of the sources, such as people’s emotions, such big issues as loyalties and beliefs, and the ‘what ifs’ of history). However, as several speakers stressed, academic history itself is increasingly seen as a fictive concept: historians select and interpret their material with greater or lesser degrees of subjectivity, while even ‘primary sources’ aren’t the beginning of a process but the end of one. They are the recording of an event that has already taken place, and are thus themselves subject to selection and subjectivity, rather like modern TV or newspaper reporting; or as Arthur Marwick used to put it, ‘history’ is actually the artificial construct, the prism, through which we study the totality which was ‘the past’, only a minute fraction of which we can ever recreate. I think this realisation that history and fiction aren’t really so far apart after all reflects the fact that academic history, once remarkably hierarchical and even snobbish, has become rather more tolerant and inclusive in the last 15-20 years or so. When I started work on my doctorate in the early 1980s there was a definite ‘pecking order’, with political and religious history at the top – the former, for my period, dominated by such titans as Sir Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Russell and Hugh Trevor-Roper, all of whom I encountered at once time or another. (In Trevor-Roper’s case, this involved knocking him off his bike when rushing to his lecture; as far as I know, the trauma he might have suffered from my carelessness has never been advanced as a possible cause of his subsequent faux pas in authenticating the Hitler diaries.) Economic history was tolerated, social history was mainstream thanks to the likes of Hobsbawm and Thompson but was still not entirely respectable, while naval history was regarded very much as an unfashionable and insignificant backwater (although then probably still more ‘mainstream’ than gender and race history, etc).

Thus I was something of an exotic beast at Oxford historical seminars in the mid-1980s, although the tide was already turning. Indeed, the very fact that I was taken on as a DPhil student by Gerald Aylmer, one of the most eminent political historians of the day, has been used in a recent study of the progress of naval history as proof that things were changing. Now there is a chair in naval history at King’s College, London; a naval historian holds a fellowship of All Souls; Cambridge runs a maritime history workshop; and the numbers of those studying naval history at such institutions as King’s, Greenwich and Exeter probably run into hundreds. So maybe I’ll live to see a professorship in historical fiction at Oxford, but perhaps we’ll only be certain that all the barriers really have come down when David Starkey writes a sex-filled Tudor bodice ripper (ideally with a black protagonist) or Niall Ferguson succeeds Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver as the author of the next Bond novel, in which Q gives Bond six really ‘killer apps’. But I won’t hold my breath.

The Joy of Source

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I’ve encountered some writers who look upon research as a huge and daunting mountain that they have to climb before they can actually start the fun part, the writing itself. I look on it very differently, probably because I spent many years as a ‘proper’ research historian before I started writing fiction and non-fiction aimed at a general, rather than an academic, audience. Research can be huge fun – the thrill of discovering something previously unknown in some musty archive takes some beating, while actually handling the materials left behind by people from previous generations is often both humbling and moving. In that respect, I’m particularly fortunate that the two main projects I’ve got underway at the moment involve some particularly fascinating research and in some cases a revisiting of old friends. For example, the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight, is set in Sweden in 1666. I taught seventeenth-century Swedish history to several generations of sixth formers, and some of them still recall ‘the Swedish question’ with affection. (Choosing such an apparently obscure topic wasn’t just self-indulgence on my part, although it did fit nicely with my ‘must-teach’ topic on the 17th century military and naval revolution; there was a considerable element of cunning strategy involved, as the less frequented topics like Sweden often had ‘easier’ questions set on them, and it was easier for good candidates to stand out in a smaller field.) So delving back into the histories of the Vasa dynasty, of Sweden’s ‘golden age’ and her ‘Gothic fantasy’, of the enigmatic Queen Christina and her successors, has really felt like a happy revisiting of old acquaintances!

 

The same has been true of my parallel work on the new non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. This has really taken me back to my roots, both geographically and in terms of source material. For example, I’ve been revisiting the medieval Welsh chronicles, which I last looked at seriously 30 years ago; my first ever published piece was actually not naval at all but a piece of early medieval history. But I’ve also been discovering all sorts of previously untouched topics and, for me, unfamiliar sources, ranging from articles in journals about Roman archaeology to nineteenth century newspapers and twentieth century pacifist tracts. Over the weekend I was looking at the 1901 census online. I’d used this when compiling my family history, but had never really worked on it systematically, so some of the results were at once interesting and alarming. The census was transcribed by prisoners, a fact that caused some controversy at the time, and although there’s been much discussion of the sometimes bizarre consequences among genealogists over the last decade, it had never really presented me with an issue. However, looking at the transcriptions of the returns for HM ships (as part of a sampling process to estimate the number of Welshmen in the navy at the time) has turned up some unsettling but also hilarious findings. The prize of the day goes to the hapless convict who transcribed the return for the sloop HMS Racoon, lying at Aden. Like many ships on foreign stations, the Racoon had entered a significant number of crewmen locally – listed on her return as ‘seedies’. The ship had a particularly interesting and eclectic mix, including Somalis, Sudanese and Portuguese Goans, but this evidently caused insuperable difficulties for the incarcerated transcriber. Thus ‘Socotra’ was rendered as ‘Scotland’, ‘Comoro Islands’ as ‘Romania’ (!), and my personal favourite, ‘Sierra Leone’ as ‘Sierra, Lancashire’. Conversely, he managed to transform the old Anglicised spelling of Caernarfon, ‘Carnarvon’, into the far more exotic ‘Carnaroon’. I’ll keep a lookout for any more howlers as I continue to work through the returns, but one wonders just how many unsuspecting individuals researching their family history and relying in the first instance on the online transcriptions have been thrown off track by the incompetence (or simple laziness) of inmates who make Norman Stanley Fletcher look like a Nobel Prize winner.