J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Matthew Quinton

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.

Gentleman in the First Person

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A few weeks ago, Susan Keogh, author of the Jack Mallory chronicles, posted a pretty positive and particularly thoughtful review of Gentleman Captain, in which she raised a couple of interesting and important critical points. I’ve been meaning to post about these for some time, but a combination of holidays and the completion of the revised draft of the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, means that I’ve not had a chance to do so until now.

First of all, Susan clearly doesn’t like first person narration, finding it too limiting. In terms of my own reading, I’d largely agree with her – and the use of the first person has caused me a few interesting plot construction issues in Blast, where it’s been essential for me to have more than one viewpoint character. (Having said that, I think the device I’ve adopted to get round the problem works very well, and fortunately, so far and touching a lot of wood, my critical readers agree!) But the reason why I adopted a first person narrative goes back to the very origins of the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’. In the early days of writing Gentleman Captain, I experimented with an alternative version of the first few chapters which used third person narration. Somehow, though, it didn’t feel quite as immediate or dramatic, particularly during the shipwreck scene at the very start of the book; and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that this experiment confirmed my original instinct. One of my key objectives with the series is to tell the whole story of the Royal Navy from the 1580s, the era of the Spanish Armada, to the 1720s, when something that was much more recognisably the navy of Horatio Nelson was taking shape. Telling the story through the eyes of ‘old Matthew’, and giving him a grandfather who had been one of Drake’s contemporaries and rivals, achieved this purpose admirably as far as I was concerned, and would have been much harder to do from third person viewpoints; moreover, it presented plenty of opportunities for humour, with an archetypal ‘grumpy old man’ comparing the dog days of his youth with the supposedly ‘improved’ world around him.

Susan’s other point is that surely Matthew wouldn’t have been as ignorant of the sea as I’ve made him. Well, the short answer to this is – yes, he would. This was one of the key points about the commissioning of young aristocrats and gentlemen by King Charles II and his brother James; many of them literally were entirely ignorant of the sea, particularly in the early years after the Restoration (the setting of Gentleman Captain). Moreover, many of them actually believed that it was important to remain ‘ignorant’ – seamanship being regarded as a ‘rude, mechanical’ art, and thus beneath the honour and dignity of men of their social status. It’s true that some went against this belief, and I’ve based Matthew on the likes of Captain Francis Digby, a real historical figure of the 1660s whose manuscript journals reveal that he gradually – but only gradually – became a highly competent navigator and seaman. But there were others who held to the older philosophy that a captain was essentially in charge of the military aspects of a ship’s operations alone, and in The Mountain of Gold (and then much more extensively in Blast) I’ve introduced the character of Matthew’s friend Captain Beau Harris, who is again based on several real people and who actually revels in his determination to learn nothing of the seaman’s art, in order to provide a sharper counterpoint to Matthew’s determination to improve. One of the key themes of the series of ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’ will be the way in which ‘gentlemen captains’ like Matthew Quinton gradually won out, thus preparing the ground for the Jack Aubreys and their real-life equivalents in the future. But it wasn’t an overnight process, and during the 1660s many a young captain like Matthew Quinton might well have struggled with an inner conflict between received opinions of what should be beneath the honour of a gentleman and their own recognition of the qualities necessary for a successful ship’s captain.