J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

The Mountain of Gold

But I Still Never Read Reviews, Dahling

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A sort of semi-re-blog of an old post this week, one which first saw the light of day some three years ago. Looking back over it, I see that much of it still applies – I still look at my Amazon and Goodreads reviews only very rarely, unlike many fellow authors. This isn’t because I can’t take criticism: remember that I was a teacher for thirty years, so I became well used not just to criticism, but also to personal abuse and every swear word in the book (and that was just from the Headmaster). It’s partly a question of time, partly the factors outlined in the post that follows, partly an innate scepticism about the multiple fallibilities of the reviewing process; let’s not forget, for example, that Pepys, Tolstoy, Tolkien, Voltaire and George Bernard Shaw all reckoned Shakespeare was absolute pants. But every now and again, a review comes along that’s simply impossible to ignore, and that’s certainly the case when you get your first ever review in a national newspaper, as happened to me in The Times last weekend. For those who don’t want to register on their website for free access (you can do this up to the limit when the paywall kicks in), here’s the text of the review-

Death’s Bright Angel by JD Davies

There is a welcome return, too, for Captain Matthew Quinton of Charles II’s navy. JD Davies is an expert on the 17th-century navy, and his series about a gentleman captain in the Age of Sail has won him keen fans. In Death’s Bright Angel, Sir Matthew, the master of HMS Sceptre, is fighting in the continuing wars against the Dutch but he is becoming ever more uneasy because his orders compel him to burn civilian homes.

On his return to a plague-diminished London, he is charged with finding terrorists who threaten the fragile post-Civil War peace. This is 1666, and a small fire in the heart of London is about to turn nasty. Naval fiction is a crowded sub-genre in historical fiction, but Davies knows his subject and wears his knowledge lightly. Death’s Bright Angel is the sixth book in a series of real panache.
Old Street, 288pp, £8.99

OK, I won’t repeat the corny joke I made on Facebook about thinking that Real Panache was a Spanish football team…but seriously, huge thanks to Antonia Senior for praising the book, and the series, so highly!

And now, gentle reader, let’s travel back to May 2013, when Nick Clegg (who he? ed.) was still deputy prime minister, Ed Milliband (who he? Ed. Yes, that’s what I said…) was leading the Labour party, and people were still wondering when a British man would ever win Wimbledon again.

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A confession: I’m really not much good at many aspects of the self-promotional side of being an author. OK, I enjoy blogging as it gives me an opportunity to explore issues I simply can’t cover in the books and, yes, to have a good old-fashioned rant every now and again. Twitter is quite fun and informative, and bizarrely, there now seem to be over 600 people who want to know what I’m up to [now over 2,000], which suggests either that I come up with the odd interesting tweet every now and again or they’ve mistaken me for one of the many other J D Davieses out there (a big hello at this point to Jack over at @jddavies, erstwhile owner of an alpaca business in California; the J D Davies roofing and guttering business in Doncaster; and the slightly misspelt Belgian dance music legend J D Davis). Having said that, I guess I could have had many more followers by now, but so far I’ve been averse to automatically following people back, especially if they don’t really fit with my interests – so apologies to Californian life coaches and pizza takeaways in the Rhondda. (Don’t get me wrong, I love pizza, and I love the Rhondda, but it would be a bit cold by the time I got it back to Bedfordshire.) As for Facebook…sorry, but although I dutifully post updates every now and again, I really have had it up to here with photos of other people’s babies / dinner / cats / dogs / allegedly amusing posters (delete as applicable) and a privacy policy that’s as transparent as the admission criteria for the Illuminati.

One aspect of this deep-rooted aversion to what some might loosely term ‘the twenty-first century’ has been a reluctance actually to read reviews of my own books. Now, I know this makes me sound like some precious old stage lovey, as per the title of this blog, so I need to qualify the statement straight away. Obviously, I read what one might term the ‘big’ reviews – I was thrilled when Gentleman Captain got rare starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, for example, and these naturally appear on my website. I’m very grateful when authors whom I respect hugely, like Angus Donald, Dewey Lambdin, James Nelson and Sam Willis [since joined by Conn Iggulden], provide highly complimentary blurb for my books, and few things are nicer than getting emails from readers who’ve enjoyed reading the Quinton Journals. But I’ve never gone in for avidly looking at the reviews of my titles on, say, Amazon, and – whisper it softly – I only signed up for Goodreads last weekend, following a prompt from a fellow author. Consequently, I’ve never actually quoted praise or criticism of my books from emails, Amazon or Goodreads on, say, Twitter, unlike many of my fellow authors, despite the fact that the majority of reviews of my books on Amazon, for example, have been four or five stars. Whether this reticence to blow my own trumpet has been false modesty or downright stupidity on my part is probably for others to judge…

However, going onto Goodreads for the first time proved to be something of a Damascene moment for me. Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to see the ratings and reviews for every one of my books, and my initial reaction was one of crushing disappointment. What? Gentleman Captain only has 3.57 out of 5? Oh God, I’m a failure, I shall crawl back underneath a stone, drink a gallon of meths, sob gently and bemoan the injustice of it all. But then I started finding my way around the site, and realised pretty quickly that 3.57 is a perfectly respectable score. Some of my own favourite books from genres similar to my own have very similar ratings – for example, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s brilliant Captain Alatriste has 3.58, Robert Goddard averages between 3.3 and 3.9 for his many titles, while even Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander only just creeps above 4 (slightly below The Blast That Tears The Skies, in fact – although my score is from six reviews and his from 15,544…). Romeo and Juliet has 3.72, only just ahead of The Da Vinci Code, for heaven’s sake! Moreover, I remembered my teaching career and my reluctance to give any sixth form essay, no matter how brilliant, more than 18/25, on the grounds that [a] I didn’t want the young person in question to become over-confident and complacent [b] I’m a grumpy, miserly old Welsh Scrooge (for let’s face it, my fellow Cymry, we’re not a race renowned for our generosity). Similarly, as soon as I started rating books on Goodreads myself I found myself giving out four stars far more often than fives, so if others work on the same eminently sensible principle, it’s obvious that very many books are going to end up with three-point-something, given that some people out there are always going to give anything – even, say, Pride and Prejudice – one or two stars, just to be ornery (or, in the case of P&P, maybe because they’re disappointed that it turned out not to be the version with zombies).

I don’t intend to quote any of the reviews, not even the ones that say things like ‘What a great book! This brings the 17th century to life…perfect for the armchair seadog’, ‘Both more literate and more entertaining than the run of maritime historical fiction. Highly recommended!’, ‘Naval triumph…Probably the best “Hornblower” story I’ve ever read, including Hornblower. Deserves to be much better known and more widely read’ or even ‘Excellent…I’ve been an avid reader of naval fiction for ages and read many different authors. Many of the authors are inevitably compared to Patrick O’Brian, J D Davies is easily his equal in terms of erudition and storytelling. In fact in some ways he is better.’

Oops, sorry, guess I did just quote a few of them. Not quite sure how that happened…

To be balanced, though, I should point out that there are some less complimentary reviews out there too, although I’m still scratching my head over the one that lambasted my writing style (‘stilted’, ‘adverb laden’), my characterisation (‘some of them are simple caricatures, stick figures redrawn time and again’ – ouch) and pretty much everything else about The Mountain of Gold, yet this particular reviewer still gave it four stars and ended by stating how much he was looking forward to book three. I’m perfectly fine with the fundamental truth that no author is going to please all of his or her readers, all of the time, but in this case, I’d like to know just how badly I need to write a book to get five stars from this particular reviewer!

Of course, if any of my readers are inspired by this post to go onto Goodreads or Amazon to post additional five-star reviews of any of my titles, I’ll be eternally in their debt. No names, no pack drill, and above all, no sockpuppets.

Merry Christmas, Restoration Navy Style

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Henry Teonge, a Warwickshire clergyman, was fifty-five when he first went to sea as a naval chaplain, presumably forced into the job by the extent of his debts. In 1675 he joined the Fourth Rate Assistance, commanded by William Houlding, which was despatched to the Mediterranean as part of Sir John Narbrough’s fleet, operating against the corsairs of Tripoli. Teonge kept a lively diary of his time aboard the ship, and during his subsequent service on the Bristol and Royal Oak. This is one of the best contemporary sources for the nature of shipboard life in the Restoration navy, and I’ve used it often during my research for the Quinton books. For example, several of the ‘menus’ for officers’ meals in Gentleman Captain were taken straight from Teonge, while my description of Matthew Quinton’s Christmas at sea aboard the Seraph in The Mountain of Gold was based closely on the following passage in the diary – his account of Christmas 1675 aboard the Assistance, near Crete.

24 Very rough today. No land yet. Our decks are washed for Christmas.

25 Christmas Day we keep thus. At 4 in the morning our trumpeters all do flat their trumpets and begin at our Captain’s cabin, and thence to all the officers and gentlemen’s cabins; playing a levite at each cabin door, and bidding good morrow, wishing a Merry Christmas. After they go to their station, viz. on the poop, and sound three levites in honour of the morning. At 10 we go to prayers and sermon ; text, Zacc. ix. 9. Our Captain had all his officers and gentlemen to dinner with him, where we had excellent good fare: a rib of beef, plum puddings, mince pies, &c. and plenty of good wines of several sorts ; drank healths to the King, to our wives and friends; and ended the day with much civil mirth.

Zacchariah Chapter 9, Verse 9 reads (in the King James version that Teonge would have used) ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.’ (The first part of the verse was later used for a famous soprano solo in Handel’s Messiah.) Teonge records no specific New Year festivities, although he did write a poem as a special New Year’s present for Captain Houlding. William Houlding, a former East India Company captain, held several important commands in Charles II’s reign, including that of the London in the 1673 campaign, and died on 20 September 1682.

A NEW-YEAR’S GIFT TO OUR CAPTAIN.

ACROSTICON.

W — hen Phoebus did this morning first appear,

I — nriching with his beams our hemispheare,

L- eaving the darksome night behind him, and

L — onging to be at his meridian;

I — magine then the old-year’s out of date,

A — new one unto Jove let’s dedicate—

M— an should not be like an old almanack.

H – eavens guide you, sir, that Paul’s words may be true,

O — ld things are done away, all things are new;

U — nto the rich endowments of your mind,

L — ift up your noble courage: Fortune’s kind

D — irections bid you forwards; your Assistance

I — s beggd by Mars for th’ Trypolenes resistance-

N — ‘er man more fit bold acts to undertake,

G — od with his blessings make you fortunate.

On 6 January, Teonge recorded the hilarious festivities for Twelfth Night.

6 Very rough weather all the last night, and all this day.  We are now past Zante; had we been there this day, we had seen a great solemnity ; for this day being Twelfth Day, the Greek Bishop of Zante doth (as they call it) baptise the sea, with a great deal of ceremony; sprinkling their galleys and fishing-tackle with holy-water. But we had much mirth on board, for we had a great cake made, in which was put a bean for the king, a pea for the queen, a clove for the knave, a forked stick for the cuckold, a rag for the slut. The cake was cut into several pieces in the great cabin, and all put into a napkin, out of which every one took his piece, as out of a lottery. Then each piece is broken to see what was in it, which caused much laughter to see our lieutenant prove the cuckold, and more to see us tumble one over the other in the cabin, by reason of the rough weather. 

And with that glorious mental image of the chaplain and officers of the Assistance laughing uproariously and falling over each other (and, presumably, the great cake), I’ll wish you all the compliments of the season and a very Happy New Year!

Thanks so much to all of you for your support of this blog and my books during 2012. Gentlemen and Tarpaulins will return on Monday 7 January, and 2013 will be quite a year! I’ll be using the blog to build up to the UK publication of ‘Quinton 4’, The Lion of Midnight, and the North American publication of ‘Quinton 3’, The Blast That Tears The Skies, both in April, and then to the launch of Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales in July. There are also some other interesting irons in the fire, so please continue to watch this space!

The Princes, the Removal Men and the Big Hole in the Ground

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It’s been a busy week! On Saturday I chaired the Naval Dockyards Society AGM at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, before joining a party of society members on a walking tour of the site of the old Deptford royal dockyard. This is currently the location of a huge and ongoing archaeological dig preparatory to redevelopment of the site, although the development itself is proving controversial and is about to be redesigned yet again. The tour was certainly a real eye-opener. Although the vast foundations of the Tudor ‘great storehouse’ (left) have now been covered over, work has moved on to other parts of the site, exposing, for example, the dockyard smithy, No. 1 slipway and, most interesting of all from the viewpoint of a Stuart navy buff like myself, the walls of the wet dock, including a fragment of timber from the 16th century wall (below right). This struck a particular chord with me as the wet dock is the setting for an important scene in ‘Quinton 2’, The Mountain of Gold, which seems to be going down really well in the US following its publication there a few weeks ago. To think that this would have been part of the dockyard that Samuel Pepys knew, and where, in my fiction, Matthew Quinton fought the flames threatening the Seraph! It was also reassuring to find that my description of the dimensions of the dockyard, e.g. how long it would have taken people to move from one side of it to the other, which I derived from plans and pictures of the yard, was borne out pretty much completely by the actual experience of walking the site. More photos of Deptford dockyard will be posted on the NDS Facebook page in the next few days.

I was also in Greenwich a couple of days earlier to welcome back to England the sternpiece of the Royal Charles, captured by the Dutch at Chatham in 1667, which is returning to form part of the forthcoming Royal River exhibition at the NMM (I’ve been invited to the royal opening of this by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, so hopefully will be able to provide a ‘sneak preview’ in a future post). I’ve covered the sternpiece, and provided a picture of it, in an earlier post, so I won’t dwell on the importance of this iconic item here. But the return itself wasn’t quite what I’d expected. We were due to go aboard HNlMS Holland, the newest ship in the Dutch Navy, at moorings off Greenwich, but arrived to find said moorings disconcertingly empty. It transpired that thick fog had prevented her coming up the Thames on time, so the whole event had been moved to the Queen’s House. At this point I still expected the event in question to consist of a few dozen museum and embassy people milling around. Instead, the lawn behind Queen’s House was filled with hundreds of people, large numbers of military and naval folk in dress uniform, a naval guard of honour, along with TV and press galore. We had an announcement that ‘the princes are coming’, and a few minutes later, they duly appeared – Prince Michael of Kent and the Prince of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne, both in flag officer uniforms. The band played, the dignitaries saluted and up rolled…a typical British furniture van, from which emerged typical British removal men, who proceeded to unload a very large box adorned with a picture of the sternpiece; and as is the way of British removal men, they did so with much grunting, scratching of heads and seemingly coming very close to dropping the whole thing off the back of the van. Nevertheless, the box duly emerged, the speeches were made (I’ll draw a veil over the number of basic historical howlers in one of them in particular) and the audience turned to the champagne, canapes and networking, which in my case involved talking about the volume of views of battles of the third Anglo-Dutch war that I’m editing for the Navy Records Society.

From a purely personal viewpoint, the return of the Royal Charles sternpiece is remarkably timely. She was the fleet flagship in the 1665 campaign and above all in the Battle of Lowestoft on 3 June, which forms the climax of ‘Quinton 3’, The Blast That Tears The Skies. Indeed, her duel with the Dutch flagship Eendracht leads to the dramatic event that gives the book its title. (Incidentally, several people have asked me about the origin of the title; it’s from the third verse of Rule, Britannia.) Several important scenes are set aboard the Royal Charles and quite a number of them are based on real events, such as a council of war that was attended by some of the most famous names of Restoration England and the Restoration Navy: King Charles II’s brother James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral and the future King James II & VII; Charles’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth; Prince Rupert of the Rhine; the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most famous Restoration rakes; Sir William Penn, father of the founder of Pennsylvania; and of course, in my version by Matthew Quinton too. They would have been sitting literally a few feet from the wonderful relic of the Restoration navy that will be on display at Greenwich this summer and which I strongly urge all of you in the UK to go and see – clutching copies of Blast of course!

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!

A Broadside More

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Cheating this week, I’m afraid…a fairly major work crisis, so no time to write a proper blog! But it’s all for a good cause, and there’ll be some exciting news about the ‘Quinton Journals’ coming soon. In the meantime, here’s a little ditty published in 1665. In fact, this serves a double purpose rather neatly – as well as saving me time, it provides a superb insight into the sorts of mentality, language and anti-Dutch xenophobia that form the backdrop to both The Mountain of Gold and The Blast That Tears The Skies. ‘Hogen Mogen’ was an English nickname for the Dutch, derived from the translation of ‘High Mightinesses’, the form of address used for the States-General of the United Provinces. However, it seems that the author had very little idea of what he was writing about. The action he describes bears little resemblance to the Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665, which forms the climax of The Blast That Tears The Skies, and his references to ‘Trump’ clearly refer to Admiral Maarten Tromp, who was killed in 1653 not long after (probably apocryphally) tying a broom to his mast to indicate he had swept the Channel, rather than to his son Cornelis, who was present at Lowestoft. The author is clearly also a rabid Cavalier who praises by name the two royal admirals, the Duke of York and Prince Rupert, but omits any similar mention of the former Parliamentarians, notably the Earl of Sandwich and Sir John Lawson. This tension between the two rival camps, deriving from the bitter legacies of the civil war, is a major plot theme in The Blast…

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.