Read The Mountain of Gold Online
Authors: J. D. Davies
My account of Tangier as a British colony is based on many sources, notably EMG Routh's venerable
Tangier: England's Lost Atlantic Outpost.
Fortunately, the seventeenth century River Gambia, along with its flora, fauna, social system and rumoured existence of gold mines or mountains, was described in great detail by several contemporary travellers: I relied especially on the accounts provided by Jean Barbot and Richard Jobson, published by the Hakluyt Society, together with the original manuscript journal of Holmes' first expedition and Zook's
The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa.
The character of Brian Doyle O'Dwyer is fictitious, but it is not inconceivable that someone very much like him could have existed. Charles the Second's leniency toward plausible rogues was a byword—hence his treatment of Colonel Blood following the theft of his crown jewels, to which Matthew refers, and his decision to award the command of a royal warship to Bartholomew Sharpe, a genuine 'pirate of the Caribbean'. Many European renegades (about 15,000 at any one time, in fact) served in the corsair fleets of the Barbary regencies of North Africa, and both the adventurous spirit and ferocious fighting qualities of the corsairs were legendary. The attack on Baltimore in 1631, by no means the furthest flung of their attacks, happened very much in the way that O'Dwyer describes it, and is still remembered in that corner of County Cork; it has recently been the subject of a book,
The Stolen Village
by Des Ekins. Whether the corsairs were unscrupulous pirates preying on Christian shipping, or were merely responding to constant Christian duplicity and treaty violations, remains a matter for the verdict of history. The corsairs, and the British response to them, are covered in my non-fiction book,
Pepys'
Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649-89,
and in Adrian Tinniswood's
The Pirates of Barbary
(2010).
The Seigneur de Montnoir is a fictional character, but I have based my account of the Knights of Malta closely on the record; for example, during the latter part of the seventeenth century French knights certainly dominated the galley fleet of the Order, with many of them later going on to high commands in the French navy. Further afield, French bribes were very much a feature of political life, and of the royal court, during Charles the Second's reign; several of the king's mistresses were in receipt of them. The king's treatment of the Earl and Countess of Ravensden was inspired very loosely by the story of his principal mistress, Lady Castlemaine (later the Duchess of Cleveland), her cuckolded husband and their son, later the first Duke of Grafton, whose paternity was debated for the first seven years of his life until the king belatedly acknowledged him and changed his surname from Palmer to Fitzroy. It would not have been unlikely for a nobleman like Roger d'Andelys to be given command of such a great French warship as
Le Téméraire
in the 1660s, but the French navy actually had no ship of that name until 1671. How the name
(sans
accents) came to be borne by one of Nelson's ships at Trafalgar, later becoming the subject of 'Britain's favourite painting', is another story.
*
The
Masque of Alfred,
which culminates in 'Rule, Britannia', was not written by James Thompson and set to music by Thomas Arne, who was indeed the son of an upholsterer of Covent Garden, until 1740; but I could not resist the modest anachronism of bringing the song's composition forward by a few years.
Mariners might object that my account of the near collision between the
Seraph
and the 'mystery ship' in the Thames flies in the face of the time-honoured 'rules of the road' for sailing vessels. In fact, there is little certainty over when those rules first became 'rules' at all, and it was certainly the case that in the seventeenth century, British royal warships expected merchant ships to give way to them, and to 'salute the flag', within the broadly defined 'British seas'. There were also many collisions in confined waters, and this element of the plot was inspired by the fact that one of the frigates on the first Holmes expedition, the
Kinsale,
was badly damaged in a collision with a merchantman in very much the same waters while putting to sea. Finally, the poignant epitaph on the grave of Henrietta Quinton actually exists: it can be found on a memorial in the parish church of Clare, Suffolk.
Acknowledgements
In writing
The Mountain of Gold,
I have been fortunate once again to be able to call upon the assistance of the other leading authorities on the Restoration navy. In particular, Richard Endsor and Frank Fox provided detailed information on the nature and capabilities of seventeenth century warships and were always willing to provide advice; our discussion about the best way to sabotage a Fifth Rate frigate proved particularly memorable! Peter Le Fevre assisted with other aspects of the book, and once again, David Jenkins ensured that my descriptions of the sailing qualities of square-rigged ships remained within the bounds of possibility. I am grateful to Chris Mazeika of the Master Shipwright's House at Deptford for providing me with a detailed insight into the layout and surviving structures of the dockyard. Servee Palmans introduced me to some particularly interesting recesses of the Dutch language, while my former colleague Andrew Wilson of
www.classicspage.com
followed up his translation of Harry Potter into ancient Greek by providing me with the Latin translation for Phineas Musk's introduction of Tristram Quinton.
Particular thanks are due to Peter and Rosie Buckman of the Ampersand Agency for keeping me 'on task', to my editor Henry Howard for his constructive and invariably helpful input, to Tom Bouman of my American publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for rigorous suggestions that undoubtedly improved the book, and to Ben Yarde-Buller of Old Street Publishing for his continuing confidence in 'The Journals of Matthew Quinton'. Finally, once again my greatest debt is to Wendy, my partner, both for her steadfast moral support and for her detailed advice on many aspects of the story. The female characters in particular owe much to her insight!
J. D. Davies
Bedfordshire, March 2011
Footnotes
* Impressively told by Sam Willis in his
The Fighting Temeraire
(2009).
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