Testament

Acknowledgments

I’m very grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi of LBA; to my editors, Sherise Hobbs at Headline in London and Peter Wolverton at Thomas Dunne Books in New York; to my former editor Martin Fletcher and to Ann Verrinder Gibbins and Jane Selley for their continuing excellent work on my books; to the rest of the teams at Headline and at Thomas Dunne Books, including Beth Eynon, Christina Demosthenous, Emily Gowers, and Emma Stein; to Alison Bonomi and Ajda Vucicevic at LBA; to Nicki Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Jenny Robson, Simone Smith, and Alice Natali at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; and to my many foreign publishers and translators.

As with my other novels in this series, much of the diving and archaeology that I’ve written about here is based on my own experiences. My brother Alan has been my companion on many wreck dives in recent years, and his photo of me underwater can be seen in the design cover of this book. Mark Milburn dived with me in Gunwalloe Cove in Cornwall when we discovered the wreck of the Grip, and since then we’ve found much older wrecks in those waters. My excavations at Carthage were carried out under the auspices of the Carthage Museum and were funded by the British Academy, the Cambridge University Faculty of Classics, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. I’m very grateful to the staff of the National Archives at Kew and the archivist of the Clan Line for assisting with my research on convoys off West Africa. I owe much to my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, for having talked to me about his wartime experiences as a Merchant Navy officer. My research on the Abyssinia campaign benefited from assistance I received at the Royal Engineers Library in Chatham, the Cambridge University Library, and the India Office Collections of the British Library, and I’m also grateful to Heidelberg University Library for allowing me to see the original tenth-century manuscript of the Periplus of Hanno. Lastly, I owe a special thanks to my daughter for suggesting that we visit Bletchley Park, and for freediving with me off Cornwall just as Rebecca does with Jack in this novel.