Tyger

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Of all the characters in history I’ve come across while researching the sixteen volumes in the Kydd series to date, there’s been none like Rear Admiral Sir Home Riggs Popham KCB (as he eventually became). He served under the Duke of York in the army, was a scientist, secret-service manipulator, fellow of the Royal Society, inventor of Nelson’s Trafalgar code of signals, originator of the Sea Fencibles and a Member of Parliament all through the time of his contact with Kydd-but never once did he take his ship against the enemy.

Yet, gifted as he was, for some reason he had a genius for making enemies-from the visceral hatred of St Vincent and nearly the entire Board of Admiralty to many of the highest in the land. The closest I could come to putting my finger on it is to conceive that he never bothered to conceal his intelligence in his dealings with lesser mortals. I kept coming across asides like “incurably plausible” and “he suffers from an excess of cleverality.” Whatever the reason, his court-martial was the sensation of the age, leaving none in the land without an opinion. It polarised the navy and Kydd’s experiences were typical. You’ve not heard the last of this cryptic figure in Kydd’s future adventures …

Despite his taking against my hero I’ve to confess much admiration for John Jervis, Earl St Vincent. Denied the life of a sailor by his parents, he nevertheless ran away to sea. His service spanned the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic War, and he was still standing at Waterloo. His devotion to the navy was intense and unwavering. When Britain was hysterical at the threat of invasion he famously said, “I do not say, my lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea!” His uncompromising stand on mutiny and discipline made him much feared, but the same approach nearly cost England the war when, as first lord of the Admiralty, he ruthlessly moved against corruption in the royal dockyards and the timber cartel that was manipulating prices for the most vital raw material of all. They responded essentially with an embargo, and the crusty lord, utterly refusing to give way, provoked an instant crisis. It took all the diplomacy of Nelson himself to resolve it. Such a man of indomitable black-and-white views was never going to be biddable in politics and he was removed from office subsequently.

And I couldn’t resist the piquant tableau of the founder of Australia, Captain Arthur Phillip, in his old age acting the press-gang chief, hating it but doing his duty for his country in its time of peril. Incidentally, recent research has thrown up that, almost certainly, he was a paid secret agent of the Crown in deeds of derring-do that had considerable effect on the conduct of the war.

In the course of working on this tale I became particularly fascinated by my Arctic research. There was indeed half-hearted thinking to resurrect Archangel to act as a fall-back port if the Danes sided with the French to close off the crucial Baltic trade, but as it turned out, events took another course. Nevertheless, with my modern charts and pilot to hand, I stand amazed and humbled at the sheer grit and fortitude of those who voyaged in these regions in days of sail. In conversation with W. K. De Vaney, an Arctic hand of no small experience, it was eye-opening to pore over the great narratives of the historic Arctic to reveal what had to be borne to allow routine human existence in those latitudes.

Trade ventures there in Kydd’s day were mainly locally subscribed from England’s north. One of these was merchant broker John Bellingham, whom Kydd meets in a Russian gaol. He’d gone to sea as a midshipman in an East Indiaman and been caught up in a mutiny that sent the ship ashore. On return home he set up as a factor and businessman and was signally unsuccessful, ending up in Archangel, where he got on the wrong side of the Dutch, who probably framed him. Languishing for years in prison, he conceived a violent hatred of the British government, which he believed had failed him, and in 1812 sought revenge by killing Spencer Perceval in the lobby of the House of Commons, the only prime minister in British history to be assassinated. His friends’ attempts to have him declared insane failed and Bellingham was publicly hanged.

In this stage of Kydd’s career the greatest military drama was undoubtedly Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign to the east of the continent, caused by Trafalgar and its consequences, which prevented his breaking out of Europe. A truly astonishing canvas of millions of men clashing under arms, spread over nearly a dozen countries, it was vastly bigger than the Peninsular War that was to follow and only ended with Bonaparte’s disastrous retreat from Moscow. The part Kydd plays in the fevered times before Friedland is based on contemporary events, the little-known heroism of the Royal Navy in the defence of Danzig and that of Kolberg at the time. England does not remember them but their part is certainly revered in Germany-Danzig eventually fell but the navy’s desperate help, including the night spent navigating under fire of a powder barge to the besieged, is cherished, while with their help Kolberg held out to the end.

The Prussian hero of Kolberg, Gneisenau, has a grand statue still venerated in the now Polish city of Kolobrzeg. The brooding but talented Gerhard von Scharnhorst, whom we see as chief of general staff to Blucher, afterwards joined with him and a brilliant pupil, Carl von Clausewitz, to transform Prussian military culture into the most feared in Europe, going on to defeat France and enter Paris as a prelude to taking all of Germany under one flag.

Ironically, in the Second World War these men and their epics of resistance were commemorated by the German Navy in their famous battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and were held out by Hitler as an example to follow in the most expensive Nazi film ever made, in the calamitous final year of the Third Reich-the Royal Navy, of course, held to a humble walk-on part.

The Vistula Spit, the Polish Mierzeja Wislana, as it is now known, is a noted vacation spot, but Pillau and Konigsberg have had a different fate. The port is now within the Kaliningrad Oblast, a peculiar piece of cut-off Russian territory carved out of southern Lithuania for the sole purpose of securing Pillau-now Baltiysk-as an ice-free port for Russia’s Baltic Fleet. Most of the town and its red star-shaped fort are therefore now forbidden to foreigners. Konigsberg, with its rich heritage, now Kaliningrad, saw grievous tragedy in the Second World War but many relics of this past remain, despite strenuous efforts at Russification.

All in all I stand amazed at the range and breadth of what happened after Trafalgar in eastern Europe, with Napoleon at the height of his powers and astride these antique untouched lands, like a colossus. I can promise even more in the next tale, as Kydd and the navy are called upon to stand alone before the conqueror …

To all those who assisted me in the research for this book I am deeply grateful. My appreciation also goes to my editors at Hodder amp; Stoughton, Oliver Johnson and Anne Perry, and their creative art/design team; and copy editor Hazel Orme, who has brought her meticulous blue pencil to bear on the Kydd series right from the debut title. And, as always, heartfelt thanks to my wife and literary partner, Kathy-and my literary agent Carole Blake.