Killigrew and the Sea Devil
Page 50
Brunel, meanwhile, really did design a ‘jet-propelled’ floating battery, to be sailed out of the opening bows of a specially converted collier (shades of the tanker Liparus in the film The Spy Who Loved Me!), for use in the siege of Sevastopol. Sadly – unlike the prefabricated hospital he designed – it was never constructed.
The Crimean War was also the first war to see the use of ‘infernal machines’, as sea mines were then known. The first models, designed by Professor Moritz Jacobi, were set off from the shore by electricity, although by the summer of 1855 the contact mines of Immanuel Nobel were in use. It was guilt over the use of his father’s explosives in the Crimean War that prompted Alfred Nobel – who invented dynamite in 1866 – to found his famous prizes.
Rear Admiral Michael Seymour (later Sir Michael) dredged one of Nobel’s mines up in his gig with Captain Hall, and took it on board the Duke of Wellington to show to Dundas. According to Captain Bartholomew J. Sulivan:
They all played with it; and Admiral Seymour took it to his ship, and on the poop had the officers round it examining it… Some of the officers remarked of the danger of it going off, and Admiral Seymour said, ‘O no. This is the way it would go off,’ and shoved the slide in with his finger… It instantly exploded, knocking down everyone around it.
Sulivan played a major role in the Baltic Campaigns: it was he who surveyed a channel through the Åland Islands, making the attack on Bomarsund possible in 1854; and in 1855 his surveying ship, HMS Merlin, went down in history as the first vessel ever to strike a mine; fortunately, the Russians did not put sufficient gunpowder in the devices to do any real damage.
The plan for the bombardment of Sveaborg was Sulivan’s. The bombardment lasted for forty-four hours, from 7 or 7.30 a.m. (sources vary as to the exact time) on 9 August to 3 a.m. on the 11th, and even then it was only stopped when the mortars began to wear out.
It may seem like an overly convenient device to have the officers of the garrison throw a ball on the night before the bombardment, allowing Killigrew and Aurélie to gain access to Sveaborg by posing as guests, but the ball is a matter of historical record. It was held in honour of the Grand Duke Konstantin, who was visiting at the time; one of the first casualties of the bombardment was the wife of a naval officer who was injured leaving the following morning. The grand duke himself seems to have escaped the bombardment uninjured.
There is a marked discrepancy between the quoted numbers of Russian casualties incurred by the bombardment: all too willing to be misinformed by their reluctant Finnish spies, the British claimed 2,000 had been killed, whereas the Russian insisted the only victim was a single Cossack. More realistic figures are given by the Finnish historian A. W. Rancken (55 killed and 204 wounded) and the Russian historian Borodkin (62 killed and 199 wounded).
William Don claimed in his memoir that it was the destruction of Sveaborg that convinced the Russians to come to terms the following year rather than risk a similar attack on Kronstadt, leaving St Petersburg open to bombardment. This is an exaggeration, certainly, but perhaps not as much of an exaggeration as all that. Previously the fall of Sevastopol has been seen as the turning point in the war, but from the point of view of the Tsarist government in St Petersburg, the Crimea was a far-flung outpost of the Russian empire, while the Gulf of Finland was right on their own doorstep. Only in recent years have historians begun to reassess the importance of the Baltic Campaign in the misnamed ‘Crimean’ War.
Acknowledgements
It’s time to knock on the head the old lie that writing novels, unlike writing film scripts, is not a collaborative process. While a novelist by definition spends most of his (or her) time sitting alone in a room telling himself (or herself) stories, we are all dependent on a variety of dedicated, talented and hard-working people who help the work in progress along to the stage where it is fit and ready for publication.
The past year has been particularly difficult for me, encompassing as it has the departure of my former editor, Sarah Keen, from Headline: a loss which at the time seemed quite bad enough, but was then totally eclipsed by the tragic death of my agent, James Hale. While neither could ever be replaced, full credit is due to Martin Fletcher of Headline and Andrew Hewson of Johnson & Alcock for bravely trying to fill their shoes as editor and agent respectively; both have proven themselves equal to the task.
Thanks are also due to Alastair Wilson and Yvonne Holland for keeping an eye on the technical and literary details respectively; and when one strays into the territory of the other, as they invariably do, I’m never less than delighted to discover that once again their sharp eyes and capacious minds have preserved me from humiliation; where mistakes do occur, the responsibility is all mine.
Thanks are also long overdue to Helena Towers, my publicist, whose enthusiasm, efficiency and overall niceness is a constant delight not only to myself but also to the editors, reviewers and booksellers with whom she brings me into contact.
Undying gratitude to Susan Yamamoto for the two maps and for being so supportive over the past few years. And an especial thanks to the League of Gentlemen – Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith – for permission to use the name and rules of ‘Go Johnny Go-Go-Go-Go’.
Finally, thanks to the following for inspiration: David Arnold, John Barry, Paul Bowers, Pierce Brosnan, John Buchan, Sean Connery, Graham Crowden, Roald Dahl, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Daphne du Maurier, Bruce Fierstein, Ian Fleming, George MacDonald Fraser, Jerry Goldsmith, Nikolai Gogol, Basil Greenhill and Anne Giffard, Bernard Herrmann, Aleksandr Herzen, Christopher Hibbert, Jack Higgins, Alfred Hitchcock, Lawrence Kasdan, Ernest Lehmann, Herbert Lom, Alistair MacLean, Richard Maibaum, Tom Mankiewicz, James Mason, John McTiernan, Roger Moore, Bill Nighy, Aleksandr Pushkin, L.T.C. Rolt, Julia Sawalha, Dr Seuss, Donald Thomas, Publius Vergilius Maro, Jules Verne and – last but by no means least – the late, great Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli.
Commander Christopher I. Killigrew
1824 – Born. 1837 – Entered the Navy. 1840 – Aide-de-Camp to Commodore Charles Napier in Syria. Distinguished himself at St Jean d’Acre. 1842 – Served at the capture of Woosung and Shanghae, and in the operations on the Yang-tse-Kiang. Distinguished himself at the storming of Ching-Kiang-Foo, and obtained in consequence his first commission. 1843 – Took part in an attack on a large piratical settlement on the Island of Borneo. 1845–7 – Active in the oppression of slavery. 1847 – Made a Lieutenant. Employed at the destruction of the Owodunni Barracoon. 1849 – Actively engaged against the pirates in the South China Sea. 1852–53 – Took part in Sir Edward Belcher’s Arctic Searching Expedition. Promoted to Commander in consequence. 1854 – Appointed to the Ramillies. Commander Killigrew’s person bears the marks of no fewer than eight wounds.
Killigrew R.N.
The Guinea Coast, 1847
Killigrew and the Golden Dragon
South China Sea, 1849
Killigrew and the Incorrigibles
The South Seas, 1850
Killigrew and the North-West Passage
The Arctic, 1852–3
Killigrew’s Run
The Baltic, 1854
Killigrew and the Sea Devil
The Gulf of Finland, 1855
First published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by Headline
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
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Copyright © Jonathan Lunn, 2005
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A CIP catalog
ue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781911591917
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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