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The remarkable historical backdrop to the wreck of the Schiedam includes the involvement of none other than Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist of 1660s London, who in his “day job” was Secretary to the Admiralty and a passionate promoter of the Royal Navy, without in any way being a nautical man himself. Having been appointed under Lord Dartmouth to help oversee the evacuation of Tangier—the port inherited by Charles II as a dowry with his Portuguese wife Catherine of Braganza, but which had proved disastrously expensive to maintain—he decided to write a diary again for the first time in almost fifteen years. The most recent edition, The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys (edited by Edwin Chappell for the Navy Records Society, 1935), contains other primary documents, as does the other main source, Enid Routh’s Tangier, England’s Lost Atlantic Outpost, 1661–1684 (London, 1912), including the account of the loss of hand grenades to the Moors in 1680 at Charles Fort outside the city walls that Jack remembers during his dive in Chapter 3 and Pepys in Chapter 9 (Routh, op. cit., p. 179).
The Tangier diary is far more prosaic than Pepys’s earlier diary, and is important not so much as a literary achievement as a unique day-to-day account of the final dramatic months at Tangier, including Pepys’s excursions to negotiate with the besieging Moors; but there are occasional flashes of the old Pepys in his acerbic comments about some of the officials at Tangier, and about his own health and private affairs. He reserves his most damning judgments for the governor, Colonel Kirke, who on 7 October took Pepys to see some “old Roman little aqueducts,” and whose wife we glimpse in Chapter 8. Pepys’s mention of the Knights of Malta—“Got a copy of the letter of thanks from the Knights of Malta to our King on the redemption of some of them with the rest of the Christian slaves” (24 July 1683, in Chappell, op. cit., p. 319)—was my inspiration for the inclusion of the Knights in the storyline of this novel.
One of Pepys’s responsibilities was to assist in negotiations with Ali Ben Abdala, the chieftain of the nearby town of Alkazar, the man chosen by the Moroccan sultan to besiege Tangier. The Alcaïd’s fictional son in Chapter 9 and his shooting skill is inspired by Pepys’s account of one occasion when they were joined by Ali Ben Abdala’s son, “a pretty youth,” who “exercised very neatly” when there was “great shooting with the small shot” (28 September 1683).
Pepys mentions the Schiedam and other fluyts or “flyboats” several times in his diary, but his most extensive reference to the ship is among his correspondence in the Admiralty Papers, held in the National Archives, where he concerns himself with the salvage and financial affairs after the wrecking—including, for reasons that are not easy to explain, considerable efforts to exonerate and reinstate the pay of the lamentable Captain Fish, who “lies abed and cries instead of having saved any of the wreck.”
Among the nefarious activities known to have taken place in Tangier was coin-clipping, in which Spanish gold and silver hammered coins, already irregularly shaped and often clipped at the mint to achieve the desired weight, were clipped further to remove bullion; the alteration of coins in this way was the basis for my idea that some merchants might have overstamped their coins with marks such as the Star of David, something that was further inspired by the Jewish merchant tokens used in the Caribbean from at least the eighteenth century onward, including those of the Brandão family of Jamaica (R. D. Leonard, “Tokens of Jewish merchants of the Caribbean before 1920,” in R. J. Doty and J. M. Kleeberg, Money of the Caribbean, The American Numismatic Society, 2006, pp. 219–48).
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In the historical backdrop to this story, the Inquisition is not the only agency to have had anti-Semitic policies; at Tangier, the “Barbary Jews” were banished in 1677 by the then governor, Sir Palmes Fairborne, though in 1680 a few were allowed back in, and in 1683, shortly before Pepys arrived, Governor Kirke decreed “that the trading Jews of Barbary must lodge in tents outside the walls and only come in by day; only those of proved fidelity might sleep in the town” (Routh, op. cit., p. 276). Whether or not Portuguese Jewish merchants were present in Tangier at the time of the evacuation is unknown, but given the previous Portuguese ownership of the town and the extent of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora, it seems likely.
João Rodrigues Brandão—owner of the fictional Star of David stamp—actually existed; he was my ancestor, through my four-times-great-grandmother Rebecca Brandon, part of the Sephardic community in London. The Brandão family were conversos or “New Christians” in Viseu and Porto in northern Portugal, where they prospered as merchants but lived under the constant threat of persecution by the Inquisition for their concealed faith. Because the men of the Inquisition were fastidious record-keepers and much of their documentation survives in the Portuguese National Archives, it has been possible to build up a detailed picture of the Brandão family in the seventeenth century—including João’s considerable wealth and his interests in the tobacco trade with Brazil, and the long periods that he and his wife and children spent imprisoned at Coimbra. João’s grandson Daniel, Rebecca’s father, fled to London in the mid eighteenth century, and others of the family escaped to France, Holland, and Jamaica, where the Brandons of Port Royal and Kingston were part of the community of Jewish merchants who provided brokerage for the pirates, and where many of their descendants continue to live today.
The buildings of the Inquisition still exist at Coimbra, including the tribunal chamber, the cells where João and his family were imprisoned, and the square where the condemned endured their auto-da-fé, either an act of public penance or burning at the stake, the latter being the fate suffered by at least one of my Brandão ancestors in the sixteenth century. In common with most Portuguese Jews, they would probably originally have been expelled from Spain in 1492, and would have traced themselves back to the Jews who had fled the Holy Land during the Roman period; it is conceivable that they might have included “Christian Jews,” sympathetic to Christianity, as suggested in this novel, and that they might have lived in the northeastern region of Spain.
One of the Portuguese Christians sympathetic to the Jews in the late seventeenth century was Father António Vieira, a Jesuit whose report to the Pope on the conditions that he had experienced when he himself had been imprisoned resulted in the Inquisition in Portugal being suspended from 1674 to 1681. The words quoted by João Brandão to the tribunal in Chapter 10 are authentically those of Vieira. Whether or not Vieira went to Potosi, in present-day Bolivia, to the Cerro Rico, the Mountain of Riches, is unknown, but in Brazil he devoted himself indefatigably to the improvement of conditions for the indigenous people and the downtrodden, earning the name the Apostle of Brazil. According to most accounts, he died in Salvador, Brazil, persecuted in his last years by those who wished to undermine him, having left Portugal for the last time in 1681 when the Inquisition was reinstated.
For Vieira, as for the Pilgrim Fathers, the New World would have offered the possibility of a “Celestial City,” as Pepys’s contemporary John Bunyan termed it in The Pilgrim’s Progress; the attraction would have been heightened as religious persecution in Europe plumbed new depths of barbarity. At the same time, the behavior of Europeans unleashed in the New World, some previously morally constrained, others drawn to it precisely because they were not, would have shown the temptations and dangers of such places—with Port Royal, like Tangier, being the antithesis of the Celestial City—and led to the redoubling of efforts, religiously motivated or otherwise, to ensure that the dark side of human nature did not win the day.
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The circumstances of present-day mining at Cerro Rico in Bolivia, including the employment of boys, the health problems that they suffer, and the veneration of El Tío, the devil-like spirit of the underworld, are much as described in this novel. Few examples of the equipment of the seventeenth-century mint survive, having become redundant with the adoption of milling in the eighteenth century, but those that do exist can be seen in the collections of the Casa de la Moneda at Potosi. During the Spanish col
onial era, as now, most of the mine workers were descendants of the Inca peoples of the Andes, but a proportion of them—as well as those used to man the mills in the mint, referred to by their masters as “human donkeys”—were African slaves. The mass grave in Chapter 19 is based on an actual mass grave discovered in 2014 in Potosi, containing some four hundred skeletons of the colonial era that may have included both slaves and free laborers who worked in the mines. In 2011, a large sinkhole appeared at the top of the mountain, a result of a collapse within the huge complex of tunnels below, so a scenario on the scale of the collapse in Chapter 22 of this novel is a very real possibility.
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Laurentius was a deacon of Rome who was murdered during the persecution of Christians by the Emperor Valerian in AD 258. The circumstances of his death as presented in the Prologue are drawn from Church tradition, including the edicts of the emperor ordering the confiscation of Church treasures, the attempt by Laurentius to distribute them among the people, and his famous defiance of the city prefect, when he proclaimed that the true treasures of the Church were the poor and the suffering, and that “the Church is truly rich, far richer than your emperor.” His execution by roasting on a gridiron was one of the more horrific martyrdoms of the Roman period. He is said to have given the Holy Chalice—the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, also known in medieval tradition as the Holy Grail—to a Roman soldier named Proselius, with instructions for him to take it for safekeeping to Laurentius’s home-town in Spain. The same tradition states that the cup had been brought to Rome in the first century AD by St. Peter, and that it had been passed to Laurentius by Pope Sixtus II before his own martyrdom earlier in the same persecution.
Nothing else is known about Proselius except that he too was said to have been Spanish. My account of his rescue of the Chalice from the catacombs is fictional, but the description of the underground passages and tombs is closely based on my own exploration of the Catacomb of Callixtus while researching this novel. Proselius’s destination in Spain may have been Osca, modern Huesca in the northeast near the Pyrenees, the town thought to have been the home of Laurentius. As for the Chalice itself, assuming it existed, its most likely appearance is much as Jack surmises in the final chapter, a simple pottery vessel rather than one of glass or metal, and certainly not the bejeweled Grail of Arthurian legend. Intact examples of goblets and bowls of the type that may have been used at an event such as the Last Supper were found in the caves at Qumran, site of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and can be seen on display in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
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The Black Swan and the slave-market discovery at Port Royal in Jamaica in this novel are fictional, as is the island Santo Cristo del Tesoro. However, the wreck is based on an actual discovery made by a team from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Port Royal in the 1990s. During the excavation of a group of buildings some sixty meters from the 1692 shoreline, divers found the lower timbers of a ship that had clearly been driven over the wharf and up the street during the earthquake, ramming into the wall of a building before coming to rest. It is most likely to have been HMS Swan, a vessel known to have been careened at the time and therefore out of ballast, and more easily lifted above the wharf by the wave. Like my fictional Black Swan, HMS Swan was originally a Dutch vessel, captured by the English in 1672 when the two countries were still at war, but rather than being a pirate ship she had been used against the pirates, carrying out numerous patrols during her years of service in the Caribbean.
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Stories of lost treasure abound in Cornwall, many of them based on ships carrying bullion known to have been wrecked off this coast. One of the more persistent concerns Henry Avery, “King of the Pirates,” notorious for ransacking the Grand Mughal’s fleet in the Arabian Sea in 1695, for further filling his coffers in the Caribbean, and then retiring with his treasure allegedly intact. Avery was a Cornishman, born probably near Plymouth in 1659, and began his career in the Royal Navy, perhaps serving as a junior officer by the time of the evacuation of Tangier. Whether or not he was present at the evacuation is unknown, but the suggestion in the novel that he may have been given temporary command of a transport vessel is consistent with other junior officers being given commands at the time. After leaving the navy, he became an illicit slave trader—the basis for my fictional arrangement with the Howard family, in which he absconded with money meant to underwrite legitimate trade—and then embarked in earnest on his career as a pirate, supposedly amassing more treasure in the few years he was active in the mid 1690s than any other pirate before or since.
The involvement of the fictional Howard family in Atlantic trade at this period is based on the real-life activities of the Gale family of Whitehaven, who are ancestors of mine. Four brothers who were all sea captains, including my ancestor Matthias Gale (1677–1751), began as officers in the Royal Navy but then became merchant captains and prospered in the tobacco trade with the American colonies, where they owned land. Matthias’s brother Lowther, the basis for the fictional Lowther Howard in the novel, is the only one of the brothers known to have ventured into the slave trade, though unsuccessfully—his ship the Nancy Galley was taken by an enemy privateer on his one and only voyage to the Guinea coast, in 1711. However, another of the brothers, George Gale (1671–1712)—whose wife was the grandmother of George Washington—had slaves on his plantation in Maryland, and the fact that anyone prospering from the tobacco trade at this period was ultimately profiting from slave labor is the basis for Jack’s disquiet about his own family’s wealth in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both Matthias and George were present at the first trial of pirates by the Virginia Admiralty Court, and witnessed the hanging of pirates in cages at Cape Henry in Virginia; the fourth of the brothers, John Gale, was captured in 1726 with his ship the John and Betty by the pirate Willam Fly, whose execution in chains that year is often seen to mark the end of the “golden age” of piracy.
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Henry Avery disappeared mysteriously in the Caribbean, never to be heard of again, but one tradition is that he returned to Cornwall with his treasure, buried it, and died in obscurity without ever having recovered his loot. The parish record that provides the key to Jack’s discovery in Kynance Cove is fictional, but is based on an actual Victorian account of wrecks off the adjoining parish to the north. The idea that Avery’s treasure might have been lost in a shipwreck, and not buried, was inspired by my own explorations at the cove, and by actual wrecks known to have taken place there. In 2014, I took my gear down the cliff path and dived through the Devil’s Bellows, just as Jack does. I was chasing rumors of a seventeenth-century Dutch wreck in the gully at the seaward end of the tunnel, and among the rocky ledges I did indeed find fragments of blue-and-white Delftware consistent with that date. There was too much sand in the gully to determine whether other artifacts might survive, but the idea of treasure off Kynance is not just speculation—a few hundred meters away, at Rill Cove, is a wreck of the early seventeenth century where divers have found thousands of Spanish colonial pieces of eight, many of them of silver from the Cerro Rico in Bolivia, where the action in the later part of this novel takes place. The Rill Cove wreck is a protected archaeological site under UK law, but Mark Milburn and I are licensed to dive there and are planning renewed investigations as soon as the sand levels drop enough to reveal artifacts and allow excavation.
For me, linking these real-life discoveries of my own with Jack’s adventures represents a natural confluence, to the point where the two have become almost seamlessly intertwined. From the outset, a guiding tenet of these novels has been that the diving and the archaeology should be based as closely as possible on my own experiences, and it is exciting for me now to draw this inspiration from ongoing projects and not just from past expeditions. Much of the investigation of the Schiedam took place in real time as I was researching and writing this novel, with days being divided between writing and diving, and calls coming in about new discoveries just
as Jack experiences them in the novel. This relationship gives my own life and my fictional imagination a dynamic that might never have happened had I not embarked on these novels almost fifteen years ago. In the final chapter of this novel, Father Pereira talks of Jack being a dreamer by day, and of being able to act on those dreams to bring the adventures of his imagination to life; after ten novels in this series and numerous adventures of my own along the way, living Jack’s life for me has become far more than just an act of the imagination.
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The edict that coins of Charles II should be buried in Tangier, remembered by Pepys in Chapter 8, is from Josiah Burchett’s A Complete History of the Most Remarkable Transactions at Sea (London, 1720, p. 405), and is quoted by Chappell in the frontispiece of The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys (op. cit.). The entries from Pepys’s diary in Chapter 5 about feeling abominable and in Chapter 7 about artifacts are both fictional, though inspired by his actual writings in the surviving Tangier diary; that is also the source of the order of Lord Dartmouth quoted in Chapter 7. The fictional entries for 1684 are possible because Pepys’s actual diary for that final period at Tangier, if it ever existed, is lost.
The proclamation for Avery’s arrest that Jack reads in Chapter 4 is an actual document, issued by the Privy Council of Scotland on 18 August 1696, as is the late-seventeenth-century chart of west Cornwall by van Keulen that Jack has on his wall; both can be seen on my website. You can also see images of the coin, videos of me diving through the Devil’s Bellows and on the wreck of the Schiedam, extensive accounts of the Brandão family and the Inquisition in Portugal, and much else related to the novel, as well as updates on the exciting discoveries that my team and I are continuing to make on shipwrecks and other underwater sites around the world.
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