Tide of War (42 page)

When he had gone Nathan poured himself another glass and ran his eyes over the casualty list again. Shaw of course and Mr. Midshipman Meadows and others he had never got to know and now never would. Then he saw the name of Kerr. The captain's servant, who had chosen to stay with the ship and serve under the purser. And there was Declan Keane at the very end. Nathan thought for a moment and then he found pen and ink and wrote the name of Dermot Quinn at the bottom of the list.

Then he picked up the letter from his mother. It was thicker than she usually wrote. She was not a great one for writing letters and he wondered if it would contain news of the divorce—but she had enclosed another letter with it and he saw with a shock that it was from Mary Wollstonecraft. It was addressed to his mother but he saw after reading the first page why she had sent it to him.

I pray that your son Nathan may still be alive and in good health and then when you next see him, or write to
him, you will give him my good wishes and inform him that I have received a letter purporting to be from his dear friend and mine, Sara, Countess of Turenne, who was believed to have died upon the guillotine.

The letter was sent from the Vendée several months since and reached me in Le Havre by a most circuitous route, the region being plunged into the most violent conflict between royalist rebels and troops loyal to the Republic. It is, as far as I can tell, in Sara's hand—though I do not know it well and have no papers with which to compare it. However, it contains details of her escape from the Plaice du Trône where she was to be executed among the last of those condemned in the time of the Terror.

According to this account she and another prisoner, also a woman, managed to free their hands and jump from the cart as it approached the square. Her companion was apprehended by the guards but Sara escaped with the aid of some among the crowd who smuggled her from Paris that same night. Believing herself still to be in the greatest peril she made her way by degrees to the Vendée where she felt herself to be safe from pursuit. However, the situation there is extremely volatile and the region is under martial law which is why she has been unable to communicate news of her escape to her friends and most especially to her young son whom she still believes to be in Paris. It also makes it impossible for me to verify this account or to write back.

However, I am assured that Nathan will wish to know of this news as soon as possible and that she sends him her love and her hope that they will meet again.

That is all I know for the present and all I have time to write but I hope shortly to be in England when I will hope to bring you more news from

Your very dear friend,

Mary Imlay.

Nathan sat for a long, long moment holding the letter in his hand. The blood had drained from his face. He felt a mixture of emotions. There was joy—somewhere—but it was buried under a weight of doubt, and a terrible anxiety. How long since the letter had been written? He turned it over in his hands. November 5th, 1794. Over three months ago. And how many months before that had Sara written her own letter? If it
was
Sara.

On the deck above he heard the sounds of the men at the capstan and the sound of the fiddler finding his tune … And then they began to sing. And somehow news of their destination must have made itself known to them—through Gabriel most likely—for they were singing the song of homecoming.

Farewell and adieu to you Spanish ladies,

Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain

For we've orders to sail for old England

Though we hope in a short time to see you again.

And now the great stamp and shout as they put their backs into the capstan:

Oooooh—We'll rant and we'll roar like true British sailors,

We'll rant and we'll roar all on the salt sea,

Until we strike soundings in the channel of old England,

From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues.

The Tide of War
is a novel but many of the events described are based on contemporary accounts of historical events and I've used several characters who were involved in them. Readers might like to know who was real and who was not and what parts of the novel are based on actual events. So …

In 1794, when the book starts, the French Revolution was five years old and had more or less run its course. The French had guillotined King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, and established a Republic based on the principles of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality. This had resulted in war with the rest of Europe—which was still, on the whole, ruled by kings and queens, emperors and empresses. Faced with a war for their survival and undermined by royalists and dissidents in France itself, the leaders of the Revolution resorted to a rule of Terror.

By the summer of 1794, the majority of Frenchmen and women had had more than enough of this bloodletting. Robespierre and his closest allies on the Committee of Public Safety were overthrown in the coup of Thermidor and a new, more moderate government took power. But the war continued.

At the beginning of
The Tide of War
the rival armies had reached a position of stalemate and Britain decided to take advantage of its naval supremacy by launching an attack on the French possessions
in the West Indies. A major armada was being prepared—the biggest ever to leave the shores of Britain up to that date. The rest is fiction—but I've used two real-life characters who played a significant, if shady, part in the true history of these times.

One of them is Baron Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet—a native of Flanders—who was Governor-General of Louisiana and West Florida, then part of the vast Spanish Empire in North America, covering most of the present-day U.S.A. from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean and from Mexico to the Canadian border and beyond.

Carondelet fought a losing battle against the encroachments of the French and the British and, more particularly, the rapidly expanding population of the United States. In the National Archives of Cuba (No. 48 Secret, Seccion de Floridas Legajos 2, 11) there is a despatch from Carondelet expressing his fear of “the immoderate ambition of a new people, adventurous and hostile to all subjection, who have gone on, gathering and multiplying in the silence of peace since the recognition of the independence of the United States.” In his letter to the Duke of Alcudia, Secretary of State in Madrid, Carondelet is revealed as something of a prophet (the Spanish at the time would have called him a Jonah). This is what he writes about the people of the newly independent United States of America:

This vast and restless population, progressively driving the Indian tribes before them and upon us, seek to possess themselves of all the vast regions which the Indians occupy between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Gulf of Mexico and the Apalache
[sic]
mountains, thus becoming our neighbours at the same time that they demand with menaces the free navigation of the Mississippi … Their roving spirit and the readiness with which these people procure sustenance and shelter, facilitates rapid settlement. A rifle and a little cornmeal in a bag is sufficient for an American wandering alone in the woods for a month; with the rifle he kills wild cattle
and deer for food and also defends himself against the savages; the cornmeal soaked serves as bread; with tree-trunks placed transversely he forms a house, and even an impregnable fort against the Indians; the cold does not terrify him and when the family grows weary of one locality it moves to another and settles there with the same ease … Who shall warrant that our few inhabitants will not unite with joy and eagerness with men who, offering them their help and protection for the securing of independence, self-government and self-taxation, will flatter them with the spirit of liberty and the hope of free, extensive and lucrative commerce?

One of the men the Governor-General refers to was an American called Gilbert Imlay.

Imlay began his career as an officer in Washington's army, fighting for independence from the British. He was thought to have turned traitor and become a British spy but it seems likely that he was part of a select band of secret agents working for General Washington, a kind of pioneer CIA known as “Washington's Boys.”

After the war, Imlay followed the great pioneer Daniel Boone across the Appalachians into the territories that became Kentucky and Tennessee and he bought 17,000 acres of land on the Licking River. In the hope of encouraging immigration to the area—and enhancing the value of this land—he wrote a book:
A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America,
published in London by Debret in 1792. But his enthusiasm did not stop with literature. He was one of the men Carondelet feared were planning to invade the region to “liberate” it from Spanish rule. Fearful that their activities would bring war between Spain and the United States, President Washington ordered the arrest of the leading conspirators and Imlay disappeared for a while. He is suspected of being employed as a Spanish agent in Florida under the name
Gilberto,
or
Agent Number Thirty-Seven
—though it is possible he was always
working secretly for Washington. But at any rate, in 1792 he turned up in Revolutionary France.

In 1793, when France declared war on both England and Spain, Imlay set himself up in Le Havre and Paris as a shipping agent, importing goods past the British blockade. He also became the lover of Mary Wollstonecraft, the British pioneer feminist who had moved to Paris to write about the Revolution and found herself in danger of imprisonment as an enemy alien. As Imlay's “wife”—no-one knows for certain whether they were married or not—Wollstonecraft became an American citizen and continued to live in France throughout the time of the Terror. In May, 1794, she gave birth to Imlay's child in Le Havre but shortly after this Imlay moved to London where he began an affair with an actress living in Charlotte Street. His activities over the winter of 1794-95 remain elusive. We know only that Mary wrote increasingly desperate letters to him from Le Havre, begging him to rejoin her and their child.

There is no evidence that he was either working for the British or that he returned to North America—but nor is there any doubt that his intrigues continued. In the Paris
Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Louisiane et Florides 1792-1803,
there are two documents entitled “Observations du Capitain Imlay” and “Memoire sur la Louisiane,” relating Imlay's plans for the invasion and conquest of Spanish Louisiana and New Orleans, written during the Terror in 1792 and submitted to Lazare Carnot, the military expert on the Committee of Public Safety. It is these plans that form the basis for the plot of
The Tide of War.

John Dew, British ambassador in Havana, Richard Gott, Hal Klepak and Tim Marchant for sharing their knowledge of Cuba, past and present; to Fizz Carr for sharing her knowledge of sheep on the Sussex Downs; to Cate Olsen and Nash Robbins of Much Ado Books in Alfriston, East Sussex, for providing me with obscure and invaluable reference books on 18th-century life in Sussex and the Caribbean; to the staff of the Reading Room at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich—and especially to Brian Thynne of the NMM for digging out some remarkable 18
^th
-century charts of the Caribbean and the waterways around New Orleans; to the captain and crew of the
Earl of Pembroke
at Square Sail in Charlestown, Cornwall, and to Michael Ann and Ian Tullett for all their help with sailing and the sea; to Henry Escudero and Margaret Ann for their hospitality and guidance at the Jungle Lodge in Bocas del Toro off the coast of Panama; and to Sharon Goulds for arranging my trip to Cuba and being such a stimulating and entertaining travelling companion.

SETH HUNTER
is the pseudonym of the author of a number of highly acclaimed novels for adults and children. He has written and directed many historical dramas for British television, radio, and the theatre. He lives in London. Visit him on the web at
www.nathanpeake.com

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