by Seth Hunter
The Moorish Castle in Gibraltar is a real place and is still there – you can visit it, if you don’t mind the climb. Alternatively, you can see a picture of it on the back of a Gibraltar five-pound note. It was used as a prison until 2010.
General Charles O’Hara, the Lieutenant Governor of Gibraltar, is a real-life character and it is true that he had the distinction of being taken prisoner by two of the greatest political and military leaders in history – Washington and Napoleon. The son of an Irish lord and the latter’s Portuguese mistress, he was variously described by his contemporaries as charming, garrulous, eccentric and larger than life – but suffered a ludicrous caricature as an upper-class English officer in the film The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson.
The story of the migrating swallows is, I think, particularly interesting from an historical point of view. It was only when I was writing this that I thought I had better check to see if people knew about the migration of birds in 1797. It turned out that they didn’t – but that they were thinking about it. Until then, it was widely believed that the birds hibernated – under water.
Absurd though this seems, in those days it would have been a lot more believable than the notion that they could fly from England to Africa and back without getting lost. One of the first to suggest this as a possibility was the Reverend John White, who saw it happening during his stint as Chaplain to the garrison of Gibraltar. He was unable to convince his more famous brother, Gilbert, however, who continued to believe to his dying day that the swallows spent the winter months in ponds.
As for the corvette Swallow and its mission to Tripoli, this is based on the operations of the newly established US Navy and Marines in the First Barbary War of 1801–05. Yusuf Karamanli and his two brothers – Hassan and Ahmed – are historical characters, as are James Leander Cathcart, Xavier Naudé and Peter Lisle aka Murad Reis. I hope I haven’t been too unjust to them. Having said that, Yusuf appears to have been an eighteenth-century version of Gaddafi, who not only seized power by murdering his older brother in their mother’s harem – in the way I have described – but went on to terrorise his people and whoever else was unfortunate enough to fall into his power. But, like Gaddafi, he did have charisma. This is not a recommendation. However, to read more about him, and the war with the US, I recommend A Nest of Corsairs: The Fighting Karamanlis of the Barbary Coast by the former British diplomat Seton Dearden.
Life inside the harem is described from personal experience, although it is based not on the harem in the Red Castle but on the Great Sultan’s harem in Topkapi. I spent a very happy few weeks there filming the docudrama series Harem for Channel Four in 2003. It hadn’t changed much, not by the time we’d finished with it.
Spiridion Foresti is a real character. He was British Consul in Corfu but was kicked out when the French came. I have no idea if he was ever in the Levant, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Nelson said he was the best intelligence agent he had ever met. Though now I come to think about it, I’m not sure they actually did meet. Their correspondence is well worth a read, however. You can find it in the National Archives at Kew.
Gilbert Imlay is another real-life character. And he, too, was a spook. He was probably born in Philadelphia around 1753. As a youth, he was employed in the family shipping business which was largely centred on the rum trade – a euphemism for smuggling in the West Indies, though rum probably came into it somewhere. During the American War of Independence he served in Washington’s army – as pay officer for the New Jersey Line, an early example of the credulity of his fellows, for who in his right mind would have entrusted Imlay with his pay? He deserted after a few months and his activities for the rest of the war are shrouded in mystery. His family were convinced to their dying day that he had been an agent for the British – or certainly an informer – and they never spoken to him again. But others reckoned he was working for General Washington all along: one of a select band of brothers known as Washington’s Boys who were paid out of the General’s own pocket – or at least out of secret funds provided by Congress for whatever nefarious purposes the General and his Boys had in mind. A kind of embryonic CIA.
After the War of Independence, Imlay turned up in London, with a book he’d written based on his experiences on the American frontier: A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, which was published by Debrett ‘to wide acclaim’. He followed this up with a novel called The Emigrants. Less widely acclaimed, it contained scenes of rape, wife-beating and brutal attacks by native Americans. Imlay said his purpose was to encourage emigration.
Certainly it made him something of a celebrity for a time and he became a popular guest on the London salon circuit. Then came the French Revolution and he took himself off to Paris where the action was – and the money. He worked as a shipping agent running goods past the British blockade for a handsome profit and helped himself to the Bourbon silver, i.e. the property of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He was also some kind of a diplomat and probably a spy. I’ve seen copies of his reports – in Paris and Havana – proposing French operations in Spanish Louisiana, which certainly show he was up to no good. While he was in Paris he became the lover of Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneer English feminist, and fathered her child, Fanny. His behaviour towards her was such that she twice tried to commit suicide. He eventually got her off his back by sending her to Sweden, with their one-year-old daughter, to find a treasure ship he’d lost, with the Bourbon dinner service on board.
You couldn’t make it up.
However, I have made up his adventures in the Levant. I doubt I have been unjust to his character but if I have, he deserves it.
A note on the Levant, by the way. The Levant is now taken to mean the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Bosphorus to the Nile, but in the eighteenth century it was used to describe the much wider region covered by the Ottoman Empire, including the Greek islands and the eastern provinces of North Africa, including Egypt.
And turning to Egypt – Nathan’s intelligence of the French invasion plans are derived from the secret intelligence reports of Spiridion Foresti and Sir Sidney Smith, an English naval Captain who had been taken prisoner by the French and learned of the plans while he was in Paris. It is also an historical fact that their lordships discounted these reports – preferring to believe that the French intended to invade Sicily or Portugal or the British Isles themselves. This was one of the reasons Nelson was reduced to chasing shadows across the Mediterranean.
I suppose the idea that the French were planning to invade Egypt was as nonsensical to their lordships as the notion that swallows flew to Africa for the winter. And they had a point, at least as far as the French were concerned. It made no strategic sense at all – unless Bonaparte seriously thought he could march an army of 60,000 men 2,000 miles through hostile territory, desert and mountain without a reliable chain of supply. Maybe he did. Generals are not always noted for their sanity.
Here are some telling notes from his diary:
January 1st, 1798, Paris: Paris has a short memory. If I remain longer doing nothing, I am lost. In this great Babylon, one reputation quickly succeeds another. After I have been seen three times at the theatre, I shall not be looked at again. I shall therefore not go there very frequently.
January 29th: I will not remain here; there is nothing to be done. They will listen to nothing. All things fade here, and my reputation is almost forgotten; this little Europe affords too slight a scope; I must go to the Orient; all great reputations have been won there. If the success of an expedition to England should prove doubtful, as I fear, the army of England will become the army of the East, and I shall go to Egypt. The Orient awaits a man!
The French government, of course, was glad to see the back of him. Fearing a military coup, they did not really care where he went so long as it was out of France – taking his army with him. Egypt seemed just about right.
Which brings me to the Battle of the Nile.
I think I’ve described this accur
ately, even if from the POV of a fictitious participant. I had the pleasure of working on another docudrama about the life of Nelson, again for Channel Four, in 2005 – which gave me the opportunity to study the battle in detail and to film a reconstruction. Where I’ve departed from the known facts is in including the presence of the frigate Unicorn and in having Nathan bring the news of the French fleet to Nelson, as well as presenting him with a chart of the Bay of Abukir which he had taken from the Meshuda.
It is true, however, that Nelson was in the Bay of Coron at the time, and that the news was brought to him by an ‘uniden tified vessel’ which had spotted the French fleet off Alexandria. It is also true that Nelson was in a wretched state of health, physically and mentally, having spent two months in a futile search for the French, a search that had taken him to almost every part of the Eastern Mediterranean. He later admitted that those long, fraught weeks of high tension, doubt and disappointment had knocked years off his life, and there were those at the time who feared for his sanity.
But then, no sane person would have ordered a night attack on a superior enemy force in a well-defended position in the shoal waters of the Bay of Aboukir.
Certainly, it was the last thing the French Admiral expected. He had sent half his crews ashore to forage for food and water, and he thought he had at least eight hours to prepare for an attack the following day. If Nelson had been entirely sane, he might have waited until dawn, when the French would have been in a far better state to fight him.
As for the charts – it was later reported that Nelson had three charts of the area, none of them very good or trustworthy, and that his success in navigating the shoal waters of the bay was down to a combination of luck and skill. However, the French were astonished at the confidence with which the British ships entered the bay, avoiding the shoal waters with remarkable accuracy. Only one British ship – the Culloden – went aground. This might have been luck, but the French certainly believed that Nelson had the benefit of expert advice, possibly from some local pilots he took off a wine-brig. It is also true that he was studying a chart of the bay at the time he was hit in the head.
The battle was proclaimed throughout Europe – apart from in France, of course – as a great British victory. It was, and it led to the creation of a Second Coalition against the French, including Austria, Britain and Russia. But it tends to be forgotten that Nelson’s mission was to stop the French from reaching their target – and in that he failed. Twice, he missed the French Armada at sea, if only by a whisker. When he finally caught up with them, they had already landed Bonaparte and his army in Egypt, and Bonaparte had no further use for the fleet that had escorted them there. The French army went on to win several more battles against the Turks and the Mamelukes, and when Bonaparte wanted to come back to France he did so – in two frigates. He seized power in a military coup, smashed the new coalition in one decisive campaign and forced a humiliating peace on England.
Arguably, the greatest consequence of the Battle of the Nile was in India. Immediately after the battle, Nelson sent one of his officers to Bombay with news of his victory, coupled with the warning that Bonaparte might attempt to march east and join with Britain’s great enemy, Tipu Sahib, the Tiger of Mysore. After a number of adventures the officer, Lieutenant Duval, reached Bombay, where his news spurred a young Anglo-Irish officer into action. The resulting campaign saved India for the British. The officer was Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington.
But that is another story.
