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BOOKS > Books in Print > Fortunes of War
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RESEARCH TALES: SHIPS OF THE FRANCIS DRAKE ERA  The research for this one was a bear, but when you're interested in your subject, it's also a lot of fun. FORTUNES was researched long before the Internet really existed: back in the Telnet days, and I confess, though I used Telnet once or twice I never really got into it. Instead, I used about a dozen books to get the backgrounding for my novel; and two in particular were invaluable. George Malcolm Thompson's biography is another 'text book' that reads more like a novel. There's no big color pictures inside (!), but it's actually a better book than the other tome I used extensively: 'Campaigns of the Spanish Armada' may be beautifully illustrated, mostly in color, but ... yawn. It was still an invaluable research tool, but good lord, you were conscious of the fact it's a text book!
The major characters in FORTUNES are certainly fictitious, but a lot of the minor players are real-life personalities. Drake, Hatton, and the leading players in the politics driving the situation. I did take a bit of artistic license with the Spanish Ambassador. I usurped the real-life Ambassador and replaced him with Mauricio, Dermot's uncle. I wanted and needed to create a whole family history for Channon, and the Spanish side of his family are pivoral to the plot of FORTUNES ... they're also as fictitious as Drake, Hatton and others are real. The line between fiction and reality blurred, and I liked it that way!  The research took me into the history of ships, and also the history of maps and map-making. Some questions were never really answerable (such as the fine points of actually STEERING a galleon of the C16th, and in particular, Drake's ships, Revenge and Golden Hinde. A lot of the ships of the era were steered from a gigantic tiller ... others, you're starting to see a wheel. None of the research I was able to do regarding the *real* vessels (not the modern day replicas which appear in the movies, guys), answered the question as to which I should write about ... so I chose to go with the wheel when I spoke of the frigate which takes Robin out to the Americas and the gallizabra which brings them home ... why? Because it's far easier for folks of our generation to envisage a big ship being steered by a rudder-turned wheel than by a monstrous tiller. We associate a tiller with a small boat. None of the ships of that era have survived, apparently; and records are incomplete, at least as far as I was able to dig, and that was pretty deep. It's too bad, but it's also a minor point in the story and nothing to do with plotting. If I'd found major references to the tiller up on the steering deck, sure, I'd have gone to great lengths to describe it ... but there's nothing clear in this area. So why not simplify, and move the story along?
I would love to have seen a gallizabra. The popular tradition is that the Spanish ships were big, cumbersome, clumsy, and the 'little English ships' danced rings around them, ran in under their guns and pounded them to hell. This was true in 1588 ... but the Spanish ship designers learned fast, and it's tough that the popular tradition doesn't pass on what happened next! The gallizabra was more than a match for anything else on the water in those days, and I'm fascinated. I described the clothes, food and houses of that world with every bit of detail I could get away with (without the book getting wordy, dry-bones or pedantic), and I think I did pretty well. It was amusing putting this webpage together ... the books came out for scanning-in of covers, and Dave's jaw dropped when he actually SAW the clothes. "They used to wear all that ...???" Yup. Maybe it was damn' cold and they needed the layers? |
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