Between Wind and Water

Historical Notes

There are dangers in fictionalization. For one thing, I risked misrepresenting historical people who are unable to defend themselves—most notably Admiral Vernon, who filled the necessary role of villain. I fear I may have done the man a bad turn. You may read about him if you like; The Angry Admiral by Cyril Hughes Hartmann is pretty good. I remain convinced, however, that my portrayal errs only by degree. Vernon was an asshole—just not quite as much of one as I make him out to be. He was smarter than I give him credit for too—but only a little.

The other danger was that with Norrington filling the role of Captain Knowles and Jack Sparrow wandering in with no historical precedent whatsoever, I had to shift events around a bit. At times, this creates a misleading, one might say irresponsible blend of history and fiction that by the end of the story has turned to flat-out lies. I'll explain the changes I made to history individually below.

Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle won his knighthood for defeating the pirate fleet under Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts off the coast of West Africa in 1722. He took over command of the West Indies station in 1732. The story opens in 1739 approximately a year after the film's end, and if we go with the accepted canon/fanon that the prologue took place eight years before the film's main action, that means Norrington first arrived in Jamaica in 1730. Thus, he would have served under Ogle.

For those of you who don't speak Spanish, and that includes me, there is a Spanish joke in Jack's scene with the governor of Portobello. Jack means to say the word for "torture" (tortura) and says instead the word for "turtle" (tortuga)—probably because that word slips so easily off his tongue.

I permitted myself a small fudge: when the Governor spills wine on his waistcoat, he probably wouldn't have stained it, since wine from the Canary Islands was generally white.

Don Pedro Elizagaray (spelled "Ellistagaritta" in my source) was a real person, but there is very little information available about him. He was Don Blas de Lezo's flag-captain, captured with his ship by Captain Miles Stapleton in the Sheerness—and that's all I know. I had to guess at the name of his ship. The Fuerte was one of the ships Lezo brought with him to Cartagena in 1737, and since she doesn't turn up in any of the later accounts of the war with England, I figured she was as good a guess as any.

There's a potential bit of confusion about the term "Naval Officer." In the sense used here, it refers specifically to a representative of the Navy Board placed on an overseas station to look after stores and musters.

César-François Cassini de Thury was a French astronomer living around the time of this story. He was the grandson of the great Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who contributed to the study of longitude, but I don't know if the grandson was interested in it; mostly I just liked his name. The practice of giving out passports (or safe-conduct passes) to scientists to conduct research in the waters of foreign hostiles is based in fact, but I think it only goes back to the nineteenth century.

Red heels were very fashionable, and only the aristocracy were allowed to wear them. Also, Jack is wearing a style of coat that a number of people criticized at the time for its enormous shoplifters' cuffs.

I'm pretty sure nobody knew about the harmful effects of lead in the eighteenth century. Call it an intentional anachronism in the spirit of the films. Really!

None of my pirate OCs are real people. I considered using famous pirates for Jack's allies, but these guys needed to be unimpressive by historical standards, and there were not a lot of big-name pirate operating in 1739 anyway, the Navy having mostly cleaned the place up by then. I gave them all alliterative names in the tradition of Stan Lee, who always said an alliterative name was easier to remember.

A note for you nitpicky costume historians: the Royal Navy buttons changed over the years, eventually settling on an anchor motif, but in the beginning, flag officers wore buttons with a Tudor rose at the center. I've never been able to get a close look at the buttons used in the film so I couldn't verify what motif is stamped on them. Since the Royal Navy didn't even have uniforms until 1748 and this story begins in 1739, I decided to go with the earliest instantiation of the uniform for all my descriptions.

I suspect the Spanish didn't have uniforms at the time this story takes place either, but the film has Englishmen in uniforms, so I thought it only fair that the Spanish get them too.

The thing about the Dey of Algiers taking offense to such a young man being sent to negotiate with him is a reference to the life of Admiral Augustus Keppel, but no fight with Turkish pirates followed that incident, as far as I know.

I fudged the timeframe on Lord Aubrey Beauclerk's career. In fact, he commanded the Garland in the Mediterranean from 1733-4, at a time when Norrington would already have been in the West Indies.

The South Sea Company was a British venture formed to trade with Spanish colonies in a limited fashion as per England's slave-trading asiento with Spain. The company had representatives in all the major Spanish ports, who suddenly became hostages when war broke out. Much diplomatic energy was spent getting them back.

Norrington's avocation as an engineer is taken from the life of Knowles, who was responsible for most of the building at the Navy base in Port Antonio in the 1730's. The argument about which side of the harbor to put the storehouse on is based on an incident involving Knowles, but later in his career when he was commander-in-chief at English Harbour. Knowles was notorious for his hundreds of letters to the Admiralty and Navy Board.

It's true that at the time, officers' commissions in the Army had to be purchased. This was not true, however, of the artillery and engineering corps. If Norrington had wanted to follow in his father's footsteps, he wouldn't have had to pay for it (and indeed he couldn't have, because engineers didn't generally get rich). Artillery and engineering weren't considered gentlemen's occupations, though, and Pa Norrington was raising a gentleman.

You'd never know since I've provided very little information about him, but I intended Norrington's father to play the role of a historical Army engineer named Joseph Bennet who was instrumental in the taking of Gibraltar during the War of the Spanish Succession.

The Army in Jamaica was based in Spanish Town by 1739, but that's because Spanish Town was the capital and the seat of the Governor, so I moved the Army to Port Royal to match the film.

The Cimarrones were the descendents of escaped slaves who had intermarried with native peoples and lived in tense proximity with European settlements. The ones near Nombre de Dios (the group that Jack's friend Suah comes from) assisted Sir Francis Drake in his attack on Panama in 1573 and allied themselves with the English several more times before settling into an uneasy coexistence with their Spanish neighbors. Communities of escaped slaves lived all over the Caribbean; in Jamaica, the English called them Maroons (degraded from cimarrón). Suah himself is fictional.

To my knowledge, no pirates attacked the 1739 treasure fleet on its way to Portobello. Pretty much everything Jack does in this story lacks a historical basis.

Gillette cocking his head is something of an inside joke. For most of the story, he plays Edward Boscawen, later a famous admiral who was known for holding his head at an angle, giving rise to one of his nicknames, "Wry-Necked Dick." I tried to work in somebody calling Gillette "Wry-Necked Drew" but I couldn't make it work.

Here is De Re Militari (or Epitoma Rei Militaris) by Flavius Vegetius Renatus if you're interested.

Those numbers for the contents of the Chagres customs-house are real. I had 'em, I figured I should use 'em.

Lowther is a shadowy figure who appears a few times in the Naval Chronology, first as the pirate who provided Vernon with soundings for the Chagres river estuary, and then as a lieutenant who lent his local knowledge for the abortive 1742 assault on Panama. It's not clear, but it seems reasonable to assume they're the same man. Smollett lambasts Vernon for giving a pirate a lieutenant's commission, which led me to imagine the scene with Vernon, drunk on his own magnanimity, inviting a spy into his midst. There is no historical evidence that Lowther was a spy—that's all me.

Here is a Cuban sacristy chest. Beautiful, isn't it?

The regalia thing is very loosely based on an incident in which the Worcester and Falmouth chased the viceroy of New Spain. They lost the viceroy but captured the ship carrying his regalia.

"Si hubiera estado yo en Portobello, no hubiera su Merced insultado impunemente las plazas del Rey mi Señor, porque el ánimo que faltó a los de Portobello me hubiera sobrado para contener su cobardía."

El Paisano was real. I just made up the part about him being Lowther.

The Claringbolds are not based on any real historical figures. "Sunflower futures" is an allusion to tulip mania. I had to guess at the route a coach would have taken from Port Royal to Port Antonio; my book from 1908 lists the main road as going through Bath, and it's about halfway, but who knows where the road went a hundred and sixty years earlier? Also, I'm not sure whether Bath was much of a town by 1741. You'll have to cut my half-assed Internet research some slack there.

Lord Aubrey Beauclerk is not an allusion to Patrick O'Brian. He was a real guy, and every fun fact I give about him is quite true—he was the grandson of Charles II and Nell Gwynne, his brother was a Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty, and his wife was a lusty widow called Catherine. The only thing I made up about him was his knighthood in the Order of the Bath, which had only recently been revived by the Prime Minister as a means of cultivating political support and was not yet given out like popcorn as it was in the nineteenth century. Incidentally, for the purposes of this story, I am ignoring what in the film looks like a medal of the Order of the Bath around Norrington's neck.

Norrington's capture of the Spanish ships off Puerto Rico and subsequent meeting with Lord Aubrey is vaguely grounded in fact—Lord Aubrey did detach from Ogle's squadron to chase some French ships and ran into Knowles at sea—but the fight itself is based on Captain Arthur Forrest's capture of nine French merchantmen off Petit Goave during the Seven Years' War. (That's the same Arthur Forrest who appears in this story, much later in his career.)

I have no idea what the figurehead of the Prince Frederick really looked like, but I can only assume it was a highly idealized attempt at a likeness of this guy.

This isn't really a historical note, but one of my goals for this story was to get one of Norrington's childhood chums to call him "Norry" in all gravity and believability.

I may not have made this clear, but there were elaborate rules for seating orders at formal dinners. The hosts sat at the ends with the guests seated in descending order by rank, placing those of lowest rank at the center of the table. Women were ranked by who their husbands were, and seating was boy-girl-boy-girl. Every dinner party needed a host and a hostess, so I figured that Swann would have blackmailed Elizabeth into it. Will would have been stuck somewhere in the middle of the table if he'd attended, which would have been awkward considering he was married to the hostess.

While I was able to discover that Arthur Forrest served as a lieutenant in the battle of Cartagena and distinguished himself in the raid on the Barradera, I could not find out which ship he served on. I found nothing to say he wasn't first lieutenant of the Shoreham and then the Weymouth (the historical ship for which the Dauntless stands in) but I didn't base it on any specific information.

They really did make commemorative coins to celebrate the victory at Portobello. There were a bunch of different designs, some picturing just Vernon and some picturing him with Commodore Brown. A few of them are pretty weird, like the one with Sir Robert Walpole and the satyr. Someone's going to have to explain that one to me.

The song Jack is singing is called, surprisingly enough, The Mermaid Song.

The Baron de Pointis was a French admiral and privateer whose successful raid on Cartagena made him very rich. Vernon followed his tactics closely at the beginning of his campaign, but somehow Pointis was able to sail up to the city walls and bombard it whereas Vernon failed to do so. Much ink has been spilled over why this was. If you read the accounts, it does sound like Vernon refused to bring his ships close to the city just to spite Wentworth, but there's no doubt it was tricky water to sail in. Still, if Pointis could do it, why couldn't Vernon?

I'm no great military buff, but personally I see no reason why Vernon couldn't have called off the Shrewsbury once she'd had her cable cut and ordered another ship into her position. He only had, like, twenty more of them just sitting there. He may very well have had a good reason, but since my intent is to make him the big bad villain, I decided not to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The fleet did lend the Army a few hundred seamen to help build the battery, but I made up the drama with Norrington going behind Vernon's back to do it.

The midnight attack on the Barradera was actually led by Captain Watson, not Knowles, but I needed Norrington to be involved because, well, he's the hero.

The incident with the letters sewn into the British ensign really happened, but in Cuba, many months after the battle of Cartagena. They did intercept some intelligence about Admiral Torres around this time, but it was to the effect that Torres was being reinforced by the French at Havana, not that he was safely out of the picture. So obviously I changed that.

Vernon did indeed give a dollar—not a pound—to all the men who carried the attack on the Barradera. The Spanish dollar was the most common currency all over the New World, even in English colonies.

"Britons Strike Home" was written by Henry Purcell in 1695 as incidental music for the tragedy Bonduca, and later caught on as a military anthem, getting even more play than "Hearts of Oak" for a while.

In fact, Lord Aubrey died almost immediately when both his legs were shot off, but I modified his death to fit my dramatic needs. I'm also pretty sure he was buried at sea, because he's not listed as buried in the family plot. The method of preserving his body was common; they used it for Nelson on the trip back from Trafalgar. My accounts also say Moore lived for a day after receiving his mortal wound, but again, I changed the facts according to my needs.

The surgeon's mate, Smollett, is a historical cameo. Smollett was a prolific writer whose first-hand account of the battle of Cartagena provides much of the raw material for this story. However, I believe he served aboard the Cumberland, not the Prince Frederick.

I left out an incident after Lestock's attack in which Vernon sent some men to attack the Barradera a second time, since the Spanish had managed to remount some guns there. There just wasn't any reason to include it.

Captain Knowles did lead the diversionary landing of seamen on Isla Baru before the final assault on Boca Chica Castle, and he did capture the Galicia. I made up the role of the Galicia's treacherous chaplain in her loss, however.

Jack's Latin might be correct but it might not. I chose not to check it with my Latin scholar friends because I figured Jack's Latin sucks about as badly as mine.

Strictly speaking, the fort that defends the city of Cartagena is called San Felipe de Barajas, and San Lázaro is the name of the hill it stands on, but I didn't want to get it mixed up with the other Fuerte de San Felipe at Boca Chica and it's only ever referred to in the English accounts as San Lázaro anyway.

Wigs really were that expensive. To put it in perspective, Norrington's entire salary would have been about a hundred pounds per annum. (A guinea was one pound one shilling.)

The bit with Don Blas booby-trapping Castillo Grande is completely made up. I needed an incident that would get Norrington to trust Jack again. Sorry, Don Blas. It was indeed Knowles who captured Castillo Grande, though.

Boscawen, Gillette's historical counterpart, was indeed promoted out of the frigate Shoreham into the Prince Frederick upon Lord Aubrey's death.

The deserters are real, but it wasn't Knowles who recruited them. They did in fact lead the Army astray in the dark, but whether it was out of malice or simply a mistake is unclear.

Guise really did say "used up"—it's in the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

The English did not, to my knowledge, bring Don Pedro to Cartagena. Everything about the stunt with the customs-house is complete fiction.

A translation of what Jack says in Spanish: "You have me confused with some other guy. Get your hands off me, you sons of bitches!" (Many thanks to n0_leaf_clover for this.)

Jack's capture, Norrington's accusation as a spy, their imprisonment and interrogation—it's all completely made up. Nothing like that ever happened. The sailing of the Galicia against the city walls, however, did. Apparently Vernon was trying to prove to Wentworth that he couldn't have supported the troops from the water. It was a weird, nonsensical and wasteful gesture, as most writers seem to agree.

Whether anybody had accurate soundings of the inner harbor is unclear. My guess is that nobody was entirely forthcoming about what they knew. Vernon used the harbor's shallowness as an excuse to withhold his support from Wentworth's troops. Does that mean he knew the water was deep enough and feigned ignorance, or did he really not know where the shoals were? Captain Daniel Hore, who commanded the Galicia, doesn't appear to have had the benefit of accurate soundings, but again, it's hard to tell since he intentionally ran the ship aground. The whole thing smacks of a cover-up, so I figured it was a good place for Jack and James to get caught in the crossfire between Vernon and Wentworth.

Funny thing—Swann's historical counterpart, Governor Trelawney, actually went with them to Cartagena. I just couldn't see Swann doing that.

I've characterized Ogle as the "good cop" to Vernon's bad one, but I suspect that the historic Ogle was just as unpleasant as Vernon—and indeed they seemed to operate as a unit at Cartagena. For the purposes of the story, though, I needed someone slightly less hateful, and since Norrington excelled under Ogle's command for years, it made sense that there might be some sympathy between them.

I don't think Bridewell Prison survived the earthquake. However, the film clearly shows a pre-earthquake Port Royal—indeed, it shows a Port Royal that resembles no Port Royal that ever existed—so I took the liberty.

A post-captain calling out an admiral was rare, but it did happen. In fact, it happened to Knowles. As an admiral, he impugned the conduct of several captains under his command after an embarrassing defeat, and once the courts-martial were all over, several of them challenged him to duels. At least one took place, though without bloodshed.

By most standards of realism, the court-martial is a mess. Most of the points of procedure are correct (the order of witnesses, the accused conducting his own defense) but the actual legal substance is pure fantasy. I doubt Jack could have just shown up unannounced like that, and I also don't think a colonial governor had the authority to pardon him. I have no excuse for all of this; I'm just pointing it out.

When Vernon mentions the Articles of War, he's referring to the 1661 version, which stood until 1749. I couldn't find a full text, but David Hannay's Naval Courts Martial contains a nice summary and comparison with the 1749 update.

The sword thing was an established custom; I don't know if it was established by 1741, but I liked it too much to worry. If the verdict was "not guilty", the sword was placed on the table with the hilt pointed toward the accused; if the verdict was "guilty", then the accused found himself facing its tip.

Port Mahon (Mão in Catalan) really does claim to be the birthplace of mayonnaise.

The incident with Rentone capturing the Black Pearl is, of course, totally invented.

That's it, I think! I was pretty unfamiliar with this period of history when I first started this story, so I'm sure there's plenty I didn't get right. Feel free to call me on any bullshit. If you're interested, I consulted five major sources: Beatson's Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, Schomberg's Naval Chronology, Richard Rolt's An Impartial Representation of the Conduct of the Several Powers of Europe, Herbert William Richmond's The Navy in the War of 1739-48, and Smollett's Account of the English Expedition to Carthagena. Of these, Smollett influenced me the most, with his passionate hatred for Vernon shaping my characterization of the good admiral. I drew a few details about the Spanish side of things from an article by Charles Nowell in The Hispanic American Historical Review, but I couldn't read any of the primary sources, alas. Most of the details about individual officers' careers I drew either from the Dictionary of National Biography or from John Charnock's Biographia Navalis. Hurray for Google Books!

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