Writing about writing

Friday, 14 October 2016

The Naval Hospital at Greenwich

Last week I produced not one, but two, blog posts about pattern-welded swords. It was a specialist subject and, as I expected, not wildly popular (though worth a look if metallurgy and edged weapons are your thing). I promised a return to normal service this week so here is something much lighter.

This week I finished the first draft of the next book about James Burke, so, what with that and writing about metallurgy, I've been a bit busy. So I have no brilliant ideas for this week's blog post.

I know that you all seem to like things with photographs and last month I spent an afternoon taking pictures at the Naval Hospital in Greenwich, so I thought I'd just share some of these with you.

The Naval Hospital was the brainchild of Queen Mary, though it was completed after her death in 1694. She was concerned that, while old soldiers had provision at the Chelsea Hospital (where they can still find accommodation as Chelsea Pensioners) there was no equivalent institution for old sailors. Note that this was a hospital in the old sense of somewhere providing a place of shelter, rather than a medical facility. The buildings did include an infirmary, though, which continued operating as the Dreadnought Seaman's hospital until 1986.

The building was very grand, designed to reflect the country's gratitude to the Navy rather, perhaps, than meeting the needs of common seamen. Indeed, one of the reasons that the naval hospital (unlike the Chelsea Hospital) was eventually closed down was because sailors did not particularly want to live there.

There is a good example of the way that the glorification of Britain's naval history was worked into the architecture here:

This shows the dead body of Nelson being delivered to Britannia by an angel and (look carefully for the tail) a merman. [Click on the photo to see the detail.]

Nelson is not wearing his uniform, but is naked except for a cloth spread across his loins. The figure is strikingly similar to many depictions of Christ taken down from the cross. Notice Nelson's great victories inscribed on plaques held by the figures around him (including a cherub). There is Trafalgar, of course, but also Copenhagen and the Nile. Nowadays we tend to forget the Battle of the Nile, but it was an astonishing triumph over a vastly superior French force. [And I might mention that it's the climax of Burke and the Bedouin.]

The accommodation was spacious but utilitarian. This is a view of one of the rooms nowadays.

The public rooms (most notably the chapel and the Painted Hall) were quite extraordinary, although savings were made whenever possible. The "marble" pillars in the chapel, for example, are not real marble and the sculpture work (including the scene of Nelson's death shown above) are not actually carved from stone but cast in ceramic.

The Chapel

The Painted Hall

Ceiling of Painted Hall

The buildings ceased to be used as a retirement home in 1869 and were later taken over by the Royal Navy as a training college for its officers. The Navy left in 1998 and the sailors accommodation is now used by the University of Greenwich for teaching and administration. The students there are lucky to be working in such beautiful buildings.

My books

I have written a series of books set in the Napoleonic Wars, when this hospital would have been filled with sailors who had lost limbs fighting the French. The second in the series (all the books stand alone, so you don't need to have read the first) ends with an account of Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile. It's called Burke and the Bedouin and if, like most people, you have never heard of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, you will know a lot more about the history of the wars with France when you finish it than you know now. Like all the Burke books, it features dark deeds and desperate fights, a beautiful woman and a sardonic streak of humour. You can buy it on Kindle for just £2.99/$3.99 or in paperback for £9.99/$14.95.

Tuesday, 11 October 2016

The metallurgy of Oriental weapons

This blog post looks at the science behind kris manufacture. It's even more technical than the last post about kris, so I'm making this an extra mid-week posting for people with refined taste. Don't worry: normal service will be resumed with my next effort.

Iron and steel

Swords are essentially made out of iron. Pure iron is quite soft, which isn’t ideal in a sword. But if you heat iron in a charcoal furnace, some of the carbon from the charcoal combines with the iron to give you steel. Steel is much harder than iron, which is a good thing, but as you add carbon it becomes much more brittle, which is not. A brittle blade shatters too easily, leaving you holding a few inches of broken sword for the last few seconds of your life.

The trick is to have just the right amount of carbon, giving you a sword that is flexible enough not to shatter but hard enough to do the whole cutting into your enemy and killing him bit. Getting this balance, especially with primitive equipment, is as much art as science. Not for nothing were the first Malay smiths regarded as sorcerers.

Iron and steel were first made in ‘bloomery’ furnaces. Bloomery furnaces are not particularly hot, and the iron never melts. Iron produced in this way is never pure, always being mixed in with slag from the ore.

Although iron has been made in this way for thousands of years, the limited quantities produced and its poor quality means that early kris were probably made using meteoric iron. Meteoric iron is usually found in small quantities and contains many impurities, including carbon. Depending on the amount of carbon, meteoric iron might be soft and flexible or hard and brittle. The early smiths discovered that if they beat together needles of iron from different sources they could produce a weapon that combined flexibility and hardness to give an ideal blade. A kris would therefore contain at least two kinds of iron and a good kris would have seven. The kris of the legendary hero Hang Tuah contained twenty kinds of iron.

By the 11th century smiths had developed ways of making crucible steel. Here iron and carboniferous material (e.g. plant matter) were heated in a crucible for several days. While bloomery iron was produced using air drawn in naturally, crucible steel was produced using bellows. The temperature in the crucible is much higher than that in a bloomery and the result is that the iron melts. The slag can be separated out, leaving a purer metal with a higher carbon content.

Making the kris

As crucible steel became available, it was possible to produce a flattened bar of steel that could be shaped to form the core of the sword. This steel would be hard but brittle. Softer iron was therefore welded both sides of the steel core, providing a protective layer of flexible iron. Another layer of soft steel was then welded onto that to form a harder (but not hard to the point of brittle) outer coat.

As the blade is worked, the spine of the blade is left thick, with the alternating layers of steel and iron providing a strong, yet flexible weapon. Towards the cutting edges, though, the blade is ground away, so that at the very edge we are left with just the hardest steel from the core. This gives a vicious cutting edge, but, though it may chip, it will not shatter because of its protective iron coat.

The iron is not hammered on as a simple sheet, but is folded into twisted strips before being welded onto the core. It is these twists that introduce the striations that will generate the characteristic pamor. Shaping and grinding the rough blade into finished shape reveals differing levels of the respective layers. Treating the blades with arsenic further emphasises the pattern, as does cleaning the blade with lemon juice or other fruit acids. (Some people still clean kris blades by cutting a lemon with them. The acid, though, is essentially eating away the blade and modern conservators would discourage this approach, however dramatic its short term effectiveness.)

The hammering is a vital part of creating the sword. Twisting, heating, and hammering further hardens the steel by changing its crystalline structure. It also strengthens the bond between the different layers of iron and steel. The hammering, though also adds to the waviness of the pamor, which are such an important part of the spiritual element of the blades and their aesthetic appeal to the modern collector.

With the different layers of iron and steel beaten and welded into a single blade, all that remains is the final shaping of the weapon. The blade is heated once again and then, having been hammered into its final shape, it is plunged into cold water, not only completing the shaping process but also hardening the outer steel (which changes its crystalline structure) while allowing the iron, protected by the outer steel coat, to retain its vital flexibility.

This, then, is the way that kris were traditionally produced. The patterning was both a product of the manufacturing method and appreciated for its aesthetic and spiritual properties.

Crucible steel and the development of wootz

Meanwhile, the way in which steel was produced was becoming more technologically advanced. Smiths discovered that if crucible steel was left to cool very slowly it would form large dendritic crystals of a ferrous carbon compound, cementite (Fe₃C). If such steel was carefully forged at low temperatures, it would retain these large crystals which could (after polishing and micro etching) form a visible pattern on the blade surface. This is known as watering and steel produced in this way is often referred to as ‘Damascene’ steel or, in India, wootz. Fig 1 shows a comparatively crudely patterned wootz blade.

Fig 1

Usually the patterning is much more subtle. By careful hammering and working of the steel, smiths could work the watering into regular patterns. On this blade (badly displayed and almost impossible to see properly – yes, I’m looking at you, Wallace Collection) you can (just) make out a pattern of horizontal stripes across the blade (known as the ladder of the prophet) interspersed with rosettes. (Click on the pic for a larger, clearer view.)

Fig 2

Here’s a much less beautiful – but more easily seen – example of watering on a knife from Syria.

Fig 3

As you can see, there are similarities between the pattern produced in a damascened blade and that produced by pattern welding. Because Damascene steel was viewed as exceptionally strong (and is said to never need sharpening) swords made of wootz were particularly valued. (Game of Thrones fans can think of Valerian steel at this point.) Some blades were therefore pattern welded so that they could be passed off as damascened. At the same time, some blades were so polished – especially by Western collectors – as to almost entirely eliminate the patterning. (That's one of the reasons that the pattern is so difficult to see in figure 2.) The result is that, although the blades have very different qualities in use, it is often impossible to tell how the blade was made by visual inspection. (Note that I describe the blade in figure 3 as Damascene judged on appearance and provenance. It may well not be.)

Analysing blades by neutron diffraction

You can take a sample of the metal for analysis, but many museums are understandably uncomfortable with the idea of chipping bits off some of their finest exhibits. Fortunately, it is now possible to establish the nature of the metal by a process of neutron diffraction.

When neutrons are passed through metal some of the neutrons are distracted as they interact with the atoms in the metal. When they are passed through steel, the pattern of diffraction allows you to estimate the proportion of carbon in the steel. This will show whether the steel was produced by the bloomery process or if it is crucible steel.

If the steel is homogeneous, then the results will be the same whatever the angle at which the beam enters the metal. However, if these steel contains cementite dendrites, then the results will vary according to the angle at which the beam enters the metal because the carbon within the steel is not evenly spread. Neutron diffraction can therefore be used not only to state whether or not the metal is crucible steel, but also whether or not there is watering. Because the watering is a function of the crystalline structure, it extends throughout the sword even if it's surface appearance has been removed by over polishing. This approach, which reveals some sorts to be finer than they appear, also enables us to say with confidence that some swords which seem to have damascened blades were actually produced by pattern welding, as there is no evidence of dendritic cementite. (Pattern welded swords may be made from crucible steel. For example, much iron contains a small amount of phosphorus and if irons with different phosphorus content are welded together in the manufacture of a blade, it is possible to obtain a watered blade through pattern welding.)

The manufacture of wootz developed in India. It is unlikely that wootz was produced in Malaysia, but there was an extensive trade in wootz ingots. It is therefore quite possible that some later kris were produced with damascened blades.

The development of neutron diffraction analysis of metal weapons has led to a reassessment of some museum pieces. For example, many 19th-century Indian axe heads, richly overlaid with silver and/or gold turn out not to have been made of steel at all, but just plain iron.

Neutron diffraction does allow us a better understanding of the way these swords were made but, despite our sophisticated technology, there is nobody nowadays who can produce the exquisite watered patterns of the finest blades of the past.

Acknowledgements and further reading

I was inspired to write this after a two-day conference at the Wallace collection (All Depends Upon the Brave:Recent Research into Museum Collections of Ottoman, Middle Eastern and Asian Arms and Armour). I'm very grateful for all that I learned there. I have drawn particularly on the presentations by Prof. Alan Williams and David Edge.

For an excellent discussion of the making of pattern welded blades with details of how a modern smith achieves this effect, see http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/a-sinuous-and-deadly-beauty-pattern.html

Fig 1 is reproduced using a Creative Commons licence: awrose/Foter/CreativeCommons attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Friday, 7 October 2016

Kris: the magical sword of Malaysia

If you were reading the blog last week, you'll know that I spent a couple of days at the Wallace Collection while people talked about Oriental arms and armour. This reminded me that I blogged about some oriental daggers a fair while ago, so I've dug that post out and updated and expanded it.

I hope you find this interesting. I think that the swords are beautiful and the more I know about them, the more I appreciate them. If you find the text heavy going, enjoy the pictures.

I first came across kris on holiday in Borneo. This was the holiday where I discovered James Brooke, so kris and Brooke have always been linked in my mind. Accent even put a picture of a kris on the cover of their edition of The White Rajah.

What exactly are kris? Most are really too long to be called daggers but too short for swords. They’re a distinctive weapon common in South East Asia, being found throughout Indonesia and Malaysia. In the UK they’re usually depicted (as in the cover illustration) as wavy, though they come in a variety of shapes and sizes with marked differences from one area to another. Some old kris are as small as any dagger and the largest are the size of a sword. There isn't even any agreement about how it should be spelt. Although 'kris' is the usual English spelling, I have also often seen it spelt 'keris'. Wikipedia throws up even more variants: 'cryse', 'crise', 'criss', 'kriss' and 'creese', although these appear obsolete terms used by European colonists. Generally, the usual spelling in the West is 'kris', while 'keris' is more popular in the East.

Despite the variety of spellings, sizes and shapes, kris are easy to recognise. What are the attributes that define them?

The blade

The first thing is that all kris have, to a greater or lesser extent, "watered" blades. I’m going to write a lot more about this in a separate post, which is likely to appeal to a more specialist audience, but for now I’ll just say that the watering here is produced by a technique called ‘pattern welding’. Although the pattern can resemble that seen in the famed damascene steel, these blades are produced by a completely different technique and are vastly inferior in quality. They are quite beautiful though.

Some legends say that this pattern, known as the "pamor", is made by the waves of the hair of a spirit inhabiting the blade. In fact, the waves are the result of the kris being made from thin bars of iron or steel which are beaten together. I’ll be writing separately about how these and other blades are made in a post for sword/metallurgy geeks.

The top of blade is wider on one side, maintaining a sharp edge. The other side is decorated with a curl in the metal, which resembles an elephant's trunk (the 'belalai gajah'). A good example of this is shown in figure 2.

FIG 2. Detail of a Kris Ksay Cantrik from Jogjakarta, Java.

The widening of the blade allows it to form a guard (the 'ganja'). The guard is usually made from a separate piece of metal. This is placed across the top of the blade, providing a stronger and more effective protection for the user's hands. Although this is made separately, during the forging of the weapon it is attached to the main part of the blade. This is also clearly visible in figure 2. At the top (in figure) a gap is clear between the main part of the blade and the guard, but the two are firmly joined beyond that point.

Some people suggest that the shape is derived from the shape of a stingray’s ‘sting’. The idea is that people used the sting as a weapon and then produced metal weapons based on the same shape. Unlikely as it is, the oldest kris are very small and thin and the resemblance there is more marked.

The details of the decoration at the top of blade vary considerably. The example shown in figure 2 could be regarded as typical. The example shown in figure 3 shows how, in some cases, these elements are reduced to a minimal symbolic representation. However, they are always present even if, as here, the cross piece is omitted.

FIG 3 Detail of peninsular kris

The tang (the bit of the blade that fits into the hilt) is very narrow. This is a significant weakness of the kris as a weapon. European sailors fighting natives armed with kris would typically use a belaying pin (essentially a large, heavy stick) to disarm their opponents by striking the kris blade, which would snap at the tang.

The kris in use

The hilts are sometimes described as offering a pistol grip. The blade is held horizontal to the ground. The fist fits around the hilt with the thumb and forefinger pinching the blade itself. Held like this, the so that the guard covers the base knuckle of the forefinger. (This would not be the case with the very long kris of the Philippines, which are, effectively, swords and will be held in the usual way.)

If only one kris is being used, it’s generally held in the right hand, with the scabbard sometimes held in the left, where it can be used to ward off blows. According to Draeger and Smith, the kris fighter will strike into soft flesh target areas of his enemy with the abdominal region, throat, and kidney areas most highly favoured.

I have seen displays, showing how the kris might be used in combat. Such displays, called main silat are a traditional form of entertainment where the duellists imitate the thrusts and parries, the passes and steps of a fight to the death. It is impossible to be sure how accurately these reflect fighting in the days when they were typically used, but the display I witnessed seemed a very stylised form of fighting, rather than a straightforward thrust and parry. Of course, as any fighting style becomes more refined it can take on an almost ritualistic quality, like fencing with the epee. It may be that the main advantage that English sailors had was that they did not bother with the finer points of kris use but simply bludgeoned their way to victory.

The style of fighting does mean that the blade will often slide along your opponent's guard and the guard was often notched. This would serve to catch your opponent's blade momentarily, and might give you an advantage.

Many people suggest kris blades were poisoned, although it is difficult to find any evidence that this was common. There are lots of Malaysian plants that can be used to make poisons (and blow-pipe darts, for example, have to be poisoned to be effective) but making these poisons takes time and if they are left smeared on the blade they soon become ineffective. You’d need a lot to cover the whole length of the blade and it’s just not an efficient way of killing. The application of poison to the blade hardly seems necessary as the blade is extremely lethal anyway. Perhaps the use of arsenic and lime juice to clean and etch the blade in its final stages of preparation has given rise to the idea that all kris blades were poisonous.

Kris were also used in executions. It is likely that straight edged kris were preferred for this. In the West, straight kris are sometimes referred to as executioners kris. This is, in part, because of a notion that straight kris are unusual and therefore probably reserved for some special purpose, but, as we have seen, this is a misunderstanding. Straight kris are, if anything, more common than the wavy ones. Not all of them could have been used principally for executions.
Nonetheless, the straight kris is particularly well adapted to the traditional manner of execution in which the victim is held with their arms out their sides and the kris is pushed vertically down through their collarbone into the heart, causing instant death. The kris may be pushed through wadding to reduce the amount of blood generated.

The hilt

The hilts are usually made of wood, often kemuning, which some people claim has magical qualities. Weapons owned as status symbols may well have hilts of horn, ivory (elephant or walrus) or bone.

The hilts of kris are always carved into symbolic decorations, often with a religious element. Many hilts represent the garuda bird, which carries the god Vishnu in Hindu myth. Sometimes these images are elaborate, but, in many cases, they are very stylised and can appear quite plain. Examples of two extremes of decorative style are shown in figure 5.

Although the most common image is that of a more or less stylised garuda, other patterns are seen. Sometimes, the figure is that of a crouching man. The Erotic Museum in Berlin has several examples of hilts which represent people engaged in sexual acts.

A particularly interesting type of hilt is tajong, known in the West as a "Kingfisher" hilt. This is characterised by a long "beak" extending from the end of the hilt. Carving these takes considerable skill, and such hilts are rare. The workmanship would have made them valued when they were originally produced, but their scarcity nowadays means that they are worth considerable sums to collectors.

Although Western collectors attach great significance to the hilts, it is important to remember that the culture is that produced the kris saw the true magic and value of the weapon as lying in the blade. The blade will be preserved as the furniture is changed. This is particularly the case with kris that have been traded by collectors. It is common for hilts to be removed from blades so that a particularly good hilt can be matched with a particularly good blade to make a more saleable piece. My own collection includes kris where the orientation of the hilts to the blade is wrong, indicating that the hilt has been replaced. Whilst the furniture of a kris can provide useful clues as to its provenance, they can never be definitive.

The hilt usually sits in a small metal cup (the pendongkok), separating the hilt from the main part of the blade. Figure 3 shows a relatively elaborate example of this. Once the hilts are removed, the cup, which is not attached to the blade, is easily slipped off and therefore often changed when hilts are changed. In some examples held by Western collectors, the cup will be missing.

The sheath

Kris sheaths are also distinctive. Sheaths are made of wood, although they may be covered with a metal sleeve. The end of the sheath might be tipped with a chap of bone or ivory (the buntut). They are distinguished by a wide wooden crosspiece (the sampir) which protects the guard of the weapon. This is often described as "boat shaped". The sampir may be a relatively functional rectilinear shape or an elaborately carved piece of decorative work.

Fig 6. Scabbard with metal sleeve. Jogjakarta.

The kris as a spiritual object

Kris are valued as spiritual objects. Although there is some uncertainty surrounding their origin, it is likely that the very first kris were the kris majapahit. 'Majapahit' refers to the Majapahit Empire, which was based on Java in the 14th to 15th centuries. The very first kris were made when iron was a rare and precious metal. Early kris may well have been made of meteoric iron. They were very small, and may have been intended for use in religious ceremonies, rather than combat. The symbolic carving of the hilts reflects their continuing religious links.

Fig 7. Kris majapahit

Traditionally, the manufacture of kris was surrounded with ceremonies reflecting the fact that the early smiths were practising an art which was viewed as as much magical as technological. Some stories say that women smiths would temper the blade by drawing the red hot metal through their vulva before throwing it into water. Another version says that every kris would be tempered by being stabbed into the body of a prisoner, so that a person would be killed for every kris that was made.

Although kris are functionally defined by their use as weapons, they have always been much more than that. Often beautifully decorated (sometimes with gold worked into the surface of the blade) and with hilts and scabbards so ornate as to make them almost useless for fighting, kris are symbols of status, and of craft and cultural values at least 700 years old. Collected enthusiastically by Europeans (especially the Dutch), they can still be found and bought at affordable prices in the markets of Malaysia and Indonesia. The huge variety of styles and the stories that go with them make these a source of continual fascination to any traveller in the region.

Monday, 3 October 2016

Mostly about swords.

It's been a busy week, so apologies if this rambles. If you get to the end, there will be another photograph of a ferret, as the feedback on last week's blog post definitely showed this to be the highlight.

On the writing front, the latest book - another James Burke adventure, this time set in the Peninsular War - is making good progress and the end is in sight. It's got more military history in it than most of the others, so if there's anyone wants to check if I've got the Battle of Talavera right, let me know.

It's odd writing about that particular battle. Back when I did my GCSE (O levels back then), Talavera was one of the things we had to learn. I had to be able to write the date and mark the right place on a map of Spain. Why the British were in Spain or what the importance of Talavera was was never considered to be something we should know. I can honestly say that if you were to read all the James Burke books you would know much more about this period of history than if you had sat in class with me paying attention to every word. (And I can guarantee you would have more fun learning it. There were no sexy female guerrilla fighters in the stories I was taught at school.)

On Friday I had to put the book aside while I went to a conference at the Wallace Collection. I've mentioned the Wallace in passing before. It's probably my favourite London museum.

The Wallace Collection - what's not to love?

I particularly like the Wallace because of its substantial collection of Oriental weaponry, in particular their kris.

Kris were the main edged weapon of the Malay community in Sarawak when James Brooke arrived there, so they feature quite a lot in The White Rajah. There is even a picture of one on the cover.

I've blogged about them in the past and I'm afraid you're going to hear more (a lot more) about them in the near future, as soon as I've digested all that I learned in two days of talks on "Recent Research into Museum Collections of Ottoman, Middle Eastern and Asian Arms and Armour". [The first instalment is now available HERE.] Unfortunately (as far as I was concerned) the conference was rather dominated by Indian material, but I learned a lot about the metallurgy of manufacturing pattern welded blades, which includes most kris. It was also nice to come across some Indian weapons I really didn't know much about. For example, here is something that I bought very cheaply at an auction where it was vaguely described as "Russian".

And here is what I was told was a Pesh-kabz by one of the people demonstrating the use of various Indian weapons in battle.

Originally from Iran, this type of blade became common throughout Indian. In battle it's used as a stabbing weapon, designed to penetrate armour, especially chain mail. (The demonstration of how to repair chain mail, given by one of the Wallace's conservators, was an interesting complement to this.)

The demonstration of fighting styles, which concluded the two days of lectures, was a definitely a highlight and made a bit of a change from the long discussions of the styles of flower pattern decorating various hilts.

Not your regular fine arts lecture

I learned the use of a tulwar as an infantry weapon. This particularly interested me as I've had correspondence with another writer about the period arguing whether or not you could duel with a tulwar. I have one of these "Indian sabres" and it seemed to me too heavy for fighting on foot. It's heavy with the weight clearly designed to carry the blade in a killing swing downward from a horse.

Now I know better. Although it is a cavalry weapon, it can also be used by infantry. The blade can be supported by the left arm and it is swung horizontally. Its weight makes it ideal for hacking through the enemy line at speed. Each target would be struck once before the attacker moves on, leaving others to break through the gaps in the line and finish off the enemy. The weight and balance of the sword makes it unsuitable for duelling but ideal for separate fast blows. The spike on the hilt does provide a useful additional striking element, which can be used to punch an enemy as the sword returns from the strike.

Stone's classic Glossary .... of arms and armour includes shamshir in the same class as the tulwar, although the presentation on Saturday showed them as very different. The shamshir is lighter and the balance makes it very easy to move as an extension of the arm. It is a very useful sword for an infantry fighter.

Shamshir

Nidar Singh Nihang's presentation concentrated as much on the way that the fighters moved as on the nature of their weapons, which was as it should be. Modern collectors and academics can too easily fetishise the weaponry independently of the context in which it is used and seeing the way that Nidar Singh Nihang fought (and also the contemporary illustrations of the weapons in use) gave a much greater understanding of how they worked and the social context in which they were deployed. I was particularly interested in seeing how the katar is used. I've never understood the logic behind the hilt of this punch dagger, but all became clear when it was demonstrated in use with the small round shields shown in the photo above. The dagger can be held in the hand that holds the shield (through a double strap) and thedesign means that the blade projects beyond the shield edge. The shield arm can therefore double as a second sword arm, just as the projections on the shield face mean that it can be used as a punching weapon as well as a means of defence.

Katar, National Museum, New Delhi

All in all, then, a fascinating couple of days. A few people said it must be fun researching books like this but, truth to tell, I have no immediate plans for another book set in the Far East, so this was purely to gratify my own curiosity. It does mean that the next time I give a talk on these weapons (please contact me if you'd like me to), it will have that much more background, and there will be a new version of my post on kris up here soon. As for researching my books, that's more a matter of immersing myself in 19th century accounts of the Battle of Talavera.

Thanks for reading. If you've got this far, you definitely deserve another picture of a ferret.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to the Wallace Collection for two fascinating days.

Shamshir from NY Metropolitan Museum. For full catalogue entry see http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/31130

Katar photo by Saad Akhtar (Saad) from New Delhi, India - Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

There are some fantastic photos on the Wallace Collection website (http://www.wallacecollection.org). Sadly, their copyright limitations are so complicated, it seemed safer not to use them: a particular shame as the presentation by their photographer, Cassandra Parsons, was one of the highlights of the conference.

Stone's somewhat outdated Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armour remains a useful starting point for weapons enthusiasts. It was republished by Dover Publications in 2000.

MY BOOKS

Oriental weapons feature prominently in the first two books about John Williamson. The White Rajah

is set in Borneo and inevitably features kris. Cawnpore, set during the Indian Mutiny doesn't dwell on the edged weaponry of the day, but there is the odd sword there in the background. They're both exciting reads and if you enjoy my blogs I would really appreciate it if you could buy the books. You might even get around to reading them eventually.

Thanks.

Friday, 2 September 2016

Presenting the fact behind the fiction

This time last week I was in mid-Wales, talking about James Brooke as part of the Llandrindod Wells Victorian Festival. Rather to my surprise, a respectable audience (most dressed in Victorian costume) paid good money to come and listen. (None of the money came to me. The council no longer funds the Festival, so they need all the cash they can raise.)

This was a new experience for me. I was not talking about my book (although it may have been mentioned once or twice) but about the historical character it was based on.

When I first had the idea of writing about Brooke (so long ago he was practically a contemporary character) I did a lot of research. Frankly, I think I did too much. My first attempt at writing about him got bogged down in the realities of his life. I had an editor who suggested that I might be better off writing a straight biography, and at that point I realised I was badly off course And I put the novel on one side until I had managed to forget most of the research I had done. Now, decades later, I had to try to remember it all again.

It's an odd idea, when you come to think about it. Although there are writers of historical fiction who see themselves basically as historians who write novels (and some actually are historians with doctorates and published research), most of us are novelists who prefer to write stories based around real events. Asking us to lecture on history is a bit like asking people who write hospital romances to remove your appendix. So why might people prefer to get their history from people like me than from experts who really know what they're talking about?

Having done it, I think it does make sense.

It turns out I do know quite a lot about James Brooke. Not as much as the man who wrote the definitive biography, which I read all those years ago, but more than people who are going to turn up to hear a talk at a Victorian Festival. But, and this is significant, I don't know all that much about Brooke. That definitive biography has so much information, so many facts, that it is practically unreadable. Professional historians, it often seems, can get so involved with the minutiae of their subject that they miss the wider story. What the public (by which I mean people without history degrees) want is a narrative. They don't want the bare 'facts' about Brooke, but they want his story. They want to know how a rather over-indulged young man, who flitted from one project to another as the fancy took him, ended up ruling (and, on balance, ruling rather well) his own private kingdom in Borneo. And that's what I can tell them, and what can sometimes get lost in the work of learned scholars.

Me, trying to prove I've done some research

Preparing a talk on Brooke's life differs from writing a novel because you have a responsibility not to simply make things up. There are historical novelists who will say that they never just invent stuff (though that must limit their ability to write dialogue, I always think). I make stuff up all the time. In fact, part of my talk was on the way that writers (including writers of non-fiction) started making stuff up about James Brooke even in his lifetime. But my talk was (as far as I know) entirely truthful. Making sure that all my facts were right was a bit of a shock to my system. I had to return to my notes, check things in books, and generally spend quite a bit of time on it. I was relieved to find that most of the detail in The White Rajah was accurate, but there were some bits of history I had changed for the convenience of the plot and then completely forgotten about the reality. At least, though, I only had to satisfy myself to my own satisfaction. Real historians (good ones at least) can't just read something somewhere in a book and take the writer's word for it. They have to chase up the original source and confirm that the book they read got it right. They have to look at alternative possible truths, or versions of the truth, and weigh them against each other and explain their reasons for coming down on one side or the other. It takes a long, long time and, in the end, people really don't care. The world is happy to believe that Alfred burned the cakes, Canute tried to turn back the tide and Harold died with an arrow in his eye. We don't want a detailed discussion of why the first of these is false, the second a misinterpretation of something that probably didn't happen anyway, and the third is argued about by real historians on, it seems, an almost daily basis. I have read the details of the negotiations that led to James Brooke being appointed Rajah of Sarawak and, trust me, you really don't want to know. They were, essentially, diplomatic negotiations which involved the competing interests of different elements in the court at Brunei, Brooke's personal interest and his perception of what would most further British influence in the region. They went on a very long time. Somewhere in all this, there was an attempt to poison Brooke, which isn't that important historically. In my talk you get told about the poisoning attempt and about the outcome of the negotiations. That's why people like me can be more interesting than some academic historians.

Does this mean that historical novelists should move into writing non-fiction about their periods? I'm not sure that it does.

My books about James Burke (a real person, so I'm stuck with the confusingly similar name) are set in the Napoleonic Wars. Besides reading non-fiction about the period, I read Bernard Cornwell's wonderful series of books about the fictional Richard Sharpe. They provide a lovely feel for the period and the brutal realities of soldiering. It seemed perfectly natural, then, that when I wanted to study the battle of Waterloo for Burke at Waterloo, I should read Cornwell's non-fiction Waterloo. I'm picking on Cornwell because he is hugely successful and big enough to take it and Waterloo has garnered a lot of 5* reviews on Amazon, so it obviously provides many readers with exactly what they want. But it really, really isn't the place to go if you want a historically accurate account of the details of the battle. There are hundreds of historians who will tell you exactly who was doing what that fateful afternoon. I went to a two-day conference on Waterloo at which I listened to a brilliant talk by a man who has spent at least three years just researching the events at La Haye Sainte, the farm in the centre of the battlefield. I'll go to Cornwell for a general overview of what it might have been like for a rifleman there, but I'll go to a professional historian for an analysis of the type of ammunition used by the Brunswickers in their defence of La Haye Sainte.

Am I right to avoid non-fiction? Perhaps not. The suggestion of that editor all those years ago gets repeated every now and then, most recently by a publisher I definitely respect. Do any of my readers here (including those who write historical fiction) have their own views that they might share? Please comment on this page if you have.

For now, at any rate, I'm back to writing fiction, this time in the Peninsular Campaign. I've been spending a lot of time with maps of Spain and contemporary accounts of troop positions and lines of march, but James Burke's adventures with the guerrillas do not feature in any history I've read. I am, though, available to talk about the real historical background to all of my books. Not everywhere is as lovely and as broke as the Llandrindod Wells Victorian Festival, so I'm not necessarily free, but let me know if you're interested and we can sort something out. Contact me at jamesburke.confidentialagent@gmail.com.