A little over ninety-nine years ago one of my great-great uncles died of his wounds near the river Aisne in northern France, a few weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. He was one of the ‘Old Contemptibles’, the regular soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force which was all but destroyed by the end of that year, among the first of some eight million men of all sides killed by the time of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 ...
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Of all the larger-than-life character portraits that have entered popular memory from the 1884-5 British Nile campaign – the future Lord Kitchener, a desert spy, disguised as an Arab and carrying a cyanide tablet in case of capture; the wiry and imperturbable General Wolseley, sticking to his plans against the odds; the extraordinary Colonel Fred Burnaby, greatest adventurer of his age, wearing a deerstalker and blasting away at the dervishes with his shotgun – none are more impressive for me than James Deer, known to his people as Sak Arakentiake ...
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My novel Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage begins in 168 BC at the Battle of Pydna, the decisive engagement in which the Roman general Aemilius Paullus defeated a Macedonian army and secured Roman power in northern Greece. The action then moves to Rome for the triumphal procession, a massive haul of works of art and other booty being watched by Aemilius Paullus, his son Scipio Aemilianus and the old senator Marcus Porcius Cato, whose cry ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ resonates through the novel just as it did in real history ...
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I blogged last month about my pleasure in reading General Gordon's diary from Khartoum while I was researching my novel Pharaoh, and how I particularly relished his attention to detail - describing everything with an engineer's eye, and calculating quantities and distances as closely as possible. One great advantage of this was that I knew that I could rely on his sketch maps as a basis for the maps that my publisher Headline created for the novel, both of which are reproduced here along with a printed original from Gordon's diary
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The two Victorian campaign medals shown here were among my most prized artefacts while I was writing Pharaoh, and appear as illustrations in several editions of the novel. My 19th century protagonist is a Royal Engineers officer in the 1884 campaign to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum, and I was thrilled to discover a medal named to an actual R.E. sapper who took part in the campaign. These two medals were awarded to all British soldiers and sailors who saw active service in Egypt and Sudan from 1882 to 1889, and were dated accordingly ...
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Interview with David Gibbins on The Book Plank:
Question one: tell us about yourself and your hobbies:
I’m an archaeologist by training, and a novelist by profession. After a first career as a university lecturer I became a full-time writer ten years ago, and have since published eight novels that have sold three million copies in thirty languages. My biggest passion is diving and underwater exploration, but I’ve also worked on archaeological sites on land and travelled extensively. My hobbies – when I can find the time! – include antiquarian books and maps, genealogy, and restoring and shooting antique firearms; in Britain I love mountaineering, and in Canada, where I was born, wilderness canoeing, everything about the winter and managing the forest on our family farm where I do most of my writing ...
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One of the great excitements for me of writing Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage was the chance to create a story set against an event that was not only pivotal in ancient history, but also a highlight of my own career. Like many archaeologists I’ve often had difficulty correlating what I’ve been excavating with the great events of recorded history—with wars and political upheavals. Often it seems as if those events simply bypass the majority of people, leaving unaffected what the historian Fernand Braudel called the “underlying continuity” of day-to-day life. But sometimes the events are so huge, so all-encompassing, that they reach through the entire fabric of life, leaving their mark everywhere. When you’re confronted with that evidence emerging from the ground, when the scale and reality of those events becomes apparent, the effect can be shocking ...
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One of the great pleasures for me in researching my novel Pharaoh was acquiring an original copy of General Charles Gordon’s Journals, covering his final months as Governor-General in Khartoum in 1884-5 before the city was overrun by Mahdist forces and he was killed. I’d wanted to find out more about his archaeological and ethnographic interests, but I found myself utterly absorbed by his day-to-day management of the city and the problems he faced. Unlike his other published work of the period ...
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I'm delighted to be able to show two maps that appear in Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage, produced by my publisher Macmillan. The first one is a superb topographical map of the Mediterranean region showing the main settings of the novel - Rome, Macedonia, Spain and North Africa. The second is a plan of ancient Carthage showing the direction of the final Roman assault in 146 BC, from the harbours and the sea wall towards the 'Byrsa' and its temple. One the way you can see places that figure in the novel - the Tanit sanctuary, where the Romans witness horrific scenes of child sacrifice ...
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The present-day action in my novel Pharaoh opens with Jack Howard and his IMU team diving deep into the Mediterranean in search of a 19th century shipwreck thought to contain a fabled sarcophagus from ancient Egypt. Their search is based on fact: the ship was the Beatrice, a British merchantman lost in 1838, and the sarcophagus was the stone coffin of Menkaure, pharaoh of the 4th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom who died about 2500 BC. Only months before the wrecking the sarcophagus had been found in the Pyramid of Menkaure ...
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I’ve just returned from a canoeing expedition with my daughter in Algonquin Park, a huge expanse of more than 7,600 square kilometres of forest and lake in central Ontario first mapped by Royal Engineers surveyors in the 1820s and 1830s. At the time, the main interest was in finding a new route from the Ottawa River west to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron, but as any modern canoeist will attest that was never going to be feasible – there are too many portages! Instead the region became a focus for logging, much of it to supply the British shipbuilding industry, until that was stemmed by the creation of the park in 1892 and the preservation of large tracts of wilderness that remain today, with abundant populations of bear, moose and other wildlife, and much of the park interior only being accessible by canoe and portage. My novel Pharaoh was very much in my mind throughout our trip, and the extraordinary fact that the Nile expedition of 1884 depended on Canadian voyageurs of aboriginal descent who had learned their skills on lakes and rivers very similar to those that my daughter and I were traversing ...
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In my blog about the author Patrick O’Brian I included a picture of me holding a flintlock Sea Service pistol, the same type that you can see Russell Crowe wielding as Captain Jack Aubrey in the film version of Master and Commander. In the film the enemy ship is French, the Acheron, whereas in the novel it’s American, one of the superb new frigates that faced the British at sea and on the Great Lakes during the War of 1812. Since its anniversary last year that war has received long-overdue attention in Canada, with focus on the achievements of the British forces and the local militia ...
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I'm delighted to say that my UK publisher Headline have put up a free chapter sample from Pharaoh on their website, in advance of the UK paperback publication next month. The excerpt comes from a chapter about a third of the way through the novel. Earlier, Jack and Costas had made an astonishing discovery in the Mediterranean, searching for looted Egyptian antiquities on a 19th century wreck. What they find takes them up the Nile beyond Egypt to the deserts of the Sudan, to a place inundated by the waters of the Aswan Dam that provides clues not only to an ancient Pharaoh but also to a British officer whose mission in the 1880s becomes part of Jack's own quest. Read more to follow Jack and Costas on of the most incredible dives of their careers ...
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I took these pictures yesterday of my daughter free-diving on the wreck of the Alice G at Tobermory in Canada, during a few days spent exploring the pristine waters …
Read MoreInterview with David Gibbins on Parmenion Books
First question: what was the inspiration for Jack Howard?
There’s a good deal of me in Jack – we share a diving and archaeological background, and have many of the same historical and intellectual interests. But I very much think of him as a separate fictional character, drawn from my experience of others in our profession. Like many leaders Jack can be solitary and introspective, but his friendships are intense and down-to-earth and a driving force in the novels. What Jack and I share most is a passion for archaeology and the determination to see a project through, and that’s where I identify most closely with him ...
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In my novel Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage, the Roman general Scipio Africanus stands with his companion Fabius before the walls of Carthage, waiting for the catapults to let fly and for the assault that will change the course of history. The two men cast their minds back to the siege of Intercatia in Spain years before when Scipio had been the first on the walls, winning the coveted corona muralis, and they wonder which of them will be first this time. Here’s an extract from the novel to show what happens next ...
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Exciting news - my publishers have just released a free online preview of my novel Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage in advance of hardback publication of the book in the UK and the US on 3 September, the same day that Sega release Total War: ROME II. Click on the image to read the chapter-length Prologue, set during the Battle of Pydna in 168 BC when Rome finally defeated Macedonia and opened the way for conquest of Greece and the East ..
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In my novel Pharaoh my Victorian protagonist Major Edward Mayne has a secret purpose for being with the Nile expedition, but he operates in the guise of an intelligence officer whose job is to scout ahead of the river column to spot obstacles and any evidence of enemy activity. He takes his sketchbook with him to record features of the river, and in his spare time back at camp draws scenes of river activity that he sends anonymously to The Illustrated London News for publication ....
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This photo shows Major Horatio Herbert Kitchener of the Royal Engineers, recognisable from the image of him years later as a Field Marshal in the famous First World War recruitment poster. Here we see him fresh from the Nile campaign of 1884-5, on the cusp of a career that would see his meteoric rise to Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, Commander-in-Chief in India and finally Secretary of State for War in 1914. The popular perception of Kitchener is built on that recruitment poster, which has become associated with the castigation of British leadership in the First World War. But in researching my novel Pharaoh ...
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The broadcaster and historian Dan Snow had written a moving tribute in The Radio Times to his grandfather’s experience as a merchant seaman during the Second World War, as part of the commemoration of the abatement of the Battle of the Atlantic seventy years ago that’s been taking place this summer in Liverpool and elsewhere. Because my grandfather was also a Battle of the Atlantic veteran I’ve wanted to post a few blogs remembering the role of the Merchant Navy, focusing on some of the less well-known aspects. One of those is that the battle was not just ...
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