States
The diplomatic maneuverings of the summer of 1812 that form the background of this story were real, although far more complicated than portrayed here since they also involved Austria and Prussia. England did indeed bribe the Swedes with gold and promises of Norway—which at the time was part of Denmark—in exchange for Finland, which Sweden had recently lost to Russia. The Czar was indeed pushing—unsuccessfully—for a strong, active alliance with the British.
Richard Trevithick ran a London Steam Carriage from Holborn to Paddington in 1803; in 1808 he constructed his Steam Circus in Bloomsbury. The New Steam Circus described here in 1812 is my own invention.
Antonaki Ramadani was a real man, although he was actually the Charge d’Affaires from the Sublime Porte, not the Ambassador. Yasmina Ramadani is my own invention. The extensive spying activities directed toward ambassadors to the Court of St. James that Ramadani describes were quite real.
The Surrey Docks in Rotherhithe were the center of the Arctic whaling expeditions that set sail from London. Rather than being boiled aboard ship as became the practice in later years, the blubber was cut into blanket pieces and brought back to London to be melted down. But by the early nineteenth century, the whales that had once filled the seas near England were nearly extinct and the industry came to be dominated by the American whaling fleets.
The intrigue surrounding the Survey of the Situation, provided to Napoleon on the first and fifteenth of each month by the French Minister of War, was inspired by a real event. From 1811 to 1812, a traitor in the General Staff of the French Army was slipping copies of these reports to an officer attached to the Russian Embassy in Paris named Alexander Ivanovich Chernishav. The smuggling of these reports to London is my own invention, although I have referenced the real event by using Chernishav’s name for my Russian colonel.
The story of Nathan Bateman is based on the autobiographical account left to us by Joseph Bates, an American sailor impressed into the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Thousands of American sailors suffered his fate. And yes, Bates was sent to London as a prisoner and thrown into a hulk on the Thames after the United States declared war on Britain. He survived to become a ship’s captain, a revivalist minister, and a strong champion of abolition and the separation of church and state, before dying an old man in 1872.
