Although the vast majority of the action in To Die a Dry Death happens on the Abrolhos Islands, some of it takes place in the city of Batavia itself. Pelsaert had a meeting with Governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen to inform him the ship Batavia had been wrecked, Pelsaert had a second meeting with the new…
The Battle of Bannockburn, fought over two days in the summer of 1314, was when the Scots came of age, and Robert the Bruce cemented his hold on the Scottish throne, and sent Edward II’s English army packing. The field on which the most famous of battles between England and Scotland was fought, is visible…
I recently posted a few dioramas of the engine room (so to speak) of Stirling Castle – the kitchen and bake house. We also visited the upstairs chambers, where the gentry lived. Much of the restored part dates back to the sixteenth century. At this time, the kings of Scotland used Stirling Castle as home….
Scotland is, of course, full of Scottish history. One of the most interesting visits we made was to Stirling Castle, which stands on a rugged crag above the town of Stirling. As with all these castles, some sort of fort would have stood up there for millennia. Over the years, the walls and buildings were…
There’s a tendency for we humans, living in the here and now, to think things were always like that. Oh, we might acknowledge that once there was a place called Gondwana, and that it sat over the South Pole, and that continents drift on a lava ocean. But that was eons ago. Sure, geological change…
I’m one of those people who believes that when you write about real historical events, it isn’t your place to change facts. For example, unless you’re writing alternative history, you can’t move the Battle of Waterloo from 1815 to 1820, or 1795 simply because it suits your story better. In my novel, I’ve stuck to…
I alluded in a previous post to the events surrounding the loss of other VOC merchantmen and the fact that quite a few Dutchmen actually reached land in Australia, then vanished. Of all the stories, that of the Zuytdorp is perhaps the most mysterious. And those breech blocks in the title of this post play…
For many years, Australia was known as New Holland. Anything more different to the flat, verdant and continually damp polders of the Netherlands than the forbidding, parched land of the central west Australian coast is hard to imagine. Be that as it may, two young Dutchmen from the Batavia were the first white inhabitants of…
I saw in a Dutch paper that the statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen which has proudly stood in the square in Hoorn for several hundred years, was to be replaced with a less controversial figure. The reason, it seems, was that he wasn’t at all a ‘nice’ man and his treatment of the Javanese when…
I recently wrote a post on my other blog concerning the bits authors leave out of time travel. With my tongue firmly in my cheek, I called it ‘the sexy side of time travel’. Imagine yourself going back from the 21st century to (say) Elizabethan London. What would your impressions be? A lot of it…