Maria and the Admiral
On the night of the 9th of April, I undressed and went to bed for the first time since we left Rio de Janeiro. All was then over, and I slept long and rested; but I awoke to the consciousness of being alone and a widow, with half the globe between me and my kindred.
Valparaiso. One of the most remote places on earth, caught between the Pacific and the majestic snow-capped Andes. June 1822. Admiral Lord Cochrane who has led the Chilean fleet to victory over the country’s Spanish rulers, sails into Valparaiso harbour. A British woman, Maria Graham, whose husband, a captain in the Royal Navy, died as they rounded Cape Horn, watches her compatriot’s triumphant arrival from her house above the bay. A charismatic and opinionated young writer, with several books already published, she decides that her isolation has come to an end.
Lord Cochrane, a popular hero of the Napoleonic wars, had long been at odds with the Admiralty in London, who failed to subdue his outspoken independence. He left England in disgrace following a year spent in prison after an alleged stock exchange fraud. In Maria he meets a woman whose intelligence and spirit of adventure match his own.
Inspired by Maria Graham’s own journals published in 1824, Maria and the Admiral vividly imagines Maria and Lord Cochrane’s intense friendship, against a background of political turmoil, earthquake and eventually civil war. When Cochrane accepts the invitation to head independent Brazil’s fleet, Maria joins him on the journey to Rio de Janeiro. As Cochrane’s wife sails from England to claim her husband, Maria faces a new drama in the steamy court of the Emperor.
Background engraving by Maria Graham 1823
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Thoughts
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A Hidden Year
Photo: RB at Admiral Cochrane’s house, Quintero, Chile.
Maria and the Admiral is my first historical fiction.Why does anyone write historical fiction? Isn’t history interesting enough without making stuff up? I used to believe that historical fiction was for novelists who didn’t have enough imagination to invent their own characters and story.
Then in 2004 I went to Chile and met (in history) two extraordinary figures who so captured my imagination that I knew I would have to write about them. My new novel Maria and the Admiral is the result. Maria is Maria Dundas/Graham/Callcott and the Admiral is Admiral Cochrane, the Tenth Earl of Dundonald. If you google them, you’ll find she was a writer published in the early eighteenth century who married twice but had no children and he was a Napoleonic naval hero who antagonised the Admirality, then the House of Commons as an M.P. and was imprisoned for stock exchange fraud. Abandoning England, he became a Chilean hero of as head of their navy. He has just successfully defeated the Spanish colonialists when he met Maria Graham in Valparaiso whose captain husband had died as they rounded Cape Horn. She fell under his spell immediately and her devotion never wavered through earthquake, civil war, their flight to Brazil and their marriages to others.
I did so much research both in Chile where the photo above was taken and in libraries in the UK that I might as easily have written a history book – except that then the TRUTH would have remained hidden. Maria’s voluminous journals and letters which gave me much of the material for the book fall completely silent for an entire year. As I followed her story, I realised that that hidden (or secret) year when she was living alone in Brazil was the key to my story. An historian could only state the absence of information but I could fill the gap.