On the other hand, the Periplus of Himilco, if it ever existed, does not survive even in part; the only indication that there might have been such a work is a remark by Pliny that Hanno “published an account of his voyage, as did Himilco.” A circumnavigation of the British Isles would have been at least as worthy of celebration in Carthage as Hanno’s voyage, and if a Periplus did exist in Pliny’s time, it seems surprising that he should not have made more of it. For that reason I have imagined that Himilco did not, in fact, survive his voyage, that his brother Hanno waited in vain for him in Carthage until all hope was lost, and that the only news that eventually did come of Himilco — none of which mentioned a successful circumnavigation of the British Isles — originated with those who had left the expedition earlier, and who could report nothing that Pliny centuries later could regard as interesting or reliable enough to put in his Natural History.
The chapter set in Carthage was inspired by my own experiences co-directing investigations at the ancient harbor site as part of the UNESCO “Save Carthage” project when I was a post-doctoral research fellow at Cambridge University. Just as Hiebermeyer does in the novel, we watched while a digger excavated deep into the sediment at the harbor entrance, eventually revealing the gray-black sludge of the channel; on the way it exposed a skeleton, perhaps of a sixteenth-century Spanish soldier, that our students dubbed “Miguel.” At the time, I wondered whether the unexcavated seafront flanking the channel might have been the site of a monumental harbor entrance, just the kind of place where the achievement of the great navigators might have been celebrated — perhaps even the site of a temple precinct of Ba’al Hammon that contained the tablets of the Periplus and the gorillae skins from Hanno’s voyage.
A harbor-front platform might also have been a place where propitiatory child sacrifice was performed before great voyages, rather than at the Tophet sanctuary some distance inland. As of yet, nothing has been found of the horrifying furnace described by the Roman author Diodorus Siculus (20:14.6), a “bronze image of Ba’al Hammon extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.” However, recent analysis of child cremation burials from the Tophet, suggesting that most were healthy infants, not premature or stillbirths, strongly supports the picture of Carthaginian child sacrifice presented by Diodorus and other Roman historians, something that would fall in line with similar practice evidenced among the ancient Semitic peoples of the Near East.
One of my most exciting recent discoveries has been in Gunwalloe Church Cove, Cornwall, the site of the fictional Phoenician wreck in this novel, after winter storms had stripped away meters of sand and revealed the well-preserved hull of the steamship SS Grip. You can see a film I took of that dive on my website, as well as images of cannon found on other wrecks in the vicinity. Beyond the Grip was an expanse of shingle just as I describe Jack seeing in this novel, and as I swam over it I imagined the wreck I had always dreamed of finding in these waters — a Phoenician tin trader, blown inshore by the prevailing westerlies like so many other ships through the centuries that had foundered in the cove. No such wreck has yet been found off Britain, but several Phoenician wrecks recently investigated in the Mediterranean give an idea of the artifacts that might be uncovered. One off Cartagena in southeast Spain from the seventh or sixth century BC has produced amber from the Baltic, tin and other metal ingots, artifacts inscribed with Phoenician letters, and, most amazingly of all, sections of elephant tusk from northwest Africa. Seeing those tusks reminded me of elephant and rhino ivory of East African origin that I had handled from a late Bronze Age wreck off Turkey, part of a cargo that showed the interrelationship of Canaanite, Egyptian and other traders and suggested a similar model for trade in Phoenician times, with goods being sought by men such as Hanno and Himilco from the very farthest reaches of the known world and beyond.
The idea of setting part of this novel in the wartime Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park came to me while I was sitting in Alan Turing’s reconstructed office in Hut 8 during a visit to Bletchley with my daughter. The recent Hollywood films, the large number of books and TV documentaries, and the revitalization of the site as a tourist attraction have lifted some of the veil of secrecy from wartime operations at Bletchley, but much remains poorly known — in particular, some of the uses to which Ultra intelligence was put, including difficult decisions not to act on all intercepts of U-boat movements for fear of alerting the Germans that the code had been broken. Nazi organizations monitored at Bletchley undoubtedly included the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s “Department of Cultural Heritage,” whose schemes included the search for lost Jewish treasures; another would have been the organization responsible for the exchange of high-grade raw materials and gold between Japan and Germany, carried out by Japanese and German submarines. The characters and the special operations hut in my novel are fictional — as is the letter in Chapter 14 from Fan to Louise — but my account is based as closely as possible on the types of people who worked at Bletchley, on the procedure for conveying intelligence to the Admiralty, and on the circumstances of the Battle of the Atlantic during those pivotal months of April — May 1943.
My account of the British merchant ship Clan Macpherson is based on the actual circumstances of her wrecking on May 1 1943, when she was one of seven ships in convoy TS-37 torpedoed by U-515 some seventy-five nautical miles off Freetown in West Africa. No attempt has ever been made to locate the wreck, which could lie close to the edge of the continental shelf as I suggest here. The names of the four engineer officers who went down with her can be seen on the Tower Hill Memorial to the Merchant Navy in London, along with the names of thousands of other merchant seamen who died as a result of enemy action during the war. The correspondence in Chapter 7 between the Admiralty and Clan Macpherson’s master, Captain Edward Gough, OBE, Lloyd’s War Medal — a veteran of two previous sinkings — is quoted from letters in private hands reproduced in part in Gordon Holman’s In Danger’s Hour (1948), the Clan Line Second World War history. A file containing further correspondence relating to the sinking and the adequacy of the escort is in the National Archives (ADM 1/14944), and extracts from it can be seen on my website.