I've been thinking of writing something about Lord Bernard Stewart, who led a hundred Scottish knights to conquer most of western Europe at the end of the fifteenth century - notably ending the independence of England in 1485, since when it has been ruled by a succession of Welshmen, Scotsmen, and minor German princes.
Or Colonel Jack Churchill, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar, who decided to be Scottish mainly as a matter of style, and used his claymore very effectively during the Salerno landings in World War II (he was also the last English soldier to kill enemies with a longbow during the retreat to Dunkirk).
But today, I discovered Captain George Scott and the frigate James, so I'm going to try and tell you a story that no-one's told in print from end to end before.
Origins: 1643-1645
For reasons lost to history, he came to Inverness in 1643 with some shipwrights from the south, and began to build a very large ship: "for bulk and burden, non such ever seen in our north seas", recalled the local writer John Fraser; as an awestruck schoolboy, he had followed her creation - his family probably oversaw the cutting of the wood for her hull, he would have watched her take shape on the slipway every day, and he even managed to spend some time aboard her as she prepared for her first voyage.
This great ship was called the James, and Captain Scott told the locals that he was building her as a merchant ship, but soon enough, she became a battleship - and she was one of the mightiest of the age.
In 1646, she carried forty-five guns, a potent armament by the standards of the 1640s, although her crew of 70 men was more suited for a trading voyage. By 1649, fully fitted out for war, she is said to have mounted 70 guns, which would make her one of the most powerful warships anywhere in the world.
Much depends on the weight of the roundshot fired, but a ship of 70 guns would only be equalled or surpassed by the Royal Navy's two gigantic "ships royal", the brand new HMS Sovereign of the Seas (100) and the newly-rebuilt HMS Royal Prince (70), which between them embodied all the ambition of a seventeenth-century great power; there only seem to have been around half-a-dozen more warships carrying above 45 guns in 1645, the national flagships of the other major navies.
In short, the little Highland burgh of Inverness seems to have produced something genuinely, inexplicably world-class.
By either estimate, she seems to have been the largest ship built in Scotland since the legendary Great Michael of 1512, and I don't think anything else comparable was launched north of the Border until after 1750 or even into the early nineteenth century; when she sailed into the Mediterranean, she may have been the largest fighting ship between Gibraltar and Odessa.
Perhaps we even have a picture of her, a mid-seventeenth-century portrait of a Scottish warship pierced for sixty-two guns - no other ship that served under the Scottish flag seems to have come close to this armament until the 1690s.
It's just not quite clear what she was for.
Captain Scott may have been a relative of Sir John Scott of Scotstarvit, who had made a tidy profit by financing a successful commerce-raiding frigate in the 1620s; he may have been a relative of Sir James Scott of Rossie, a soldier-of-fortune who had fought for the Venetians a few years earlier, and who would have known that the Serene Republic paid handsomely for fighting ships from northern waters.
Perhaps he simply knew about James IV's unaccomplished plan to take the Great Michael on Crusade against the Turks, and decided to fulfill the king's vow 130 years later.
Or he may have just been a merchant skipper who ended up in a military career by accident.
It's equally unclear why he built the James at Inverness. Presumably, part of the idea was that the forests of the Lovat lordship offered solid oak for hull timbers without the wartime disturbances of England, and tall fir trees for masts without the hassle of importing them from the Baltic. Perhaps he was attracted by the potential of Cromarty Bay - always underused, always recognized as the best harbour on Great Britain's North Sea coast.
Perhaps he'd heard, as scholars began to rediscover the medieval chronicles of Matthew Paris, that one of the largest ships of the medieval Crusades had been built there; perhaps he wanted to find somewhere quiet, away from the various hostile governments in Edinburgh, London, Oxford and Kilkenny, to build a big ship without the wrong people asking questions.
I don't know. After more than 360 years, I don't know if we can know. The simple story is that a man came unexpectedly to Inverness and built himself a huge battleship there, and it really speaks for itself.
And, appropriately enough, she went to sea against a backdrop of gunfire and battle.
From Inverness to the Dardanelles - 1645-1649
By April 1645, the James was ready for sea: she was anchored off the Moray coast, probably still in civilian rig, and proving quite a sensation with the locals. She was due to depart on 9th May, but while she made ready to weigh anchor that morning, two armies appeared on the misty shoreline.
Along the coast road came the Army of the Covenant, well-drilled professional regiments with pikes and muskets, fresh from the pivotal victory of the English Civil War at Marston Moor; company by company, they detached themselves down to the water's edge, firing professional salutes across the tideline to clean out their guns before the battle, then moved up in battle order towards the little town of Auldearn.
Around the old castle hill, there waited an outnumbered insurgent force of mounted knights in medieval armour, and Highland clansmen in kilts.
The passengers aboard the James - mostly supporters of the Covenant, it seems - watched the Battle of Auldearn from the main deck; they watched as the hopelessly outnumbered forces of Scottish anachronism absolutely annihilated the best modern soldiers of the era.
It's not entirely clear which side Captain Scott was on, but that afternoon, the big ship hauled up her anchor, set sail, and departed on a swift course for the south.
It seems probable that most of her seventy crewmen were local sailors: there's no mention of the James's captain bringing hands up with him from the south, and with Irish and Dutch pirates roaming the seas, the herring fisheries and the coastal trade had probably been badly disrupted. Warfare, political violence, and the threat of conscription might also make local landsmen look to the ocean for escape.
Even so, they would probably be a polyglot lot, speaking what were effectively four separate languages - the strangely accentless English of the Black Isle coast, the broad Scots of the Moray burghs, the sing-song Gaelic of the Sutherland fisher-folk, and the Dansk - the gruff old Viking dialect of Caithness and the Northern Isles.
We next hear of Captain Scott and the James on 14th August 1646, when they were officially accepted into the Venetian Navy. The seafaring Republic was anxiously building up a fleet of broadside sailing ships for a war against the Turkish Empire, and by now, the ship from Inverness was armed for battle.
It's possible that the James was already in the Mediterranean by this date, but it's not quite clear that she was. Fraser says that Captain Scott sailed south "to the Straits", and it may be that she was the Scottish frigate which subsequently appeared among the royalist privateers in the English Channel. She may equally be the James of Wemyss, which became the Covenanters' flagship in 1647 - this James certainly seems to have been a large fighting ship, an adequate replacement for the big Dutch-built raider Golden Lion, which had previously been the best ship that they had.
Presumably, she wasn't both, but I wouldn't quite rule it out.
But eventually, she certainly made her way south into the Mediterranean, and hoisted the lion of St Mark alongside the saltire cross of St Andrew.
I'll leave the explanation of what followed to Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie, another wild Scottish hero - whether in the battlefield or in the dirty business of writing maths textbooks; in his Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel, an anthemic handbook to the general brilliance of crazy Scotsmen, he wrote a proud eulogium for Captain Scott (even if he does get his name slightly wrong):
Nor can I well forget that sea-captain, Captain William Scot, whose martiall atchievements in the defence of that State against the Turks, may very well admit him to be ranked amongst the colonels; he was vice-admiral to the Venetian Fleet, and the onely renowned bane and terror of Mahometan navigators ; whether they had galleys, galeoons, galiegrosses, or huge war ships, it was all one to him; he set upon all alike, saying still, The more they were, the manyer he would kill; and the stronger that the encounter should happen to be, the greater would be his honour, and his prise the richer. He oftentimes so cleared the Archipelago of the Mussulmans, that the Ottoman family at the very gates of Constantinople would quake at the report of his victories; and did so ferret them out of all the creeks of the Adriatick gulph, and so shrewdly put them to it, that sometimes they did not know in what part of the Mediterranean they might best shelter themselves from the fury of his blows. Many of their mariners turned land-souldiers for fear of him; and of their maritime officers, several took charge of caravans to escape his hand, which for many yeers together lay so heavy upon them, that he was cryed up for another Don Jean d' Austria, or Duke d' Orea, by the enemies of that Scythian generation; in spight of which, and the rancour of all their unchristian hearts, he dyed but some eighteen moneths ago in his bed, of a feaver, in the Isle of Candia.
Like most of Sir Thomas Urquhart's spectacular claims of Scottish brilliance, this is not actually all that inaccurate at all. The Venetian campaign drove the Turks from the Aegean in 1646 and subsequently bottled their fleet up behind the Dardanelles, and Captain Scott and the James played a major role in the war - not least in the first great Venetian victory.
The James against the Turkish Navy - 12th May 1649
In 1649, the Turkish navy slipped past the blockade, in calm weather where their oared galleys and galleasses could outpace the Venetian galleons and great ships; but the soldiers aboard the Turkish ships objected to the idea of a sea battle, and insisted on taking up a defensive position on the coastline; perhaps, as Urquhart said, the James had put them off serving as marines.
They moved to the ancient fortified harbour of Phocaea, on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, and awaited their opponents.
On 12th May, the Venetian fleet found them; but their admiral, Giacomo di Riva, had problems of his own.
The Dutch ships which formed the main strength of his fleet refused to fight unless they could take out insurance, and most of them gave little help in the battle even when they got it; the English ship Experience left the fleet without so much as an apology, one of the Italian ships surrendered before the battle began, and a French one managed to sail straight into the beach.
That left the Venetians with an effective squadron of just four real ships of war, plus one small scout; they were facing a Turkish force of eleven galleons, ten galleasses, and seventy-two galleys, occupying a strong defended position.
But one of their four ships was the James, with Captain Scott and his crew of seventy brave men from Inverness; and it was the Scots that led the advance into the fortified harbour.
The official reports of their contribution to the battle are written in raptures, but they ring true even in Italian: Captain Scott "strenuously performed every duty that could be desired of him", and his ship "performed the most marvelous feats of valour and skill".
She set herself in the thick of the fighting; she sent crippling broadsides into the Turkish flagship, sank one enemy galleass, captured another, and fought off a determined boarding attack by a third; at this point, the admiring Venetian admiral diverted his flagship to force the Turkish attacker off; and all the while, the Scottish ship's boats were rowing back and forward through the battle, rescuing the shackled galley slaves from amid the wreckage and the broadsides.
It was a dramatic victory, leaving the Turks with just one ship and six light galleasses, while their galley fleet had scattered and fled; but it also left the James dismasted and hulled below the waterline. She reached a safe anchorage at the pirate island of Andros, but on the night of 23rd May, she began to take on water through her battle-damaged timbers, and settled at the bottom of the harbour.
Two days earlier, the disgruntled Turkish janissaries had returned to Istanbul, and promptly murdered their prime minister. They disposed of the next one the next year, when he tried to send them back into another naval campaign. Meanwhile, the senior officer who remained with the fleet had refused an admiral's flag and transferred to a shore assignment. I'm not sure if he took up camel driving, but Urquhart is, again, broadly right.
Aftermath: 1649-1652
Captain Scott may have returned briefly to home waters - a frigate called the Scott appears in the royalist fleet later in the year, big, fast and heavily-armed; he certainly took advantage of the insurance cover that the Admiral had grudgingly given to the Dutch, to ask the Venetian government for 35,000 reals in compensation for the loss of the James: but if he did leave the Venetian fleet for a while, he soon returned to it.
The Turks had acquired a new navy of Barbary pirates and English Roundheads, and Captain George Scott died in the defense of the great Venetian fortress base at Candia on Crete, of a fever that seems to have been brought on by his military exertions - Fraser says it was in 1652, while Urquhart implies a date in 1651.
The Venetians were so impressed by the sacrifice and heroism of this Scottish adventurer and his big ship from Inverness that they erected a monument in their honour; a marble statue of the brave George Scott, standing proudly on the banks of the Grand Canal.
And beneath the warm blue waters of Andros harbour, overlooked by the bright while buildings of a little Greek village, the Mediterranean clay holds buried fir and oak hewn down in Glenmoriston, and wrought into a ship on the shores of the Beaulay Firth - a corner of a foreign port, that is forever Scotland.
