In the 1980s I was introduced to Patrick O’Brian’s novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin (it’s curious that the series does not have a title). Like so many others, I became hooked on the detailed descriptions of life on board a Royal Navy ship in the early years of the 19th century. The depth and range of Patrick O’Brian’s research is impressive and many of the novels draw on real events and real people. My favourite character is Stephen Maturin not least because, like him, I have a mixture of Irish and Spanish blood but it did not occur to me that he could be based on a real person until the evidence was, literally, put in front of me.
It came about like this. I was asked by Eduardo Ortiz, now Emeritus Professor in Mathematics and the History of Mathematics at Imperial College, to meet him at 6 Carlton House Terrace one autumn afternoon in the 1990s. He took me into the Royal Society where he had made an appointment for us to be shown the Council Chamber on the first floor. Around the walls hang portraits of illustrious former Presidents and in pride of place is one of Sir Joseph Banks, President 1778-1820.
He appears in Patrick O’Brian’s novels as himself and as the fictional Joseph Blaine. This portrait shows an older man than the Joshua Reynolds portrait in the National Gallery, painted in 1772/73. It was painted in 1808 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1809. Banks is seated in the Presidential chair looking keenly at the viewer, almost as if he is staring into a camera lens. In front of him are various items relating to the Royal Society and lying on the table in front of him is a paper and it was to this that Eduardo drew my attention. It reads, “On an Improved Reflecting Circle by Don Jose de Mendoza y Rios”.
Mendoza was born in Seville in 1761. He was born plain Mendoza and later appended “y Rios” to be associated with his aristocratic maternal grandmother. Maturin added “y Domenica” for a similar reason. Mendoza and Maturin were both brought up in Spain. In 1776 Mendoza enlisted in the (Spanish) navy as an Aferéz de Fragata, equivalent to a midshipman. Three years later his ship, the Santa Inés, was engaged by two English cruisers. He was taken prisoner and spent a year in prison in Cork, where he learned English and, possibly, Irish, putting him on a par with Maturin. He was released and returned to active service in the navy. There was further naval combat and he took part in a failed attack on Gibraltar but unlike Thomas Cochrane and his alter ego Jack Aubrey, this was not to be his life.
He had turned into a gifted mathematician and wrote a treatise on navigation that was published in 1787. He submitted a proposal to create an institute near Cadiz for the advancement of the science of navigation. This was authorised by Charles IV and eventually became the fore-runner of today’s Naval Museum in Madrid. He was released from active service and went to Paris in 1789 to acquire maps, charts, books and instruments relevant to navigation and to report on scientific and industrial advances in the countries he visited. . He was admitted to the French Academy of Sciences in 1792 but later that year, as the Revolution unfolded, moved to London.
He had been in correspondence with Joseph Banks who befriended him when he came to London for the first time. His position was delicate as he remained an officer in the Spanish navy. However, he was presented at the Royal Society in January 1793 and elected a Fellow two months later. His imprisonment, time in Paris and friendship with Joseph Banks are all shared by Maturin, who received a Doctorate in Paris and was taken to dine by Joseph Banks before attending a meeting of the Royal Society and becoming a Fellow.
Mendoza had freedom to visit scientists and astronomers and shared his discoveries with his associates in Spain. In 1796 he was able to send to Spain, from London, a large and valuable collection of maps, charts and scientific and geographic books. He negotiated the purchase of telescopes for the King of Spain; one 25 ft. (then the second largest in Europe) and another 7 ft. ordered from William Herschel in 1796 but not shipped until 1802. It must have been tricky getting this done considering England and Spain were at war from 1796 until 1808. However, the King paid a high price, £3,150. Mendoza’s assistance did not go unrewarded, at least from Herschel. He gave him a 7 ft. reflector gratis in 1801. Mendoza was able to place young Spanish apprentices in the workshops of several key English instrument makers, even succeeding in getting one of them instruction in precious stone cutting, a very secretive area.
Meanwhile, Mendoza’s private life was less turbulent than Stephen Maturin’s. The former married Anna Maria Parker in 1798 and had a daughter, as did Maturin, the following year; more of her later.
In 1814 the Board of Longitude awarded him £1,200 for his improved longitude tables. He was known throughout Europe and both Russia and Sweden made him a foreign member of their Academies. Like Maturin, he prospered financially but suffered ill health. He had a painful condition for which there was no relief and ended his life, hanging himself at his house in Brighton in 1816. His Irish connection, unpromisingly started in prison in Cork, was continued when his daughter married an Irish landowner and politician, Patrick Bellew.
Patrick O’Brian, who knew so much about Joseph Banks that he wrote his biography, would have come across this naval officer, mathematician and scientist who lived for the last 24 years of his life in England but remained on the Spanish navy list until 1800 and found in him the inspiration for Stephen Maturin. Of course Maturin developed his own most distinctive personality and it is this characterisation which contributes so much to the novels. Portraits of Mendoza and his wife still hang at the Bellew home in Ireland. They are by Thomas Phillips RA, who painted the portrait of Joseph Banks hanging in the Royal Society.
(Details of Mendoza’s biography are taken from his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Eduardo L. Ortiz, to whom I am grateful.)