The impeccably neat lines of shorthand are familiar, the voracious gathering up of fact, incident, anecdote and sightings of pretty women even more so. Samuel Pepys’s other diary, kept 14 years after the last line was ruled on his first – arguably the most famous journal in the world – with a sad declaration that due to his failing eyesight he would never write another, goes on display next week in a major exhibition celebrating Pepys’s life and work at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London.

“Many people have no idea that this later diary even exists,” said Robert Blyth, co-curator of the exhibition. “He only kept it for a few months, and it’s mostly taken up with work matters – but it’s our boy all right, he cant help himself, there’s no mistaking him.”

Pepys was sent to Tangier, Morocco, in 1683 as the most senior civil servant in the navy. The city had been claimed by England since 1661 as part of the dowry that came to Charles II with Catherine of Braganza, but far from being a colonial boom town it had become a nightmare, costing a fortune to maintain. With its inadequate harbour and almost useless walls, fortified at huge expense but overlooked by the surrounding hills, and garrisoned by grumbling soldiers and populated by their discontented families, the enclave was constantly under threat of being reclaimed by the Moroccans.

In addition, Blyth said, it had become infamous for gambling, drunkness and debauchery. The eventual solution was drastic: Tangier was abandoned, the houses torched, the fortifications blown up.

Pepys recorded all the bureaucracy of the preparations, but also noted the governor’s wife in church, “a lady I have long admired for her beauty but she is mightily altered. And they do tell stories of her on her part, while her husband minds pleasure of the same kind on his”.

Everything new interested him. “Here I first observed crawling upon the site of the church windows some lizards and sticking in the windows to bask themselves in the sun. And at noon we had a great locust of a sudden on the table; and this morning in my chamber the most extraordinary spider ever I saw, at least ten times as big as an ordinary spider.”

The famous early diary came to an end on 31 May 1669. Pepys sadly recorded another busy day – up betimes, work meetings, dined at home, boat up the Thames to Whitehall via an encounter with an old amour (“Je did baiser elle”) and finally with his long-suffering wife and a friend to walk in the park and a merry evening at The World’s End pub, “and so home late”.



Then he laid down his pen after chronicling the death of Cromwell, the restoration of Charles II, the great plague and the fire of London, as well as his new brown suit, his jealousy over his wife’s dancing master, the fate of his parmesan cheese, and his inability to keep his hands off the female staff, in six volumes and 1.25m words. As he wrote: “And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand.”

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He feared he was going blind – but in fact his eyesight lasted, as the exhibition demonstrates, through many more adventures, honours, love affairs and acquisitions. He died in 1703, aged 70, leaving his library of thousands of volumes, the movable book cases he designed himself – the earliest recorded in England – and the diary first to his nephew, and then to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where they remain.

The Tangier diary has come to Greenwich on loan from the Bodleian library in Oxford, but the earlier diary cannot leave Magdalene under the terms of the bequest.

Co-curator Kristian Martin’s hero is a Cambridge undergraduate, poor John Smith, who in the early 19th century was set the appalling task of transcribing the entire early diary. Smith assumed it was written in code, and managed to crack it by comparing an account of the escape of Charles II from the battle of Worcester with a text published from Pepys’s later longhand version.

A year later, somebody broke the news to Smith that Pepys had actually written in a shorthand system devised by Thomas Skelton, and that the text book from which he learned it was on a shelf over his head.

Samuel Pepys, Plague, Fire, Revolution; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; 20 November – 28 March

• This article was amended on 17 November 2015, to identify the exhibition item illustrated in the photograph.

