Lands of Red and Gold, Act II
- Thread starter Jared
- Start date
Thanks. I thought it would be important to get a broader view of this part of the history.
There's also a couple of hints about the future of Aururia, if you read between the lines.
Haven't read LoRaG in quite some time, but this is definitely a fascinating update, though.
I don't think you really needed to quote the whole thing...
Poor Aururians. The Western World is closing in on them, willy-nilly. I imagine some of them will be able to retain independence through the 18th century, but it's unlikely they'll make it to 1900: they just don't have the population or resource bases to really industrialize in a pre-globalization world, especially after the losses from European diseases. (They have some disease defenses of their own, but Aururia isn't the Bight of Benin [1], either).
Bruce
[1] "Beware and take heed of the Bight of Benin."
"Where few come out but many go in."
Poor Aururians. The Western World is closing in on them, willy-nilly. I imagine some of them will be able to retain independence through the 18th century, but it's unlikely they'll make it to 1900: they just don't have the population or resource bases to really industrialize in a pre-globalization world, especially after the losses from European diseases. (They have some disease defenses of their own, but Aururia isn't the Bight of Benin [1], either).
Bruce
[1] "Beware and take heed of the Bight of Benin."
"Where few come out but many go in."
ISTM that a handful of trading posts with no political authority or settlements or plantations hardly counts as a "colonial empire".
Is this author grinding an axe?
This is huge. OTL, one doesn't see non-European societies thinking much about the world outside their particular domain until much much later.
This and the Nuttana trading with Japan...
I find this awkward. People generally resist being sent to their deaths, or the equivalent. Unless there is a reason for others in that area to enforce it, it does't fly. Punishment for crimes or slave trading, but just because won't cut it.
Who is being sent? If it is the bound laborers of the landholding class, they won't like it.
This makes no sense. The rebels are mere laborers, it says above, yet they are wealthy enough to own exotic livestock. Also, how many donkeys are there in the country? Either a tiny number, in which case the rebel leadership is a tiny clique, or a fairly large number, which implies revolutionary changes in rural way of life.
Also, is there an OTL precedent for this? That is, a revolutionary movement imposing narrow franchise requirements on itself? AFAICR, such limits have been imposed from the top down, by figures or groups in power.
My appetite is roused, but there's no chance of these ever being shipped up here, I suppose.
Despite the above caveats, still an enormous amount of fun, and superbly done.
Good update, Jared!
Haven't read LoRaG in quite some time, but this is definitely a fascinating update, though.
Thanks. This one was a fun one to write, too. Long, but fun.
Europeans will of course exert an enormous amount of pressure, but I'm not sure whether the eighteenth or nineteenth century is really the bigger danger point.
There's no certainty that any Aururian society will retain independence, of course. But the states that are most likely to retain some degree of functional independence through to the start of the eighteenth centuries are, more or less in order, the Five Rivers states, the Nuttana, less likely the Yadji and (outside chance) the Patjimunra. The southern highlands might still qualify as independent (possibly), but hardly as a state.
During the eighteenth century, well, the big early challenge is the continuing loss of population. The population declines will still being striking at the start of the century, due to European diseases. In OTL, the indigenous population of Australia bottomed out about 1900, roughly 110 years after first European permanent landings, and more significantly European diseases. The population then increased more than four-fold over the next century.
Translating that population trend into TTL's demographics requires some caution, of course. Things have changed in so many ways. The diseases arrive more piecemeal, which allows more survivors but also means a longer timeframe before the population reaches a minimum. The population recovery will also be more mixed; less access to medicine ITTL, but also a generally higher population growth rate in a preindustrial era.
My very ballpark estimate is that the Aururian indigenous population will bottom out in roughly 1740 AD. The magnitude of the decline will differ; for reasons I've outline previously, the Nuttana and the Five Rivers will be slightly better off than other regions. The Five Rivers had an indigenous population of around 2.5 million before TTL's European contact, and will bottom out at somewhere between 900,000-1 million. They will probably have recovered to their pre-contact population by 1800. The Yadji Empire (or former Yadji lands, depending) had a similar pre-contact population, but will drop lower and will need slightly longer to recover.
Is that sort of population enough of a base to recover and hold off from later European colonialism? Perhaps, perhaps not. The challenges are obvious, but (especially) the Five Rivers have a geographical advantage in that an invasion of them is quite hard. Not only are they at the arse-end of the world as far as Europe is concerned, their heartland is a lot harder to invade since they're inland. Assuming that they are able to acquire European arms from somewhere (either learning by then how to make them, or by buying them from any European power other than the one trying to invade them), then they may be able to put up a pretty good fight. Consider how much trouble the British had trying to suppress the Maori during the Maori Wars (1845-1872) - and I think that a still-independent Five Rivers would be a much tougher proposition than the Maori were. Survival is by no means guaranteed, but it's not impossible either.
In part, the author is grinding an axe - just as previous European historians tended to understate indigenous Aururian achievements, he tends to overstate them.
But the Nangu colonial outposts were substantial in proportion to their population. Roughly 30% of their population lived overseas in a variety of trading posts and colonial-founded trade cities where they had either formal (e.g. *Port Augusta aka Dogport) or informally recognised authority (e.g. *Victor Harbor aka Jugara, where they effectively ruled the city itself regardless of which state controlled the territory outside). The *Eyre Peninsula (with 5-6 times their own population) was effectively an informal colonial realm which they maintained via both commercial and religious influence. This isn't an actual colonial empire, of course - far from it. The ATL author exaggerates there. But it is colonialism.
Well, it's not common amongst non-Europeans, but it happened on occasion. Zheng He's treasure fleets sailing around much of South Asia and parts of Africa, or Japan sending an ambassador to Europe (Hasekura Tsunenaga) in the early seventeenth century before deciding on seclusion.
The key difference is that China and Japan both decided, in essence, that there wasn't much to interest them outside of their particular domain. The Aururians are in rather a different position because they now know that there's a big world out there, and there are things there which interest them.
My wording was unclear. It should have been "lifelong sentence" rather than death sentence.
What happened was a political misjudgement on the part of the Atjuntja monarchy. Slaves who were sent to the mines were (usually) there for life punishment. While working in the gold mines was unpleasant and involved a risk of death, it was thought of as a lifelong sentence because a slave would not usually be allowed to return (save a few who earned freedom as a reward). The conditions in the mines were certainly unpleasant, and the fact that rumours made them sound even worse than they were had never previously worried the Atjuntja monarchs - it made a useful deterrent to potential criminals, since they knew the punishment.
What the Atjuntja monarch was proposing to do was extend the existing system of labour drafts (3 months of the year) to draft some labourers to work in the mines for that period of time and return. The labour draft part itself was common practice; labourers would be drafted every year either by the royal administrators or local landholders, depending on who was in control of that area. (The affected ones in this case would have been under royal control).
The misjudgement was that the monarchy underestimated the popular revulsion to going into the mines at all - because their horrors had been exaggerated. The draftees would have returned at the end of the usual labour season - but instead they never made it there, because of the revolt.
It makes more sense in the Atjuntja context. They have an elective tradition, of sorts. Their monarch, the King of Kings, is elected by the thirteen noble families who are each headed by their "kings", and those kings are in turn elected from within the eligible members of their own family. Sometimes those elections are pro forma - e.g. if the king has only one nominated successor - while sometimes they are genuine contests.
But the Atjuntja idea of an election is of a group of smart, successful people meeting to deliberate on their choice of leader, with the discussions being the key part and any actual vote merely the confirmation. Something like the election of the Pope via the College of Cardinals might be if only one round of voting was permitted, or what the U.S. founders envisaged the electoral college to be, rather than what it actually became.
The Atjuntja don't think of elections as being something that includes everyone, and it would be rather an intellectual leap for them to move in one go from "the best people elect one leader" to "everyone elects all of our leaders". They were actually making a big step by moving from "elect one leader" to "elect a council of several leaders", and even that step mostly happened because there were competing groups of rebels who couldn't agree on who should be one leader, so they decided on a council.
So when it came to deciding on leaders, the rebels naturally turned to elections, but they had to work out how to pick their electors. They had no obvious source of authority - no hereditary authority - but had heard vaguely of the Raw Men using property qualifications for elections. They couldn't use land ownership - since at this level land is seen as belonging to the community and only being worked by a family - but wanted something which marked a genuinely successful farmer. The idea being, from their point of view, that someone who was a successful farmer had proven their ability to make good decisions (or else they would be an unsuccessful farmer).
So what qualification can be used to distinguish a very good farmer from merely an average one? The answer was one who has done well enough to be one of the (relative) few who can buy an imported European donkey. There were some donkeys around, for the most successful farmers, but they weren't common enough that most farmers would have one. So it was an ideal criterion to get enough of the more successful farmers together to deliberate on their choice of leaders.
There are specialty suppliers around who ship bushfood spices overseas, including Tasmanian peppers/Dorrigo peppers, often called pepperberry and pepperleaf in marketing. I've ordered some online from within Australia in the past (though these days I buy them from a place near where I work). Shipping them overseas adds significantly to the cost, naturally, but it can be done.
mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
Are any curious Australians starting to notice that the animals being imported from the outside world (donkeys,pigs,horses,cats,etc) Are not mammals like the majority of the fur bearing creatures of their homeland? What do they make of this fact?
The *Australians already know about both sorts of mammals, in a general sort of way. Themselves, of course, and domesticated dogs. So there's been some awareness of the differences between different kinds of mammals. It does register that the imported animals are the same, of course.
Thus far, no-one's really done a systematic study of the possible reasons behind it, though there will be the equivalent of a bestiary or two. The questions about the whys and wherefores of it are questions which would appeal to some *Australians, particularly those in the Five Rivers, but those kinds of questions are at the moment a long way down their list of things to ask. There's so many more pressing questions about survival and European technology and so forth.
Sooner or later someone will get around to making a more thorough study of the question, but I'm not sure when that will be.
Aururian food and Jews
I was just thinking that the Mediterranean areas that will use the Red Yam more or less line up with the areas that have Sephardic Judaism. Do you expect any change to Jewish Diet due to Aururian food other than the Sephardic red Latkes?
Note, in general, I would expect all Aururian plants to be judged as Kosher (and Kosher for Passover) and all Aururian land mammals to be *not* Kosher, just like OTL.
I was just thinking that the Mediterranean areas that will use the Red Yam more or less line up with the areas that have Sephardic Judaism. Do you expect any change to Jewish Diet due to Aururian food other than the Sephardic red Latkes?
Note, in general, I would expect all Aururian plants to be judged as Kosher (and Kosher for Passover) and all Aururian land mammals to be *not* Kosher, just like OTL.
The Five Rivers is the part of the continent with the closest thing approximating a scientific tradition, or at least an investigative one. Note their physicians, for example.
The reasons for this are partly cultural, but there's some underlying geographical and economic reasons. The Five Rivers is the oldest agricultural society on the continent, and has had a large population for a long time. Thanks to perennial crops and an excellent waterborne transportation network, it has the sort of agricultural surplus and commercial mindset that allows it to support large numbers of people who can deal with these sorts of questions. (A bit like how when Greece, and particularly Athens, saw large urbanization on the back of imported food, we got the Golden Age of Greek philosophy).
The other areas with large populations (the Yadji and Atjuntja realms) lack these natural transportation networks. They have started to build excellent roads, which are a partial substitute, but they lack the beasts of burden to make best use of the roads. Both realms are also much more recent in having a large population, and so have not had anywhere near as long to develop such a tradition of inquiry. In the case of the Yadji, the cultural mindset is also rather more hostile to open inquiry, being a rather regimented place.
The next most likely place to develop a tradition of inquiry, incidentally, is the Patjimunra in the *Hunter Valley, who in a smaller way have their own natural transportation network and a long tradition of being settled.
Well, there's always the caveat that I can't claim to be very familiar with the Jewish diet, Sephardic or otherwise.
The wattles are also an obvious addition as a staple crop. The bush pear (called luto ITTL) is also something that will be grown a lot around the Med, and so would be integrated into the diet. Similarly for the kutjera/desert raisin, which can be made to flower almost continuously if irrigated, and so will be a popular condiment.
Past that, there's of course a whole range of spices that may be adopted, but I'm not familiar enough with their cuisine to know how likely they would be to take them up.
The interesting question is what happens to emus/noroons. Big, useful bird, but may be ruled unsuitable. From memory, when this topic came up before, the example of the ostrich suggested that it would be non-kosher, but if there's any possibility for the emu to be considered kosher, things could get interesting.
Last edited:
Lands of Red and Gold #84: Time of the Great Dying
Lands of Red and Gold #84:Time of the Great Dying
“Abyss’s maw gapes wide,
Death’s fix’d grin be-stares ev’ry mortal
Smile back or go mad.”
- Lancelin Fisher-King, The Mists of Memory
* * *
Carl Ashkettle, chronicler [reporter], writer, actor, philanthropist – and now biographer for the world’s most enigmatic man.
After three weeks of hearing him recite the tale, Ashkettle still does know what to make of the man sitting opposite him. Either a three-hundred-year-old survivor of the age before Europeans came to Aururia, or the world’s most accomplished and fortunate liar.
The man answers to the name of Clements. He tells a long story, one full of so many details, and one which is almost entirely consistent, save for very minor lapses of memory or trivialities which could be expected of any eyewitness account. Much of what Clements has declared is impossible to verify anywhere else; yet he has told a few details of history which have been confirmed by scholars, but which would hardly be known to the general public.
The recounting of Clements’ life – or alternatively, the spinning of the greatest work of fiction since vows of wifely obedience were included in the Gunnagalic marriage service – has covered many topics, over many days. Some of it in chronological order, but some not. That has been part accident, and part design; sometimes Clements is reminded of other things, and other times Ashkettle has deliberately gone back to probe previous topics to catch out any rehearsed sequence of lies.
Of all the topics, there is one that haunts him the most. The plagues. The seemingly-endless waves of foreign diseases that struck at Aururia, one after another. The most lethal part of de Houtman’s gift to the Third World. He has known about the plagues, of course. It is a topic of which any educated man is aware. But never before has he had such an appreciation for the era of the plagues. Or, as Clements puts it, the time of the great dying.
Clements has described several of the plagues, the afflictions, their courses, and what he has seen of them. So far, he had asked to pass over the description of the worst plague, saying that he found it painful to recount so much of the litany of sorrow at once. That left an unwelcome lacuna in his tale, a major omission around the early 1660s, which had troubled Ashkettle. He dislikes having such a gap in his preferred sequence of events. Now, with more of the later history – or it just his story? – covered, he wants to return to the greatest plague, find out what he can, and incorporate it into his now-voluminous notes.
“Mr Clements, I want to ask you-”
“About the great plague, yes.” Clements takes in his expression, and chuckles.
“Am I so obvious?” Ashkettle asks.
“You learn to read people, in this game. The survival game, that is.”
“So I gather. But I would like to hear the tale. Unless it is still too painful.”
Clements shrugs. “Painful now, or painful later. May as well be now. Time dulls most memories, blurring pleasure and sorrow alike. But grief always seems to last.”
“In any case. I lived in the city then. Yigutji. In the year 1661, to put it in parlance your wider audience would recognise. Still a leatherworker, one of high repute by then, no matter that I had left the city for a long while... but you know all that. 1661, the Year of Our Lord – and is that not an irony which stings?
“I was the tjarrentee, the master craftsman, the head of the family. Not the eldest, but the one judged most accomplished in the craft. So I was responsible for solving everything, when there was a dispute. Not just in the leather business, but the whole boon – the family, the extended family, to use the modern term. My father had died, hmm, six years before, which made me the tjarrentee, and my mother three or four years, so she could not advise me.” He chuckles, briefly. “Maternal advice which no sane man would reject.”
“Head of the family meant I had to know about every family member. Same went for the shop workers, in business matters. In personal matters, I would speak to their tjarrentee and we would solve it together. An argument, a dispute over property, approving a marriage contract, confirming the name of a child, managing the taxation, answering any order of the king or his bureaucrats. All of that – my problem.
“So I knew about the whole family, who lived, where they lived – though that mostly meant on the same street – and everything.” He pauses, and there is a glistening in his eye. “And how they died.”
“1661. Me, head of the family. My wife, Mitjantjara, though we had no children. My older and younger brothers who were leatherworkers under my roof – I’ll skip all of their names for now, but I’ll write them out for you with everything else – their wives, with four surviving sons between them, their four wives, and one unmarried daughter. My two sisters were now part of their husbands’ families, naturally, together with two of my nieces. One surviving uncle, one widowed aunt-by-marriage, one aunt who had returned to the family when all of her husband’s kin died or fled after the light-fever [typhus]. Two of their children – my cousins – who had not created or joined other family businesses, and so remained part of the boon. Two apprentice leatherworkers, both with wives of their own. For the children, two great-nephews from my elder brother, one nephew-by-craft from the elder apprentice, and four unnamed children.”
“Unnamed children?” Ashkettle says.
“Meaning just that, they had not been given names yet. In the city, we did not name a child until it had survived swamp-rash, or until its third birthday. Whichever came sooner. We believed it was bad luck to name a child earlier, and only invited death from swamp-rash.
“So, thirty boon members in my care. Plus my two sisters, their husbands, and their two daughters, who were not in my care but who I still remember.
“In the Year of the Great Dying. That’s what we called it. We had seen terrible plagues before that. So many dead beforehand. Wave after wave of death. Many of my own family among them, sisters, brothers, nieces, apprentices. But no matter how much sorrow we had witnessed before, nothing could prepare us for what happened during the greatest plague of all.
“The Great Death, we called it. The fatal cough. Or the royal rash, because the king caught it early and died from it. Pestilence would be the best word for it now, I suppose.”
Clements falls silent for a time, his breathing faster, and his gaze downcast. At length he looks up. “I remember the terror. The dread in anticipation. Word had come up the river of a “four-day fever.” Tjibarr suffered, and other lands further away. We knew the pestilence was coming. The physicians urged quarantine as they had done with previous plagues. That worked, sometimes. But not for this pestilence.
“It came so fast, that was the worst of it. Everyone fell ill at once. Including my family. All of them. That made it so much harsher. So many lay dying when they might have recovered with help, if not that those who would have cared for them were stricken themselves.
“The fever came first, with me. And with everyone in the family, as best I can remember. Then a hacking cough, burning eyes, and an inflamed nose. The rash came afterward, spreading from the head down the chest and back. It itched incredibly, and when you saw the rash, you knew that death awaited you. Four days it was, but they felt endless. Consumed with fever, drifting to sleep without finding rest, itch, coughing, hoping not to die of thirst... That was the worst time in my life. Never had I felt so close to death. And for Mitjantjara, and so many more of my family, it was death.
“Thirty and six in my care, before. Fewer, after. Mitjantjara, my elder brother, his eldest son, and his son, my aunt-by-marriage, my younger sister, my elder sister’s daughter, both my apprentices and one of their wives, and two of the unnamed children. My younger brother recovered from the rash and we thought he was safe, only to develop a worsening cough after that, until he died. Three and ten dead, all told. A third of my family dead.
“I recovered first – I do that with most diseases – so I was active in time to see most of them die, but too late to do anything about it. I remember holding Wingalee, my elder brother, giving him water, trying to help him cool, and watching him slip away. I remember seeing the children breathe their last...” He stops then, tears streaming down his face.
“So many died. Not just in my family, in the whole city. The bodies were piled up in houses, and on the streets. We had to burn the dead. There was no choice, we could not bury so many in time.
“I volunteered to be part of the groups sent out to collect firewood. Better that than stay around looking at so many fallen kinfolk. We harvested anything we could find inside the city that could burn – furniture from abandoned houses, street stalls, anything. Then we moved outside, to the cornnart [wattle] groves, we stripped off everything, cut off every branch. We did not care about the harvest so much as feeding the pyres, and we knew that with all of the spread of the pestilence, there would be abandoned trees further away that could be collected at harvest-time. I remember watching the smoke rising from the west, day after day, as hope seemed to burn away with the endless death.
“I knew then, we all knew, that the city would never be the same again. And so it was. Some went mad, or the next worst thing to it. Violence and crime of all sorts worsened, even amongst the troubled survivors. So did war, in the years after. Men believed that they had nothing to lose, and so they struck out. It was bad for years, decades after, there and elsewhere, but especially right away...
“One time I remember, which told me just how much things had changed. An argument over who had right of way in a narrow street. A trivial thing, or it should have been. Two men, neither could pass without the other flattening against the wall or stepping back. Neither wanted to budge. Neither man was elder or tjarrentee, neither had precedence, so either of them could have stepped back. Instead, it came to argument. Then shouting. When one man threatened with a fist, the second drew iron, turning what should have been a matter of blows into a death fight. I doubt that anyone ever bothered to prosecute the slayer for recompense or death, either. In that time, who cared enough to act? The king was dead himself, among with so many others who might have passed judgement.
“It was around the time when I witnessed that murder that I decided I had to leave the city, too. The leatherworking craft had collapsed with the deaths – my uncle and I were the only proper craftsmen left, so it would not survive us. More than that, there were too many bad memories, and too much loss. If I was to find another wife then, it would not be in the city. I already knew that I looked younger than my years – it was hard to avoid – but that was only another reason to go. So I stayed long enough to see the family choose a new head, for everyone to have some kind of life to continue with, then I left.”
I think I believe him. Impossible as his tale sounds, I believe him. Clements’ account is simply too real not to believe.
“That was the start of my vagrancy,” Clements says. “Shifting from place to place, never daring to live in the one locale for too long, lest people notice that I never seemed to age. A very long time as a vagrant, as it happens. At the time I spoke only the language of Yigutji, naturally, but if there was one bit of good fortune amidst the destruction, it was that people fled everywhere. No-one was surprised to see refugees. That made it easy to blend in, and master the craft for the later times when I would need more subtlety in moving around and concealing my past.”
“And forget your past, too?” Ashkettle ventures.
“Quite. No-one who lived through any of the plagues wanted to remember them, and for the pestilence that was truest of all.”
* * *
As with so many of the other plagues that afflicted Aururia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, history does not record precisely how the plague that came to be called the Great Death made its way from the Old World to the Third World. Unlike the early plagues that afflicted Aururia, the Great Death produces no asymptomatic carriers, and must be transmitted from person to person; it does not even linger long on clothing or bedding. The long sea voyages between Europe and Aururia, together with the fact that so many Europeans would have caught the Great Death in childhood, meant that any infection usually burnt out long before a Raw Man ship reached the Land of Gold.
Yet in the 1640s and 1650s, the number of European ships which visited the Third World increased with every passing year. The two decades were marked by a boom in existing commodities (with one exception), and expansion into new markets and new commodities.
In the west of the continent, the Atjuntja supplied an ever-growing amount of gold to the Dutch. While the early trade in Aururian sandalwood collapsed through over-exploitation, the Atjuntja turned to the cultivation of common sweet peppers as an alternative crop, and the Dutch began to build up a market exporting these into India, Ceylon and Europe. Sweet peppers proved especially popular in Ceylon, where down into modern times the common sweet pepper would be known as Dutch pepper.
In the south of the continent, the Dutch visited the Seven Sisters for more sweet peppers and other minor spices, but this peninsula was mostly useful as a way-station for trade further east. For the Five Rivers exported an ever-growing amount of kunduri, a small but extremely lucrative trade in musk (worth more by weight than gold), and a few other minor commodities. This trade was divided between the English and the Dutch, for the Yadji controlled the best port (Jugara) and refused the Dutch admittance, but Tjibarr had built trade roads to other ports and sold many of its commodities via that route. As well as controlling part of the Five Rivers trade, the Yadji sold a considerable amount of gold and sweet peppers to the English.
In the Cider Isle, too, the Dutch and English visited increasingly often for gold and sweet peppers. They had no interest in the gum cider that gave the island its local name, leaving it to the remnants of the Nangu to conduct that trade with the Aururian mainland [1].
In the east of the continent, the volume of European trade was negligible during the 1640s but gradually grew over the 1650s, as both the Dutch and English competed for access to the Spice Coast. Verbenas [myrtles] and the hotter kinds of sweet peppers were both sought-after commodities, from several eastern coast societies, and both the Dutch and English sent ever more ships to trade as much as they could in these. The English also traded in jeeree [Aururian lemon tea], although during this era that commodity was mostly sold as a curiosity. There was also some smaller trade from the Aururians themselves, for the Nuttana traded in jeeree and spices to the East Indies, together with a very limited trade (2-3 ships per year) to Japan.
With such a growing volume of ships visiting, it was inevitable that one of them would eventually bring the Great Death. No records survive which identify the particular ship involved. Likely, for the crew of the ship itself, the pestilence that became the Great Death was only a minor affliction that passed between several crew members; for to them it was usually a minor malady.
The Great Death first appeared in Dogport [Port Augusta], in late 1659 or early 1660; the records of the time are understandably vague. Dogport was a venerable trading outpost, for despite having a marginal climate for agriculture, it had a good natural harbour and was on the terminus of the ancient “Dog Road” that traded into the interior for opals. The port had thrived during the Imperial Era, but with the collapse of imperial authority it had been neglected. The Nangu had refounded the city in the twelfth century to take direct control of the opal trade, rather than relying on Mutjing intermediaries, and it continued as one of their colonial outposts from that time on. Dogport was surrounded by territory that would later be claimed by Tjibarr, but rather than risk offending the Nangu who controlled trade, that kingdom recognised that Dogport itself was sovereign.
So Dogport remained an independent Nangu colonial outpost through to the seventeenth century and the coming of Europeans. As with all of Aururia, it was afflicted by the plagues, but unlike most places, its population actually grew in that era, thanks to refugees fleeing the Island. The Dutch East India Company was given permission to establish a trading post in 1644, but the Nangu refused to make this exclusive, and also allowed other European ships to visit. And so, while it was probably a Dutch ship that bore the Great Death to Aururia, the possibility remains that it was an English vessel, or possibly even one of the occasional French visitors. Whatever the source, the Great Death first appeared in Dogport, and Aururia would never be the same again.
* * *
The Great Death – or the pestilence, four-day fever, the royal rash, or any of a dozen other names which the Aururians gave to the scourge that burnt through the continent in the early 1660s.
The pestilence was marked by an infection of the respiratory tract, the skin, severe fever and (though Aururians of the time did not realise it) infection of the immune system. The Great Death usually began with a high fever accompanied by lethargy and reduced appetite, together with a severe cough, congested nose and red eyes. This would be followed, a couple of days later, by a spotted rash over most of the body. The fever distinctively lasted for four days, for those who survived, and worsened on the third or fourth day, for those who did not. The equally distinctive rash usually started a couple of days after the fever, and lingered several more days afterward.
Most people who lasted for a week or thereabouts would survive, although an unfortunately large minority would develop complications such as pneumonia, acute inner ear infection or eye infection (which could lead to permanent reduction in hearing or vision), or encephalitis. The encephalitis reminded the Aururians of the similar (though usually more severe) symptoms associated with the native Aururian disease the Waiting Death – and in that they were correct to notice, for the virus which causes the Great Death is a distant relative of that which causes Marnitja (the Waiting Death) [2]. While the encephalitis of the Waiting Death was much more likely to kill those afflicted by it, overall the pestilence killed many more of those infected, and thus it was christened the Great Death.
The Great Death was highly infectious – it was, after all, a respiratory illness – and spread rapidly amongst the population. Thanks to an incubation period which could last for almost two weeks, it was also very difficult to prevent through quarantine, for too many people could carry it unwittingly. Sometimes an outbreak could be sealed within a particular city with a well-imposed quarantine, but that was only a temporary success; inevitably the Great Death would spread from some other afflicted region and work through the countryside again.
As always happened whenever the Great Death entered an epidemiologically naïve population, the Aururian death toll was high. Virgin-soil epidemics of the Great Death around the world have always been severe, particularly among populations who are malnourished or weakened from epidemics of other diseases; the death toll from the Great Death has ranged from 20% to 65% of the population.
Aururian societies were in some respects fortunate – if such a word can be used when describing a continent that would lose a quarter of its population. While Aururians had no previous exposure to the Great Death, they did have a history of epidemic diseases of their own, which strengthened their adaptive immune systems in comparison to populations with no exposure to epidemic diseases. While Aururia had suffered from previous Old World epidemics, the delay between the epidemics meant that that in most cases the people had had some time to recover their health. With a few exceptions, the populations were also reasonably well-nourished. The high-protein Aururian diet had always provided good nutrition for a preindustrial agricultural society [3], and the death toll from the plagues so far meant mostly that it was the more marginal agricultural lands that had been abandoned, leaving the most productive lands still supplying food.
Across most of Aururia, the average death toll from the Great Death was 25-30%. A few societies fared better. Most notably, the Nuttana were fortunate that some of their population had survived the Great Death when they caught it while visiting the Old World, and they also had some Papuan guest workers who had survived the Great Death in childhood. While even the Nuttana suffered badly, the death toll there was significantly lower than in most Aururian societies. In contrast, a few of the east coast societies had barely recovered from typhus, which reached them in the late 1640s and early 1650s; in those societies, the toll ranged up to 35% of the population.
The death toll from the Great Death was so severe that in one epidemic, it killed as great a percentage of the Aururian population as the cumulative toll of all previous Old World epidemics combined (chickenpox, mumps, syphilis, tuberculosis, and typhus). The total death toll in Aururia was now close to half of the pre-contact population of the continent; while the collapse had been slower, in percentage terms Aururia had been struck harder than when the Black Death ravaged Europe [4]. Societies were on the verge of collapse, and inevitably, some of them slipped over the precipice in the troubled times that followed.
* * *
When the first reports of a “four day fever” spread out of Dogport, the Tjibarri administrator outside the city’s walls reacted with commendable swiftness, ordering the city gates sealed from the outside, with no-one to be permitted to leave until the plague had abated. The Nangu port-captain inside the walls imposed a similar quarantine, forbidding any berthed ships from leaving, or any new ships from docking.
Such moves were astute, but unfortunately far too late. The plague had already spread beyond Dogport’s walls, both into the countryside and on two recently-departed Nangu ships. Those ships had already brought the pestilence to Jugara [Victor Harbor] and Munmee [Cowell] before the port-captain, too, broke out in a four-day fever which would eventually claim his life. The outbreak also flared up in the countryside outside Dogport, from farmers who had visited the city and contracted the pestilence before the quarantine went into effect. While the Tjibarri administrator maintained the quarantine of Dogport, the effort was futile.
From Jugara, the pestilence spread quickly up the Nyalananga [River Murray] to the Tjibarri heartland. It appeared in Tapiwal [Robinvale], where the endlessly-disputing physicians recognised it as a relative of the Waiting Death; those who survived the fever and rash christened it the Great Death.
The spread of the pestilence was most rapid along trade routes, particularly water-borne routes. The key trading cities of Tjibarr were afflicted early, and the Great Death spread quickly to the large cities of the other Five Rivers kingdoms (Gutjanal and Yigutji). The epidemic also quickly progressed to other key port cities on the Island, Gurndjit [Portland, Victoria] in the Yadji realm, Cider Isle cities, and from Munmee into the other key ports in the Seven Sisters [Eyre Peninsula].
Quarantines were imposed whenever the Great Death appeared in a city, with varying success. Sometimes the quarantines contained a particular outbreak, but on many occasions infected people with no visible symptoms successfully fled the cities, fearing death from being trapped in a pestilential city but in truth bringing the epidemic with them.
Even where city-based outbreaks were successfully contained, nothing could stop the slow burn of the Great Death across the countryside. From Dogport it spread north and south, east and west, amongst farmers in Tjibarr and the Seven Sisters, and hunter-gatherers in north, west and east. No seaborne trade carried the Great Death to the western Atjuntja realm, but it spread there by slow transmission across the hunter-gatherers of the interior, and plunged the empire into chaos. To the east it spread through the Five Rivers and the Yadji Empire, in a patchy spread of trade and slow burn. The trade routes of the Spice Road soon brought it to the east coast, where it struck first at the Patjimunra and civil-war-divided Daluming, and then north and south along the coast. In time it reached north to the Kiyungu and then to the Nuttana, while to the south it eventually reached into the highlands. In the interior of the continent, the epidemic spread from one hunter-gatherer group to the next, until it reached the northern and western coasts of the continent.
The Maori in Aotearoa were, for a time, spared the Great Death; the sailing distances between there and Aururia meant that on most occasions the pestilence burned out amongst a crew before they landed in the Land of the Long White Cloud. With the Great Death now endemic in Aururia, though, it was only a matter of time before the pestilence spread across the Gray Sea [Tasman Sea].
In short, the Great Death consumed most of the continent of Aururia. It struck most populations, particularly any towns connected to trade routes. Still, it did not quite strike everywhere in the first wave. A few people in afflicted towns cut themselves off all contact with others, and so were not infected. Likewise, some small rural enclaves were not initially hit by the epidemic, sometimes thanks to good fortune, and sometimes thanks to imposing their own local version of quarantine where they broke off all contact with outsiders until the pestilence had passed by. A few hunter-gatherer groups in the centre and north of the continent were also spared from the first wave too, due to the vagaries of transmission.
Some of the initial avoiders of the Great Death would be afflicted later, in secondary waves of infection that were transmitted back through the continent, or from new strains which were brought over occasionally from the Nuttana or subsequent European traders. So the Great Death became endemic in Aururia. It would never again have the same virgin-soil epidemic, but it continued to flare up periodically and claim more Aururian lives; for centuries, even the most well-nourished indigenous Aururian populations remained more susceptible to the Great Death than those of Old World or mixed descent.
In fact, the Great Death remained endemic in Aururia for almost three centuries. In 1944, Panyilong [5] Tjurra Barany of the Panipat had pioneered a method of cultivating viral material in chicken-embryo tissue cultures, and he used this to develop a world-first vaccine that was by then called measles vaccine. Mass vaccination programs across the continent followed over the next few years, until Aururia was once more freed of the scourge of the Great Death.
* * *
[1] This is because gum cider is too bulky to be worthwhile transporting back to Europe or Asia, and European ships are not (yet) involved in the inter-Aururian trade markets, preferring to visit one location to trade for commodities which are useful in the Old World, rather than multiple trading stops.
[2] Although sadly the relationship between the Great Death and the Waiting Death is too distant for immunity to one to convey any additional protection against the other.
[3] The Aururian diet is a very high-protein diet by the standards of most pre-industrial agricultural diets because it includes a large quantity of wattleseeds, which are about 25% protein (more than the average beefsteak).
[4] Depending on which estimate of the Black Death’s death toll in Europe is accepted. Estimates of the toll range from 30-60% of Europe’s population, with a consensus estimate of 40-45% of the population being perhaps the most reliable.
[5] Panyilong is an academic title which can be approximately translated as “professor” or “associate professor”.
* * *
Thoughts?
P.S. This instalment simply provides a broad overview of the effects of the Great Death. More details about the effects on some societies, and what happens in the aftermath, will be provided in subsequent instalments.
“Abyss’s maw gapes wide,
Death’s fix’d grin be-stares ev’ry mortal
Smile back or go mad.”
- Lancelin Fisher-King, The Mists of Memory
* * *
Carl Ashkettle, chronicler [reporter], writer, actor, philanthropist – and now biographer for the world’s most enigmatic man.
After three weeks of hearing him recite the tale, Ashkettle still does know what to make of the man sitting opposite him. Either a three-hundred-year-old survivor of the age before Europeans came to Aururia, or the world’s most accomplished and fortunate liar.
The man answers to the name of Clements. He tells a long story, one full of so many details, and one which is almost entirely consistent, save for very minor lapses of memory or trivialities which could be expected of any eyewitness account. Much of what Clements has declared is impossible to verify anywhere else; yet he has told a few details of history which have been confirmed by scholars, but which would hardly be known to the general public.
The recounting of Clements’ life – or alternatively, the spinning of the greatest work of fiction since vows of wifely obedience were included in the Gunnagalic marriage service – has covered many topics, over many days. Some of it in chronological order, but some not. That has been part accident, and part design; sometimes Clements is reminded of other things, and other times Ashkettle has deliberately gone back to probe previous topics to catch out any rehearsed sequence of lies.
Of all the topics, there is one that haunts him the most. The plagues. The seemingly-endless waves of foreign diseases that struck at Aururia, one after another. The most lethal part of de Houtman’s gift to the Third World. He has known about the plagues, of course. It is a topic of which any educated man is aware. But never before has he had such an appreciation for the era of the plagues. Or, as Clements puts it, the time of the great dying.
Clements has described several of the plagues, the afflictions, their courses, and what he has seen of them. So far, he had asked to pass over the description of the worst plague, saying that he found it painful to recount so much of the litany of sorrow at once. That left an unwelcome lacuna in his tale, a major omission around the early 1660s, which had troubled Ashkettle. He dislikes having such a gap in his preferred sequence of events. Now, with more of the later history – or it just his story? – covered, he wants to return to the greatest plague, find out what he can, and incorporate it into his now-voluminous notes.
“Mr Clements, I want to ask you-”
“About the great plague, yes.” Clements takes in his expression, and chuckles.
“Am I so obvious?” Ashkettle asks.
“You learn to read people, in this game. The survival game, that is.”
“So I gather. But I would like to hear the tale. Unless it is still too painful.”
Clements shrugs. “Painful now, or painful later. May as well be now. Time dulls most memories, blurring pleasure and sorrow alike. But grief always seems to last.”
“In any case. I lived in the city then. Yigutji. In the year 1661, to put it in parlance your wider audience would recognise. Still a leatherworker, one of high repute by then, no matter that I had left the city for a long while... but you know all that. 1661, the Year of Our Lord – and is that not an irony which stings?
“I was the tjarrentee, the master craftsman, the head of the family. Not the eldest, but the one judged most accomplished in the craft. So I was responsible for solving everything, when there was a dispute. Not just in the leather business, but the whole boon – the family, the extended family, to use the modern term. My father had died, hmm, six years before, which made me the tjarrentee, and my mother three or four years, so she could not advise me.” He chuckles, briefly. “Maternal advice which no sane man would reject.”
“Head of the family meant I had to know about every family member. Same went for the shop workers, in business matters. In personal matters, I would speak to their tjarrentee and we would solve it together. An argument, a dispute over property, approving a marriage contract, confirming the name of a child, managing the taxation, answering any order of the king or his bureaucrats. All of that – my problem.
“So I knew about the whole family, who lived, where they lived – though that mostly meant on the same street – and everything.” He pauses, and there is a glistening in his eye. “And how they died.”
“1661. Me, head of the family. My wife, Mitjantjara, though we had no children. My older and younger brothers who were leatherworkers under my roof – I’ll skip all of their names for now, but I’ll write them out for you with everything else – their wives, with four surviving sons between them, their four wives, and one unmarried daughter. My two sisters were now part of their husbands’ families, naturally, together with two of my nieces. One surviving uncle, one widowed aunt-by-marriage, one aunt who had returned to the family when all of her husband’s kin died or fled after the light-fever [typhus]. Two of their children – my cousins – who had not created or joined other family businesses, and so remained part of the boon. Two apprentice leatherworkers, both with wives of their own. For the children, two great-nephews from my elder brother, one nephew-by-craft from the elder apprentice, and four unnamed children.”
“Unnamed children?” Ashkettle says.
“Meaning just that, they had not been given names yet. In the city, we did not name a child until it had survived swamp-rash, or until its third birthday. Whichever came sooner. We believed it was bad luck to name a child earlier, and only invited death from swamp-rash.
“So, thirty boon members in my care. Plus my two sisters, their husbands, and their two daughters, who were not in my care but who I still remember.
“In the Year of the Great Dying. That’s what we called it. We had seen terrible plagues before that. So many dead beforehand. Wave after wave of death. Many of my own family among them, sisters, brothers, nieces, apprentices. But no matter how much sorrow we had witnessed before, nothing could prepare us for what happened during the greatest plague of all.
“The Great Death, we called it. The fatal cough. Or the royal rash, because the king caught it early and died from it. Pestilence would be the best word for it now, I suppose.”
Clements falls silent for a time, his breathing faster, and his gaze downcast. At length he looks up. “I remember the terror. The dread in anticipation. Word had come up the river of a “four-day fever.” Tjibarr suffered, and other lands further away. We knew the pestilence was coming. The physicians urged quarantine as they had done with previous plagues. That worked, sometimes. But not for this pestilence.
“It came so fast, that was the worst of it. Everyone fell ill at once. Including my family. All of them. That made it so much harsher. So many lay dying when they might have recovered with help, if not that those who would have cared for them were stricken themselves.
“The fever came first, with me. And with everyone in the family, as best I can remember. Then a hacking cough, burning eyes, and an inflamed nose. The rash came afterward, spreading from the head down the chest and back. It itched incredibly, and when you saw the rash, you knew that death awaited you. Four days it was, but they felt endless. Consumed with fever, drifting to sleep without finding rest, itch, coughing, hoping not to die of thirst... That was the worst time in my life. Never had I felt so close to death. And for Mitjantjara, and so many more of my family, it was death.
“Thirty and six in my care, before. Fewer, after. Mitjantjara, my elder brother, his eldest son, and his son, my aunt-by-marriage, my younger sister, my elder sister’s daughter, both my apprentices and one of their wives, and two of the unnamed children. My younger brother recovered from the rash and we thought he was safe, only to develop a worsening cough after that, until he died. Three and ten dead, all told. A third of my family dead.
“I recovered first – I do that with most diseases – so I was active in time to see most of them die, but too late to do anything about it. I remember holding Wingalee, my elder brother, giving him water, trying to help him cool, and watching him slip away. I remember seeing the children breathe their last...” He stops then, tears streaming down his face.
“So many died. Not just in my family, in the whole city. The bodies were piled up in houses, and on the streets. We had to burn the dead. There was no choice, we could not bury so many in time.
“I volunteered to be part of the groups sent out to collect firewood. Better that than stay around looking at so many fallen kinfolk. We harvested anything we could find inside the city that could burn – furniture from abandoned houses, street stalls, anything. Then we moved outside, to the cornnart [wattle] groves, we stripped off everything, cut off every branch. We did not care about the harvest so much as feeding the pyres, and we knew that with all of the spread of the pestilence, there would be abandoned trees further away that could be collected at harvest-time. I remember watching the smoke rising from the west, day after day, as hope seemed to burn away with the endless death.
“I knew then, we all knew, that the city would never be the same again. And so it was. Some went mad, or the next worst thing to it. Violence and crime of all sorts worsened, even amongst the troubled survivors. So did war, in the years after. Men believed that they had nothing to lose, and so they struck out. It was bad for years, decades after, there and elsewhere, but especially right away...
“One time I remember, which told me just how much things had changed. An argument over who had right of way in a narrow street. A trivial thing, or it should have been. Two men, neither could pass without the other flattening against the wall or stepping back. Neither wanted to budge. Neither man was elder or tjarrentee, neither had precedence, so either of them could have stepped back. Instead, it came to argument. Then shouting. When one man threatened with a fist, the second drew iron, turning what should have been a matter of blows into a death fight. I doubt that anyone ever bothered to prosecute the slayer for recompense or death, either. In that time, who cared enough to act? The king was dead himself, among with so many others who might have passed judgement.
“It was around the time when I witnessed that murder that I decided I had to leave the city, too. The leatherworking craft had collapsed with the deaths – my uncle and I were the only proper craftsmen left, so it would not survive us. More than that, there were too many bad memories, and too much loss. If I was to find another wife then, it would not be in the city. I already knew that I looked younger than my years – it was hard to avoid – but that was only another reason to go. So I stayed long enough to see the family choose a new head, for everyone to have some kind of life to continue with, then I left.”
I think I believe him. Impossible as his tale sounds, I believe him. Clements’ account is simply too real not to believe.
“That was the start of my vagrancy,” Clements says. “Shifting from place to place, never daring to live in the one locale for too long, lest people notice that I never seemed to age. A very long time as a vagrant, as it happens. At the time I spoke only the language of Yigutji, naturally, but if there was one bit of good fortune amidst the destruction, it was that people fled everywhere. No-one was surprised to see refugees. That made it easy to blend in, and master the craft for the later times when I would need more subtlety in moving around and concealing my past.”
“And forget your past, too?” Ashkettle ventures.
“Quite. No-one who lived through any of the plagues wanted to remember them, and for the pestilence that was truest of all.”
* * *
As with so many of the other plagues that afflicted Aururia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, history does not record precisely how the plague that came to be called the Great Death made its way from the Old World to the Third World. Unlike the early plagues that afflicted Aururia, the Great Death produces no asymptomatic carriers, and must be transmitted from person to person; it does not even linger long on clothing or bedding. The long sea voyages between Europe and Aururia, together with the fact that so many Europeans would have caught the Great Death in childhood, meant that any infection usually burnt out long before a Raw Man ship reached the Land of Gold.
Yet in the 1640s and 1650s, the number of European ships which visited the Third World increased with every passing year. The two decades were marked by a boom in existing commodities (with one exception), and expansion into new markets and new commodities.
In the west of the continent, the Atjuntja supplied an ever-growing amount of gold to the Dutch. While the early trade in Aururian sandalwood collapsed through over-exploitation, the Atjuntja turned to the cultivation of common sweet peppers as an alternative crop, and the Dutch began to build up a market exporting these into India, Ceylon and Europe. Sweet peppers proved especially popular in Ceylon, where down into modern times the common sweet pepper would be known as Dutch pepper.
In the south of the continent, the Dutch visited the Seven Sisters for more sweet peppers and other minor spices, but this peninsula was mostly useful as a way-station for trade further east. For the Five Rivers exported an ever-growing amount of kunduri, a small but extremely lucrative trade in musk (worth more by weight than gold), and a few other minor commodities. This trade was divided between the English and the Dutch, for the Yadji controlled the best port (Jugara) and refused the Dutch admittance, but Tjibarr had built trade roads to other ports and sold many of its commodities via that route. As well as controlling part of the Five Rivers trade, the Yadji sold a considerable amount of gold and sweet peppers to the English.
In the Cider Isle, too, the Dutch and English visited increasingly often for gold and sweet peppers. They had no interest in the gum cider that gave the island its local name, leaving it to the remnants of the Nangu to conduct that trade with the Aururian mainland [1].
In the east of the continent, the volume of European trade was negligible during the 1640s but gradually grew over the 1650s, as both the Dutch and English competed for access to the Spice Coast. Verbenas [myrtles] and the hotter kinds of sweet peppers were both sought-after commodities, from several eastern coast societies, and both the Dutch and English sent ever more ships to trade as much as they could in these. The English also traded in jeeree [Aururian lemon tea], although during this era that commodity was mostly sold as a curiosity. There was also some smaller trade from the Aururians themselves, for the Nuttana traded in jeeree and spices to the East Indies, together with a very limited trade (2-3 ships per year) to Japan.
With such a growing volume of ships visiting, it was inevitable that one of them would eventually bring the Great Death. No records survive which identify the particular ship involved. Likely, for the crew of the ship itself, the pestilence that became the Great Death was only a minor affliction that passed between several crew members; for to them it was usually a minor malady.
The Great Death first appeared in Dogport [Port Augusta], in late 1659 or early 1660; the records of the time are understandably vague. Dogport was a venerable trading outpost, for despite having a marginal climate for agriculture, it had a good natural harbour and was on the terminus of the ancient “Dog Road” that traded into the interior for opals. The port had thrived during the Imperial Era, but with the collapse of imperial authority it had been neglected. The Nangu had refounded the city in the twelfth century to take direct control of the opal trade, rather than relying on Mutjing intermediaries, and it continued as one of their colonial outposts from that time on. Dogport was surrounded by territory that would later be claimed by Tjibarr, but rather than risk offending the Nangu who controlled trade, that kingdom recognised that Dogport itself was sovereign.
So Dogport remained an independent Nangu colonial outpost through to the seventeenth century and the coming of Europeans. As with all of Aururia, it was afflicted by the plagues, but unlike most places, its population actually grew in that era, thanks to refugees fleeing the Island. The Dutch East India Company was given permission to establish a trading post in 1644, but the Nangu refused to make this exclusive, and also allowed other European ships to visit. And so, while it was probably a Dutch ship that bore the Great Death to Aururia, the possibility remains that it was an English vessel, or possibly even one of the occasional French visitors. Whatever the source, the Great Death first appeared in Dogport, and Aururia would never be the same again.
* * *
The Great Death – or the pestilence, four-day fever, the royal rash, or any of a dozen other names which the Aururians gave to the scourge that burnt through the continent in the early 1660s.
The pestilence was marked by an infection of the respiratory tract, the skin, severe fever and (though Aururians of the time did not realise it) infection of the immune system. The Great Death usually began with a high fever accompanied by lethargy and reduced appetite, together with a severe cough, congested nose and red eyes. This would be followed, a couple of days later, by a spotted rash over most of the body. The fever distinctively lasted for four days, for those who survived, and worsened on the third or fourth day, for those who did not. The equally distinctive rash usually started a couple of days after the fever, and lingered several more days afterward.
Most people who lasted for a week or thereabouts would survive, although an unfortunately large minority would develop complications such as pneumonia, acute inner ear infection or eye infection (which could lead to permanent reduction in hearing or vision), or encephalitis. The encephalitis reminded the Aururians of the similar (though usually more severe) symptoms associated with the native Aururian disease the Waiting Death – and in that they were correct to notice, for the virus which causes the Great Death is a distant relative of that which causes Marnitja (the Waiting Death) [2]. While the encephalitis of the Waiting Death was much more likely to kill those afflicted by it, overall the pestilence killed many more of those infected, and thus it was christened the Great Death.
The Great Death was highly infectious – it was, after all, a respiratory illness – and spread rapidly amongst the population. Thanks to an incubation period which could last for almost two weeks, it was also very difficult to prevent through quarantine, for too many people could carry it unwittingly. Sometimes an outbreak could be sealed within a particular city with a well-imposed quarantine, but that was only a temporary success; inevitably the Great Death would spread from some other afflicted region and work through the countryside again.
As always happened whenever the Great Death entered an epidemiologically naïve population, the Aururian death toll was high. Virgin-soil epidemics of the Great Death around the world have always been severe, particularly among populations who are malnourished or weakened from epidemics of other diseases; the death toll from the Great Death has ranged from 20% to 65% of the population.
Aururian societies were in some respects fortunate – if such a word can be used when describing a continent that would lose a quarter of its population. While Aururians had no previous exposure to the Great Death, they did have a history of epidemic diseases of their own, which strengthened their adaptive immune systems in comparison to populations with no exposure to epidemic diseases. While Aururia had suffered from previous Old World epidemics, the delay between the epidemics meant that that in most cases the people had had some time to recover their health. With a few exceptions, the populations were also reasonably well-nourished. The high-protein Aururian diet had always provided good nutrition for a preindustrial agricultural society [3], and the death toll from the plagues so far meant mostly that it was the more marginal agricultural lands that had been abandoned, leaving the most productive lands still supplying food.
Across most of Aururia, the average death toll from the Great Death was 25-30%. A few societies fared better. Most notably, the Nuttana were fortunate that some of their population had survived the Great Death when they caught it while visiting the Old World, and they also had some Papuan guest workers who had survived the Great Death in childhood. While even the Nuttana suffered badly, the death toll there was significantly lower than in most Aururian societies. In contrast, a few of the east coast societies had barely recovered from typhus, which reached them in the late 1640s and early 1650s; in those societies, the toll ranged up to 35% of the population.
The death toll from the Great Death was so severe that in one epidemic, it killed as great a percentage of the Aururian population as the cumulative toll of all previous Old World epidemics combined (chickenpox, mumps, syphilis, tuberculosis, and typhus). The total death toll in Aururia was now close to half of the pre-contact population of the continent; while the collapse had been slower, in percentage terms Aururia had been struck harder than when the Black Death ravaged Europe [4]. Societies were on the verge of collapse, and inevitably, some of them slipped over the precipice in the troubled times that followed.
* * *
When the first reports of a “four day fever” spread out of Dogport, the Tjibarri administrator outside the city’s walls reacted with commendable swiftness, ordering the city gates sealed from the outside, with no-one to be permitted to leave until the plague had abated. The Nangu port-captain inside the walls imposed a similar quarantine, forbidding any berthed ships from leaving, or any new ships from docking.
Such moves were astute, but unfortunately far too late. The plague had already spread beyond Dogport’s walls, both into the countryside and on two recently-departed Nangu ships. Those ships had already brought the pestilence to Jugara [Victor Harbor] and Munmee [Cowell] before the port-captain, too, broke out in a four-day fever which would eventually claim his life. The outbreak also flared up in the countryside outside Dogport, from farmers who had visited the city and contracted the pestilence before the quarantine went into effect. While the Tjibarri administrator maintained the quarantine of Dogport, the effort was futile.
From Jugara, the pestilence spread quickly up the Nyalananga [River Murray] to the Tjibarri heartland. It appeared in Tapiwal [Robinvale], where the endlessly-disputing physicians recognised it as a relative of the Waiting Death; those who survived the fever and rash christened it the Great Death.
The spread of the pestilence was most rapid along trade routes, particularly water-borne routes. The key trading cities of Tjibarr were afflicted early, and the Great Death spread quickly to the large cities of the other Five Rivers kingdoms (Gutjanal and Yigutji). The epidemic also quickly progressed to other key port cities on the Island, Gurndjit [Portland, Victoria] in the Yadji realm, Cider Isle cities, and from Munmee into the other key ports in the Seven Sisters [Eyre Peninsula].
Quarantines were imposed whenever the Great Death appeared in a city, with varying success. Sometimes the quarantines contained a particular outbreak, but on many occasions infected people with no visible symptoms successfully fled the cities, fearing death from being trapped in a pestilential city but in truth bringing the epidemic with them.
Even where city-based outbreaks were successfully contained, nothing could stop the slow burn of the Great Death across the countryside. From Dogport it spread north and south, east and west, amongst farmers in Tjibarr and the Seven Sisters, and hunter-gatherers in north, west and east. No seaborne trade carried the Great Death to the western Atjuntja realm, but it spread there by slow transmission across the hunter-gatherers of the interior, and plunged the empire into chaos. To the east it spread through the Five Rivers and the Yadji Empire, in a patchy spread of trade and slow burn. The trade routes of the Spice Road soon brought it to the east coast, where it struck first at the Patjimunra and civil-war-divided Daluming, and then north and south along the coast. In time it reached north to the Kiyungu and then to the Nuttana, while to the south it eventually reached into the highlands. In the interior of the continent, the epidemic spread from one hunter-gatherer group to the next, until it reached the northern and western coasts of the continent.
The Maori in Aotearoa were, for a time, spared the Great Death; the sailing distances between there and Aururia meant that on most occasions the pestilence burned out amongst a crew before they landed in the Land of the Long White Cloud. With the Great Death now endemic in Aururia, though, it was only a matter of time before the pestilence spread across the Gray Sea [Tasman Sea].
In short, the Great Death consumed most of the continent of Aururia. It struck most populations, particularly any towns connected to trade routes. Still, it did not quite strike everywhere in the first wave. A few people in afflicted towns cut themselves off all contact with others, and so were not infected. Likewise, some small rural enclaves were not initially hit by the epidemic, sometimes thanks to good fortune, and sometimes thanks to imposing their own local version of quarantine where they broke off all contact with outsiders until the pestilence had passed by. A few hunter-gatherer groups in the centre and north of the continent were also spared from the first wave too, due to the vagaries of transmission.
Some of the initial avoiders of the Great Death would be afflicted later, in secondary waves of infection that were transmitted back through the continent, or from new strains which were brought over occasionally from the Nuttana or subsequent European traders. So the Great Death became endemic in Aururia. It would never again have the same virgin-soil epidemic, but it continued to flare up periodically and claim more Aururian lives; for centuries, even the most well-nourished indigenous Aururian populations remained more susceptible to the Great Death than those of Old World or mixed descent.
In fact, the Great Death remained endemic in Aururia for almost three centuries. In 1944, Panyilong [5] Tjurra Barany of the Panipat had pioneered a method of cultivating viral material in chicken-embryo tissue cultures, and he used this to develop a world-first vaccine that was by then called measles vaccine. Mass vaccination programs across the continent followed over the next few years, until Aururia was once more freed of the scourge of the Great Death.
* * *
[1] This is because gum cider is too bulky to be worthwhile transporting back to Europe or Asia, and European ships are not (yet) involved in the inter-Aururian trade markets, preferring to visit one location to trade for commodities which are useful in the Old World, rather than multiple trading stops.
[2] Although sadly the relationship between the Great Death and the Waiting Death is too distant for immunity to one to convey any additional protection against the other.
[3] The Aururian diet is a very high-protein diet by the standards of most pre-industrial agricultural diets because it includes a large quantity of wattleseeds, which are about 25% protein (more than the average beefsteak).
[4] Depending on which estimate of the Black Death’s death toll in Europe is accepted. Estimates of the toll range from 30-60% of Europe’s population, with a consensus estimate of 40-45% of the population being perhaps the most reliable.
[5] Panyilong is an academic title which can be approximately translated as “professor” or “associate professor”.
* * *
Thoughts?
P.S. This instalment simply provides a broad overview of the effects of the Great Death. More details about the effects on some societies, and what happens in the aftermath, will be provided in subsequent instalments.
Wow
50%+ death rate for combined epidemics is no fun, but, yes, they were 'fortunate' (as you say, to the extent such a word can be used in such a situation), as Native Americans sometimes had 90% die offs with repeated waves of various diseases iOTL. iTTL, the latter will be even worse off, as they have the 3rd World diseases to cope with as well as Eurasian ones.
50%+ death rate for combined epidemics is no fun, but, yes, they were 'fortunate' (as you say, to the extent such a word can be used in such a situation), as Native Americans sometimes had 90% die offs with repeated waves of various diseases iOTL. iTTL, the latter will be even worse off, as they have the 3rd World diseases to cope with as well as Eurasian ones.
I did a quick google, and it looks like rabbinical usage is to require a 'tradition' of birds being kosher before they can they can be considered kosher, or that they be the same as something already kosher. So, no Emu won't be kosher. Unfortunately.
That was brutal reading.
Excellent, if harrowing, stuff, Jared. I was wondering when we'd see Ashkettle and Clements again.
Excellent, if harrowing, stuff, Jared. I was wondering when we'd see Ashkettle and Clements again.
