I'm wondering if the Meridian dominance of Southern Africa's diamond and gold fields (pity that Natal cant get its act together) will result in the rise of a Cecil Rhodes equivalent from that side of the water. With societism's rise looming, an ultra wealthy proponent of "the Meridian way" would be an interesting development.
Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
I forget if it's been covered, but how are Blacks doing amongst the Meridians? Apparently they were a pretty large chunk of Argentina's population pre-independence OTL, but saw a massive collapse (due to epidemics, getting pushed into fighting a lot, and some nastier more deliberate population decrease efforts).
Thande
Donor
Perhaps I didn't phrase it well but the Cape Dutch/Meridians aren't dominating the diamond and gold fields, Natal still has the majority of them, they're just laying claim to more of them than they really should be able to given the pre-discovery claim lines because of Natalese internal difficulties.
Still subject to unofficial discrimination but better off than in most Novamundine countries.
Literally Hitler. Wow.
Is it just me or does this world have a strange obsession with adventurers?
I didn't really understand how the Feng handled the Gorkhas. Tibet was annexed and Nepal vassalized? Or annexed as well? What Bhutan, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, then?
PS: A Hitler causing a war, a global war no less? Naaaah... very unlikely...
Is it just me or does this world have a strange obsession with adventurers?
I didn't really understand how the Feng handled the Gorkhas. Tibet was annexed and Nepal vassalized? Or annexed as well? What Bhutan, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, then?
PS: A Hitler causing a war, a global war no less? Naaaah... very unlikely...
Thande
Donor
It's another update!
Part #219: Cloak and Dagger
“Don’t believe those daft stories you hear down the pub, Dan—the Norwood Inquirer does not have a reporter on staff who’s a master of disguise super-sleuth. And if they did, he wouldn’t spend his days at the cigarette machine trying to listen in on your detailed, groundbreaking campaign strategies like not getting on the wrong multi and spending the afternoon manning a stall in bloody Carshalton instead. Give me a break.”
From “Great Lives” by Patricia Daniels (1979)—
Peter Fitzhugh (1827-1902) would be worthy of memory if his only contribution to the world had been the coining of the term The Melting Pot to describe his adopted home of California. However, the book to which that term formed the title was the wellspring of a cultural phenomenon that continues to be enjoyed today: that of ratiocinic fiction.[1]
Fitzhugh was born in Virginia only a few years after the discovery of gold in California. His father, Richard, was a younger son of the wealthy and powerful Fitzhugh family, one of the original ‘First Families’ of Virginia. It is possibe that Richard and his wife Mary might have considered moving westwards even without the intervention of the Virginia Crisis, but the devastation wrought on their farm (fortunately in their absence) by Caesar Bell’s Kleinkriegers persuaded him that the promise of the Golden Province was a better option than trying to rebuild in the seething climate of post-Crisis Virginia. Although Peter would sometimes affect the manner of a Virginian gentleman in later life, he admitted in private that he barely remembered anything of the old Confederation he had left at such an early age.
Unlike so many of the hopeful Californian immigrants of this period, Richard Fitzhugh made enough from his business (largely through selling board and equipment to prospectors rather than joining their ranks himself) that he was able to provide a modest middle-class existence for his family. They kept on the right side of New Spanish law, paid lip service to the increasingly shrill demands made by the City of Mexico about Catholicism and taxation, and kept their heads down. Peter had just achieved the age of majority when California was plunged into the strife of the Great American War. He rejected calls by some of the Carolinians fighting there to join the government side, as a few Virginians did, and fought (albeit reluctantly) for the Americans. In the process he received a minor and ‘picturesque’ (as he put it) wound to the knee which led him to walk with a slight limp and a cane for the rest of his life. In post-revolutionary California he inherited his father’s land holdings and supplemented them with income from his nascent writing career. Initially this consisted mainly of articles published for newspapers, but he gradually began branching out into short stories. However, in those early days they were nothing to set the world on fire.
In the course of his life Fitzhugh became the great friend of a fellow immigrant, Francesco ‘Frank’ Melloni of Tuscany. Melloni had come to California not because of the fading charms of gold, nor even for the newer stories told of silver wealth in the interior province of Argentina,[2] but owing to backing the wrong horse in the internal Tuscan struggle that had formed part of the Patrimonial War. Fitzhugh, whose Nivkh wife Ludmila was unable to have children, served as godfather to Melloni’s son Aurelio and daughter Rosalba; after Melloni passed away in 1870 he effectively took over the parental role. Rosalba initially made the greater impact of the two Melloni children, becoming a great soprano who helped make the Cometa opera scene one taken seriously by the European (and Novamundine) establishment. Aurelio joined the police force organised nationwide in California with the new Constitution of 1873, rising to the position of Inspector. It seemed as though both Aurelio and Peter Fitzhugh would be mere footnotes to history, mentioned in passing in relation to the great Rosalba Melloni, who might herself be forgotten if the unique Californian school of hybrid Sino-Italian opera went out of fashion again. However, it was not to be.
In 1885, when Fitzhugh was in his late fifties and Aurelio his mid-thirties, a story consumed the papers which Fitzhugh continued to occasionally write for. From the English-language Stargazer of Las Estrellas to the Spanish El Mensajero of Monterey to the Russian Grazhdanin of Cometa (for Fitzhugh was fluent in both English and Spanish and had a working knowledge of Russian, aided by his Nivkh cousin Valdemar Lazatev), the frontpages blared out in one voice.[3] Emilia Mendoza, ‘La Zorra’, the Vixen, the great fighter and leader in the revolutionary war, had passed away at the age of sixty-six. Though Mendoza was still a household name, at first the story did not dominate to the extent implied above. Her role in the founding of the Republic was still somewhat controversial; since the independence she had fought so hard to win, she had been repeatedly sidelined by other interests, either short-sighted radicals who dismissed her efforts to carefully balance the influence of the Russians, Americans and Meridians, or hidebound traditionalists who refused to confront the idea of a woman with such power and achievements.[4] The rewriting of history might be less professional in those days before the Fever Dream, but it was no less enthusiastic by its proponents. It was helped along by the new Constitution of 1873, whose proponents had made unpleasantly negative statements aimed at the original back-of-an-envelope constitution that had begun with Mendoza, never mind that it had always been intended to be temporary. At first it seemed as though Mendoza’s death, just like Fitzhugh’s life, might be nothing more than a footnote.
Public interest was, however, sparked when a scandal exploded. Not concerning La Zorra’s legendary political conquests in the bedroom, which were already public knowledge (and perhaps partly responsible for the fact that so many had gone along with the anti-Mendoza factions’ interpretation of history: sheer embarrassment). The scandal instead concerned inheritance. Mendoza’s heir was her only (legitimate) child, a daughter, Carmen California ‘Cali’ Mendoza. Emilia had possessed considerable personal wealth in jewellery beside her estates and had bequeathed these personally to her daughter, while making generous donations to charitable causes out of her property. However, Cali Mendoza went to the papers with the story that on the night of her mother’s death, she had found her safe broken into and her jewels missing! The only clue was an enigmatic note which hinted at dark secrets and bore a bloody, smudged fingerprint. A fingerprint, when the uniqueness of fingerprints and their potential for tracking criminals had been noted and suggested by Daniel Young of New York only the year before...
The scandal grabbed the imagination not only of the Californian public but far beyond. Lectel meant that everyone from Cytherean agitators in their Paris salons to Meridian industrialists comparing the sizes of their factories were discussing the Mysterious Case of the Vixen’s Jewels. Contrary to popular belief (though the latter is understandable given what came later), Aurelio Melloni was not placed in command of the case from the start, but was one of several police inspectors assigned by the Captain General to investigate a case of clear public and national interest. As they investigated, the papers continued to run pieces spinning out the story in the hope of a new development. Some of these pieces were contributed by Fitzhugh, who had briefly met La Zorra during the revolutionary war and had always felt saddened that her role in the conflict had been too often brushed under the carpet of history by her political enemies. Fitzhugh was only one writer among many, but he doubtless contributed towards the introspective mood of the papers beyond the excitement that an unusually complex and fascinating florin bloody had come to life. Suddenly people were ready to re-examine Mendoza’s life and celebrate it in a way they had been deaf to while she had lived. Mendoza had already been a Cytherean icon to some extent, but it was only after her death in 1885 that she truly entered the global public consciousness.
Aurelio proved to be a more brilliant detective than his superiors had given him credit for. Aided by his godfather Fitzhugh, who searched through past editions and newspaper archives to lend credence to his theory, Inspector Melloni found the lost jewels and who had taken them. The culprit turned out to be none other than Cali Mendoza herself, having taken and concealed the jewels specifically to provoke exactly the sort of national conversation that had exploded into life, successfully ensuring her mother’s legacy could not be quashed by her enemies. Now and forever, Emilia Mendoza would be remembered as the founding mother of the Adamantine Republic of California.
This incident might have made Aurelio Melloni’s name in his lifetime, but it is likely he would be forgotten today were it not for his godfather’s efforts. Seeking to more widely publicise the achievements of the godson he was proud of, Fitzhugh wrote The Melting Pot, a fictionalised and embellished account of the Vixen’s Jewels affair. For the first time his writing was read by people outside California, and his command of descriptive language was particularly noted, bringing the beauty and the chaos of California to life for an audience which had previously only had vague images. Fitzhugh was undoubtedly helped by being able to write for a wider audience than ever before: with Lazatev’s help, he released the book in English, Spanish and Russian (some editions released in California itself even collected the three into one trilingual omnibus). This opened up a huge global market, helped along by the Lectel and Standard Crate steamships which were shrinking the world, though Fitzhugh and the inheritors of his estate spent much time arguing copyright law: this was arguably what began a movement towards international copyright agreements, with unauthorised and often error-prone copies of Fitzhugh’s books flooding some countries.
For it was ‘books’ plural. Flush from the success of The Melting Pot and with occasional assistance from Melloni himself, Fitzhugh created the first serious recurring fictional detective. The name of his character was eventually changed to Carlo Matteucci in order to allow Fitzhugh to explore new adventures he was not comfortable connecting his real-life godson with. Most modern editions name the protagonist of the ‘Melting Pot Series’ Matteucci from the start, backdating this. While Fitzhugh mostly wrote full-length novels, his background in writing short newspaper pieces meant that he also contributed serials of short Matteucci stories. Regardless of their length, the tales always focused on particularly diabolical or inventive crimes, with the focus on Matteucci’s ingenuity as well as his daring as he unravelled the problems. This concept of intellectual satisfaction, in which the reader had a chance to solve the crime along with Matteucci rather than being subject to the random plot twists and deus ex machina common to the florin bloody adventure genre, was what truly created the new genre of ratiocinic fiction.
Predictably, Fitzhugh was not alone for long. Writers of ratiocinic fiction arose around the world, often seeking to create an exotic investigator with a gimmick of their own in emulation of Matteucci’s Italian ways amid the mostly Hispano-Anglo-Russian culture of California. Many of these emulations sank without trace and are today only known to literary experts, but some survived and prospered, being scarcely less prone to film and Motoscope adaptations than Matteucci himself. Among these are Thomas Gordon’s Inspector Macavity, a Scotsman in a fictitious Outsiders’ Village in Feng China; Philippe Pagnol’s Émile Dujardin, a veteran of the Jacobin Wars haunted by his past who now serves as a juge d’instruction in small-town Provence; Jack Harris, the hardbitten Chichago-based creation of Henry Bower (and his eternal New York rival Jonas “Always” Wright, penned by Bower’s own rival and eventual wife Jane Hill); and Esteban López, the Black Knight, a wealthy black Meridian whose alter ego investigated crimes and discrimination against his people on the streets of Buenos Aires and beyond. The latter in particular is important for social history, sometimes being compared to the earlier Black Shadow sequents in the ENA, but fundamentally being part of a sense of public remorse that Meridian foreign policy had propped up the slaveholders in Carolina for years before ending the institution there. The stories were published under the name Miguel Santos, who had only a little black ancestry himself, but it was later revealed that they were co-written with the black businessman Ramón Novas, considered by many to be the model for López himself.
These are to name but a few. The ratiocinic genre has become so popular that even to name its most mainstream products would take a book in itself. We cannot however leave this topic without considering the case of Anders Jacobsen. This quiet accountant of Vejle waged a one-man front in the Kulturkrieg of the 1880s as the German government attempted to eradicate Danish language and culture in Jutland. Jacobsen created the character of Astrid Hjejle, the wife of a comically incompetent Danish investigator who is nonetheless heralded as a great man by the people of 1840s Scandinavia, who do not dream that his crimes are in fact solved by his spouse. Jacobsen never injected explicit politics into his stories. Their power was in their simple readability. Even more than the other ratiocinic tales of the period, the Astrid stories spoke to a wide audience because they combined both humour at Poul Hjelje’s expense and wonder at the ingenuity of the plots Astrid navigates through. Through banned printing presses, with the slash through the letter ø sometimes painstakingly drawn in by hand as the type in question had been melted down by German government inspectors, Jacobsen used uniquely Danish settings, phraseology and references which were extremely difficult to translate. Thus even when the German government attempted to overcome the stories’ popularity by releasing translated German versions they ended up producing lacklustre copies which missed a lot of the subtlety and genius of the originals.
Jacobsen’s role in the Kulturkrieg has sometimes been exaggerated by overly hagiographic biographers. Nonetheless it is difficult to argue that it was down to both his own efforts and his inspiration for his imitators that helped keep the Danish language alive in Jutland under the Bundesreich, and was at least in part responsible for Dresden belatedly deciding to effectively abandon the effort in 1891...shortly, of course, before world events would render the question moot in any case.
[1] Detective fiction (ratiocination for ‘reasoning’ is a term Edgar Allen Poe used for his own early detective stories in OTL). This writer is obviously not delving into the nitty-gritty of deciding what constitutes detective fiction, when it began, and whether debatable earlier examples should be considered or not (much as is the case in OTL).
[2] OTL Nevada.
[3] Note that this is not meant to imply that the cities in question are dominated by those languages—Californian cities are indeed a melting pot by this point and these just happen to be the ones Fitzhugh wrote for, but all of them will have newspapers in those three languages at the very least, to say nothing of Chinese, Corean, German, Japanese, Italian, Lithuanian, Nivkh, Aynyu, Tagalog...
[4] The author is not exactly unbiased in Mendoza’s favour here.
Part #219: Cloak and Dagger
“Don’t believe those daft stories you hear down the pub, Dan—the Norwood Inquirer does not have a reporter on staff who’s a master of disguise super-sleuth. And if they did, he wouldn’t spend his days at the cigarette machine trying to listen in on your detailed, groundbreaking campaign strategies like not getting on the wrong multi and spending the afternoon manning a stall in bloody Carshalton instead. Give me a break.”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
*From “Great Lives” by Patricia Daniels (1979)—
Peter Fitzhugh (1827-1902) would be worthy of memory if his only contribution to the world had been the coining of the term The Melting Pot to describe his adopted home of California. However, the book to which that term formed the title was the wellspring of a cultural phenomenon that continues to be enjoyed today: that of ratiocinic fiction.[1]
Fitzhugh was born in Virginia only a few years after the discovery of gold in California. His father, Richard, was a younger son of the wealthy and powerful Fitzhugh family, one of the original ‘First Families’ of Virginia. It is possibe that Richard and his wife Mary might have considered moving westwards even without the intervention of the Virginia Crisis, but the devastation wrought on their farm (fortunately in their absence) by Caesar Bell’s Kleinkriegers persuaded him that the promise of the Golden Province was a better option than trying to rebuild in the seething climate of post-Crisis Virginia. Although Peter would sometimes affect the manner of a Virginian gentleman in later life, he admitted in private that he barely remembered anything of the old Confederation he had left at such an early age.
Unlike so many of the hopeful Californian immigrants of this period, Richard Fitzhugh made enough from his business (largely through selling board and equipment to prospectors rather than joining their ranks himself) that he was able to provide a modest middle-class existence for his family. They kept on the right side of New Spanish law, paid lip service to the increasingly shrill demands made by the City of Mexico about Catholicism and taxation, and kept their heads down. Peter had just achieved the age of majority when California was plunged into the strife of the Great American War. He rejected calls by some of the Carolinians fighting there to join the government side, as a few Virginians did, and fought (albeit reluctantly) for the Americans. In the process he received a minor and ‘picturesque’ (as he put it) wound to the knee which led him to walk with a slight limp and a cane for the rest of his life. In post-revolutionary California he inherited his father’s land holdings and supplemented them with income from his nascent writing career. Initially this consisted mainly of articles published for newspapers, but he gradually began branching out into short stories. However, in those early days they were nothing to set the world on fire.
In the course of his life Fitzhugh became the great friend of a fellow immigrant, Francesco ‘Frank’ Melloni of Tuscany. Melloni had come to California not because of the fading charms of gold, nor even for the newer stories told of silver wealth in the interior province of Argentina,[2] but owing to backing the wrong horse in the internal Tuscan struggle that had formed part of the Patrimonial War. Fitzhugh, whose Nivkh wife Ludmila was unable to have children, served as godfather to Melloni’s son Aurelio and daughter Rosalba; after Melloni passed away in 1870 he effectively took over the parental role. Rosalba initially made the greater impact of the two Melloni children, becoming a great soprano who helped make the Cometa opera scene one taken seriously by the European (and Novamundine) establishment. Aurelio joined the police force organised nationwide in California with the new Constitution of 1873, rising to the position of Inspector. It seemed as though both Aurelio and Peter Fitzhugh would be mere footnotes to history, mentioned in passing in relation to the great Rosalba Melloni, who might herself be forgotten if the unique Californian school of hybrid Sino-Italian opera went out of fashion again. However, it was not to be.
In 1885, when Fitzhugh was in his late fifties and Aurelio his mid-thirties, a story consumed the papers which Fitzhugh continued to occasionally write for. From the English-language Stargazer of Las Estrellas to the Spanish El Mensajero of Monterey to the Russian Grazhdanin of Cometa (for Fitzhugh was fluent in both English and Spanish and had a working knowledge of Russian, aided by his Nivkh cousin Valdemar Lazatev), the frontpages blared out in one voice.[3] Emilia Mendoza, ‘La Zorra’, the Vixen, the great fighter and leader in the revolutionary war, had passed away at the age of sixty-six. Though Mendoza was still a household name, at first the story did not dominate to the extent implied above. Her role in the founding of the Republic was still somewhat controversial; since the independence she had fought so hard to win, she had been repeatedly sidelined by other interests, either short-sighted radicals who dismissed her efforts to carefully balance the influence of the Russians, Americans and Meridians, or hidebound traditionalists who refused to confront the idea of a woman with such power and achievements.[4] The rewriting of history might be less professional in those days before the Fever Dream, but it was no less enthusiastic by its proponents. It was helped along by the new Constitution of 1873, whose proponents had made unpleasantly negative statements aimed at the original back-of-an-envelope constitution that had begun with Mendoza, never mind that it had always been intended to be temporary. At first it seemed as though Mendoza’s death, just like Fitzhugh’s life, might be nothing more than a footnote.
Public interest was, however, sparked when a scandal exploded. Not concerning La Zorra’s legendary political conquests in the bedroom, which were already public knowledge (and perhaps partly responsible for the fact that so many had gone along with the anti-Mendoza factions’ interpretation of history: sheer embarrassment). The scandal instead concerned inheritance. Mendoza’s heir was her only (legitimate) child, a daughter, Carmen California ‘Cali’ Mendoza. Emilia had possessed considerable personal wealth in jewellery beside her estates and had bequeathed these personally to her daughter, while making generous donations to charitable causes out of her property. However, Cali Mendoza went to the papers with the story that on the night of her mother’s death, she had found her safe broken into and her jewels missing! The only clue was an enigmatic note which hinted at dark secrets and bore a bloody, smudged fingerprint. A fingerprint, when the uniqueness of fingerprints and their potential for tracking criminals had been noted and suggested by Daniel Young of New York only the year before...
The scandal grabbed the imagination not only of the Californian public but far beyond. Lectel meant that everyone from Cytherean agitators in their Paris salons to Meridian industrialists comparing the sizes of their factories were discussing the Mysterious Case of the Vixen’s Jewels. Contrary to popular belief (though the latter is understandable given what came later), Aurelio Melloni was not placed in command of the case from the start, but was one of several police inspectors assigned by the Captain General to investigate a case of clear public and national interest. As they investigated, the papers continued to run pieces spinning out the story in the hope of a new development. Some of these pieces were contributed by Fitzhugh, who had briefly met La Zorra during the revolutionary war and had always felt saddened that her role in the conflict had been too often brushed under the carpet of history by her political enemies. Fitzhugh was only one writer among many, but he doubtless contributed towards the introspective mood of the papers beyond the excitement that an unusually complex and fascinating florin bloody had come to life. Suddenly people were ready to re-examine Mendoza’s life and celebrate it in a way they had been deaf to while she had lived. Mendoza had already been a Cytherean icon to some extent, but it was only after her death in 1885 that she truly entered the global public consciousness.
Aurelio proved to be a more brilliant detective than his superiors had given him credit for. Aided by his godfather Fitzhugh, who searched through past editions and newspaper archives to lend credence to his theory, Inspector Melloni found the lost jewels and who had taken them. The culprit turned out to be none other than Cali Mendoza herself, having taken and concealed the jewels specifically to provoke exactly the sort of national conversation that had exploded into life, successfully ensuring her mother’s legacy could not be quashed by her enemies. Now and forever, Emilia Mendoza would be remembered as the founding mother of the Adamantine Republic of California.
This incident might have made Aurelio Melloni’s name in his lifetime, but it is likely he would be forgotten today were it not for his godfather’s efforts. Seeking to more widely publicise the achievements of the godson he was proud of, Fitzhugh wrote The Melting Pot, a fictionalised and embellished account of the Vixen’s Jewels affair. For the first time his writing was read by people outside California, and his command of descriptive language was particularly noted, bringing the beauty and the chaos of California to life for an audience which had previously only had vague images. Fitzhugh was undoubtedly helped by being able to write for a wider audience than ever before: with Lazatev’s help, he released the book in English, Spanish and Russian (some editions released in California itself even collected the three into one trilingual omnibus). This opened up a huge global market, helped along by the Lectel and Standard Crate steamships which were shrinking the world, though Fitzhugh and the inheritors of his estate spent much time arguing copyright law: this was arguably what began a movement towards international copyright agreements, with unauthorised and often error-prone copies of Fitzhugh’s books flooding some countries.
For it was ‘books’ plural. Flush from the success of The Melting Pot and with occasional assistance from Melloni himself, Fitzhugh created the first serious recurring fictional detective. The name of his character was eventually changed to Carlo Matteucci in order to allow Fitzhugh to explore new adventures he was not comfortable connecting his real-life godson with. Most modern editions name the protagonist of the ‘Melting Pot Series’ Matteucci from the start, backdating this. While Fitzhugh mostly wrote full-length novels, his background in writing short newspaper pieces meant that he also contributed serials of short Matteucci stories. Regardless of their length, the tales always focused on particularly diabolical or inventive crimes, with the focus on Matteucci’s ingenuity as well as his daring as he unravelled the problems. This concept of intellectual satisfaction, in which the reader had a chance to solve the crime along with Matteucci rather than being subject to the random plot twists and deus ex machina common to the florin bloody adventure genre, was what truly created the new genre of ratiocinic fiction.
Predictably, Fitzhugh was not alone for long. Writers of ratiocinic fiction arose around the world, often seeking to create an exotic investigator with a gimmick of their own in emulation of Matteucci’s Italian ways amid the mostly Hispano-Anglo-Russian culture of California. Many of these emulations sank without trace and are today only known to literary experts, but some survived and prospered, being scarcely less prone to film and Motoscope adaptations than Matteucci himself. Among these are Thomas Gordon’s Inspector Macavity, a Scotsman in a fictitious Outsiders’ Village in Feng China; Philippe Pagnol’s Émile Dujardin, a veteran of the Jacobin Wars haunted by his past who now serves as a juge d’instruction in small-town Provence; Jack Harris, the hardbitten Chichago-based creation of Henry Bower (and his eternal New York rival Jonas “Always” Wright, penned by Bower’s own rival and eventual wife Jane Hill); and Esteban López, the Black Knight, a wealthy black Meridian whose alter ego investigated crimes and discrimination against his people on the streets of Buenos Aires and beyond. The latter in particular is important for social history, sometimes being compared to the earlier Black Shadow sequents in the ENA, but fundamentally being part of a sense of public remorse that Meridian foreign policy had propped up the slaveholders in Carolina for years before ending the institution there. The stories were published under the name Miguel Santos, who had only a little black ancestry himself, but it was later revealed that they were co-written with the black businessman Ramón Novas, considered by many to be the model for López himself.
These are to name but a few. The ratiocinic genre has become so popular that even to name its most mainstream products would take a book in itself. We cannot however leave this topic without considering the case of Anders Jacobsen. This quiet accountant of Vejle waged a one-man front in the Kulturkrieg of the 1880s as the German government attempted to eradicate Danish language and culture in Jutland. Jacobsen created the character of Astrid Hjejle, the wife of a comically incompetent Danish investigator who is nonetheless heralded as a great man by the people of 1840s Scandinavia, who do not dream that his crimes are in fact solved by his spouse. Jacobsen never injected explicit politics into his stories. Their power was in their simple readability. Even more than the other ratiocinic tales of the period, the Astrid stories spoke to a wide audience because they combined both humour at Poul Hjelje’s expense and wonder at the ingenuity of the plots Astrid navigates through. Through banned printing presses, with the slash through the letter ø sometimes painstakingly drawn in by hand as the type in question had been melted down by German government inspectors, Jacobsen used uniquely Danish settings, phraseology and references which were extremely difficult to translate. Thus even when the German government attempted to overcome the stories’ popularity by releasing translated German versions they ended up producing lacklustre copies which missed a lot of the subtlety and genius of the originals.
Jacobsen’s role in the Kulturkrieg has sometimes been exaggerated by overly hagiographic biographers. Nonetheless it is difficult to argue that it was down to both his own efforts and his inspiration for his imitators that helped keep the Danish language alive in Jutland under the Bundesreich, and was at least in part responsible for Dresden belatedly deciding to effectively abandon the effort in 1891...shortly, of course, before world events would render the question moot in any case.
[1] Detective fiction (ratiocination for ‘reasoning’ is a term Edgar Allen Poe used for his own early detective stories in OTL). This writer is obviously not delving into the nitty-gritty of deciding what constitutes detective fiction, when it began, and whether debatable earlier examples should be considered or not (much as is the case in OTL).
[2] OTL Nevada.
[3] Note that this is not meant to imply that the cities in question are dominated by those languages—Californian cities are indeed a melting pot by this point and these just happen to be the ones Fitzhugh wrote for, but all of them will have newspapers in those three languages at the very least, to say nothing of Chinese, Corean, German, Japanese, Italian, Lithuanian, Nivkh, Aynyu, Tagalog...
[4] The author is not exactly unbiased in Mendoza’s favour here.
Alex Richards
Donor
Ooh very nice, an Italian Holmes in California. There's shades of ValJean with Dujardin there as well.
And that's an interesting line at the end there. Either Jutland's going back to Scandinavia, or the Danes are being deported, or possibly the government is being replaced with a Diversitarian one me thinks.
And that's an interesting line at the end there. Either Jutland's going back to Scandinavia, or the Danes are being deported, or possibly the government is being replaced with a Diversitarian one me thinks.
What's a 'multi'? A bus? Is its full name 'the multimobile'?
I don't know why, but I kept thinking of the Pink Panther during the whole stolen jewels section.
I actually thought that 'moot point' means that during all of that bloodshed, no one is really going to care that much. I also don't think we're going to be seeing Societism's rise anywhere else than in the UPSA and the UPSA-o-sphere during or directly after the Pandoran War.
I don't know why, but I kept thinking of the Pink Panther during the whole stolen jewels section.
I actually thought that 'moot point' means that during all of that bloodshed, no one is really going to care that much. I also don't think we're going to be seeing Societism's rise anywhere else than in the UPSA and the UPSA-o-sphere during or directly after the Pandoran War.
Reverse Charlie Chan?
Seems with this fondness for exotic and complex settings, mystery writing may have a smaller "cozy" element than the OTL version. Also, it seems quite likely to be a Diversitarian mode of fiction par excellence.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone.
NB this is actually just a restoration of the status quo of the 1790s before the Three Emperors' War, and the Qing in OTL also had this kind of position in the late eighteenth century before it gradually faded.
However you are correct to bring up Charlie Chan because, although Matteucci is essentially the 'Sherlock Holmes' figure of LTTW in terms of impact, his origins much more resemble Chan's, i.e. being based on a real investigator.
It's more that the late nineteenth century of the world does because of the lack of major wars and the trends of globalisation. Not unlike OTL, of course.
Strictly speaking, both Tibet and Nepal were vassalised, but in practice Tibet is treated as more of a direct-rule place and Nepal more of a vassal. Boutan (Bhutan) and Sikkim are also vassals whereas I didn't comment on modern Arunachal Pradesh yet as that's going to be a wee bit more complex.
NB this is actually just a restoration of the status quo of the 1790s before the Three Emperors' War, and the Qing in OTL also had this kind of position in the late eighteenth century before it gradually faded.
Yes and yes. I almost kept the OTL term omnibus and just abbreviate it to omni rather than bus to be different, but there are some etymological questions about whether 'omnibus' came from a specific incident in OTL that wouldn't be repeated in TTL.What's a 'multi'? A bus? Is its full name 'the multimobile'?
I was actually more thinking Clouseau in relation to Jacobsen's accident-prone detective whom his wife is secretly the brains behind.I don't know why, but I kept thinking of the Pink Panther during the whole stolen jewels section.
It could be considered very loosely inspired by the Dirk Struan novels of James Clavell, though those aren't detective themed.Reverse Charlie Chan?
However you are correct to bring up Charlie Chan because, although Matteucci is essentially the 'Sherlock Holmes' figure of LTTW in terms of impact, his origins much more resemble Chan's, i.e. being based on a real investigator.
Yeah, or rather the 'cosy' style of detective fiction is going to be something that develops later on, perhaps as a cultural trend of wanting to embrace the quiet and familiar due to war trauma...
So everything is vassalized but Tibet is under stricter control, northeastern India is a mess. Thanks for clarification.
I feel so smart. I didn't know that the full name of 'bus' is in 'omnibus' in English. I expected 'autobus', just like in my native language.
It must have been the jewels then, nothing else. Speaking of Clouseau, you need a Russian detective who hired a Yapontsi nindzya to attack him from time to time.
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Thande
Donor
Indeed, I am going to have to devote some space to describing what India actually looks like when the dust from the Jihad settles.
It's not well known by most modern English speakers. Strictly speaking, omnibus was abbreviated to bus and then 'auto-' in some languages was tacked back on to specify a motorised rather than horse-drawn one.
I admit I avoided mentioning a Russian detective just because it would have ended up being too much like Boris Akunin's Erast Fandorin (those books are what got me interested in Tsarist Russia in the first place).It must have been the jewels then, nothing else. Speaking of Clouseau, you need a Russian detective who hired a Yapontsi nindzya to attack him from time to time.
Great updates as always, really love how you're fleshing out the many characters of the world as we count down to World War Doom. This world has so much depth and care I have to say it is really impressive.
Also if I'm reading this right in regards to Anglo-American relations, in this world where America did not declare independence from the British Empire we are going to see England (and apparently Ireland/Scotland) declare independence from what has largely become an American Empire? Must say I love that!
Of course relations will warm after a brief hot period I assume given the rise of Diversitarianism and how such a thing will be seen as good and even natural I suppose.
I can't wait for more.
Also if I'm reading this right in regards to Anglo-American relations, in this world where America did not declare independence from the British Empire we are going to see England (and apparently Ireland/Scotland) declare independence from what has largely become an American Empire? Must say I love that!
Of course relations will warm after a brief hot period I assume given the rise of Diversitarianism and how such a thing will be seen as good and even natural I suppose.
I can't wait for more.
Thande
Donor
Part #220: Ship of Fools
“Don’t worry, love, I’ve made sure we’ve got tickets for the First Alderman’s Regatta. I know how much Peter wants to see the Raleigh sailing up the Thames, we’ll have the best seats in the house, as it were. Just tell him he’s not allowed to make whoosh-bang noises unless we’re absolutely sure the Cholanese Ambassador isn’t in earshot. See you later love, DBH xx”
*
From “Great Lives” by Patricia Daniels (1979)—
Wallace Essex was born in what was then the Kingdom of the Britons in 1838.[1] For most of his life he did not have much impact on history, but ultimately shaped the course of the twentieth century in a way he could not have dreamed. Wallace studied architecture as one of the first students at Charnwood Polytechnic College in Leicestershire, one of the new institutions created under the first Moderate government led by Stephen Watson-Wentworth. It is fitting that his alma mater should be a college both groundbreaking and radical in reputation but also often regarded as second-rate and populated by cranks by some of its stuffier older counterparts.
Wallace’s early work was at the time regarded as not especially worthy of note: it was not remarkable or particularly praised, but equally (contrary to what some biographers have claimed) it was not castigated as inferior. His buildings, such as the 3B Bank[2] in Leicester (now a Wesleyan chapel) and the New Corn Exchange in Lincoln, were generally regarded as adequate, functional, mediocre. It was Wallace’s burning passion for interests outside his day job which would go on to splash his name across the pages of history, for better or for worse.
Before we go on, we should remember an important caveat when dealing with the military history of the late nineteenth century and especially the naval military history. Courtenay (Lord Congleton), writing two generations later with the benefit of hindsight, compared the whole farcical process of naval technology advancement in the Long Peace with “two men trying to play chess blindfolded while a third randomly shuffles the pieces around the board and invents new ones that move by different rules, without telling either man what they are”. Capt. Gordon Dobson, another commentator, instead compared it to an eologist trying to reconstruct an entire skeleton of a megalapteryx from a single tiny bone fragment.[3] Both men were attempting to express the fact that naval theorists were severely hamstrung in the Long Peace because it was a time of both important technological advancement in general, yet also a time (as the name implies) when there were few direct clashes between European or Novamundine powers possessing frontline, cutting-edge military hardware.
This is not to say there were not plenty of conflicts in the period, but there were always caveats associated with attempting to draw conclusions from their outcomes. Battles such as Penang in 1880, where a large Siamese wooden fleet was defeated by five French armourclads, could be held to have the simple message that the time of wooden ships was over and only armourclads were worth possessing. Yet by 1880 that lesson had already been regarded as self-evident by most of the European and Novamundine military establishment, and indeed even in Siam several officers had attempted fruitlessly to convince their superiors of the importance of the crushing disparity they faced. In the case of Penang, the problem for military theorists was that the French had faced a well-trained and disciplined but technologically inferior opponent, which did not yield lessons which could be applied to a naval conflict with say Belgium, Great Britain or the UPSA.
Equally there were several examples of clashes where the opponent did have fairly advanced (if not directly equivalent) hardware but might suffer from possessing crews with inferior training and discipline, which could doom a fleet even more assuredly than a technological disadvantage. The Battle of Jiaozhou Bay in 1864, one of the last major battles between wooden fleets, was similarly frustrating for theorists because of how the Beiqing fleet had so suffered from these problems that the Feng had not faced an equivalent opponent.
The true naval lessons of the Long Peace therefore had to be sifted patiently like tiny gold nuggets from the dross of inapplicable experience. Inevitably there were arguments about whether a glittering prize triumphantly held aloft was in fact fool’s gold. The sociologists Ryan Taylor and Susannah Willis have also argued that the pattern of naval initiatives in the 1870s-90s also evokes studies of peer pressure and faddish behaviour. Navies and governments, fundamentally uncertain of the significance of particular breakthroughs and moves by their rivals, had a tendency to hastily copy whatever they were doing. Often particular patterns of ship design and tactics spread around the world when today theorists argue they were objectively flawed or worse than what had come before—but there is no way of knowing for certain, as they were never properly used before they were superseded in turn. Perhaps the most farcical example of this was in 1879, when the still recently united Italian Regia Marina built their new lineship[4] Horatio Nelson with its mizzenmast taller than its mainmast. This was simply due to an error with the plans early in the construction, but the RM covered up the incident and completed it that way rather than face the humiliation of admitting the mistake. Despite this design being objectively flawed, it was hastily copied by several other powers determined to see what all the fuss was about. The incident is particularly well remembered because masts on ships were on the way out anyway, rendering it an even more farcical affair—even if the Nelson had not had the flaw it would probably be remembered as a craft obsolete as soon as it took to the waves.[5]
These problems unfortunately coincided with an era in which almost every power was eager to build bigger and better navies, both for reasons of national prestige and in reflection of the fact that in an increasingly global trade network, their economies were dependent on keeping their trade routes open. With the Submarine Rage of the 1860s and 70s, there were many suggestions that the ever larger, more common, faster steam freighters joining (say) France to India and China could be sunk at will and wreck a nation’s economy overnight. Some European powers’ populations had grown faster than their ability to feed themselves thanks to grain imports from the ENA and UPSA, and might even face starvation in the event of war.
Of course all of this is tainted with hindsight. Naval theorists at the time did not regard ironsharks as being the omnipresent threat which the general public did, as they knew that (at least for the moment) the craft were short-range and likely only a coastal threat working out of local bases. However, Walker’s steelteeth weapon could be based on other craft as well. Toothboats were not treated seriously (often cited as a major mistake) until the outbreak of the Pandoric War, but steelteeth could also be deployed on large-scale surface warships and strike at a distance. In 1888, albeit in a rather unrealistic set-piece demonstration, the Bundesmarine even dropped a steeltooth from a steerable [airship] and struck the hulk of an obsolete armourclad as a target, sinking it. Realistically feasible air-launched steelteeth would come later, but it did illustrate the sense of paranoia that these weapons could come from anywhere.
Despite this, though, steelteeth were actually less of a factor in the decisions that led to Wallace Essex’s prominence than the simple advancement of naval gunnery. Early armourclads had still been wedded to the kind of naval doctrine that had dominated the eighteenth century and only been partly challenged by the use of single-gun steam galleys. Vessels such as the Lord Washington, Antorcha de la Libertad and Spartacus were equipped primarily with many relatively small broadside guns. It is unsurprising that in this era armourclads were considered essentially invincible and the success of Watson’s Trident in damaging the Washington was treated as such a shock. However, gunnery theorists realised that the wrought iron/teak armour of these vessels could be penetrated by larger and more advanced guns. The most important breakthrough was that of the French inventor Martin Boulin in 1872, who created a shaped shell made of cast-iron with a hardened water-cooled tip. The shell was designed to fit large rifled cannon (of a French calibre already used for coastal fortifications) and could penetrate even the best armour of the day.[6] Initially it took some time for the Boulin Shell to make an impact (no pun intended). Traditionalist navies were extremely sceptical of the idea of basing such large guns on their vessels, which would require the abandonment not only of masts (which were already on the way out) but the entire gundeck arrangement which dated back centuries. Some hyperbolics declared it would be the end of ships with souls, that ‘she’ would be replaced with ‘it’, that a naval tradition stretching back to the classical era would be severed.
This waffle would be silenced by the Nigale Incident of 1876. The exact circumstances of the affair have never quite been pinned down despite considerable research both then and now. It would appear that, despite the increasingly peaceful relations between the ENA and UPSA, some Meridian officers sought to apply the flag of convenience policy used in other theatres closer to home. For background, the UPSA (already regarded with suspicion for years on this score due the Armada’s use of a false-flag operation during the Popular Wars) had begun ‘leasing’ modern warships to its Hermandad vassals in order to put pressure on its foes without risking all-out war. Most significantly the UPSA ‘sold’ three armourclads to the Cape Republic in order to allow the Cape Dutch to stand toe to toe with their Belgian enemies in naval skirmishes. In practice, these armourclads still had Meridian crews and commanders, just with a token Cape Dutch officer who could be presented as the captain if challenged and a Cape Dutch flag flying from their masts. The same policy was used elsewhere with Hermandad members such as the Batavian Republic and, after its titular independence in 1880, the Philippine Republic. The policy would be copied later by other powers possessing similar vassals which allowed them plausible deniability, and it was this tactic which gave up most of the fragments of usable data that naval theorists attempted to work from during the Long Peace.
Regardless, a cabal of Meridian naval officers sought to do the same with vassals closer to home like the Kingdom of New Granada, a Hermandad member state since John III had been made an offer he couldn’t refuse in the aftermath of the Venezuelan Revolution. The older Meridian armourclad Almirante Ramírez, tellingly named for a Third Platinean War commander, was quietly ‘sold’ to the New Granadines, renamed Juan I and employed in a New Granadine attempt to bully the Venezuelans into allowing free passage into the Gulf of Venezuela and through the straits to Lake Maracaibo, defying the American-backed tariff regime. The Venezuelans, however, had built Fort Nigale on the Isla de Zapara guarding the entrance to the Gulf. Zapara had been one of the headquarters of a native revolt by the former slave Nigale in the sixteenth century, an incident romanticised by the new Venezuelan government as an act of rebellion against external rule (never mind that more Venezuelans were descended from the Spaniards Nigale had been fighting than from his own people).
The fort was equipped with modern heavy rifled guns. As noted above it has never been satisfactorily explained why at least one of these guns had been equipped with Boulin shells. The most plausible theory is probably that of Prof Jeremy Linwood of the University of Erieport, who claims that the shells were the result of a brief, abandoned inquiry into trying to replicate the controversial new French weapon by the Imperial Navy, and then after a change of senior officers were sold off to America’s Venezuelan lackey. It does not seem likely, as others have suggested, that the move was a deliberate attempt to test the weapon (as the Meridians did with their own privateering policy) because how would the Americans have known there would be an attempt to force the entrance to the Gulf?
In any case, the Venezuelan commander General[7] Alejandro Guayanesa ordered his gunners to fire warning shots at the “Juan I” as it attempted to defy the customs boats. By an odd coincidence, not only did one of the shots accidentally hit, but it was the one fired from the gun with the Boulin shells. The hardened-tip shell, spinning as it flew thanks to the rifled gun, drilled through the “Juan I”’s wrought iron/teak armour and exploded, smashing out a sizeable chunk of gundeck and killing six Meridian crew. Shocked, the Meridian ‘first officer’ (real commander) Jaime Salas ordered a retreat lest the Venezuelans fire again. Suddenly, armourclads were no longer invincible to gunnery.
The Nigale Incident could easily have escalated into a re-cooling of relations between the ENA and UPSA, throwing away all the work of Araníbar, Braithwaite and Chamberlain. However, the matter was smoothed over not least because of mutual embarrassment. The Meridian Government was furious at this naval cabal which had acted contrary to its wishes and began a purge of ‘secret societies’ (which, it can be argued, ultimately resulted in the Sanción Roja). The Americans were outraged that such a powerful weapon had been dismissed and handed over to the Venezuelans. Heads rolled on both sides and diplomats agreed to quietly brush over the affair. But the world had been changed. Suddenly the protestations of traditionalist admirals were met with flat offers to accept their resignations. A line had been drawn under the past, and gundeck warships joined the chariot, pikeman and musket in the museum of obsolete weapons. If armourclads were to sink one another, they needed bigger guns and Boulin shells.
The ensuing decade was a frantic period of each nation attempting to respond to this discovery with ever more weird and wonderful (and horrible) looking ships. Despite the dismissal of the traditionalists, there remained all sorts of peculiar holdovers due to designers being overly wedded to the received wisdom of the past. Despite the arguments of some theorists, designers were leery of designing ships only around big-gun main armament,[8] preferring the idea of a mix of sizes of weapons. Small rapid-fire cannon [quick-firing guns] were also deployed, partially to destroy enemy ships’ superstructures at short range but primarily as a point defence against steelteeth spotted in the water. There were also arguments over what role rockets should play in warships, which had raged on some level since the Jacobin Wars but had always been of limited use on lineships due to the retention of masts, sails and rigging at least for auxiliary propulsion. With these increasingly on the way out (the Lionheart was not, contrary to popular belief, the first mastless warship) rockets became more viable, but again tradition reared its ugly head.
This more than the tactical justification was largely responsible for the invention of the dentist ship class alongside the pre-existing lineships and frigates. Dentists, originally named by the French naval theorist Frédéric Morin, were so called because they were designed primarily to ‘pull the steelteeth’ of enemy ships. These craft were faster and nimbler than lineships (though less so than frigates) and intended as escorts to intercept both steelteeth and the craft that fired them, whether surface ships or ironsharks. Dentists were therefore equipped with both counter-steelteeth tubes of their own, many rapid-fire cannon and rocket pods for their main armament, but lacked the big guns of the lineships.[9] Increasingly accurate rockets provided a useful ‘instant barrage’ to indiscriminately blast any unexpected foe before it could fire its steelteeth, whereas individual cannon shots might be more effective but were now a case of single hit or miss due to smaller volume of fire. In this sense dentist rockets replaced the old gundeck broadside as an indiscriminate attack, but typically took much longer to reload. Dentists would therefore defensively guard lineships in the line of battle while the lineships provided the main offensive fire with their large and medium guns. Due to the use of rockets on dentists, they were also often adapted into modern bomb-ships as mortars gradually became obsolete.
It seems obvious to us now that lineships should mount their large cannon in turrets, but in fact this was only one idea among many at the time. Several of the earliest post-Boulin armourclads tried to mount three or four large cannon in sponsons in what was essentially a reimagined gundeck—again showing the pernicious legacy of tradition for tradition’s sake. The complexity required to allow recoil can be imagined. The Lionheart was also not the first ship to mount a single main turret, but that is how she has been remembered.[10]
Speaking of which we should return to the Lionheart and Wallace Essex. Wallace was a proud British patriot, raised on tales of the naval heroes of the past, whether Drake or Nelson and Leo Bone. He had shared in his grandfather’s bitterness that Great Britain had suffered so much in French invasion and its aftermath due to the naval cuts of the Fox Ministry driving the latter two great men away to Italy and France. He knew of the many missed opportunities thanks to Marleburgensian and Populist misrule, the naval cuts and the transfer of many ships to the Imperial Navy. By the time Wallace was a grown man, the British people had elected Moderate and Regressive governments who built the Royal Navy back up again, but it was still only considered an even match for France’s fleet—something which would have been unimaginable a century before and was still shameful considering to France, the Navy would always be a second priority behind the Army.
Wallace wanted to change that. He wanted a weapon that would change the world and he wanted it in British hands. Not the ungentlemanly ironshark, but a bold, undeniably powerful flagship which would make the world fear the name of Britannia once again. In his lunch breaks and his days off, asking mysteriously phrased advice from friends in naval architecture, he designed what became the Lionheart.
Wallace had no particular experience in ship design. In hindsight some biographers have suggested that this meant he was not so held back by hidebound tradition and outdated practices as his counterparts within the system. Others, especially at the time, simply said it made him unqualified. Certainly the design of the Lionheart was radical. Not only did it lack masts but the hull shape was like nothing that had been seen before. It was truly built around big guns for Boulin shells (though still possessing smaller secondary armament) rather than being tainted by ‘established knowledge’ of how hulls should work, with no concern for whether the positioning of the decks fitted a traditional layout. Most importantly as far as the general public was concerned, it was the first true ‘all-iron’ warship, not merely iron armour layered on teak. This led to the nickname ‘Ironheart’ when the ship’s name was established. This of course brought the romantics out in full force, declaiming about how a ship with no wood was not a true ship at all.
All this publicity took place while the ship remained a mere sketch. Wallace relied heavily on his cousin Roderick, a Liverpool stockbroker who had moved down to London and its own financial scene (which, despite the effects of the French invasion and the abolition of the City of London by the Populists, had nonetheless somewhat risen from the ashes in the late nineteenth century). Roderick is often somewhat unfairly described as a con man. It is true he was an excellent self-publicist and a director on the boards of multitudinous companies which had a rather debatable existence outside bits of paper. Nonetheless he was considered relatively trustworthy and reliable by his peers, which doubtless helped him promote his cousin’s marvellous new invention to both the general pbulic and a sceptical Admiralty. In the end the Government agreed to part-fund the project but Roderick had to come up with the remaining funds himself. He did so adeptly with many clever schemes designed to excite public interest, with tours of mock-ups of the mis-named ‘Secret Weapon’ and, most famously, a public competition to vote for the name of the new ship for a small fee. This required some surreptitious machinations behind the scenes after several asinine or obscene names turned out to be leading the Lectel poll, but Lionheart turned out to be the most popular not to fall into that category. The romantic Wallace loved the name, evoking a great figure from England’s past with the double meaning of putting the English Lion back into the hearts of England’s people.
Construction began at Plymouth in 1883, but suffered several slowdowns and reversals, not least when the general election later that year replaced Kenneth Shaw’s Moderate-led government with a Regressive-led one under Hugh Grosvenor, returning to power for a second term. Grosvenor had already led a government from 1877 to 1880 and had been noted for his sceptical approach to military projects claiming great innovations—admittedly this was an era in which many of these actually did turn out to be expensive dead ends. At the time this was overshadowed by the controversy over Grosvenor’s campaign openly whipping up anti-Scottish sentiment against Shaw among English voters, which would poison relations between the parts of Great Britain at a crucial time. However, the Essexes knew their project was in peril. Construction did continue at a slower pace as Roderick continued to raise more funds, but the completion of the Lionheart was delayed again and again.
It is quite likely, in fact, that the ship might never have been completed, were it not for Wallace Essex being saved by the aforementioned tendency of paranoid governments in this period to copy one another’s projects ‘just in case’ they turned out to be a world-changing superweapon. It was not known until 1925, twenty years after Wallace’s death, how the Russians had obtained the plans to the Lionheart. It transpired that the ‘Katie Galoshes’ referred to in his coded diary was in fact Katerina ‘Katya’ Kalashnikova, wife of the Cultural Attaché at the Russian Embassy. Questions have been asked ever since about whether Wallace knew his mistress had obtained the plans or not. It certainly tainted the image of this patriot for a while, years after his innovation had become obsolete in turn.
Regardless, the Russian Government examined this new idea, and like many new ideas in Russia, it was carefully packed off to Siberia where it could be tested far away from the country’s establishment. More specifically, the design came to the RLPC and to Governor-General Mikhail Vorontsov in Vostochny Pavlovsk [Edo/Tokyo]. Vorontsov, himself a little sceptical, fobbed off the idea on his ambitious lieutenant Jonas Alseniskiai. Undaunted at being asked to build an all-iron warship in a country not known for its iron resources, Alseniskiai commandeered the new shipyard being built in Myunkhgausensk [Kobe], a city that had recently been renamed for Ulrich Münchhausen. Both the shipyard and the Lionheart copy, unimaginatively named the Moritz Benyovsky, were built with ‘compensated’ Yapontsi labour, a euphemism evoking the increasing brutalities of Russian rule in Yapon following the Hanran Rebellion. According to (naturally rather untrustworthy) accounts by Alseniskiai and his assistants, though one might expect the Yapontsi to deliberately sabotage the project, the workers found themselves unable to do so due to their sense of pride and honour in their work. This also illustrates the manner in which Yapontsi in this era were presented, as intelligent and capable but fundamentally hidebound by a sense of social strictures which, to many European observers, rendered them less than human. When we consider what came later, we cannot but help see those events through this prism. But that is another discussion.
The Benyovsky was therefore completed while the Lionheart was still in drydock, and in 1885 Vorontsov (perhaps a little annoyed Alsenikskiai had succeeded in the project) sent her (or ‘it’, to the bruised traditionalists) on a shakedown cruise to fly the RLPC flag. What came next could not have been predicted. The French had decided to copy the Meridians’ privateer tactics and had ‘sold’ two armourclad warships, the Amiral Rivet and Amiral de Grasse, to the Liaodong Republic. While these two were no longer the best in the French fleet, they were not hopelessly obsolete either, and though they were traditional gundeck ships, each had been retrofitted with one large bow chaser equipped with Boulin shells.
The French at the time were concerned that their influence in Liaodong would be threatened by Beiqing China, which was increasingly becoming more of a Russian (or Russo-Corean) influenced state and rebuffing the French’s own advances. The French Government feared a Russian-backed Beiqing invasion of the Republic. The Russians, of course, were only too willing to push the boundaries of Liaodong sovereignty in the process, and Captain Moritz Nielsen (the grandson of Thorvald Nielsen) steamed into the Gulf of Zhili [Bohai Sea] to challenge the alleged republic’s junta. Frequently forgotten is the fact that the Lionheart and Benyovsky also revolutionised steam turbine technology, necessary to move their heavily armoured hulls at a reasonable speed; it is believed this breakthrough was not made by Wallace himself but by a fellow inventor whom Roderick had bailed out a few years before.
Certainly the two ‘Liaodong’ ships were caught offguard by the Russians. It remains unclear who fired the first shot—it may in fact have been a coastal battery staffed by Liaodong conscripts who did not hold their nerve. Regardless, the sabre-rattling escalated into an open skirmish. Captain Nielsen himself was shocked by the result. The Benyovsky’s heavy turret guns easily tore through the two French/Liaodong ships’ wrought iron/teak armour, while those ships were unable to more than dent the Benyovsky’s own more advanced armour even with their bow chasers. Witnesses also spoke of the Benyovsky’s surprising speed, which likely had thrown off the French/Liaodong ships’ gunnery. What was ignored at the time was that the Russians were using an early Solution Engine and newer equations to make firing solutions, and that it was likely this as much as the Benyovsky’s design that was responsible for them chewing through the foe so rapidly and dramatically. In doing so they created a new legend. A few years before in 1879, a Belgian and a ‘Cape Dutch’ (Meridian) armourclad of the second generation (1860s design) had blasted away at each other with their standard gundeck armament for an hour and caused only superficial damage to each other. Now there was a ship that could not only sink an old-style armourclad with Boulin shells but stand up to enemy Boulin shells (or so it seemed – in practice the Lionheart design still had weak points, but the public ignored such subtleties).
Once again the world’s powers engaged in mutual recriminations and hastily re-engineered to catch up. Half-completed armourclad ships were scrapped, the Lionheart-type turret became the norm for gun mountings and all-iron was now considered the only option. This had several unforseen economic effects, being a tough challenge for those countries lacking much in the way of iron ore, and those countries which did have a functioning steel industry and shipyards swiftly made money from building craft for export. The British economy benefited from this in the long run, as did those of many other countries.
In the short term, however, the British government was attacked for failing to fund the Lionheart, which was hastily completed. Even as this symbol of a new dawn left the dockyard in 1886, though, changes were apace. King-Emperor Henry X died suddenly after only eleven years on the throne, a short reign to follow his father’s long one. His two sons, George and Frederick, were on opposite sides of the Atlantic, with George in America and Frederick in Britain. As Duke of York, Frederick was a popular figure in the motherland (whereas George had always spent more time in the ENA) and initially functioned effectively as Regent (a title which had come to effectively convey ‘Lord Deputy of Great Britain’ since Hugh Percy). However, he resigned in protest at one of his brother’s earliest decisions, not long after the general election in Britain had turfed out the embarrassed Grosvenor in favour of Walter Cavendish’s Moderates. The new King-Emperor George IV was paranoid about the Meridians building a ‘lionheart’ (as the generic term became known) while the ENA were still left unprotected. The idea was absurd as the Meridians were far poorer in the resources needed to build one than the ENA, but it spoke of George’s attitudes when he demanded the Lionheart be transferred to the Imperial Navy. This decision met with public outrage, and although compensation was eventually delivered, it was this display of carelessness for the security of the motherland – the motherland which had produced the inventor responsible for the Lionheart – which sent the English-speaking world down the path to its inevitable future.
It is of course interesting to speculate how naval technology and tactics might have changed further if peace had continued.[11] But we shall leave that to the speculative romantics. For, only six years after the lionheart design proved itself and shipyards around the world began to frantically build them, the Pandoric War changed the world forever...
[1] This is slightly imprecise as it did not formally become the Kingdom of the Britons until the Constitution of 1839.
[2] The TTL analogue of Barclays, having picked a different rebrand inspired by the eighteenth century period when they were “Barclay, Bevan and Bening”.
[3] Eologist = paleontologist and megalapteryx = dinosaur, respectively.
[4] In TTL ‘line of battle ship’ has been abbreviated to ‘lineship’ rather than ‘battleship’ as in OTL.
[5] Note that all of this is very similar to the same period in OTL and for the same reason of having few datapoints of meaningful naval conflict to judge by. At least TTL has missed out on the fifty-year obsession with building rams on warships in OTL after ramming featured in the Battle of Lissa in 1866.
[6] This is equivalent to OTL’s Palliser Shell, invented by Sir William Palliser in 1867.
[7] Venezuela in TTL is one of those countries prone to rank inflation.
[8] A breakthrough made by HMS Dreadnought in 1905 in OTL.
[9] Dentists are loosely equivalent to destroyers (originally an abbreviation of ‘torpedo boat destroyer’) in OTL, but not so specifically aimed at torpedo boats (toothboats in TTL) which have not really become a major threat in TTL yet.
[10] In OTL, problems with turrets (especially elevation limitations) meant many warships in this era had a ‘barbette’ mounting for their guns, with lateral armour but none on top, allowing gun rotation and elevation but being vulnerable to plunging fire. In TTL, because of the ubiquitousness of rockets as a naval weapon, nobody would seriously consider a barbette mounting and they are not even mentioned here. This is the primary reason why it takes longer than OTL to develop turret guns in TTL – there is less of a gradual progress of logical steps involved.
[11] In OTL, of course, peace did continue longer and in 1905 HMS Dreadnought obsoleted previous ‘pre-dreadnought’ battleships with its all-big-gun layout, prompting the dreadnought arms race. In TTL because war comes earlier this doesn’t have a change to happen. The loose TTL analogue for the Lionheart would be HMS Majestic (1895), which similarly was a much-copied pattern for other ships around the world, but is largely forgotten compared to the impact of the Dreadnought ten years later. Essentially then, with some differences such as the ‘dentist’ rocket ships rather than destroyers, the Pandoric War is a war fought with pre-dreadnought level naval technology.
“Don’t worry, love, I’ve made sure we’ve got tickets for the First Alderman’s Regatta. I know how much Peter wants to see the Raleigh sailing up the Thames, we’ll have the best seats in the house, as it were. Just tell him he’s not allowed to make whoosh-bang noises unless we’re absolutely sure the Cholanese Ambassador isn’t in earshot. See you later love, DBH xx”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party—Croydon Urban)
*
From “Great Lives” by Patricia Daniels (1979)—
Wallace Essex was born in what was then the Kingdom of the Britons in 1838.[1] For most of his life he did not have much impact on history, but ultimately shaped the course of the twentieth century in a way he could not have dreamed. Wallace studied architecture as one of the first students at Charnwood Polytechnic College in Leicestershire, one of the new institutions created under the first Moderate government led by Stephen Watson-Wentworth. It is fitting that his alma mater should be a college both groundbreaking and radical in reputation but also often regarded as second-rate and populated by cranks by some of its stuffier older counterparts.
Wallace’s early work was at the time regarded as not especially worthy of note: it was not remarkable or particularly praised, but equally (contrary to what some biographers have claimed) it was not castigated as inferior. His buildings, such as the 3B Bank[2] in Leicester (now a Wesleyan chapel) and the New Corn Exchange in Lincoln, were generally regarded as adequate, functional, mediocre. It was Wallace’s burning passion for interests outside his day job which would go on to splash his name across the pages of history, for better or for worse.
Before we go on, we should remember an important caveat when dealing with the military history of the late nineteenth century and especially the naval military history. Courtenay (Lord Congleton), writing two generations later with the benefit of hindsight, compared the whole farcical process of naval technology advancement in the Long Peace with “two men trying to play chess blindfolded while a third randomly shuffles the pieces around the board and invents new ones that move by different rules, without telling either man what they are”. Capt. Gordon Dobson, another commentator, instead compared it to an eologist trying to reconstruct an entire skeleton of a megalapteryx from a single tiny bone fragment.[3] Both men were attempting to express the fact that naval theorists were severely hamstrung in the Long Peace because it was a time of both important technological advancement in general, yet also a time (as the name implies) when there were few direct clashes between European or Novamundine powers possessing frontline, cutting-edge military hardware.
This is not to say there were not plenty of conflicts in the period, but there were always caveats associated with attempting to draw conclusions from their outcomes. Battles such as Penang in 1880, where a large Siamese wooden fleet was defeated by five French armourclads, could be held to have the simple message that the time of wooden ships was over and only armourclads were worth possessing. Yet by 1880 that lesson had already been regarded as self-evident by most of the European and Novamundine military establishment, and indeed even in Siam several officers had attempted fruitlessly to convince their superiors of the importance of the crushing disparity they faced. In the case of Penang, the problem for military theorists was that the French had faced a well-trained and disciplined but technologically inferior opponent, which did not yield lessons which could be applied to a naval conflict with say Belgium, Great Britain or the UPSA.
Equally there were several examples of clashes where the opponent did have fairly advanced (if not directly equivalent) hardware but might suffer from possessing crews with inferior training and discipline, which could doom a fleet even more assuredly than a technological disadvantage. The Battle of Jiaozhou Bay in 1864, one of the last major battles between wooden fleets, was similarly frustrating for theorists because of how the Beiqing fleet had so suffered from these problems that the Feng had not faced an equivalent opponent.
The true naval lessons of the Long Peace therefore had to be sifted patiently like tiny gold nuggets from the dross of inapplicable experience. Inevitably there were arguments about whether a glittering prize triumphantly held aloft was in fact fool’s gold. The sociologists Ryan Taylor and Susannah Willis have also argued that the pattern of naval initiatives in the 1870s-90s also evokes studies of peer pressure and faddish behaviour. Navies and governments, fundamentally uncertain of the significance of particular breakthroughs and moves by their rivals, had a tendency to hastily copy whatever they were doing. Often particular patterns of ship design and tactics spread around the world when today theorists argue they were objectively flawed or worse than what had come before—but there is no way of knowing for certain, as they were never properly used before they were superseded in turn. Perhaps the most farcical example of this was in 1879, when the still recently united Italian Regia Marina built their new lineship[4] Horatio Nelson with its mizzenmast taller than its mainmast. This was simply due to an error with the plans early in the construction, but the RM covered up the incident and completed it that way rather than face the humiliation of admitting the mistake. Despite this design being objectively flawed, it was hastily copied by several other powers determined to see what all the fuss was about. The incident is particularly well remembered because masts on ships were on the way out anyway, rendering it an even more farcical affair—even if the Nelson had not had the flaw it would probably be remembered as a craft obsolete as soon as it took to the waves.[5]
These problems unfortunately coincided with an era in which almost every power was eager to build bigger and better navies, both for reasons of national prestige and in reflection of the fact that in an increasingly global trade network, their economies were dependent on keeping their trade routes open. With the Submarine Rage of the 1860s and 70s, there were many suggestions that the ever larger, more common, faster steam freighters joining (say) France to India and China could be sunk at will and wreck a nation’s economy overnight. Some European powers’ populations had grown faster than their ability to feed themselves thanks to grain imports from the ENA and UPSA, and might even face starvation in the event of war.
Of course all of this is tainted with hindsight. Naval theorists at the time did not regard ironsharks as being the omnipresent threat which the general public did, as they knew that (at least for the moment) the craft were short-range and likely only a coastal threat working out of local bases. However, Walker’s steelteeth weapon could be based on other craft as well. Toothboats were not treated seriously (often cited as a major mistake) until the outbreak of the Pandoric War, but steelteeth could also be deployed on large-scale surface warships and strike at a distance. In 1888, albeit in a rather unrealistic set-piece demonstration, the Bundesmarine even dropped a steeltooth from a steerable [airship] and struck the hulk of an obsolete armourclad as a target, sinking it. Realistically feasible air-launched steelteeth would come later, but it did illustrate the sense of paranoia that these weapons could come from anywhere.
Despite this, though, steelteeth were actually less of a factor in the decisions that led to Wallace Essex’s prominence than the simple advancement of naval gunnery. Early armourclads had still been wedded to the kind of naval doctrine that had dominated the eighteenth century and only been partly challenged by the use of single-gun steam galleys. Vessels such as the Lord Washington, Antorcha de la Libertad and Spartacus were equipped primarily with many relatively small broadside guns. It is unsurprising that in this era armourclads were considered essentially invincible and the success of Watson’s Trident in damaging the Washington was treated as such a shock. However, gunnery theorists realised that the wrought iron/teak armour of these vessels could be penetrated by larger and more advanced guns. The most important breakthrough was that of the French inventor Martin Boulin in 1872, who created a shaped shell made of cast-iron with a hardened water-cooled tip. The shell was designed to fit large rifled cannon (of a French calibre already used for coastal fortifications) and could penetrate even the best armour of the day.[6] Initially it took some time for the Boulin Shell to make an impact (no pun intended). Traditionalist navies were extremely sceptical of the idea of basing such large guns on their vessels, which would require the abandonment not only of masts (which were already on the way out) but the entire gundeck arrangement which dated back centuries. Some hyperbolics declared it would be the end of ships with souls, that ‘she’ would be replaced with ‘it’, that a naval tradition stretching back to the classical era would be severed.
This waffle would be silenced by the Nigale Incident of 1876. The exact circumstances of the affair have never quite been pinned down despite considerable research both then and now. It would appear that, despite the increasingly peaceful relations between the ENA and UPSA, some Meridian officers sought to apply the flag of convenience policy used in other theatres closer to home. For background, the UPSA (already regarded with suspicion for years on this score due the Armada’s use of a false-flag operation during the Popular Wars) had begun ‘leasing’ modern warships to its Hermandad vassals in order to put pressure on its foes without risking all-out war. Most significantly the UPSA ‘sold’ three armourclads to the Cape Republic in order to allow the Cape Dutch to stand toe to toe with their Belgian enemies in naval skirmishes. In practice, these armourclads still had Meridian crews and commanders, just with a token Cape Dutch officer who could be presented as the captain if challenged and a Cape Dutch flag flying from their masts. The same policy was used elsewhere with Hermandad members such as the Batavian Republic and, after its titular independence in 1880, the Philippine Republic. The policy would be copied later by other powers possessing similar vassals which allowed them plausible deniability, and it was this tactic which gave up most of the fragments of usable data that naval theorists attempted to work from during the Long Peace.
Regardless, a cabal of Meridian naval officers sought to do the same with vassals closer to home like the Kingdom of New Granada, a Hermandad member state since John III had been made an offer he couldn’t refuse in the aftermath of the Venezuelan Revolution. The older Meridian armourclad Almirante Ramírez, tellingly named for a Third Platinean War commander, was quietly ‘sold’ to the New Granadines, renamed Juan I and employed in a New Granadine attempt to bully the Venezuelans into allowing free passage into the Gulf of Venezuela and through the straits to Lake Maracaibo, defying the American-backed tariff regime. The Venezuelans, however, had built Fort Nigale on the Isla de Zapara guarding the entrance to the Gulf. Zapara had been one of the headquarters of a native revolt by the former slave Nigale in the sixteenth century, an incident romanticised by the new Venezuelan government as an act of rebellion against external rule (never mind that more Venezuelans were descended from the Spaniards Nigale had been fighting than from his own people).
The fort was equipped with modern heavy rifled guns. As noted above it has never been satisfactorily explained why at least one of these guns had been equipped with Boulin shells. The most plausible theory is probably that of Prof Jeremy Linwood of the University of Erieport, who claims that the shells were the result of a brief, abandoned inquiry into trying to replicate the controversial new French weapon by the Imperial Navy, and then after a change of senior officers were sold off to America’s Venezuelan lackey. It does not seem likely, as others have suggested, that the move was a deliberate attempt to test the weapon (as the Meridians did with their own privateering policy) because how would the Americans have known there would be an attempt to force the entrance to the Gulf?
In any case, the Venezuelan commander General[7] Alejandro Guayanesa ordered his gunners to fire warning shots at the “Juan I” as it attempted to defy the customs boats. By an odd coincidence, not only did one of the shots accidentally hit, but it was the one fired from the gun with the Boulin shells. The hardened-tip shell, spinning as it flew thanks to the rifled gun, drilled through the “Juan I”’s wrought iron/teak armour and exploded, smashing out a sizeable chunk of gundeck and killing six Meridian crew. Shocked, the Meridian ‘first officer’ (real commander) Jaime Salas ordered a retreat lest the Venezuelans fire again. Suddenly, armourclads were no longer invincible to gunnery.
The Nigale Incident could easily have escalated into a re-cooling of relations between the ENA and UPSA, throwing away all the work of Araníbar, Braithwaite and Chamberlain. However, the matter was smoothed over not least because of mutual embarrassment. The Meridian Government was furious at this naval cabal which had acted contrary to its wishes and began a purge of ‘secret societies’ (which, it can be argued, ultimately resulted in the Sanción Roja). The Americans were outraged that such a powerful weapon had been dismissed and handed over to the Venezuelans. Heads rolled on both sides and diplomats agreed to quietly brush over the affair. But the world had been changed. Suddenly the protestations of traditionalist admirals were met with flat offers to accept their resignations. A line had been drawn under the past, and gundeck warships joined the chariot, pikeman and musket in the museum of obsolete weapons. If armourclads were to sink one another, they needed bigger guns and Boulin shells.
The ensuing decade was a frantic period of each nation attempting to respond to this discovery with ever more weird and wonderful (and horrible) looking ships. Despite the dismissal of the traditionalists, there remained all sorts of peculiar holdovers due to designers being overly wedded to the received wisdom of the past. Despite the arguments of some theorists, designers were leery of designing ships only around big-gun main armament,[8] preferring the idea of a mix of sizes of weapons. Small rapid-fire cannon [quick-firing guns] were also deployed, partially to destroy enemy ships’ superstructures at short range but primarily as a point defence against steelteeth spotted in the water. There were also arguments over what role rockets should play in warships, which had raged on some level since the Jacobin Wars but had always been of limited use on lineships due to the retention of masts, sails and rigging at least for auxiliary propulsion. With these increasingly on the way out (the Lionheart was not, contrary to popular belief, the first mastless warship) rockets became more viable, but again tradition reared its ugly head.
This more than the tactical justification was largely responsible for the invention of the dentist ship class alongside the pre-existing lineships and frigates. Dentists, originally named by the French naval theorist Frédéric Morin, were so called because they were designed primarily to ‘pull the steelteeth’ of enemy ships. These craft were faster and nimbler than lineships (though less so than frigates) and intended as escorts to intercept both steelteeth and the craft that fired them, whether surface ships or ironsharks. Dentists were therefore equipped with both counter-steelteeth tubes of their own, many rapid-fire cannon and rocket pods for their main armament, but lacked the big guns of the lineships.[9] Increasingly accurate rockets provided a useful ‘instant barrage’ to indiscriminately blast any unexpected foe before it could fire its steelteeth, whereas individual cannon shots might be more effective but were now a case of single hit or miss due to smaller volume of fire. In this sense dentist rockets replaced the old gundeck broadside as an indiscriminate attack, but typically took much longer to reload. Dentists would therefore defensively guard lineships in the line of battle while the lineships provided the main offensive fire with their large and medium guns. Due to the use of rockets on dentists, they were also often adapted into modern bomb-ships as mortars gradually became obsolete.
It seems obvious to us now that lineships should mount their large cannon in turrets, but in fact this was only one idea among many at the time. Several of the earliest post-Boulin armourclads tried to mount three or four large cannon in sponsons in what was essentially a reimagined gundeck—again showing the pernicious legacy of tradition for tradition’s sake. The complexity required to allow recoil can be imagined. The Lionheart was also not the first ship to mount a single main turret, but that is how she has been remembered.[10]
Speaking of which we should return to the Lionheart and Wallace Essex. Wallace was a proud British patriot, raised on tales of the naval heroes of the past, whether Drake or Nelson and Leo Bone. He had shared in his grandfather’s bitterness that Great Britain had suffered so much in French invasion and its aftermath due to the naval cuts of the Fox Ministry driving the latter two great men away to Italy and France. He knew of the many missed opportunities thanks to Marleburgensian and Populist misrule, the naval cuts and the transfer of many ships to the Imperial Navy. By the time Wallace was a grown man, the British people had elected Moderate and Regressive governments who built the Royal Navy back up again, but it was still only considered an even match for France’s fleet—something which would have been unimaginable a century before and was still shameful considering to France, the Navy would always be a second priority behind the Army.
Wallace wanted to change that. He wanted a weapon that would change the world and he wanted it in British hands. Not the ungentlemanly ironshark, but a bold, undeniably powerful flagship which would make the world fear the name of Britannia once again. In his lunch breaks and his days off, asking mysteriously phrased advice from friends in naval architecture, he designed what became the Lionheart.
Wallace had no particular experience in ship design. In hindsight some biographers have suggested that this meant he was not so held back by hidebound tradition and outdated practices as his counterparts within the system. Others, especially at the time, simply said it made him unqualified. Certainly the design of the Lionheart was radical. Not only did it lack masts but the hull shape was like nothing that had been seen before. It was truly built around big guns for Boulin shells (though still possessing smaller secondary armament) rather than being tainted by ‘established knowledge’ of how hulls should work, with no concern for whether the positioning of the decks fitted a traditional layout. Most importantly as far as the general public was concerned, it was the first true ‘all-iron’ warship, not merely iron armour layered on teak. This led to the nickname ‘Ironheart’ when the ship’s name was established. This of course brought the romantics out in full force, declaiming about how a ship with no wood was not a true ship at all.
All this publicity took place while the ship remained a mere sketch. Wallace relied heavily on his cousin Roderick, a Liverpool stockbroker who had moved down to London and its own financial scene (which, despite the effects of the French invasion and the abolition of the City of London by the Populists, had nonetheless somewhat risen from the ashes in the late nineteenth century). Roderick is often somewhat unfairly described as a con man. It is true he was an excellent self-publicist and a director on the boards of multitudinous companies which had a rather debatable existence outside bits of paper. Nonetheless he was considered relatively trustworthy and reliable by his peers, which doubtless helped him promote his cousin’s marvellous new invention to both the general pbulic and a sceptical Admiralty. In the end the Government agreed to part-fund the project but Roderick had to come up with the remaining funds himself. He did so adeptly with many clever schemes designed to excite public interest, with tours of mock-ups of the mis-named ‘Secret Weapon’ and, most famously, a public competition to vote for the name of the new ship for a small fee. This required some surreptitious machinations behind the scenes after several asinine or obscene names turned out to be leading the Lectel poll, but Lionheart turned out to be the most popular not to fall into that category. The romantic Wallace loved the name, evoking a great figure from England’s past with the double meaning of putting the English Lion back into the hearts of England’s people.
Construction began at Plymouth in 1883, but suffered several slowdowns and reversals, not least when the general election later that year replaced Kenneth Shaw’s Moderate-led government with a Regressive-led one under Hugh Grosvenor, returning to power for a second term. Grosvenor had already led a government from 1877 to 1880 and had been noted for his sceptical approach to military projects claiming great innovations—admittedly this was an era in which many of these actually did turn out to be expensive dead ends. At the time this was overshadowed by the controversy over Grosvenor’s campaign openly whipping up anti-Scottish sentiment against Shaw among English voters, which would poison relations between the parts of Great Britain at a crucial time. However, the Essexes knew their project was in peril. Construction did continue at a slower pace as Roderick continued to raise more funds, but the completion of the Lionheart was delayed again and again.
It is quite likely, in fact, that the ship might never have been completed, were it not for Wallace Essex being saved by the aforementioned tendency of paranoid governments in this period to copy one another’s projects ‘just in case’ they turned out to be a world-changing superweapon. It was not known until 1925, twenty years after Wallace’s death, how the Russians had obtained the plans to the Lionheart. It transpired that the ‘Katie Galoshes’ referred to in his coded diary was in fact Katerina ‘Katya’ Kalashnikova, wife of the Cultural Attaché at the Russian Embassy. Questions have been asked ever since about whether Wallace knew his mistress had obtained the plans or not. It certainly tainted the image of this patriot for a while, years after his innovation had become obsolete in turn.
Regardless, the Russian Government examined this new idea, and like many new ideas in Russia, it was carefully packed off to Siberia where it could be tested far away from the country’s establishment. More specifically, the design came to the RLPC and to Governor-General Mikhail Vorontsov in Vostochny Pavlovsk [Edo/Tokyo]. Vorontsov, himself a little sceptical, fobbed off the idea on his ambitious lieutenant Jonas Alseniskiai. Undaunted at being asked to build an all-iron warship in a country not known for its iron resources, Alseniskiai commandeered the new shipyard being built in Myunkhgausensk [Kobe], a city that had recently been renamed for Ulrich Münchhausen. Both the shipyard and the Lionheart copy, unimaginatively named the Moritz Benyovsky, were built with ‘compensated’ Yapontsi labour, a euphemism evoking the increasing brutalities of Russian rule in Yapon following the Hanran Rebellion. According to (naturally rather untrustworthy) accounts by Alseniskiai and his assistants, though one might expect the Yapontsi to deliberately sabotage the project, the workers found themselves unable to do so due to their sense of pride and honour in their work. This also illustrates the manner in which Yapontsi in this era were presented, as intelligent and capable but fundamentally hidebound by a sense of social strictures which, to many European observers, rendered them less than human. When we consider what came later, we cannot but help see those events through this prism. But that is another discussion.
The Benyovsky was therefore completed while the Lionheart was still in drydock, and in 1885 Vorontsov (perhaps a little annoyed Alsenikskiai had succeeded in the project) sent her (or ‘it’, to the bruised traditionalists) on a shakedown cruise to fly the RLPC flag. What came next could not have been predicted. The French had decided to copy the Meridians’ privateer tactics and had ‘sold’ two armourclad warships, the Amiral Rivet and Amiral de Grasse, to the Liaodong Republic. While these two were no longer the best in the French fleet, they were not hopelessly obsolete either, and though they were traditional gundeck ships, each had been retrofitted with one large bow chaser equipped with Boulin shells.
The French at the time were concerned that their influence in Liaodong would be threatened by Beiqing China, which was increasingly becoming more of a Russian (or Russo-Corean) influenced state and rebuffing the French’s own advances. The French Government feared a Russian-backed Beiqing invasion of the Republic. The Russians, of course, were only too willing to push the boundaries of Liaodong sovereignty in the process, and Captain Moritz Nielsen (the grandson of Thorvald Nielsen) steamed into the Gulf of Zhili [Bohai Sea] to challenge the alleged republic’s junta. Frequently forgotten is the fact that the Lionheart and Benyovsky also revolutionised steam turbine technology, necessary to move their heavily armoured hulls at a reasonable speed; it is believed this breakthrough was not made by Wallace himself but by a fellow inventor whom Roderick had bailed out a few years before.
Certainly the two ‘Liaodong’ ships were caught offguard by the Russians. It remains unclear who fired the first shot—it may in fact have been a coastal battery staffed by Liaodong conscripts who did not hold their nerve. Regardless, the sabre-rattling escalated into an open skirmish. Captain Nielsen himself was shocked by the result. The Benyovsky’s heavy turret guns easily tore through the two French/Liaodong ships’ wrought iron/teak armour, while those ships were unable to more than dent the Benyovsky’s own more advanced armour even with their bow chasers. Witnesses also spoke of the Benyovsky’s surprising speed, which likely had thrown off the French/Liaodong ships’ gunnery. What was ignored at the time was that the Russians were using an early Solution Engine and newer equations to make firing solutions, and that it was likely this as much as the Benyovsky’s design that was responsible for them chewing through the foe so rapidly and dramatically. In doing so they created a new legend. A few years before in 1879, a Belgian and a ‘Cape Dutch’ (Meridian) armourclad of the second generation (1860s design) had blasted away at each other with their standard gundeck armament for an hour and caused only superficial damage to each other. Now there was a ship that could not only sink an old-style armourclad with Boulin shells but stand up to enemy Boulin shells (or so it seemed – in practice the Lionheart design still had weak points, but the public ignored such subtleties).
Once again the world’s powers engaged in mutual recriminations and hastily re-engineered to catch up. Half-completed armourclad ships were scrapped, the Lionheart-type turret became the norm for gun mountings and all-iron was now considered the only option. This had several unforseen economic effects, being a tough challenge for those countries lacking much in the way of iron ore, and those countries which did have a functioning steel industry and shipyards swiftly made money from building craft for export. The British economy benefited from this in the long run, as did those of many other countries.
In the short term, however, the British government was attacked for failing to fund the Lionheart, which was hastily completed. Even as this symbol of a new dawn left the dockyard in 1886, though, changes were apace. King-Emperor Henry X died suddenly after only eleven years on the throne, a short reign to follow his father’s long one. His two sons, George and Frederick, were on opposite sides of the Atlantic, with George in America and Frederick in Britain. As Duke of York, Frederick was a popular figure in the motherland (whereas George had always spent more time in the ENA) and initially functioned effectively as Regent (a title which had come to effectively convey ‘Lord Deputy of Great Britain’ since Hugh Percy). However, he resigned in protest at one of his brother’s earliest decisions, not long after the general election in Britain had turfed out the embarrassed Grosvenor in favour of Walter Cavendish’s Moderates. The new King-Emperor George IV was paranoid about the Meridians building a ‘lionheart’ (as the generic term became known) while the ENA were still left unprotected. The idea was absurd as the Meridians were far poorer in the resources needed to build one than the ENA, but it spoke of George’s attitudes when he demanded the Lionheart be transferred to the Imperial Navy. This decision met with public outrage, and although compensation was eventually delivered, it was this display of carelessness for the security of the motherland – the motherland which had produced the inventor responsible for the Lionheart – which sent the English-speaking world down the path to its inevitable future.
It is of course interesting to speculate how naval technology and tactics might have changed further if peace had continued.[11] But we shall leave that to the speculative romantics. For, only six years after the lionheart design proved itself and shipyards around the world began to frantically build them, the Pandoric War changed the world forever...
[1] This is slightly imprecise as it did not formally become the Kingdom of the Britons until the Constitution of 1839.
[2] The TTL analogue of Barclays, having picked a different rebrand inspired by the eighteenth century period when they were “Barclay, Bevan and Bening”.
[3] Eologist = paleontologist and megalapteryx = dinosaur, respectively.
[4] In TTL ‘line of battle ship’ has been abbreviated to ‘lineship’ rather than ‘battleship’ as in OTL.
[5] Note that all of this is very similar to the same period in OTL and for the same reason of having few datapoints of meaningful naval conflict to judge by. At least TTL has missed out on the fifty-year obsession with building rams on warships in OTL after ramming featured in the Battle of Lissa in 1866.
[6] This is equivalent to OTL’s Palliser Shell, invented by Sir William Palliser in 1867.
[7] Venezuela in TTL is one of those countries prone to rank inflation.
[8] A breakthrough made by HMS Dreadnought in 1905 in OTL.
[9] Dentists are loosely equivalent to destroyers (originally an abbreviation of ‘torpedo boat destroyer’) in OTL, but not so specifically aimed at torpedo boats (toothboats in TTL) which have not really become a major threat in TTL yet.
[10] In OTL, problems with turrets (especially elevation limitations) meant many warships in this era had a ‘barbette’ mounting for their guns, with lateral armour but none on top, allowing gun rotation and elevation but being vulnerable to plunging fire. In TTL, because of the ubiquitousness of rockets as a naval weapon, nobody would seriously consider a barbette mounting and they are not even mentioned here. This is the primary reason why it takes longer than OTL to develop turret guns in TTL – there is less of a gradual progress of logical steps involved.
[11] In OTL, of course, peace did continue longer and in 1905 HMS Dreadnought obsoleted previous ‘pre-dreadnought’ battleships with its all-big-gun layout, prompting the dreadnought arms race. In TTL because war comes earlier this doesn’t have a change to happen. The loose TTL analogue for the Lionheart would be HMS Majestic (1895), which similarly was a much-copied pattern for other ships around the world, but is largely forgotten compared to the impact of the Dreadnought ten years later. Essentially then, with some differences such as the ‘dentist’ rocket ships rather than destroyers, the Pandoric War is a war fought with pre-dreadnought level naval technology.
Shoulda called it Boaty McBoatface.
Also, Megalapteryx? Giant Wing/Feather seems an odd name. I'm going to have to guess that Pterosaurs are counted as part of the group ITTL? Still seems difficult to get dinosaurs into that group unless the definition was based on Archaeopteryx + insert a Pterosaur, and they realised later those large reptiles they'd dug up elsewhere actually fit in that group.
Also, Megalapteryx? Giant Wing/Feather seems an odd name. I'm going to have to guess that Pterosaurs are counted as part of the group ITTL? Still seems difficult to get dinosaurs into that group unless the definition was based on Archaeopteryx + insert a Pterosaur, and they realised later those large reptiles they'd dug up elsewhere actually fit in that group.
Alex Richards
Donor
Hmm so a final split between the ENA and Britain, and between England and Scotland also, seems to be brewing, while naval technology blooms apace.
Thande
Donor
That is, in fact, what I was referencing.Shoulda called it Boaty McBoatface.
Discussed a couple of updates back; steelteeth are torpedoes, and therefore toothboats are torpedo boats.