Thande
Donor
Interlude #14: Do Automatons Dream of Steampunk Sheep?
Dr D. Wostyn: Start recording.
You will be aware of how matters are progressing from Captain MacCaulay’s reports, so I will just explain this brief sidetrack in the historical narrative. This is partly, admittedly, due to us shifting base and having to obtain access to a new library in Dublin, so I don’t have all the books I would wish to digitise at the moment. However, I do think the field of ‘paracthonic romance’ (as the natives of this timeline dub a collection of literary genres approximately corresponding to our ‘speculative fiction’) is worthy of study in its own right, for it provides insights into the different cultural background of this world—and, importantly, give us clues as to whether they are likely to deduce the existence of the Portals and crosstime travel. One feels it would be much easier for a man of the early twentieth century to understand the concept of time travel if he had already had the opportunity to read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, for example, than for his father a generation before. But I do not wish to waste any further space with this recording, so...roll the digitiser (click!)
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“Is God simply capable of making smaller and finer gears and mechanisms than Man could hope to?”
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From: “An Unofficial History of the Paracthonic Romance” by E. B. Stark (1979)—
Unquestionably one of the greatest landmarks in the field was the publication of The New Eden in 1818 by Clara Keppel (née Roberts) who, like many female novelists of the time, used a male nom de plume—Cuthbert Lucas. She was a disciple in many ways of the school of realist social commentary in English literature pioneered by Elizabeth Austen a generation before.[1] However, whereas Austen and most of her imitators were firmly grounded in the realities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life, Lucas transposed that realist approach towards characters and dialogue into an alien setting. It has been argued (see, for example, White and Avramenko, Proc. Ac. Hist. Lit. (Prom-Multilang),[2] vol. 89, 1955) that Lucas’ apparently dramatic and original approach was in fact only the most prominent part of a wave of thought embracing escapist settings in English literature, prompted by the shock of the French invasion of 1807, the ensuing authoritarian regime of the Churchills, and the country’s transformation by the First Industrialisation. However, contemporary accounts suggests that Lucas’ novel stood out considerably from the milder attempts of her rivals—whom, like proto-paracthonic romantics since ancient times, regarded an escapist setting as an imagined trip to a fictional Pacific island or the moon.[3] Lucas, instead, looked forward to the future by extrapolating current trends. Precisely what can be defined as the first work of scientific romance[4] is, naturally, a matter for hot speculation among scholars, but The New Eden is perhaps the most commonly cited claim.
Lucas built upon those trends not simply observed and discussed in newspapers and around the dinner table, but those she recognised herself in her life due to her husband being an industrialist and factory owner. Her own diaries are prized to-day not simply due to their connexion with her literary career, but because they also provide a telling account of social change during the Marleburgensian period, with the emergence of the middle class and power shifting from the landed gentry and traditional old money to industrialists from fairly modest backgrounds. She also noted the problems that industrialisation was causing for the working classes and in particular the way that new machines, touted by their inventors and touted by her husband for the way they saved labour, were viewed as a threat by the workers as they effectively destroyed the need for some jobs. She records the Sutcliffist rioters of the 1810s before they became politicised, and their interaction with the proto-Mentians. ############################################################### #####################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################[5]
Like many scientific romantics who would follow her, Lucas took these trends and took them to their logical conclusion. It is worth remembering that at the time this was a fairly new idea, and so readers did not view The New Eden with the same sceptical goggles that we moderns would when reading such a romance which exaggerates current trends and ignores the idea that attitudes could ever change. Also, there is a powerful argument that The New Eden was itself part of the catalyst for those attitudes changing after the Inglorious Revolution.
Lucas’ narrative follows a protagonist named Zmit (said in a footnote to be a futuristic spelling of ‘Smith’ after one of those grand spelling reforms that always seem far more readily possible in fiction than they ever are in reality). Zmit is a farmer, like many such people in his unnamed land—implied to be either England or a fictionalised version of same. But unlike the farmers of the present day, he does not work with animals—he has never seen an animal in his life. His plough is powered by steam, his ‘cows’ are vaguely bovine-shaped machines that ingest grass and produce synthetic milk, his ‘sheep’ grow ‘wool’ of steel wire, gutta-percha and anything else that industry needs. Several chapters are expended in describing the setting of his farm in great detail, as a sort of anti-Arcadian image in which the only living things are plants. Zmit explains to the reader, via the plot device of a conversation with his neighbour, that all animal life on the planet died centuries ago, initially due to the unintended effects of man’s industrialisation, but later through deliberate policy as man sought to gain mastery of nature by destroying everything he could not directly control. Both Zmit and his neighbour, Zhoanz, seem fairly apathetic about the issue—ancient history. Later we meet Zmit’s son Zhaimz and daughter Lizbet, who have stronger, but opposing views on the question: Zhaimz is boldly defensive of the scheme, while the more romantic Lizbet wishes she could have heard the song of a real, living bird in the morning, rather than the music-box twinkle of the avian automatons her mother built to sing to her.
An element of the class issues Lucas notes in her diaries comes out in the book when Zmit goes into ‘the City’ (probably based on London) to visit his younger brother Ptr. Whereas Zmit is content to remain on his farm, Ptr is a high-flying industrialist who proudly shows his sibling around his factory. Everything is automated, with machines operating apparently without any supervision at all. Zmit inquires (with the voice of the reader) what happens when the machines break down, only for Ptr to introduce a group of humanoid automata with simple problem-solving abilities which are capable of repairing both the factory machines and themselves. This is often regarded as an allegory for the position of the working class in the contemporary mines and factories Lucas observed—the industrialist, Ptr, considers his maintenance automata just another set of factory machines (as indeed they are) but there is the unspoken implication that the contemporary factory owners believe the same about their common workers.
The main plot of the book takes hold when Zmit begins having heart problems (possibly inspired by those of Lucas’ uncle, though the question is controversial). The curmudgeonly old farmer stereotype to the core, he refuses every attempt by his family to persuade him to go to see the doctor, until it is almost too late—he collapses while out in the fields. A tense sequence of events follows in which Zhaimz and Lizbet rescue him and are forced to put aside their own quarrels. Zmit is rushed to the hospital just in time—but not so swiftly that Lucas does not stop to inform us about how even the hospitals of Zmit’s time are mechanised. The specifics are glossed over, but Lucas did predict something akin to an artificial respirator[6] and goes into detail about a system by which messages, medicines and even meals are shuttled about the hospital by means of a system of pneumatic tubes.
Matters are anxious as Zmit is operated on to replace his defective heart with a mechanical pump capable of performing the same task. The surgeon uses other wonders of futuristic technology (vaguely described) in his quest. Finally, in a happy ending, Zmit emerges from the operating theatre to be greeted by his grateful family.
It is at this point that Lucas makes one of the most celebrated twist endings in literary history—so celebrated that there can be few inhabitants of the Earth unfamiliar with it, and indeed there are not a few that do not realise it was ever intended to be a twist ending, and subconsciously miss the deliberate vagueness of some of Lucas’ descriptions earlier in the book. Some later editions even have cover artwork which blatantly give away the ending.[7] But to the earnest readers of the 1810s, the ending was genuinely shocking and thought-provoking.
It is revealed that Zmit’s operation was to replace one artificial heart with another—not a transplant, but simply replacing a malfunctioning part. Zmit and his fellow men and women are in fact automatons themselves, possessing no organic parts at all. When Zmit and Zhoanz reflected that there was no animal life left on the planet, they included humans in that. In an Afterword, Lucas goes into more detail about how this situation came about: man grew proud, became learned and skilled enough to construct artificial organs as good as natural ones, and—at first the rich, later everyone else—gradually replaced one organ after another with technology as they failed. Finally, centuries later, the last vestiges of humanity have been replaced with cold iron, and no-one on this world seems to have noticed that this represents a significant change.[8]
Lucas’ work provoked much debate and discussion amid literary and philosophical circles at the time (and thereafter) and is considered an important part of the trigger for the Steward movement, which would later form a key part of the Regressive Party in post-revolutionary British politics. The New Eden was viewed as a cautionary tale by many, a much more coherent and intellectual challenge to the technological progress of the early nineteenth century than the blunt opposition of the Sutcliffists or Francis of Austria. Needless to say, industrialisation played a sufficiently key role in the Phoenix Party regime that The New Eden was banned in Britain and Lucas and her husband were forced into exile in Ireland. And, as usual, such a ban only encouraged more interest in illicit copies of the book just to see what all the fuss was about.
The New Eden prompted an upsurge in interest in Automata, clockwork versions of which had been popular conversation pieces for nobles throughout the eighteenth century—Kempelen’s chess-player, Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck, Jacquet-Droz’s Musician and Merlin’s Silver Swan.[9] But the great revolution in technology sweeping across the world turned these one-off curiosities into the potential vanguard of something greater...
One factor mistakenly attributed to Lucas was the role of the steam engine. Lucas herself was careful not to give details about the means by which the automata populating the New Eden powered themselves, and tended to avoid contemporary technologies so as not to be caught in real-world limitations (a common tactic of the scientific romantic ever after[10]). It was the Saxon thinker Albrecht Bergner, writing in 1821, who introduced the idea in his critique of The New Eden (which had just been translated into German at Heidelberg, the Electors of Hesse being keen to promote an anti-technology image). “We are all familiar with the automaton operated by clockwork...such automata are amusing toys, but nothing more, for clockwork is nothing without someone to wind it up, and machines cannot wind each other up thanks to the law against perpetual motion...but what of the steam engine? Imagine an automaton that runs on coal, capable of mining for more coal to ‘feed’ itself, drawing upon an infinite supply of fuel[11]...if such an automaton could think like a man, then what need would he have for that man, for the whole human race?”
While Bergner’s writings have inevitably left the popular consciousness with the indelible impression that Zmit and company walked around emitting whistles of escaping steam,[12] they were also instrumental in the tone of Lucas’ many imitators, the so-called “Automata Craze” of the 1820s. Bergner’s open question was answered in The Iron Revolution by Yves Buillard. Using the French Revolution as a source of allegory, Buillard painted a picture of a world whereby class divisions among humans have been eliminated, with every man living the life of a king, all thanks to the use of automata to replace the workers. But the automata are themselves sentient and equal in intelligence to the humans, and rise up in a revolution to overthrow their oppressors. Unlike many of the rather dull and passable ‘automata revolt’ writers who copied him, who viewed the setting as simply an exotic one in which to set gun-toting heroes having swashbuckling adventures and fighting the evil automata, Buillard carefully made his story ambiguous in quality. We are never quite sure if the automata feel human emotions and are thus genuinely equal to humans and held unjustly in slavery, making at least part of their revolt justified, or whether they are cold machines who simply fake emotion to manipulate their overlords. Paralleling the French Revolution that was his inspiration, Buillard has the initial ‘Le Diamant’ revolution—where the automata simply demand equal rights to humans and an end to their slavery—followed by ‘Robespierre’ and ‘Lisieux’ figures who turn the whole thing into a war of extermination against humans and, later, even other automata who differ from their concept of what automata should be. Buillard keeps the ending of his story ambiguous, as the human narrator escapes on a shipful of refugees to a distant continent and he ponders whether an all-automata society is ultimately self-destructive...and, if so, what that says about the race that made them.
Automata writings spread widely and in many languages. In 1826 Luciano Piraneo, a Neapolitan, linked the concepts of The New Eden with that of The Iron Revolution by suggesting that the former was ultimately the result of the latter, with the victorious rebel automata having successfully exterminated humanity and then lied to themselves (or lied to by a repressive government) that they are in fact the descendents of humanity. In The Cogwheel Turns, Piraneo uses the simple maintenance automata in Ptr’s factory in Lucas’ book as a plot device, suggesting that as the original rebel automata grow lazy and delegate more of their tasks to the maintenance automata, the latter grow more intelligent, become angry that they are kept in slavery, and start a revolution of their own. Having set forth this cyclic idea, Piraneo then wanted to make the mind-bending possibility that humans were not the first turn in the cycle—that humans are themselves a form of automata, and were originally made by a yet earlier race (which he would identify with the various pagan gods and angels in old writings) but overthrew and slaughtered them in prehistory. However, the idea was too controversial for the Neapolitan censorship laws at the time, and so only circulated in certain unauthorised folio editions as an addendum. The official published version of The Cogwheel Turns therefore ends rather abruptly.
Other writers were anxious to extend the popular paradigm elsewhere. The Lithuanian writer Jonas Sasnauskas, who had lived for some time in Prague and knew its history, wrote the first Golem novel in 1828, called simply The Golem. Drawing upon the Jewish legend of the Golem, a man of clay with the Word of God printed on its forehead to give it life (in imitation of how Man was made by God, for if God made Man in his own image and God is a creator, then Man must also be a creator) Sasnauskas essentially applied the same ideas as the Automata writers, but in a past setting. He presented the same anti-technology moral as most (but not all) the Automata writers, suggesting that Golems made by the Jews of Prague had almost turned society upside down in the 1600s but had been destroyed and suppressed by the Hapsburg authorities. As a praising of their past and a useful excuse to be anti-Semitic, The Golem was widely promoted by the Austrian government and the German and Czech translations were best-sellers. Like the existing Automata books, it soon spawned imitators and by the time the Popular Wars were over, ‘Golem Literature’ was considered a separate (though related) genre. There were some attempts to relate the Automata craze to other mythological beings, such as the Vampires of Eastern Europe or the Zambees [zombies] of Hispaniola and Guinea, but at these did not suit the zeitgeist of the time and would only be discovered by paracthonic romance decades later.
The Popular Wars themselves would have a significant effect on the field of Automaton Literature. Just as these writings in part inspired the class-based and Steward tendencies to characterise many of both the Populist and Regressive movements, they were in turn affected by the social changes the Wars unleashed. Perhaps the best-known among the new wave of Automaton Literature was The Venator (from the Latin word for ‘hunter’) by the American writer Errol Robinson (1841). The story is told from the point of view of the titular Venator, an Automaton designed to be the ultimate warrior, and is set in the post-apocalyptic world struggling to survive that so many American paracthonic romantics are so enamoured of as a setting. The backstory of this world, told in snippets that the reader must assemble himself—none of the spoon-feeding excuse conversations that characterised The New Eden of a generation before—is that countries raised armies of Automata as soldiers, only to fight a war that (it transpired) was started by those Automata as an excuse to kill off their human masters. The humans narrowly won the war but were more than decimated in the process, and built the Venators to hunt down and destroy the last Automaton remnants. The Venator of the book is the last of his kind, genuinely believing that all Automata are a menace and happily going to the last rebel Automata down—even though he knows he is required to destroy himself afterwards to complete his programming. The Venator recounts how he is forced to reconsider his assumptions, and ends on an ambiguous note of whether he does kill the unexpectedly peaceful Automata remnant and himself or not. Of course, time marches on, and a few decades later, The Venator would inspire the reimagining All Steel is Steel, an early anti-Societist piece which emphasises the point about the rebellious Automata soldiers betraying their national masters by collaborating across the lines...
[1] An ATL ‘sister’ of Jane Austen. Her works aren’t the same as OTL, but are basically similar in tone.
[2] Abbreviation for “Proceedings of the Academy of Historical Literature (Promoted Multilanguage edition).
[3] Some examples of the earlier works the author is alluding to include Lucian’s 7th century Latin work “True History”, Cyrano de Bergerac’s “Voyage dans la Lune” (1657) and the Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, which all feature a voyage to the moon, and Thomas More’s “Utopia” (1516) and Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” (1627) which feature voyages to fictional islands.
[4] Broadly speaking, terminology in TTL goes like this: “scientific romance” = OTL “science fiction” (but with an emphasis on futuristic settings—aliens landing in the present day would not be put in this category), “fantastic romance” = OTL “fantasy” and some “horror” (settings involving supernatural elements other than mainstream religious ones) and “speculative romance” = OTL “alternate history”, but a broader category drawing in the aforementioned aliens landing in the present day. Speculative romance is often considered the most ‘realist’ school of the three, focusing on how strange events change the world as it actually is (or was), not how the author wants it to be to make a point, as is often the case in scientific romance. All three schools are collectively referred to as ‘paracthonic romance’ (from Greek para-cthon ‘beyond the world’).
[5] (Dr Wostyn’s note) You may note a blank space here. I was puzzled at the occasional presence of these gaps in the narrative of some of the books I obtained for digitising until Lieutenant McConnell happened to overhear the reason in an unrelated conversation. It seems that some of these books are printed in a single edition for all three British Isles nations. However, England and Scotland seem to have more pervasive censorship laws than relatively liberal Ireland. The solution is to provide editions with suitable blank spaces into which a secondary printing on the mainland may insert the propaganda addendums of their choice. In this case I would surmise from context that the English or Scottish version adds something about how while the classes were divided by strife then, this is a thing of the past and now all men are considered equal, though the different cultural types descending from the old class divisions are of course respected as a legacy.
[6] OTL “iron lung”.
[7] For an OTL analogy, compare all those DVD versions of Planet of the Apes which show Charlton Heston screaming at the Statue of Liberty on the cover.
[8] Compare the original origin story for the Cybermen in Doctor Who in OTL.
[9] All OTL creators of working Automata, although the ones following the POD did slightly different work to their OTL versions.
[10] What we would deem ‘hard’ sci-fi is instead considered a branch of speculative romance in TTL, and apart from scientific romance.
[11] This being based on a scientific theory of the time that the supply of coal regenerates over a relatively short timescale.
[12] Compare how people are convinced in OTL (due to later film adaptations) that Frankenstein’s monster was stitched together out of body parts and animated by lightning, when in the original novel Frankenstein creates the creature from scratch by deliberately unspecified means and certainly does not cannibalise parts from existing bodies, and lightning is not involved.
Part #121: Pablo Sanchez vs. The World
“Who’d have thought one man could have so much blood in him?”
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From – “Great Political Figures of the Last Three Centuries” by Michael P. Lamb (1987) –
Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz (a.k.a. ‘Pablo Sanchez’), 1797-1868. Founder of the political/quasi-religious ideology Societism (q.v.) and acknowledged as one of the most significant individuals to change the course of history for not only the past three centuries, but all of human history. Attempting a full life of Sanchez is beyond the scope of this book, but see Bibliography Appendix A for some recommendations. Born in Cervera (Catalonia, then Kingdom of Spain), to Francisco José Sanchez y Rodriguez and Maria Ana Figures i Fábregas; the eldest of four children, the other three being daughters. Sanchez grew up under French occupation due to the Jacobin Wars, his father (the mayor of Cervera) collaborating with the occupiers to spare the town. When the French were driven out in 1807, the mob executed Sanchez’s father and drove his mother and sisters into exile, while the boy Pablo hid from the revenge squads and escaped. The next few years are sketchy. Sanchez was recruited as a drummer boy for a local Kleinkrieger regiment, which was folded into the regular Neapolitan army after the partition of Spain (1808). Sanchez appears to have left at the end of the war and later worked in a menial role at the University of Saragossa, then as a bank clerk in Santander (1815).[1] He joined the Portuguese East India Company in 1817...
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From – “Pablo Sanchez as a Man” by Étienne Dubois (1978) –
Sanchez’s assignments for the PEIC were varied. For the ten years in which he served the Company, he travelled to almost every corner of the world, never setting down roots for very long in any particular place. Every region to which he visited left its mark on both the man himself and the worldview he was slowly developing. Important early on was the case of slavery. Sanchez had known little about the practice and was educated about it at firsthand while negotiating with Freedonians such as Josiah Quimbo about obtaining supplies to repair the Portuguese ship Centauro. Left thoughtful by the obvious hostility by which the Africans treated the Portuguese, as well as what he had seen of the young colony, Sanchez and his ship next found themselves in Montevideo, then in Portuguese Brazil. Sanchez witnessed the restless trade of radical ideas in the city (and may have played a small part in it himself) that foreshadowed the Brazilian War. Most importantly for himself, however, Sanchez met the Meridian trader Luis Carlos Cruz. The two men forged their lifelong friendship in a bar brawl against one or more Linnaean Racialists who had apparently not realised that Cruz was himself of mixed white and red blood.[2] Cruz was Sanchez’s introduction to the Meridians’ more egalitarian practices towards the different races, which he would not witness firsthand until some years later.
After leaving Brazil, the Centauro briefly visited Portuguese Mozambique, where Sanchez recorded that the local governors—though adamant about the superiority of the white man and his civilisation—were often cordial on a personal level with the local potentates such as the princes of the Matetwa Empire. This may have inspired Sanchez’s particular distaste for ideological hypocrisy that he expressed in later life. More generally, it also meant he observed the African natives of the Cape region and wrote extensively on how they differed from those in Freedonia and the rest of Guinea. Later, the Centauro finally reached its intended destination of Goa.
Sanchez worked as a clerk in Goa for four years, but never really settled in the city. He was always travelling, whether into the hinterland as part of the delegations sent out to the Maratha princes to check they were still obeying the Portuguese-puppet Peshwa, or over the sea to Persia as part of the alliance that even at the time came to life to take advantage of the Ottoman Time of Troubles. Sanchez played a minor role in liaising with the Persians and observing their Ottoman and Omani foes, but managed to get out before the reversals (such as the Retreat from Najaf) that led to acrimony and the decay of the alliance. In many ways Sanchez seems to have led an almost charmed life, particularly during his time with the Company: he saw rapid promotion in Goa not only thanks to deserved ability on his part, but also because of an outbreak of fever that killed several of his superiors. He made considerable sums thanks to bribes from Maratha princes and other local potentates, which (thanks to the corrupt nature of the Companies at the time) enabled him to buy himself further up the ladder. By the time he formally left Portuguese India in 1822, Sanchez was one of the PEIC’s rising stars and had obtained the honourary rank of major in the Portuguese Indian Army, despite not having any real military experience beyond observing others.
He left Goa thanks to having been offered a more prestigious post in China. The Portuguese possessed northern Formosa and, like the other European trading companies supporting the new Feng Dynasty in southern China, enjoyed considerable trade privileges in ports such as Fuzhou and Hanjing.[3] Sanchez was initially assigned in an administrative role in Formosa, but the reports from the mainland intrigued him enough that he was able to leverage himself into a move to Hanjing. There he acted as the third most senior administrator of the Portuguese ‘Hongmen’ in their Outsiders’ Villages. Sanchez at the time appears to have been noted as competent if not spectacular, though there are so many forged propaganda ‘records’ about him (positive and negative) that it is hard to pick out the truth. He observed the birth of the Gwayese creole people, half white and half Chinese,[4] and (having seen the utility of similar half-caste individuals in India) was part of the push to use the Gwayese as interpreters and administrators for the benefit of the PEIC.
Sanchez was also peripherally involved in the opium affairs at the time. He smoked opium himself a few times and wrote of its effects, of how he had realised he was becoming addictive and had forced himself to give up the habit. His diary records a gruesomely evocative early account of a sweating-withdrawal[5] at first hand, but he eventually triumphed, illustrating the man’s extraordinary willpower (which the world would come to know for good and for ill). After experiencing its deleterious effects himself, Sanchez was naturally at the forefront of preventing the PEIC and other traders from trading in opium—not simply out of fear of the Feng ultimatum like many of his contemporaries, but out of a genuinely felt moral imperative. It was Sanchez’s investigative work that played a role in the Dutch being fingered as flauting the opium ban, ultimately helping to kickstart the Popular Wars.[6] He also wrote somewhat philosophically about the effects of opium, specifically that what could leave men as empty husks enslaved by addiction could also remove pain and save lives in medicine. “One is left with the impression that nothing is truly good or evil in nature—it is simply how we choose to employ it”. Over a century later, some of these writings would be twisted by so-called Sanchezista regimes to justify some of their more abhorrent practices.
He continued to amass promotions and personal funds during his time in China—the Feng might be a new regime, but they were not entirely free from the hopeless corruption that had characterised the old Qing. A series of events took place at this time that vastly influenced his later ideological views. As a reasonably important figure in the structural relationship between European traders and the Feng administrators that was developing in the Watchful Peace (the legacy of the Phoenix Men), Sanchez naturally had to deal with his opposite numbers among the Feng. At one point he even met the Dansheng Emperor towards the end of his reign. The man who had once been Governor Wen Kejing was settling well into the imperial dignity and had already nominated one of his three sons to follow him, which he would in 1831 as the Xiaohong Emperor.
Sanchez was present for the Emperor ennobling several Feng military officers and civil administrators who had won themselves glory and praise for their actions in the ongoing Anqing Incident with the Qing remnant to the north. Also present was one of the original Phoenix Men, Michel Ouais. Ouais was still subdued over the death of his friend Dirk de Waar shortly before—it is thought that de Waar’s demise helped hasten the opium-addled downfall of the VOC in China. Ouais, who naturally spoke Chinese well, gave a running commentary to the other European traders about the complexities of the honour which the Dansheng Emperor was bestowing. He spoke of how in the ancestral Han Dynasty, there had been a system of ranks of nobility which men aspired to. Under the Tang they had become less important as the Chinese’s famed system of civil service examination for mandarins came in, but the ranks had survived ever since, and there were many among the northern Qing with such noble titles. The Feng, however, had decided that what had once been a triumph of meritocratic governance over blood and court intrigue had since run its course and become a practice of corruption and teaching trivialities. Their position was doubtless exaggerated simply by their desire for a clean break with the Qing—the Yongzheng and Daguo Emperors had reformed the Chinese civil service in their time and it was no longer as corrupt as it had been under the Kangxi Emperor. Nonetheless, until a more modern teaching system could be brought in and the civil service rebuilt from the groundwork up, the Feng took the decision to rely on a new class of nobility created by the Emperor. Hereditary titles were relatively rare in China (Ouais explained) which helped prevent some of the problems associated with nobility in Europe—titles were held only for life.
The younger traders, including Sanchez, listened in fascination as Ouais went on to list the titles that the Emperor was giving out. He would not immediately promote anyone save a national saviour to ranks as exalted as Prince or Duke (which he had given to men like Hao Jicai and Hu Kwa) but the men who had fought and intrigued to secure the Feng’s supremacy against the northerners were being granted the titles of Baron, Viscount, Count (or Earl) and Marquess. “But why would he give them European titles?” Sanchez asked, confused. Ouais laughed hollowly (the death of his friend was still weighing on him), and gently explained that the titles were just translations of the actual Chinese names, which had originally been made by the Jesuits many years ago.
Sanchez remained somewhat puzzled. “Why, then, do the noble titles correspond so exactly to ours?” he asked. “Perhaps there are some special Chinese ones that just didn’t come up this time? Or the Feng are emulating our ways?”
Ouais shook his head. “They work with us and treat us as something near equals, which is more than you can say for the Qing. But don’t go thinking that just because some of them see the importance of steam engines and oceanic navies that they want to be just like us. They want to copy the things we have so they can grow stronger, so we can never dictate to them. They are a proud people, after all, and their title system goes back thousands of years. Say rather that ours resembles theirs, young man.”
The affair left Sanchez thoughtful, and he wrote upon the subject (his own account is our main source for it) as well as musing about the Indian princes and potentates he had seen in Portuguese India, and the Persian and Ottoman nobility he had met during the intervention in the Time of Troubles. “Can there truly be such a universal template for governance that expresses itself in lands as far separated as Spain and China? Could it descend back to the dawn of humanity when all peoples were one? But what then of the radical Republics? They oppose nobility—do they then deny an essential feature of government? The French experiment certainly turned to chaos and instability, suggesting this might be true. But there are others. The UPSA, for one. I would very much like to see it again, and to meet Sr. Cruz once more...”
To a modern, well acquainted with the precepts of Societism, a natural reaction upon reading this (after shivering) would be to assume that Sanchez immediately went off in the direction of South America. But, surprisingly, Sanchez seems to have treated his experiences as nothing more than idle musings at this stage. He worked in China until 1827 and had the opportunity once more to travel farther afield—even to Yapon at one point, as the Portuguese sent a mission to spy on the situation there and how the rival Dutch were trading with the southern Yapontsi court. Sanchez himself was not one of the men to infiltrate Nagasaki (just as well for him, as four of them were caught out and executed by the local authorities) but did come ashore when they investigated Izumo Han, further up the coast. Sanchez learned that the typically fragmented state of government in Yapon at the time had worsened, and it was almost every man for himself. Prior to an earlier period of conflict in the sixteenth century (records are naturally sketchy[7]) Izumo had been one of the provinces dominated by the Mori clan, but the Mori had been crushed by the Tokugawa and Izumo left as a small independent fiefdom. Now the Mori were allied to the southern court (possessing long memories, and the north was dominated by the Tokugawa) and wished to regain control of Izumo.[8] The local Izumo ruler (Sanchez does not record his name), desperate for survival but knowing the northern court was too distant and fragmented to defend him, turned directly to the Russo-Lithuanians for help. The Portuguese spies, including Sanchez, record that a small Russian force arrived by sea to help defend the Izumo castle against the forces of the southern court, repulsing them. And, of course, afterwards a Russian ‘resident’ remained in that castle to ‘suggest’ to the Izumo prince appropriate courses of action in the future, if he wanted to retain that vital protection...
Sanchez’s last foreign visit of this period was to the Philippines. Having experienced war and drama during the Philippine War—and soon to see it again—Manila was recorded in his diary as a battered and complex but intriguing city. Sanchez wrote with some frustration of the many different languages spoken in the islands—doubtless simply venting some trouble he had had with interpreters, but this too would later be taken out of context by the regimes founded in his name. Sanchez also wrote prophetically that the war between the Portuguese-Castilians and the New Spanish had weakened the colonial regime in the Philippines and emboldened the natives, in particular the Sultan of Sulu in the south. “I suspect we have not heard the last of them.”
While in the Philippines, Sanchez became attached to a Portuguese ship commanded by Captain Sintra, the same man who had first brought him around the Cape of Good Hope to India several years ago. Sintra was down on his luck, but he had just had a stroke of good fortune at last: he had learned the location of a New Spanish treasure ship that had been travelling on its way to the Philippines (to bribe local fighters with gold) during the Philippine War, but had been sunken by Castilian forces. Naturally the Castilians had hoped to take it intact, but the sinking had been an accident. It had long been assumed the ship had gone down in the open ocean, too deep to be recovered—so had said the official report of the captain of the Castilian ship, the Argonauta. In any case the Argonauta itself had been lost with all hands not long afterwards, destroyed by the New Spanish.
Sintra, however, had found a drunkard in a bar who claimed to be the last survivor of the Argonauta, the last witness to the fate of the treasure ship Señora de Guaymas. The drunkard, named Rámon Salinas, said that the Argonauta’s captain had seen the treasure ship go down in shallow waters, but given a fake report and sworn the crew to secrecy, with the intention of returning later with hired South Seas divers to recover some of the treasure and keep it for themselves—perhaps turning pirate. Of course the Argonauta was lost soon afterwards, but Salinas had not been on board. He had been stranded on an island by the captain for reasons Salinas refused to go into, but perhaps involved the fact that the first mate’s daughter had accompanied him on board. As it was, Salinas had been rescued surprisingly quickly by a passing New Spanish ship. He had sought after the treasure himself, of course, but lacked the money and connections to launch such a trip. Until now.
Sanchez was sceptical, but was eventually convinced to take part in the plan. He used his connections with the PEIC to invent a mission to explain their absence. The Argonauta hired their divers—from the Friendly Islands,[9] coincidentally mere months before their conquest by Apehimana, Warlord of the United Mauré. Against all the odds, it turned out that Salinas had been telling the truth. The wreck of the Guaymas was found in shallow water off the Philippine coast, and with the aid of their divers, the crew of the Douro was able to reclaim between a quarter and a third of its treasure—the rest being too bulky to remove from the wreck. Despite the usual acrimony over how to split the riches, Sintra was able to hold the crew together and divide the gold equitably. Sanchez had begun the voyage moderately well-off, but now he was genuinely rich. He decided that, while his job was an interesting one that had taken him all over the world, he had a desire to get on in—no pun intended—society, and to do so he would need an education. Now he had the means to obtain one.
Like Sintra, Sanchez resigned from the PEIC and returned to Iberia. While Sintra is believed to have blown his riches on gambling and drink, Sanchez made some careful investments. Apparently foreseeing that chaos would come again to Europe (though, to be fair, that is hardly a remarkable assumption), Sanchez was careful to split his investments between the banks of many countries to ensure his riches could not be lost in a single blow. He then used his money to enrol in the University of Salamanca in Castile. He was intrigued in the fields of history, geography and linguistics after his experiences abroad, and began his studies in early 1828. Though supposedly only a student, his firsthand experience of the East—as opposed to teaching from books—meant that some of the professors deferred to him, and he found himself a reasonably important and popular figure within the faculty.
But, of course, even as he settled down, the Popular Wars were being ignited elsewhere. Sanchez became concerned by reports that the New Spanish were planning another invasion to regain the throne for Charles IV. While travelling through Castile, a country he had not seen for years, he was shocked that not all the burns and scars he saw afflicting cities were the result of the Jacobin Wars. Others had been inflicted during the abortive New Spanish attack during the Philippine War. He wrote in his diary of the misery that must have been caused by such a pointless and quixotic attempt, and feared what might come now, as it seemed Portugal was beset by enemies on all sides. There were rumours of a Christmas uprising in Madrid. Sanchez travelled there and shared his views of the pointlessness of war in a speech,[10] only to find himself faced by an angry mob who called him traitor and Portuguese-friend and threw stones at him. The mob were soon crushed by Alfonso XII’s troops, but Sanchez was nonetheless shaken by the experience. He returned to Salamanca, where some of his sympathetic colleagues advised him why he might have gone down so badly. Some suggested that it was simply because the people of Madrid did not know Sanchez as well as they did, and were already ready to hate him, regarding him as a simple Portuguese cat’s-paw. But there were others. There was a professor named Víctor Marañón, a regressivist aristocrat known to complain about the increasing number of students from bourgeois backgrounds. Of course, Sanchez was himself from a fairly bourgeois family, but Marañón seemed not to realise this. Marañón had a deep contempt for the working classes. He was an Enlightenment liberal of the patriarchalist, elitist school, the sort of man who would have supported Bernardo Tanucci a few generations before. He viewed the Jesuits with suspicion, but saved his real scorn for the man in the street. “Priest-ridden, empty-headed, he can be ordered about by any Jesuit, any churchman, anyone in a black robe! He does what he has always done, what he is told to do. Some say he should be able to vote for elected representation! I tell you, his landlord would tell him who to vote for, and then he would tell his son, and they would carry on mindlessly voting for the same family for all eternity, like a machine—like one of those Automata we keep hearing about. He’s not like you or me.” So Sanchez records his words, then adds his own addendum: “Marañón is a fool, but even a fool can sometimes stumble upon a great truth. Can it be...?”
Events followed swiftly. At the Battle of Cape St Vincent, the Castilian fleet sank the Dutch. Initially there was some jubilation in Castile at this victory against a traditional foe. But soon details began to leak out, probably aided by New Spanish agents. Public anger arose when the battle was presented (not inaccurately) as the Portuguese ordering their Castilian minions to throw themselves under a steam-carriage for them. As it was, the Portuguese had kept their own fleet safe and secured themselves against New Spanish invasion—or so they thought. But their act had nonetheless stoked resentment and hatred in Castile itself.
The First Spanish Revolution, as it was later known, began—ironically—in Salamanca itself. The Castilian government was convinced that the university town was loyal. It was relatively close to the Portuguese border and they knew of high-profile supporters of their regime such as Sanchez himself. But the students, ah, the students. Filled with big ideas and raging hormones, weathervanes for the tide of public anger...Sanchez was shocked and appalled when would-be revolutionaries seized control of university buildings in the name of Charles IV, flying the flag of New Spain. He was one of the people who tried to negotiate with them, and ended up dodging bullets. He did not write about the incident until later (thanks to the desperate situation) but seems almost to be weeping in his words: “These were young men I had worked alongside, some of whom I had even helped the professors teach! And now they spat on me and called me traitor as though they had never seen me in their lives before! Marañón was right, it had nothing to do with how well the crowd knew me. They are simple seized by a madness, a madness that makes them see their fellow man as a monster. They do not even have the excuse of prejudice about superficial differences, as I saw in my voyages, as I saw in my childhood when the mob turned on the French. They are Spaniards fighting other Spaniards for the sake of still other Spaniards. Why? WHY?”
The little revolution in Salamanca inspired other minor risings elsewhere, but these were only of the order of those seen during the Philippine War. On their own they would easily have been crushed, they would have amounted to nothing...but Portugal’s enemies had one more card to play...
[1] As noted in Part #100, the part about him being in Saragossa is based on rather unreliable sources, but is often repeated without citation, as it is in this case.
[2] I.e. a mestizo, ‘red’ being native American Indian.
[3] The new name for Canton / Guangzhou.
[4] Actually Gwayese originally meant adventurous Chinese youths who ran off with the Europeans and were disowned by their families. It was only later that it was applied to the mixed-race children that were a result of this and of traders marrying native women. The author got a bit confused. See Part #104.
[5] We would say ‘going cold turkey’.
[6] This is debatable, as the discovery was mainly thanks to work by the Feng themselves rather than Europeans. The author may be naturally exaggerating Sanchez’s importance at this stage.
[7] Specifically this refers to the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.
[8] This is a gross oversimplification—it’s an attempted reconstruction by historians after the fact, possessing almost no primary sources, and is also tainted by being seen through the lens of prejudice that tends to look down on the Japanese.
[9] Tonga.
[10] See page quote for part #60.
Part #122: The Reconquista
“Gam zeh ya'avor.”
“This, too, shall pass.”
*
From “The Restless Peninsula: Iberia, 1701-1853” by Franz Dietrich, 1969—
It was common knowledge in the Portuguese court that the New Spanish were likely to attempt to reclaim the motherland during the Brazilian War. After all, they had previously made an attempt in the middle of the Philippine War, even though that attempt had been half-hearted—more of a raid and a probe—and few had thought it likely to succeed. Matters now were considerably more to the advantages of New Spain. The Portuguese seemed beset with enemies on all sides. Brazil was crumbling. Castile saw scattered outbreaks of revolution and protest.
And yet, as 1829 drew to a close, King John VI and the Duke of Aveiro had grounds for a mood of cautious optimism. The Battles of Flushing and Cape St Vincent sank Dutch fleets while preserving sufficient Portuguese naval force to defend against the New Spanish. As the Dutch people rose in revolution and the Flemings invaded, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands had effectively been knocked out of the war. Dutch colonial and trading company forces continued to fight on around the world, of course—and would last longer than anyone might have dreamed—but there was no chance of a northern threat to Portugal in home waters. The initial aggressor in the Brazilian War had effectively been defeated. However, two more threats remained: New Spain and the UPSA.
The Duke of Aveiro advised his king that the Meridian contribution to the war was likely to be effectively over. The Meridians had landed troops in Cisplatina and Rio Grande to support their revolutions and only token Portuguese resistance remained there. However, it was likely that that was as far as they could go. Rio de Janeiro remained loyal, local militiamen crushing a brief attempt to set up a ‘Carioca Republic’. The hinterland of Minas Gerais was, as usual, more restless, but the troops in Rio de Janeiro had that in hand as well, and the Meridians had effectively reached the end of the supply lines that their control of the Uruguay River lent them. Aveiro pointed out that the UPSA and the New Spanish were scarcely natural allies, and suggested the entry of the UPSA into the war had been purely prompted by pragmatisme.[1] The Meridians had made considerable gain for little loss and had punished the Portuguese whom they had blamed for their loss in the Third Platinean War. There was effectively no more role for them to play. Therefore, Aveiro advised the king to send an envoy and seek peace with Cordoba. Cisplatina and Rio Grande could be written off for now, perhaps reclaimed at a later date when the UPSA was more isolated and Portugal in a stronger position. In the meantime, it would leave them facing New Spain alone.
After some hesitation and consulting with his other advisors, John VI agreed and sent an envoy in January 1830. As it happened, that envoy would not reach Cordoba until after matters had made his message obsolete—but now, when we can read President-General Velasco’s letters, it seems likely that it would have made no difference in any case.
The long-predicted New Spanish attack on the Peninsula did not materialise until March 1830. By this point, the revolution in the Netherlands had already proved the initial focus for the wave of Populist revolutions that would sweep Europe, igniting the Popular Wars. But Portugal remained focused on the immediate problem. Small groups of troops were used to quell the minor uprisings in Castile: troops were in short supply, with most of them either sent to Brazil or remaining in Portugal herself lest the New Spanish attack the Portuguese directly. The Portuguese response was, however, sufficiently strong to drive some of the revolutionary troublemakers (most notably Esteban Flores, known as “El Sombro”) over the border into Aragon. The significance of this to the ‘Reconquista’ as a whole has been debated: some have argued that Aragon would (mostly) have risen in support of the New Spanish invasion either way, but El Sombro and his ilk certainly helped. The Portuguese were themselves aware of the potential of Aragon joining Castile in rebellion, and as part of his diplomatic strategy the Duke of Aveiro also advised his king to seek alliance with the King of the Three Sicilies. During the Watchful Peace, the relations between the Portuguese and the Neapolitans had been correct at best, with the two viewing each other as jockeying for position in the Peninsula. Gennaro I had never relinquished his claim to be King of all Spain, not simply Aragon. But now matters might threaten both of them, and Aveiro’s policy made sense.
The Neapolitans had one advantage over the Portuguese: they had their own cadres of guaranteed loyalists within the kingdom of Aragon. The Catalans. Naples’ pro-Catalan policy had begun soon after the ascension of Gennaro to the throne in 1811, on the advice of his confidante (and later chief minister) the Pere de Portolà. The Catalans had always been a somewhat restless and separate-minded component of the Spanish crown, though it is wrong to retrospectively ascribe nationalist ambitions to some of their rebellions as has often been done. In 1640, around the same time as the Portuguese broke away from the Iberian Union with Spain, the Catalan peasantry had risen up—and been crushed. During the First War of Supremacy[2] the Cortes of Catalonia had declared itself in favour of the Austrian Hapsburg candidacy for the disputed throne of Spain—and, when the war had resolved itself with a Bourbon on the throne, had suffered the consequences. This ‘sedition’, together with general French Bourbon policies of centralisation and absolutism, had led to Catalonia losing many of its traditional institutions. The Catalan language was suppressed.
A century later the Jacobin Wars led to the French occupation of Spain, and the Catalans—possessing a particular dislike of the French—had been at the forefront of Kleinkrieger activity. And when Spain was divided into Castile and Aragon, the Catalans made up a sizeable portion of the new invented Aragon. Portolà had realised that, if given more freedoms and privileges, the Catalans would fight to the death to prevent any restoration of the New Spanish Charles IV or of the Portuguese-backed Alfonso XII. Thus, for the twenty years or so of the Watchful Peace, Catalans were systematically promoted and installed as an effective ruling class of administrators across Aragon. Saragossa remained the titular capital of Aragon, but the Catalan capital of Barcelona grew in importance as a port city and Neapolitan naval base. Catalans also often rose to positions of power in other parts of the Three Sicilies. It was the same logic that frequently put minorities in positions of mid-level power in other European monarchies: both the rulers and the minorities knew that the peasants would demonise them and they would be first against the wall if the revolution came, hence the minorities would work doubly hard to keep the peasantry in line.
If the Neapolitans’ support of the Catalans led to a cultural reawakening and artistic renaissance in Catalonia, though, it naturally alienated the rest of Aragon. Once more it can be debated whether Gennaro’s pro-Catalan policy ultimately helped or hindered the Neapolitans’ rule in Aragon. But resentment of the Catalans certainly played a part in Aragon’s fate during the Popular Wars.
For now, the Portuguese remained on the lookout for the New Spanish attack, the Duke of Aveiro trying to persuade the Neapolitans to contribute part of their fleet to help guard against the suspected invasion. The Neapolitans remained cagey, however, and their policy was ultimately vindicated when their ships were needed to put out the minor risings that took place in Naples proper and Sicily.
So the Portuguese stood alone, until in March 1830 a brig returned to Lisbon under full sail to report a fleet approaching. The fleet flew the New Spanish flag, yellow and red cross against a red on white cross of Burgundy. It was slightly smaller than the Portuguese had feared but, as if to balance this, also included more heavy ships of the line. But most importantly, it also had twenty large transport ships wallowing low in the water...as though packed with troops, horses and cannon.
Contrary to popular belief, Admiral Ferreira did consider the possibility that the New Spanish attack was some sort of feint, but dismissed the idea, arguing that the New Spanish Armada was not large enough for any leftover flotilla to constitute a threat. Therefore, and fatefully, he commanded his own fleet—virtually the entire Portuguese Navy in home waters—to intercept.
It was called the Third Battle of Cape Finisterre, though as usual when naming naval battles, the Galician headland in question was quite distant from the sea in which the battle was fought. Admiral Ferreira, a not tremendously imaginative but bold sailor, caught the enemy offguard. Just as it had been with the Battle of Trafalgar in 1783, the aim for the Portuguese was to sink the transports. Deprived of their troops, the New Spanish could pose no threat. The Portuguese ships outnumbered the New Spanish, and the New Spanish seemed to know it. They attempted to break off and make a run for the Iberian mainland, but Ferreira successfully intercepted. His ships sunk two of the transports with chasers alone before closing, destroying eleven more and two of the escort ships while losing seven of their own. The battle was not so epic or grand as paintings have suggested. The New Spanish seemed to want to escape rather than give battle, but Ferreira would not let them approach Iberia. Finally, after the loss of four more transports (leaving them with only three), the New Spanish gave up and retreated westward, a few Portuguese ships nipping at their heels.
Ferreira was relieved and pleased. The New Spanish had not offered so hard a fight as he had feared. They had acted in an almost cowardly fashion, unwilling to face the Portuguese—though perhaps that was simply because they had feared their transports being sunk if they stopped to give battle. And indeed Ferreira felt slightly guilty (as he later recounted) at sinking almost unarmed transport ships full of helpless men and horses who could do nothing to prevent their fate. But such was war.
One of the seventeen ships the Portuguese had neutralised had been captured intact rather than sunk. Ferreira himself went aboard to inspect it, with a bodyguard and two of his captains. The sullen New Spanish crew were on the deck with their hands tied behind their backs, watched over by suspicious Portuguese Marines.[3] A small, skeleton crew, but that was not so uncommon on a transport ship. But where then were the troops? Were they still below?
Minutes later, Admiral Ferreira found himself staring into the hold of the transport.
A hold which contained a great military force of stone slabs, barrels of water, anything to make it wallow treacherously low in the water. And, in the corner, a folded flag. It was pale and battered, unlike the unusually bright and striking colours of the New Spanish flag the ship was actually flying, as though it was this flag that normally graced the masthead. When one of his captains opened it up, Ferreira numbly noted its design. The same colours as the New Spanish flag, but arranged rather differently, with red and white in a canton, a field of yellow, a torch and motto in red.
And he knew that they had been deceived.
*
From “A Military History of the Spanish-speaking Peoples” by Antonio Vasquez, 1960:
...the Meridians faced diplomatic protest about fighting under false flag. President-General Velasco’s government countered that the fleet at Finisterre, a portion of the Meridian Armada, had been temporarily given over to New Spanish command and had ostensibly had a New Spanish admiral in command. Nonetheless the move did create a certain Meridian reputation for not playing by the rules of war, which would be taken up by the enemies of Velasco and his Adamantine Party as the Meridians neared their presidential election date of 1831. Ironically this probably only served to push the disparate groups that Velasco had united together into a single coherent political party, as they came together to defend Velasco’s policy.
As it was, the battle off Finisterre had weakened the Portuguese slightly, but its main role of course was to keep the Portuguese fleet engaged with a fake transport fleet while the real New Spanish Armada approached from the north, crossed the Bay of Biscay and landed its real troops, Infante Gabriel’s Nuevo Ejército. The New Army that had been formed in 1803 to take back Spain from its French occupiers and their Felipista lickspittles. Now King Felipe and Jacobin France shared a grave, his son Alfonso had grown to a man under Portuguese tutelage, and Spain was divided. Much had changed over the almost thirty years that the New Spanish had been absent. But Charles IV, now in his sixties, remained, and he was with the troops that landed in the Peninsula. He knew it was a gamble, but it was likely that the Meridians would not have the capability or willingness to outright destroy the Portuguese fleet, so there might be no chance to send a second wave of reinforcements once the New Spanish had achieved a beachhead. So the King-Emperor of Old and New Spain went in with his men as they landed on the beaches around Santander.
The ‘Reconquista’ was very much a matter of collapsing dominoes. The New Spanish could not physically put that many troops in Spain—Charles IV’s force is estimated at 25,000 at most. In a straight battle the Portuguese, even with their army depleted by those forces sent to Brazil, could easily have defeated him. But that was not what was important. With their King returning in glory and having a sizeable military force in place, the rumour mill in Castile promptly got to work exaggerating the events taking place and, before long, new Kleinkriegers were coming out of the woodwork everywhere. There were renewed uprisings in Salamanca and Burgos among other cities. The Burgos rising seemed on the verge of being crushed by Portuguese troops and Castilians loyal to Alfonso XII. However at the eleventh hour the New Spanish appeared, having marched inland from Santander, and the Portuguese withdrew as the rebels celebrated. That catalyst lit several more uprisings throughout Castile, and those some were crushed by Portuguese or Castilian troops, they could not suppress them all. Before the New Spanish could approach Madrid, the people rose up in one final rebellion. Alfonso had sent away too many of his own troops in vain piecemeal attempts to suppress other risings, and now he did not have enough left to prevent the revolution in his own back garden. Protected by a bodyguard of Portuguese troops, Alfonso fled amid the jeers of his would-be subjects. Initially he intended to go to Portugal to plead for more support from John, but Kleinkrieger activity and attacks on his bodyguard meant he made several diversions and ended up holed up in Badajoz for the moment. Madrid was already freed from the Castilian regime even before Charles IV marched in. There is debate about whether there was an attempt to set up a Populist republican commune of some sort in the city before the New Spanish arrived, but it is probable that this is either a myth or a minor incident blown out of all proportion by the later regime keen to emphasise the role of the local rebels.
The ‘Reconquista’ lasted until the end of 1832, but it was really just an extended collapse. The Kleinkrieger and Populist activity spread to Aragon, where the Neapolitans were in no position to suppress it thanks to their problems closer to home. The Catalans fought, however, just as Gennaro had hoped, and though most of Aragon ended up reconstituted into the restored Old Spain, an independent Catalonia survived as the new third of the Three Sicilies. French foreign policy at the time doubtless helped. The Portuguese fought for a while against the rising Spanish public tide, but John was aware that there was a danger of Populism in Portugal itself. There had been free exchange of ideas between Brazil and Portugal along with trade, of course, and the same republican ideals that had led to the revolutions in Cisplatina and Rio Grande were rumoured to be stirring in secret societies in Lisbon, Braga and Oporto. Intent on damage control (and arguably successful), John publicly dismissed and exiled the Duke of Aveiro, promoted new favourites such as the Marquis of Porto and focused on defending as much as he could of the inheritance he had obtained from his father.
This turned out not to be much. By the end of 1831 the New Spanish had control of all of pre-Jacobin Wars Spain except Catalonia, the Balearics, Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo and Galicia. The latter three had been directly annexed by Portugal during and after the Jacobin Wars, but now all three were joining the uprising. Ciudad Rodrigo was the first to fall. Confident Badajoz could defend itself, John poured all his troops into defending Galicia, and it was here where the New Spanish had their major failure. They did reclaim the symbolically important Santiago de Compostela and indeed much of the province, but the Portuguese held on to the coastline and the New Spanish were unable to dislodge them. While the rest of Galicia would remain part of Spain, La Coruña—afterwards known as Corunha—already possessed a large Portuguese population thanks to trade policy during the Watchful Peace, and racial purging and exchanges later on would solidify its existence as an integral part of Portugal. Aside from Catalonia, it was the major blot on the New Spanish’s glorious Reconquista.
All the same, the New Spanish had the last laugh. Badajoz had indeed been almost impenetrable. However, two weeks into its siege by New Spanish troops, the Governor—Miguel de Cruz—decided this was the point to reveal that he had been a secret Carlista all along. He opened the gates of the city to the New Spanish and, to make up for his years of service to the Portuguese, handed over Alfonso XII to Charles IV. The Portuguese sued for peace.
It was in August 1833, as the Popular Wars still raged over much of Europe, that the other four Infantes who had fled Spain in 1803 returned. Antonio, Gabriel, Ferdinand and John joined Charles in Madrid as he was crowned King of Old Spain. The five of them reaffirmed their coronation oaths that they had taken in the City of Mexico three decades before. And they brought along their wives and children. The people of Madrid, and Old Spain in general, were fascinated by Charles IV’s exotic queen-empress, María Jerónima Oca Moctezuma y Mendoza, formerly Condesa de Moctezuma de Tultengo. When he had been shunned and dismissed by ‘real’ European royalty, Charles had been unable to marry into another European royal house as was the usual practice. But unlike Frederick of Britain, he had not married a commoner. If he could not marry European royalty, he would marry American royalty. María Jerónima was the fourteenth generation direct descendant of Moctezuma II, ninth and last Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan (or, as Europeans generally knew the title, ‘Emperor of the Aztecs’). With a royal line going back beyond the fifteenth century, that was a better pedigree than a lot of European royal houses could boast.
And with her Charles had had children. His eldest son, Ferdinand—to become Ferdinand VII—came with her to observe the kingdom he would one day rule. And no-one suspected what might come of that...
As for Alfonso XII, there was argument between the brothers about what to do with him. Ferdinand of Guatemala and Antonio of Mexico wanted him executed as a traitor and a puppet. John of New Granada and Gabriel of Peru argued that he had been raised from a child by the Portuguese and could not be held responsible for his actions. Charles agreed with the latter two brothers in spirit but suspected Alfonso was too dangerous a potential rallying point to be left alive. However, an emotional appeal from the man himself moved the King-Emperor. The final compromise (as suggested sardonically by Antonio) was that if John and Gabriel wanted him to live so much, they could play host to him. In the end when the brothers returned to New Spain, they took Alfonso with them, and—stripped of all titles—he became something of a curiosity at John’s court in Santa Fe [Bogota].
Thus it was that the dream of New Spain and the Arandite Plan, dreamed so many years before, finally came to its fulfilment. The king over the water had returned, the nation was reunited once more, and all was at peace.
And if history was a novel, this would be a good place to close for the people of Spain. But history is not a novel, not a story. It lacks satisfying conclusions. All is temporary, all is changeable. And while some might wish that Spain’s story had concluded in this happy ending, it did not...
[1] In OTL we would say realpolitik.
[2] The War of the Spanish Succession.
[3] The corps in question is normally referred to in English as the Marines and serves the same function, but at the time it was known as the Terço da Armada da Coroa de Portugal (Tercio of the Navy of the Crown of Portugal).
Dr D. Wostyn: Start recording.
You will be aware of how matters are progressing from Captain MacCaulay’s reports, so I will just explain this brief sidetrack in the historical narrative. This is partly, admittedly, due to us shifting base and having to obtain access to a new library in Dublin, so I don’t have all the books I would wish to digitise at the moment. However, I do think the field of ‘paracthonic romance’ (as the natives of this timeline dub a collection of literary genres approximately corresponding to our ‘speculative fiction’) is worthy of study in its own right, for it provides insights into the different cultural background of this world—and, importantly, give us clues as to whether they are likely to deduce the existence of the Portals and crosstime travel. One feels it would be much easier for a man of the early twentieth century to understand the concept of time travel if he had already had the opportunity to read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, for example, than for his father a generation before. But I do not wish to waste any further space with this recording, so...roll the digitiser (click!)
*
“Is God simply capable of making smaller and finer gears and mechanisms than Man could hope to?”
—Frederick Paley, 1834
*
From: “An Unofficial History of the Paracthonic Romance” by E. B. Stark (1979)—
Unquestionably one of the greatest landmarks in the field was the publication of The New Eden in 1818 by Clara Keppel (née Roberts) who, like many female novelists of the time, used a male nom de plume—Cuthbert Lucas. She was a disciple in many ways of the school of realist social commentary in English literature pioneered by Elizabeth Austen a generation before.[1] However, whereas Austen and most of her imitators were firmly grounded in the realities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life, Lucas transposed that realist approach towards characters and dialogue into an alien setting. It has been argued (see, for example, White and Avramenko, Proc. Ac. Hist. Lit. (Prom-Multilang),[2] vol. 89, 1955) that Lucas’ apparently dramatic and original approach was in fact only the most prominent part of a wave of thought embracing escapist settings in English literature, prompted by the shock of the French invasion of 1807, the ensuing authoritarian regime of the Churchills, and the country’s transformation by the First Industrialisation. However, contemporary accounts suggests that Lucas’ novel stood out considerably from the milder attempts of her rivals—whom, like proto-paracthonic romantics since ancient times, regarded an escapist setting as an imagined trip to a fictional Pacific island or the moon.[3] Lucas, instead, looked forward to the future by extrapolating current trends. Precisely what can be defined as the first work of scientific romance[4] is, naturally, a matter for hot speculation among scholars, but The New Eden is perhaps the most commonly cited claim.
Lucas built upon those trends not simply observed and discussed in newspapers and around the dinner table, but those she recognised herself in her life due to her husband being an industrialist and factory owner. Her own diaries are prized to-day not simply due to their connexion with her literary career, but because they also provide a telling account of social change during the Marleburgensian period, with the emergence of the middle class and power shifting from the landed gentry and traditional old money to industrialists from fairly modest backgrounds. She also noted the problems that industrialisation was causing for the working classes and in particular the way that new machines, touted by their inventors and touted by her husband for the way they saved labour, were viewed as a threat by the workers as they effectively destroyed the need for some jobs. She records the Sutcliffist rioters of the 1810s before they became politicised, and their interaction with the proto-Mentians. ############################################################### #####################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################[5]
Like many scientific romantics who would follow her, Lucas took these trends and took them to their logical conclusion. It is worth remembering that at the time this was a fairly new idea, and so readers did not view The New Eden with the same sceptical goggles that we moderns would when reading such a romance which exaggerates current trends and ignores the idea that attitudes could ever change. Also, there is a powerful argument that The New Eden was itself part of the catalyst for those attitudes changing after the Inglorious Revolution.
Lucas’ narrative follows a protagonist named Zmit (said in a footnote to be a futuristic spelling of ‘Smith’ after one of those grand spelling reforms that always seem far more readily possible in fiction than they ever are in reality). Zmit is a farmer, like many such people in his unnamed land—implied to be either England or a fictionalised version of same. But unlike the farmers of the present day, he does not work with animals—he has never seen an animal in his life. His plough is powered by steam, his ‘cows’ are vaguely bovine-shaped machines that ingest grass and produce synthetic milk, his ‘sheep’ grow ‘wool’ of steel wire, gutta-percha and anything else that industry needs. Several chapters are expended in describing the setting of his farm in great detail, as a sort of anti-Arcadian image in which the only living things are plants. Zmit explains to the reader, via the plot device of a conversation with his neighbour, that all animal life on the planet died centuries ago, initially due to the unintended effects of man’s industrialisation, but later through deliberate policy as man sought to gain mastery of nature by destroying everything he could not directly control. Both Zmit and his neighbour, Zhoanz, seem fairly apathetic about the issue—ancient history. Later we meet Zmit’s son Zhaimz and daughter Lizbet, who have stronger, but opposing views on the question: Zhaimz is boldly defensive of the scheme, while the more romantic Lizbet wishes she could have heard the song of a real, living bird in the morning, rather than the music-box twinkle of the avian automatons her mother built to sing to her.
An element of the class issues Lucas notes in her diaries comes out in the book when Zmit goes into ‘the City’ (probably based on London) to visit his younger brother Ptr. Whereas Zmit is content to remain on his farm, Ptr is a high-flying industrialist who proudly shows his sibling around his factory. Everything is automated, with machines operating apparently without any supervision at all. Zmit inquires (with the voice of the reader) what happens when the machines break down, only for Ptr to introduce a group of humanoid automata with simple problem-solving abilities which are capable of repairing both the factory machines and themselves. This is often regarded as an allegory for the position of the working class in the contemporary mines and factories Lucas observed—the industrialist, Ptr, considers his maintenance automata just another set of factory machines (as indeed they are) but there is the unspoken implication that the contemporary factory owners believe the same about their common workers.
The main plot of the book takes hold when Zmit begins having heart problems (possibly inspired by those of Lucas’ uncle, though the question is controversial). The curmudgeonly old farmer stereotype to the core, he refuses every attempt by his family to persuade him to go to see the doctor, until it is almost too late—he collapses while out in the fields. A tense sequence of events follows in which Zhaimz and Lizbet rescue him and are forced to put aside their own quarrels. Zmit is rushed to the hospital just in time—but not so swiftly that Lucas does not stop to inform us about how even the hospitals of Zmit’s time are mechanised. The specifics are glossed over, but Lucas did predict something akin to an artificial respirator[6] and goes into detail about a system by which messages, medicines and even meals are shuttled about the hospital by means of a system of pneumatic tubes.
Matters are anxious as Zmit is operated on to replace his defective heart with a mechanical pump capable of performing the same task. The surgeon uses other wonders of futuristic technology (vaguely described) in his quest. Finally, in a happy ending, Zmit emerges from the operating theatre to be greeted by his grateful family.
It is at this point that Lucas makes one of the most celebrated twist endings in literary history—so celebrated that there can be few inhabitants of the Earth unfamiliar with it, and indeed there are not a few that do not realise it was ever intended to be a twist ending, and subconsciously miss the deliberate vagueness of some of Lucas’ descriptions earlier in the book. Some later editions even have cover artwork which blatantly give away the ending.[7] But to the earnest readers of the 1810s, the ending was genuinely shocking and thought-provoking.
It is revealed that Zmit’s operation was to replace one artificial heart with another—not a transplant, but simply replacing a malfunctioning part. Zmit and his fellow men and women are in fact automatons themselves, possessing no organic parts at all. When Zmit and Zhoanz reflected that there was no animal life left on the planet, they included humans in that. In an Afterword, Lucas goes into more detail about how this situation came about: man grew proud, became learned and skilled enough to construct artificial organs as good as natural ones, and—at first the rich, later everyone else—gradually replaced one organ after another with technology as they failed. Finally, centuries later, the last vestiges of humanity have been replaced with cold iron, and no-one on this world seems to have noticed that this represents a significant change.[8]
Lucas’ work provoked much debate and discussion amid literary and philosophical circles at the time (and thereafter) and is considered an important part of the trigger for the Steward movement, which would later form a key part of the Regressive Party in post-revolutionary British politics. The New Eden was viewed as a cautionary tale by many, a much more coherent and intellectual challenge to the technological progress of the early nineteenth century than the blunt opposition of the Sutcliffists or Francis of Austria. Needless to say, industrialisation played a sufficiently key role in the Phoenix Party regime that The New Eden was banned in Britain and Lucas and her husband were forced into exile in Ireland. And, as usual, such a ban only encouraged more interest in illicit copies of the book just to see what all the fuss was about.
The New Eden prompted an upsurge in interest in Automata, clockwork versions of which had been popular conversation pieces for nobles throughout the eighteenth century—Kempelen’s chess-player, Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck, Jacquet-Droz’s Musician and Merlin’s Silver Swan.[9] But the great revolution in technology sweeping across the world turned these one-off curiosities into the potential vanguard of something greater...
One factor mistakenly attributed to Lucas was the role of the steam engine. Lucas herself was careful not to give details about the means by which the automata populating the New Eden powered themselves, and tended to avoid contemporary technologies so as not to be caught in real-world limitations (a common tactic of the scientific romantic ever after[10]). It was the Saxon thinker Albrecht Bergner, writing in 1821, who introduced the idea in his critique of The New Eden (which had just been translated into German at Heidelberg, the Electors of Hesse being keen to promote an anti-technology image). “We are all familiar with the automaton operated by clockwork...such automata are amusing toys, but nothing more, for clockwork is nothing without someone to wind it up, and machines cannot wind each other up thanks to the law against perpetual motion...but what of the steam engine? Imagine an automaton that runs on coal, capable of mining for more coal to ‘feed’ itself, drawing upon an infinite supply of fuel[11]...if such an automaton could think like a man, then what need would he have for that man, for the whole human race?”
While Bergner’s writings have inevitably left the popular consciousness with the indelible impression that Zmit and company walked around emitting whistles of escaping steam,[12] they were also instrumental in the tone of Lucas’ many imitators, the so-called “Automata Craze” of the 1820s. Bergner’s open question was answered in The Iron Revolution by Yves Buillard. Using the French Revolution as a source of allegory, Buillard painted a picture of a world whereby class divisions among humans have been eliminated, with every man living the life of a king, all thanks to the use of automata to replace the workers. But the automata are themselves sentient and equal in intelligence to the humans, and rise up in a revolution to overthrow their oppressors. Unlike many of the rather dull and passable ‘automata revolt’ writers who copied him, who viewed the setting as simply an exotic one in which to set gun-toting heroes having swashbuckling adventures and fighting the evil automata, Buillard carefully made his story ambiguous in quality. We are never quite sure if the automata feel human emotions and are thus genuinely equal to humans and held unjustly in slavery, making at least part of their revolt justified, or whether they are cold machines who simply fake emotion to manipulate their overlords. Paralleling the French Revolution that was his inspiration, Buillard has the initial ‘Le Diamant’ revolution—where the automata simply demand equal rights to humans and an end to their slavery—followed by ‘Robespierre’ and ‘Lisieux’ figures who turn the whole thing into a war of extermination against humans and, later, even other automata who differ from their concept of what automata should be. Buillard keeps the ending of his story ambiguous, as the human narrator escapes on a shipful of refugees to a distant continent and he ponders whether an all-automata society is ultimately self-destructive...and, if so, what that says about the race that made them.
Automata writings spread widely and in many languages. In 1826 Luciano Piraneo, a Neapolitan, linked the concepts of The New Eden with that of The Iron Revolution by suggesting that the former was ultimately the result of the latter, with the victorious rebel automata having successfully exterminated humanity and then lied to themselves (or lied to by a repressive government) that they are in fact the descendents of humanity. In The Cogwheel Turns, Piraneo uses the simple maintenance automata in Ptr’s factory in Lucas’ book as a plot device, suggesting that as the original rebel automata grow lazy and delegate more of their tasks to the maintenance automata, the latter grow more intelligent, become angry that they are kept in slavery, and start a revolution of their own. Having set forth this cyclic idea, Piraneo then wanted to make the mind-bending possibility that humans were not the first turn in the cycle—that humans are themselves a form of automata, and were originally made by a yet earlier race (which he would identify with the various pagan gods and angels in old writings) but overthrew and slaughtered them in prehistory. However, the idea was too controversial for the Neapolitan censorship laws at the time, and so only circulated in certain unauthorised folio editions as an addendum. The official published version of The Cogwheel Turns therefore ends rather abruptly.
Other writers were anxious to extend the popular paradigm elsewhere. The Lithuanian writer Jonas Sasnauskas, who had lived for some time in Prague and knew its history, wrote the first Golem novel in 1828, called simply The Golem. Drawing upon the Jewish legend of the Golem, a man of clay with the Word of God printed on its forehead to give it life (in imitation of how Man was made by God, for if God made Man in his own image and God is a creator, then Man must also be a creator) Sasnauskas essentially applied the same ideas as the Automata writers, but in a past setting. He presented the same anti-technology moral as most (but not all) the Automata writers, suggesting that Golems made by the Jews of Prague had almost turned society upside down in the 1600s but had been destroyed and suppressed by the Hapsburg authorities. As a praising of their past and a useful excuse to be anti-Semitic, The Golem was widely promoted by the Austrian government and the German and Czech translations were best-sellers. Like the existing Automata books, it soon spawned imitators and by the time the Popular Wars were over, ‘Golem Literature’ was considered a separate (though related) genre. There were some attempts to relate the Automata craze to other mythological beings, such as the Vampires of Eastern Europe or the Zambees [zombies] of Hispaniola and Guinea, but at these did not suit the zeitgeist of the time and would only be discovered by paracthonic romance decades later.
The Popular Wars themselves would have a significant effect on the field of Automaton Literature. Just as these writings in part inspired the class-based and Steward tendencies to characterise many of both the Populist and Regressive movements, they were in turn affected by the social changes the Wars unleashed. Perhaps the best-known among the new wave of Automaton Literature was The Venator (from the Latin word for ‘hunter’) by the American writer Errol Robinson (1841). The story is told from the point of view of the titular Venator, an Automaton designed to be the ultimate warrior, and is set in the post-apocalyptic world struggling to survive that so many American paracthonic romantics are so enamoured of as a setting. The backstory of this world, told in snippets that the reader must assemble himself—none of the spoon-feeding excuse conversations that characterised The New Eden of a generation before—is that countries raised armies of Automata as soldiers, only to fight a war that (it transpired) was started by those Automata as an excuse to kill off their human masters. The humans narrowly won the war but were more than decimated in the process, and built the Venators to hunt down and destroy the last Automaton remnants. The Venator of the book is the last of his kind, genuinely believing that all Automata are a menace and happily going to the last rebel Automata down—even though he knows he is required to destroy himself afterwards to complete his programming. The Venator recounts how he is forced to reconsider his assumptions, and ends on an ambiguous note of whether he does kill the unexpectedly peaceful Automata remnant and himself or not. Of course, time marches on, and a few decades later, The Venator would inspire the reimagining All Steel is Steel, an early anti-Societist piece which emphasises the point about the rebellious Automata soldiers betraying their national masters by collaborating across the lines...
[1] An ATL ‘sister’ of Jane Austen. Her works aren’t the same as OTL, but are basically similar in tone.
[2] Abbreviation for “Proceedings of the Academy of Historical Literature (Promoted Multilanguage edition).
[3] Some examples of the earlier works the author is alluding to include Lucian’s 7th century Latin work “True History”, Cyrano de Bergerac’s “Voyage dans la Lune” (1657) and the Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, which all feature a voyage to the moon, and Thomas More’s “Utopia” (1516) and Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” (1627) which feature voyages to fictional islands.
[4] Broadly speaking, terminology in TTL goes like this: “scientific romance” = OTL “science fiction” (but with an emphasis on futuristic settings—aliens landing in the present day would not be put in this category), “fantastic romance” = OTL “fantasy” and some “horror” (settings involving supernatural elements other than mainstream religious ones) and “speculative romance” = OTL “alternate history”, but a broader category drawing in the aforementioned aliens landing in the present day. Speculative romance is often considered the most ‘realist’ school of the three, focusing on how strange events change the world as it actually is (or was), not how the author wants it to be to make a point, as is often the case in scientific romance. All three schools are collectively referred to as ‘paracthonic romance’ (from Greek para-cthon ‘beyond the world’).
[5] (Dr Wostyn’s note) You may note a blank space here. I was puzzled at the occasional presence of these gaps in the narrative of some of the books I obtained for digitising until Lieutenant McConnell happened to overhear the reason in an unrelated conversation. It seems that some of these books are printed in a single edition for all three British Isles nations. However, England and Scotland seem to have more pervasive censorship laws than relatively liberal Ireland. The solution is to provide editions with suitable blank spaces into which a secondary printing on the mainland may insert the propaganda addendums of their choice. In this case I would surmise from context that the English or Scottish version adds something about how while the classes were divided by strife then, this is a thing of the past and now all men are considered equal, though the different cultural types descending from the old class divisions are of course respected as a legacy.
[6] OTL “iron lung”.
[7] For an OTL analogy, compare all those DVD versions of Planet of the Apes which show Charlton Heston screaming at the Statue of Liberty on the cover.
[8] Compare the original origin story for the Cybermen in Doctor Who in OTL.
[9] All OTL creators of working Automata, although the ones following the POD did slightly different work to their OTL versions.
[10] What we would deem ‘hard’ sci-fi is instead considered a branch of speculative romance in TTL, and apart from scientific romance.
[11] This being based on a scientific theory of the time that the supply of coal regenerates over a relatively short timescale.
[12] Compare how people are convinced in OTL (due to later film adaptations) that Frankenstein’s monster was stitched together out of body parts and animated by lightning, when in the original novel Frankenstein creates the creature from scratch by deliberately unspecified means and certainly does not cannibalise parts from existing bodies, and lightning is not involved.
Part #121: Pablo Sanchez vs. The World
“Who’d have thought one man could have so much blood in him?”
–New Epigrams, Anonymous (2000)
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From – “Great Political Figures of the Last Three Centuries” by Michael P. Lamb (1987) –
Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz (a.k.a. ‘Pablo Sanchez’), 1797-1868. Founder of the political/quasi-religious ideology Societism (q.v.) and acknowledged as one of the most significant individuals to change the course of history for not only the past three centuries, but all of human history. Attempting a full life of Sanchez is beyond the scope of this book, but see Bibliography Appendix A for some recommendations. Born in Cervera (Catalonia, then Kingdom of Spain), to Francisco José Sanchez y Rodriguez and Maria Ana Figures i Fábregas; the eldest of four children, the other three being daughters. Sanchez grew up under French occupation due to the Jacobin Wars, his father (the mayor of Cervera) collaborating with the occupiers to spare the town. When the French were driven out in 1807, the mob executed Sanchez’s father and drove his mother and sisters into exile, while the boy Pablo hid from the revenge squads and escaped. The next few years are sketchy. Sanchez was recruited as a drummer boy for a local Kleinkrieger regiment, which was folded into the regular Neapolitan army after the partition of Spain (1808). Sanchez appears to have left at the end of the war and later worked in a menial role at the University of Saragossa, then as a bank clerk in Santander (1815).[1] He joined the Portuguese East India Company in 1817...
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From – “Pablo Sanchez as a Man” by Étienne Dubois (1978) –
Sanchez’s assignments for the PEIC were varied. For the ten years in which he served the Company, he travelled to almost every corner of the world, never setting down roots for very long in any particular place. Every region to which he visited left its mark on both the man himself and the worldview he was slowly developing. Important early on was the case of slavery. Sanchez had known little about the practice and was educated about it at firsthand while negotiating with Freedonians such as Josiah Quimbo about obtaining supplies to repair the Portuguese ship Centauro. Left thoughtful by the obvious hostility by which the Africans treated the Portuguese, as well as what he had seen of the young colony, Sanchez and his ship next found themselves in Montevideo, then in Portuguese Brazil. Sanchez witnessed the restless trade of radical ideas in the city (and may have played a small part in it himself) that foreshadowed the Brazilian War. Most importantly for himself, however, Sanchez met the Meridian trader Luis Carlos Cruz. The two men forged their lifelong friendship in a bar brawl against one or more Linnaean Racialists who had apparently not realised that Cruz was himself of mixed white and red blood.[2] Cruz was Sanchez’s introduction to the Meridians’ more egalitarian practices towards the different races, which he would not witness firsthand until some years later.
After leaving Brazil, the Centauro briefly visited Portuguese Mozambique, where Sanchez recorded that the local governors—though adamant about the superiority of the white man and his civilisation—were often cordial on a personal level with the local potentates such as the princes of the Matetwa Empire. This may have inspired Sanchez’s particular distaste for ideological hypocrisy that he expressed in later life. More generally, it also meant he observed the African natives of the Cape region and wrote extensively on how they differed from those in Freedonia and the rest of Guinea. Later, the Centauro finally reached its intended destination of Goa.
Sanchez worked as a clerk in Goa for four years, but never really settled in the city. He was always travelling, whether into the hinterland as part of the delegations sent out to the Maratha princes to check they were still obeying the Portuguese-puppet Peshwa, or over the sea to Persia as part of the alliance that even at the time came to life to take advantage of the Ottoman Time of Troubles. Sanchez played a minor role in liaising with the Persians and observing their Ottoman and Omani foes, but managed to get out before the reversals (such as the Retreat from Najaf) that led to acrimony and the decay of the alliance. In many ways Sanchez seems to have led an almost charmed life, particularly during his time with the Company: he saw rapid promotion in Goa not only thanks to deserved ability on his part, but also because of an outbreak of fever that killed several of his superiors. He made considerable sums thanks to bribes from Maratha princes and other local potentates, which (thanks to the corrupt nature of the Companies at the time) enabled him to buy himself further up the ladder. By the time he formally left Portuguese India in 1822, Sanchez was one of the PEIC’s rising stars and had obtained the honourary rank of major in the Portuguese Indian Army, despite not having any real military experience beyond observing others.
He left Goa thanks to having been offered a more prestigious post in China. The Portuguese possessed northern Formosa and, like the other European trading companies supporting the new Feng Dynasty in southern China, enjoyed considerable trade privileges in ports such as Fuzhou and Hanjing.[3] Sanchez was initially assigned in an administrative role in Formosa, but the reports from the mainland intrigued him enough that he was able to leverage himself into a move to Hanjing. There he acted as the third most senior administrator of the Portuguese ‘Hongmen’ in their Outsiders’ Villages. Sanchez at the time appears to have been noted as competent if not spectacular, though there are so many forged propaganda ‘records’ about him (positive and negative) that it is hard to pick out the truth. He observed the birth of the Gwayese creole people, half white and half Chinese,[4] and (having seen the utility of similar half-caste individuals in India) was part of the push to use the Gwayese as interpreters and administrators for the benefit of the PEIC.
Sanchez was also peripherally involved in the opium affairs at the time. He smoked opium himself a few times and wrote of its effects, of how he had realised he was becoming addictive and had forced himself to give up the habit. His diary records a gruesomely evocative early account of a sweating-withdrawal[5] at first hand, but he eventually triumphed, illustrating the man’s extraordinary willpower (which the world would come to know for good and for ill). After experiencing its deleterious effects himself, Sanchez was naturally at the forefront of preventing the PEIC and other traders from trading in opium—not simply out of fear of the Feng ultimatum like many of his contemporaries, but out of a genuinely felt moral imperative. It was Sanchez’s investigative work that played a role in the Dutch being fingered as flauting the opium ban, ultimately helping to kickstart the Popular Wars.[6] He also wrote somewhat philosophically about the effects of opium, specifically that what could leave men as empty husks enslaved by addiction could also remove pain and save lives in medicine. “One is left with the impression that nothing is truly good or evil in nature—it is simply how we choose to employ it”. Over a century later, some of these writings would be twisted by so-called Sanchezista regimes to justify some of their more abhorrent practices.
He continued to amass promotions and personal funds during his time in China—the Feng might be a new regime, but they were not entirely free from the hopeless corruption that had characterised the old Qing. A series of events took place at this time that vastly influenced his later ideological views. As a reasonably important figure in the structural relationship between European traders and the Feng administrators that was developing in the Watchful Peace (the legacy of the Phoenix Men), Sanchez naturally had to deal with his opposite numbers among the Feng. At one point he even met the Dansheng Emperor towards the end of his reign. The man who had once been Governor Wen Kejing was settling well into the imperial dignity and had already nominated one of his three sons to follow him, which he would in 1831 as the Xiaohong Emperor.
Sanchez was present for the Emperor ennobling several Feng military officers and civil administrators who had won themselves glory and praise for their actions in the ongoing Anqing Incident with the Qing remnant to the north. Also present was one of the original Phoenix Men, Michel Ouais. Ouais was still subdued over the death of his friend Dirk de Waar shortly before—it is thought that de Waar’s demise helped hasten the opium-addled downfall of the VOC in China. Ouais, who naturally spoke Chinese well, gave a running commentary to the other European traders about the complexities of the honour which the Dansheng Emperor was bestowing. He spoke of how in the ancestral Han Dynasty, there had been a system of ranks of nobility which men aspired to. Under the Tang they had become less important as the Chinese’s famed system of civil service examination for mandarins came in, but the ranks had survived ever since, and there were many among the northern Qing with such noble titles. The Feng, however, had decided that what had once been a triumph of meritocratic governance over blood and court intrigue had since run its course and become a practice of corruption and teaching trivialities. Their position was doubtless exaggerated simply by their desire for a clean break with the Qing—the Yongzheng and Daguo Emperors had reformed the Chinese civil service in their time and it was no longer as corrupt as it had been under the Kangxi Emperor. Nonetheless, until a more modern teaching system could be brought in and the civil service rebuilt from the groundwork up, the Feng took the decision to rely on a new class of nobility created by the Emperor. Hereditary titles were relatively rare in China (Ouais explained) which helped prevent some of the problems associated with nobility in Europe—titles were held only for life.
The younger traders, including Sanchez, listened in fascination as Ouais went on to list the titles that the Emperor was giving out. He would not immediately promote anyone save a national saviour to ranks as exalted as Prince or Duke (which he had given to men like Hao Jicai and Hu Kwa) but the men who had fought and intrigued to secure the Feng’s supremacy against the northerners were being granted the titles of Baron, Viscount, Count (or Earl) and Marquess. “But why would he give them European titles?” Sanchez asked, confused. Ouais laughed hollowly (the death of his friend was still weighing on him), and gently explained that the titles were just translations of the actual Chinese names, which had originally been made by the Jesuits many years ago.
Sanchez remained somewhat puzzled. “Why, then, do the noble titles correspond so exactly to ours?” he asked. “Perhaps there are some special Chinese ones that just didn’t come up this time? Or the Feng are emulating our ways?”
Ouais shook his head. “They work with us and treat us as something near equals, which is more than you can say for the Qing. But don’t go thinking that just because some of them see the importance of steam engines and oceanic navies that they want to be just like us. They want to copy the things we have so they can grow stronger, so we can never dictate to them. They are a proud people, after all, and their title system goes back thousands of years. Say rather that ours resembles theirs, young man.”
The affair left Sanchez thoughtful, and he wrote upon the subject (his own account is our main source for it) as well as musing about the Indian princes and potentates he had seen in Portuguese India, and the Persian and Ottoman nobility he had met during the intervention in the Time of Troubles. “Can there truly be such a universal template for governance that expresses itself in lands as far separated as Spain and China? Could it descend back to the dawn of humanity when all peoples were one? But what then of the radical Republics? They oppose nobility—do they then deny an essential feature of government? The French experiment certainly turned to chaos and instability, suggesting this might be true. But there are others. The UPSA, for one. I would very much like to see it again, and to meet Sr. Cruz once more...”
To a modern, well acquainted with the precepts of Societism, a natural reaction upon reading this (after shivering) would be to assume that Sanchez immediately went off in the direction of South America. But, surprisingly, Sanchez seems to have treated his experiences as nothing more than idle musings at this stage. He worked in China until 1827 and had the opportunity once more to travel farther afield—even to Yapon at one point, as the Portuguese sent a mission to spy on the situation there and how the rival Dutch were trading with the southern Yapontsi court. Sanchez himself was not one of the men to infiltrate Nagasaki (just as well for him, as four of them were caught out and executed by the local authorities) but did come ashore when they investigated Izumo Han, further up the coast. Sanchez learned that the typically fragmented state of government in Yapon at the time had worsened, and it was almost every man for himself. Prior to an earlier period of conflict in the sixteenth century (records are naturally sketchy[7]) Izumo had been one of the provinces dominated by the Mori clan, but the Mori had been crushed by the Tokugawa and Izumo left as a small independent fiefdom. Now the Mori were allied to the southern court (possessing long memories, and the north was dominated by the Tokugawa) and wished to regain control of Izumo.[8] The local Izumo ruler (Sanchez does not record his name), desperate for survival but knowing the northern court was too distant and fragmented to defend him, turned directly to the Russo-Lithuanians for help. The Portuguese spies, including Sanchez, record that a small Russian force arrived by sea to help defend the Izumo castle against the forces of the southern court, repulsing them. And, of course, afterwards a Russian ‘resident’ remained in that castle to ‘suggest’ to the Izumo prince appropriate courses of action in the future, if he wanted to retain that vital protection...
Sanchez’s last foreign visit of this period was to the Philippines. Having experienced war and drama during the Philippine War—and soon to see it again—Manila was recorded in his diary as a battered and complex but intriguing city. Sanchez wrote with some frustration of the many different languages spoken in the islands—doubtless simply venting some trouble he had had with interpreters, but this too would later be taken out of context by the regimes founded in his name. Sanchez also wrote prophetically that the war between the Portuguese-Castilians and the New Spanish had weakened the colonial regime in the Philippines and emboldened the natives, in particular the Sultan of Sulu in the south. “I suspect we have not heard the last of them.”
While in the Philippines, Sanchez became attached to a Portuguese ship commanded by Captain Sintra, the same man who had first brought him around the Cape of Good Hope to India several years ago. Sintra was down on his luck, but he had just had a stroke of good fortune at last: he had learned the location of a New Spanish treasure ship that had been travelling on its way to the Philippines (to bribe local fighters with gold) during the Philippine War, but had been sunken by Castilian forces. Naturally the Castilians had hoped to take it intact, but the sinking had been an accident. It had long been assumed the ship had gone down in the open ocean, too deep to be recovered—so had said the official report of the captain of the Castilian ship, the Argonauta. In any case the Argonauta itself had been lost with all hands not long afterwards, destroyed by the New Spanish.
Sintra, however, had found a drunkard in a bar who claimed to be the last survivor of the Argonauta, the last witness to the fate of the treasure ship Señora de Guaymas. The drunkard, named Rámon Salinas, said that the Argonauta’s captain had seen the treasure ship go down in shallow waters, but given a fake report and sworn the crew to secrecy, with the intention of returning later with hired South Seas divers to recover some of the treasure and keep it for themselves—perhaps turning pirate. Of course the Argonauta was lost soon afterwards, but Salinas had not been on board. He had been stranded on an island by the captain for reasons Salinas refused to go into, but perhaps involved the fact that the first mate’s daughter had accompanied him on board. As it was, Salinas had been rescued surprisingly quickly by a passing New Spanish ship. He had sought after the treasure himself, of course, but lacked the money and connections to launch such a trip. Until now.
Sanchez was sceptical, but was eventually convinced to take part in the plan. He used his connections with the PEIC to invent a mission to explain their absence. The Argonauta hired their divers—from the Friendly Islands,[9] coincidentally mere months before their conquest by Apehimana, Warlord of the United Mauré. Against all the odds, it turned out that Salinas had been telling the truth. The wreck of the Guaymas was found in shallow water off the Philippine coast, and with the aid of their divers, the crew of the Douro was able to reclaim between a quarter and a third of its treasure—the rest being too bulky to remove from the wreck. Despite the usual acrimony over how to split the riches, Sintra was able to hold the crew together and divide the gold equitably. Sanchez had begun the voyage moderately well-off, but now he was genuinely rich. He decided that, while his job was an interesting one that had taken him all over the world, he had a desire to get on in—no pun intended—society, and to do so he would need an education. Now he had the means to obtain one.
Like Sintra, Sanchez resigned from the PEIC and returned to Iberia. While Sintra is believed to have blown his riches on gambling and drink, Sanchez made some careful investments. Apparently foreseeing that chaos would come again to Europe (though, to be fair, that is hardly a remarkable assumption), Sanchez was careful to split his investments between the banks of many countries to ensure his riches could not be lost in a single blow. He then used his money to enrol in the University of Salamanca in Castile. He was intrigued in the fields of history, geography and linguistics after his experiences abroad, and began his studies in early 1828. Though supposedly only a student, his firsthand experience of the East—as opposed to teaching from books—meant that some of the professors deferred to him, and he found himself a reasonably important and popular figure within the faculty.
But, of course, even as he settled down, the Popular Wars were being ignited elsewhere. Sanchez became concerned by reports that the New Spanish were planning another invasion to regain the throne for Charles IV. While travelling through Castile, a country he had not seen for years, he was shocked that not all the burns and scars he saw afflicting cities were the result of the Jacobin Wars. Others had been inflicted during the abortive New Spanish attack during the Philippine War. He wrote in his diary of the misery that must have been caused by such a pointless and quixotic attempt, and feared what might come now, as it seemed Portugal was beset by enemies on all sides. There were rumours of a Christmas uprising in Madrid. Sanchez travelled there and shared his views of the pointlessness of war in a speech,[10] only to find himself faced by an angry mob who called him traitor and Portuguese-friend and threw stones at him. The mob were soon crushed by Alfonso XII’s troops, but Sanchez was nonetheless shaken by the experience. He returned to Salamanca, where some of his sympathetic colleagues advised him why he might have gone down so badly. Some suggested that it was simply because the people of Madrid did not know Sanchez as well as they did, and were already ready to hate him, regarding him as a simple Portuguese cat’s-paw. But there were others. There was a professor named Víctor Marañón, a regressivist aristocrat known to complain about the increasing number of students from bourgeois backgrounds. Of course, Sanchez was himself from a fairly bourgeois family, but Marañón seemed not to realise this. Marañón had a deep contempt for the working classes. He was an Enlightenment liberal of the patriarchalist, elitist school, the sort of man who would have supported Bernardo Tanucci a few generations before. He viewed the Jesuits with suspicion, but saved his real scorn for the man in the street. “Priest-ridden, empty-headed, he can be ordered about by any Jesuit, any churchman, anyone in a black robe! He does what he has always done, what he is told to do. Some say he should be able to vote for elected representation! I tell you, his landlord would tell him who to vote for, and then he would tell his son, and they would carry on mindlessly voting for the same family for all eternity, like a machine—like one of those Automata we keep hearing about. He’s not like you or me.” So Sanchez records his words, then adds his own addendum: “Marañón is a fool, but even a fool can sometimes stumble upon a great truth. Can it be...?”
Events followed swiftly. At the Battle of Cape St Vincent, the Castilian fleet sank the Dutch. Initially there was some jubilation in Castile at this victory against a traditional foe. But soon details began to leak out, probably aided by New Spanish agents. Public anger arose when the battle was presented (not inaccurately) as the Portuguese ordering their Castilian minions to throw themselves under a steam-carriage for them. As it was, the Portuguese had kept their own fleet safe and secured themselves against New Spanish invasion—or so they thought. But their act had nonetheless stoked resentment and hatred in Castile itself.
The First Spanish Revolution, as it was later known, began—ironically—in Salamanca itself. The Castilian government was convinced that the university town was loyal. It was relatively close to the Portuguese border and they knew of high-profile supporters of their regime such as Sanchez himself. But the students, ah, the students. Filled with big ideas and raging hormones, weathervanes for the tide of public anger...Sanchez was shocked and appalled when would-be revolutionaries seized control of university buildings in the name of Charles IV, flying the flag of New Spain. He was one of the people who tried to negotiate with them, and ended up dodging bullets. He did not write about the incident until later (thanks to the desperate situation) but seems almost to be weeping in his words: “These were young men I had worked alongside, some of whom I had even helped the professors teach! And now they spat on me and called me traitor as though they had never seen me in their lives before! Marañón was right, it had nothing to do with how well the crowd knew me. They are simple seized by a madness, a madness that makes them see their fellow man as a monster. They do not even have the excuse of prejudice about superficial differences, as I saw in my voyages, as I saw in my childhood when the mob turned on the French. They are Spaniards fighting other Spaniards for the sake of still other Spaniards. Why? WHY?”
The little revolution in Salamanca inspired other minor risings elsewhere, but these were only of the order of those seen during the Philippine War. On their own they would easily have been crushed, they would have amounted to nothing...but Portugal’s enemies had one more card to play...
[1] As noted in Part #100, the part about him being in Saragossa is based on rather unreliable sources, but is often repeated without citation, as it is in this case.
[2] I.e. a mestizo, ‘red’ being native American Indian.
[3] The new name for Canton / Guangzhou.
[4] Actually Gwayese originally meant adventurous Chinese youths who ran off with the Europeans and were disowned by their families. It was only later that it was applied to the mixed-race children that were a result of this and of traders marrying native women. The author got a bit confused. See Part #104.
[5] We would say ‘going cold turkey’.
[6] This is debatable, as the discovery was mainly thanks to work by the Feng themselves rather than Europeans. The author may be naturally exaggerating Sanchez’s importance at this stage.
[7] Specifically this refers to the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.
[8] This is a gross oversimplification—it’s an attempted reconstruction by historians after the fact, possessing almost no primary sources, and is also tainted by being seen through the lens of prejudice that tends to look down on the Japanese.
[9] Tonga.
[10] See page quote for part #60.
Part #122: The Reconquista
“Gam zeh ya'avor.”
“This, too, shall pass.”
–King Solomon
*
From “The Restless Peninsula: Iberia, 1701-1853” by Franz Dietrich, 1969—
It was common knowledge in the Portuguese court that the New Spanish were likely to attempt to reclaim the motherland during the Brazilian War. After all, they had previously made an attempt in the middle of the Philippine War, even though that attempt had been half-hearted—more of a raid and a probe—and few had thought it likely to succeed. Matters now were considerably more to the advantages of New Spain. The Portuguese seemed beset with enemies on all sides. Brazil was crumbling. Castile saw scattered outbreaks of revolution and protest.
And yet, as 1829 drew to a close, King John VI and the Duke of Aveiro had grounds for a mood of cautious optimism. The Battles of Flushing and Cape St Vincent sank Dutch fleets while preserving sufficient Portuguese naval force to defend against the New Spanish. As the Dutch people rose in revolution and the Flemings invaded, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands had effectively been knocked out of the war. Dutch colonial and trading company forces continued to fight on around the world, of course—and would last longer than anyone might have dreamed—but there was no chance of a northern threat to Portugal in home waters. The initial aggressor in the Brazilian War had effectively been defeated. However, two more threats remained: New Spain and the UPSA.
The Duke of Aveiro advised his king that the Meridian contribution to the war was likely to be effectively over. The Meridians had landed troops in Cisplatina and Rio Grande to support their revolutions and only token Portuguese resistance remained there. However, it was likely that that was as far as they could go. Rio de Janeiro remained loyal, local militiamen crushing a brief attempt to set up a ‘Carioca Republic’. The hinterland of Minas Gerais was, as usual, more restless, but the troops in Rio de Janeiro had that in hand as well, and the Meridians had effectively reached the end of the supply lines that their control of the Uruguay River lent them. Aveiro pointed out that the UPSA and the New Spanish were scarcely natural allies, and suggested the entry of the UPSA into the war had been purely prompted by pragmatisme.[1] The Meridians had made considerable gain for little loss and had punished the Portuguese whom they had blamed for their loss in the Third Platinean War. There was effectively no more role for them to play. Therefore, Aveiro advised the king to send an envoy and seek peace with Cordoba. Cisplatina and Rio Grande could be written off for now, perhaps reclaimed at a later date when the UPSA was more isolated and Portugal in a stronger position. In the meantime, it would leave them facing New Spain alone.
After some hesitation and consulting with his other advisors, John VI agreed and sent an envoy in January 1830. As it happened, that envoy would not reach Cordoba until after matters had made his message obsolete—but now, when we can read President-General Velasco’s letters, it seems likely that it would have made no difference in any case.
The long-predicted New Spanish attack on the Peninsula did not materialise until March 1830. By this point, the revolution in the Netherlands had already proved the initial focus for the wave of Populist revolutions that would sweep Europe, igniting the Popular Wars. But Portugal remained focused on the immediate problem. Small groups of troops were used to quell the minor uprisings in Castile: troops were in short supply, with most of them either sent to Brazil or remaining in Portugal herself lest the New Spanish attack the Portuguese directly. The Portuguese response was, however, sufficiently strong to drive some of the revolutionary troublemakers (most notably Esteban Flores, known as “El Sombro”) over the border into Aragon. The significance of this to the ‘Reconquista’ as a whole has been debated: some have argued that Aragon would (mostly) have risen in support of the New Spanish invasion either way, but El Sombro and his ilk certainly helped. The Portuguese were themselves aware of the potential of Aragon joining Castile in rebellion, and as part of his diplomatic strategy the Duke of Aveiro also advised his king to seek alliance with the King of the Three Sicilies. During the Watchful Peace, the relations between the Portuguese and the Neapolitans had been correct at best, with the two viewing each other as jockeying for position in the Peninsula. Gennaro I had never relinquished his claim to be King of all Spain, not simply Aragon. But now matters might threaten both of them, and Aveiro’s policy made sense.
The Neapolitans had one advantage over the Portuguese: they had their own cadres of guaranteed loyalists within the kingdom of Aragon. The Catalans. Naples’ pro-Catalan policy had begun soon after the ascension of Gennaro to the throne in 1811, on the advice of his confidante (and later chief minister) the Pere de Portolà. The Catalans had always been a somewhat restless and separate-minded component of the Spanish crown, though it is wrong to retrospectively ascribe nationalist ambitions to some of their rebellions as has often been done. In 1640, around the same time as the Portuguese broke away from the Iberian Union with Spain, the Catalan peasantry had risen up—and been crushed. During the First War of Supremacy[2] the Cortes of Catalonia had declared itself in favour of the Austrian Hapsburg candidacy for the disputed throne of Spain—and, when the war had resolved itself with a Bourbon on the throne, had suffered the consequences. This ‘sedition’, together with general French Bourbon policies of centralisation and absolutism, had led to Catalonia losing many of its traditional institutions. The Catalan language was suppressed.
A century later the Jacobin Wars led to the French occupation of Spain, and the Catalans—possessing a particular dislike of the French—had been at the forefront of Kleinkrieger activity. And when Spain was divided into Castile and Aragon, the Catalans made up a sizeable portion of the new invented Aragon. Portolà had realised that, if given more freedoms and privileges, the Catalans would fight to the death to prevent any restoration of the New Spanish Charles IV or of the Portuguese-backed Alfonso XII. Thus, for the twenty years or so of the Watchful Peace, Catalans were systematically promoted and installed as an effective ruling class of administrators across Aragon. Saragossa remained the titular capital of Aragon, but the Catalan capital of Barcelona grew in importance as a port city and Neapolitan naval base. Catalans also often rose to positions of power in other parts of the Three Sicilies. It was the same logic that frequently put minorities in positions of mid-level power in other European monarchies: both the rulers and the minorities knew that the peasants would demonise them and they would be first against the wall if the revolution came, hence the minorities would work doubly hard to keep the peasantry in line.
If the Neapolitans’ support of the Catalans led to a cultural reawakening and artistic renaissance in Catalonia, though, it naturally alienated the rest of Aragon. Once more it can be debated whether Gennaro’s pro-Catalan policy ultimately helped or hindered the Neapolitans’ rule in Aragon. But resentment of the Catalans certainly played a part in Aragon’s fate during the Popular Wars.
For now, the Portuguese remained on the lookout for the New Spanish attack, the Duke of Aveiro trying to persuade the Neapolitans to contribute part of their fleet to help guard against the suspected invasion. The Neapolitans remained cagey, however, and their policy was ultimately vindicated when their ships were needed to put out the minor risings that took place in Naples proper and Sicily.
So the Portuguese stood alone, until in March 1830 a brig returned to Lisbon under full sail to report a fleet approaching. The fleet flew the New Spanish flag, yellow and red cross against a red on white cross of Burgundy. It was slightly smaller than the Portuguese had feared but, as if to balance this, also included more heavy ships of the line. But most importantly, it also had twenty large transport ships wallowing low in the water...as though packed with troops, horses and cannon.
Contrary to popular belief, Admiral Ferreira did consider the possibility that the New Spanish attack was some sort of feint, but dismissed the idea, arguing that the New Spanish Armada was not large enough for any leftover flotilla to constitute a threat. Therefore, and fatefully, he commanded his own fleet—virtually the entire Portuguese Navy in home waters—to intercept.
It was called the Third Battle of Cape Finisterre, though as usual when naming naval battles, the Galician headland in question was quite distant from the sea in which the battle was fought. Admiral Ferreira, a not tremendously imaginative but bold sailor, caught the enemy offguard. Just as it had been with the Battle of Trafalgar in 1783, the aim for the Portuguese was to sink the transports. Deprived of their troops, the New Spanish could pose no threat. The Portuguese ships outnumbered the New Spanish, and the New Spanish seemed to know it. They attempted to break off and make a run for the Iberian mainland, but Ferreira successfully intercepted. His ships sunk two of the transports with chasers alone before closing, destroying eleven more and two of the escort ships while losing seven of their own. The battle was not so epic or grand as paintings have suggested. The New Spanish seemed to want to escape rather than give battle, but Ferreira would not let them approach Iberia. Finally, after the loss of four more transports (leaving them with only three), the New Spanish gave up and retreated westward, a few Portuguese ships nipping at their heels.
Ferreira was relieved and pleased. The New Spanish had not offered so hard a fight as he had feared. They had acted in an almost cowardly fashion, unwilling to face the Portuguese—though perhaps that was simply because they had feared their transports being sunk if they stopped to give battle. And indeed Ferreira felt slightly guilty (as he later recounted) at sinking almost unarmed transport ships full of helpless men and horses who could do nothing to prevent their fate. But such was war.
One of the seventeen ships the Portuguese had neutralised had been captured intact rather than sunk. Ferreira himself went aboard to inspect it, with a bodyguard and two of his captains. The sullen New Spanish crew were on the deck with their hands tied behind their backs, watched over by suspicious Portuguese Marines.[3] A small, skeleton crew, but that was not so uncommon on a transport ship. But where then were the troops? Were they still below?
Minutes later, Admiral Ferreira found himself staring into the hold of the transport.
A hold which contained a great military force of stone slabs, barrels of water, anything to make it wallow treacherously low in the water. And, in the corner, a folded flag. It was pale and battered, unlike the unusually bright and striking colours of the New Spanish flag the ship was actually flying, as though it was this flag that normally graced the masthead. When one of his captains opened it up, Ferreira numbly noted its design. The same colours as the New Spanish flag, but arranged rather differently, with red and white in a canton, a field of yellow, a torch and motto in red.
And he knew that they had been deceived.
*
From “A Military History of the Spanish-speaking Peoples” by Antonio Vasquez, 1960:
...the Meridians faced diplomatic protest about fighting under false flag. President-General Velasco’s government countered that the fleet at Finisterre, a portion of the Meridian Armada, had been temporarily given over to New Spanish command and had ostensibly had a New Spanish admiral in command. Nonetheless the move did create a certain Meridian reputation for not playing by the rules of war, which would be taken up by the enemies of Velasco and his Adamantine Party as the Meridians neared their presidential election date of 1831. Ironically this probably only served to push the disparate groups that Velasco had united together into a single coherent political party, as they came together to defend Velasco’s policy.
As it was, the battle off Finisterre had weakened the Portuguese slightly, but its main role of course was to keep the Portuguese fleet engaged with a fake transport fleet while the real New Spanish Armada approached from the north, crossed the Bay of Biscay and landed its real troops, Infante Gabriel’s Nuevo Ejército. The New Army that had been formed in 1803 to take back Spain from its French occupiers and their Felipista lickspittles. Now King Felipe and Jacobin France shared a grave, his son Alfonso had grown to a man under Portuguese tutelage, and Spain was divided. Much had changed over the almost thirty years that the New Spanish had been absent. But Charles IV, now in his sixties, remained, and he was with the troops that landed in the Peninsula. He knew it was a gamble, but it was likely that the Meridians would not have the capability or willingness to outright destroy the Portuguese fleet, so there might be no chance to send a second wave of reinforcements once the New Spanish had achieved a beachhead. So the King-Emperor of Old and New Spain went in with his men as they landed on the beaches around Santander.
The ‘Reconquista’ was very much a matter of collapsing dominoes. The New Spanish could not physically put that many troops in Spain—Charles IV’s force is estimated at 25,000 at most. In a straight battle the Portuguese, even with their army depleted by those forces sent to Brazil, could easily have defeated him. But that was not what was important. With their King returning in glory and having a sizeable military force in place, the rumour mill in Castile promptly got to work exaggerating the events taking place and, before long, new Kleinkriegers were coming out of the woodwork everywhere. There were renewed uprisings in Salamanca and Burgos among other cities. The Burgos rising seemed on the verge of being crushed by Portuguese troops and Castilians loyal to Alfonso XII. However at the eleventh hour the New Spanish appeared, having marched inland from Santander, and the Portuguese withdrew as the rebels celebrated. That catalyst lit several more uprisings throughout Castile, and those some were crushed by Portuguese or Castilian troops, they could not suppress them all. Before the New Spanish could approach Madrid, the people rose up in one final rebellion. Alfonso had sent away too many of his own troops in vain piecemeal attempts to suppress other risings, and now he did not have enough left to prevent the revolution in his own back garden. Protected by a bodyguard of Portuguese troops, Alfonso fled amid the jeers of his would-be subjects. Initially he intended to go to Portugal to plead for more support from John, but Kleinkrieger activity and attacks on his bodyguard meant he made several diversions and ended up holed up in Badajoz for the moment. Madrid was already freed from the Castilian regime even before Charles IV marched in. There is debate about whether there was an attempt to set up a Populist republican commune of some sort in the city before the New Spanish arrived, but it is probable that this is either a myth or a minor incident blown out of all proportion by the later regime keen to emphasise the role of the local rebels.
The ‘Reconquista’ lasted until the end of 1832, but it was really just an extended collapse. The Kleinkrieger and Populist activity spread to Aragon, where the Neapolitans were in no position to suppress it thanks to their problems closer to home. The Catalans fought, however, just as Gennaro had hoped, and though most of Aragon ended up reconstituted into the restored Old Spain, an independent Catalonia survived as the new third of the Three Sicilies. French foreign policy at the time doubtless helped. The Portuguese fought for a while against the rising Spanish public tide, but John was aware that there was a danger of Populism in Portugal itself. There had been free exchange of ideas between Brazil and Portugal along with trade, of course, and the same republican ideals that had led to the revolutions in Cisplatina and Rio Grande were rumoured to be stirring in secret societies in Lisbon, Braga and Oporto. Intent on damage control (and arguably successful), John publicly dismissed and exiled the Duke of Aveiro, promoted new favourites such as the Marquis of Porto and focused on defending as much as he could of the inheritance he had obtained from his father.
This turned out not to be much. By the end of 1831 the New Spanish had control of all of pre-Jacobin Wars Spain except Catalonia, the Balearics, Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo and Galicia. The latter three had been directly annexed by Portugal during and after the Jacobin Wars, but now all three were joining the uprising. Ciudad Rodrigo was the first to fall. Confident Badajoz could defend itself, John poured all his troops into defending Galicia, and it was here where the New Spanish had their major failure. They did reclaim the symbolically important Santiago de Compostela and indeed much of the province, but the Portuguese held on to the coastline and the New Spanish were unable to dislodge them. While the rest of Galicia would remain part of Spain, La Coruña—afterwards known as Corunha—already possessed a large Portuguese population thanks to trade policy during the Watchful Peace, and racial purging and exchanges later on would solidify its existence as an integral part of Portugal. Aside from Catalonia, it was the major blot on the New Spanish’s glorious Reconquista.
All the same, the New Spanish had the last laugh. Badajoz had indeed been almost impenetrable. However, two weeks into its siege by New Spanish troops, the Governor—Miguel de Cruz—decided this was the point to reveal that he had been a secret Carlista all along. He opened the gates of the city to the New Spanish and, to make up for his years of service to the Portuguese, handed over Alfonso XII to Charles IV. The Portuguese sued for peace.
It was in August 1833, as the Popular Wars still raged over much of Europe, that the other four Infantes who had fled Spain in 1803 returned. Antonio, Gabriel, Ferdinand and John joined Charles in Madrid as he was crowned King of Old Spain. The five of them reaffirmed their coronation oaths that they had taken in the City of Mexico three decades before. And they brought along their wives and children. The people of Madrid, and Old Spain in general, were fascinated by Charles IV’s exotic queen-empress, María Jerónima Oca Moctezuma y Mendoza, formerly Condesa de Moctezuma de Tultengo. When he had been shunned and dismissed by ‘real’ European royalty, Charles had been unable to marry into another European royal house as was the usual practice. But unlike Frederick of Britain, he had not married a commoner. If he could not marry European royalty, he would marry American royalty. María Jerónima was the fourteenth generation direct descendant of Moctezuma II, ninth and last Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan (or, as Europeans generally knew the title, ‘Emperor of the Aztecs’). With a royal line going back beyond the fifteenth century, that was a better pedigree than a lot of European royal houses could boast.
And with her Charles had had children. His eldest son, Ferdinand—to become Ferdinand VII—came with her to observe the kingdom he would one day rule. And no-one suspected what might come of that...
As for Alfonso XII, there was argument between the brothers about what to do with him. Ferdinand of Guatemala and Antonio of Mexico wanted him executed as a traitor and a puppet. John of New Granada and Gabriel of Peru argued that he had been raised from a child by the Portuguese and could not be held responsible for his actions. Charles agreed with the latter two brothers in spirit but suspected Alfonso was too dangerous a potential rallying point to be left alive. However, an emotional appeal from the man himself moved the King-Emperor. The final compromise (as suggested sardonically by Antonio) was that if John and Gabriel wanted him to live so much, they could play host to him. In the end when the brothers returned to New Spain, they took Alfonso with them, and—stripped of all titles—he became something of a curiosity at John’s court in Santa Fe [Bogota].
Thus it was that the dream of New Spain and the Arandite Plan, dreamed so many years before, finally came to its fulfilment. The king over the water had returned, the nation was reunited once more, and all was at peace.
And if history was a novel, this would be a good place to close for the people of Spain. But history is not a novel, not a story. It lacks satisfying conclusions. All is temporary, all is changeable. And while some might wish that Spain’s story had concluded in this happy ending, it did not...
[1] In OTL we would say realpolitik.
[2] The War of the Spanish Succession.
[3] The corps in question is normally referred to in English as the Marines and serves the same function, but at the time it was known as the Terço da Armada da Coroa de Portugal (Tercio of the Navy of the Crown of Portugal).
