Part #217: Beneath the Waves
“Any idea where the report from the Chatsworth Institute has gone?”
“The one about the Southwark Tunnel. I need to crib the economic case against it for this debate.”
“No I don’t remember having it last. I thought you had it.”
“Look if the blasted thing turns up in the middle of Angie’s homework somebody’s head’s going to roll, and it’s not going to be mine...”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
*
From “12 Inventions that Changed the World” by Jennifer Hodgeson and Peter Willis (1990):
But if Watson was largely indifferent to the triumph his work had produced, the world was not. From that day forward, nations across the planet would scramble to get a slice of the proven potential of submersible technology for themselves...[1]
Unsurprisingly, ‘Mr Elias Watson’s Marvellous Innovation’ was headline news in an increasingly globalised world, and drew attention even from the newspapers of distant climes which would otherwise have been indifferent to the Great American War for the most part. While the idea of a submersible boat was not new, the military potential of the Innovation was immediately apparent from all but the most hidebound of armchair admirals. It has been argued that Mr Watson’s intervention into the Great American War came at not merely a crucial moment from a military-strategic standpoint, but also the ‘alienistic moment’ in which this global readership was primed to most appreciate such a dramatic breakthrough. Comparisons have been made to Jean de Lisieux’s
La Vapeur est Républicaine, the sense that steam technology received such attention because it had been tied inextricably to the broader wave of political turmoil and social change unleashed by the French Revolution. Similarly, at a point where the Great American War had seemed to be a comedy of errors crossed with a relentless slog of apparently futile advance and retreat, the idea of a war-winning wonder weapon that could change the course of huge conflicts at a stroke was highly appealing to many. Simple solutions that make dramatic changes have always spoken to the lowest common denominator in the popular thought of mankind, and this alienistic flaw can doubtlessly be held partially responsible for the fact that so much history is written in blood.
But this is to digress. Those thinkers who did see beyond the obvious recognised the point that a war-winning wonder weapon can be built by the enemy as easily as one’s own country. There was no diabolically advanced ultimate secret at the heart of Mr Watson’s
Trident, merely a painstaking refinement of principles of buoyancy that had been studied for years around the world. Soon everyone would have their own Marvellous Innovation, their own
ironshark, as the weapon soon became known as. That term appears to be of German origin, the earliest use of
Eisenhaifisch being traced back to a copy of the
Hamburger Zeitung published in 1853, only three years after Mr Watson’s dramatic act. For whatever reason it gradually displaced the multitude of other terms then in circulation and a form of it is now used in most languages.
One reason for this may be the prominence of the German-Scandinavian dispute over ironsharks that formed part of the centrepiece for the ‘Underwater Prohibition’ debate of the 1850s and 60s. The arguments for Prohibition began, not in Germany, but in France. François Resnais, first as leader of the opposition and then as Prime Minister, argued vociferously that ironsharks were an ‘ungentlemanly’ and ‘inhumane’ method of waging war which should be banned, the act of using them akin to a cowardly stab in the back. Of course, many older commentators observed the irony that the leader of the French Adamantine Party, the descendants of Olivier Bourcier’s Jacobin remnant, would start invoking such sentiments: fifty years before the Revolution had supposedly put paid to protestations that any act could be considered illegal or immoral on the field of battle. This illustrated just how far the Adamantines had come, and was naturally condemned for this reason by the small Noir party which idolised such Jacobin attitudes. It is, furthermore, debatable just how much Resnais sincerely meant his moral arguments. He had ulterior motives aplenty. Watson had shown that an ironshark could neutralise even a large and powerful armourclad ship of the line. Reliable, mass-produced ironsharks would effectively level the playing field between those countries with large, powerful navies and those without. France definitely fell into the former category. Resnais was also known for his policies of military cuts that led to conflict with the leadership of the French Army and Navy, and led to those institutions fanning public paranoia of an imaginary German invasion in the hope of gaining popular support for more military spending. While the French Navy more typically demanded more armourclads rather than new ironshark projects, it is easy to view Resnais’ opposition to ironsharks in general as being a clampdown on the Navy’s grandiose plans.
Resnais attempted to set up an international conference to propose a global moratorium on ironshark development. This was doomed before it began, as the two biggest proponents of ‘Underwater Prohibition’ were the French themselves and the Germans—who, as mentioned above, were metaphorically at each others’ throats throughout Resnais’ premiership, and this only worsened after Resnais was replaced by the hostile Tourneur. While the Germans’ own fleet was only sluggishly growing, and one might imagine that the Germans would welcome ironsharks as a leveller against enemies such as Belgium, in fact the tone of the debate had already been set by the Scandinavians. Following the German conquest of Jutland in 1854,[2] Scandinavia began to elect revanchist governments which continuously plotted to regain the peninsula against overwhelming enemy numbers using levelling war innovations. The ironfish fit the bill precisely, even though it could only control the Baltic rather than defeat the Germans on land. Of course, the bitterness across the Lillebælt would only intensify with the Kulturkrieg of a generation later, but nonetheless the bounds of the debate had been set. Scandinavia boasted of ironshark projects, and therefore German public and establishment opinion came down on the other side.
Yet, as said above, the division between France and Germany prevented the two from cooperating on Resnais’ moratorium. There was only a lukewarm response from the ENA and Britain, despite the fact that it had been an American ship which had suffered Mr Watson’s attack. Naturally the ENA had been the first power to begin plotting the construction of its own ironsharks, and the Imperial Navy had no desire to waste the funds they had sunk into the project. Furthermore, when Lewis Studebaker became President he argued that the nature of the long supply lines for Meridian trade and resupply with Carolina meant that, though the ironshark had been a Carolinian invention, it was the other side who would be more vulnerable to its widespread use. The Meridians themselves, of course, were also busy with their own ironshark project, while the British government (particularly under President Cross) saw the levelling of ironsharks as a useful way to short-circuit the way that the Royal Navy had fallen behind its competitors in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s, there were regular sightings of British ironsharks patrolling the English Channel—and, much to the retired Resnais’ displeasure, they were often faced by French counterparts. The first French ironsharks were actually developed in Spanish shipyards, partly for the sake of plausible deniability against accusations of hypocrisy, but also because Spain’s shipbuilders had retained a reputation for innovation ever since the
Cacafuego of the Jacobin Wars. Despite the repeated troubles the country went through in the nineteenth century, this reputation survived.
It should be remembered that given the limitations of technology at this point, ironsharks were regarded as exclusively short-range weapons operating out of coastal bases, not unlike how ironpikes [monitors] were restricted to rivers and coastal waters. Long-range remoras would not come about until the leadup to the Pandoric War, and would be a war-changing weapon when they did emerge. Until that time, ironsharks were seen as a way to make coastal waters highly dangerous for enemy ships and therefore protect ports from capture, fleets in harbour from attack and—increasingly, as guns became larger and more accurate on lineships—cities from bombardment. At most they could function as commerce raiders only in areas such as the West (or East) Indies where many islands offered locations for bases. The potential for American ironsharks against Meridian-Carolinian and other Hermandad trade, observed by Studebaker, was one of the major causes behind President-General Araníbar’s rapproachment with Studebaker’s later colleague Albert Braithwaite and the ensuing neutralisation of Cuba.
Initially ironshark projects were also limited by underwater weapons technology. Watson’s spar torpedo was both short-range and dangerous, always risking an explosion that would sink the ironshark as well as its target. It was not until the development of the self-propelled steeltooth torpedo by the American inventor Herbert Gordon Walker in 1862 that more long-range attacks by ironsharks became more practicable. This helps explain the apparent paradox that the cultural impact of ironsharks often seems several years delayed from the initial shock of the
Trident incident in 1850: they were less of a credible fear for ordinary people until they were paired with steelteeth.
Some countries lagged behind in the ironshark movement. Paradoxically, given how synonymous the country later became with the technology, the Italies were initially distracted from development by the Peninsular War. Danubia, the Ottomans and the Russians were all slower to observe the potential of ironsharks, frustrating military analysts both then and now, as ironsharks could have played a significant role in the Euxine War. The process took longer in some places, with Siam purchasing Meridian ironsharks in the 1880s and then seeking to develop their own, regarding the weapon as a useful way of overcoming the deficit in armourclads that had seen the embarrassing Siamese defeat to the French at the Battle of Penang in 1880. The levelling potential of the ironshark was, as before, highly apparent. The fact that the weapon was seen as primarily a defensive one also appealed to those countries seeking to play off potentially troublesome foreign partners, such as Feng China, Persia and the Republics of California and Formosa. A defensive fleet of ironsharks, backed up by ironpikes to police the rivers in the case of China, was a useful guard against European encroachment without being viewed as an expansionist threat that would unite the squabbling European traders against it. Corea, still a little conservative in its military culture in some ways, took a little longer and was deploying its first ironsharks as the Pandoric War broke out. However, having incorporated lessons from the mistakes made by European projects, the Corean ironsharks were recognised as particularly high quality from the start—though the training of their crews did not always live up to that potential. Meanwhile, there were those countries subsumed into others’ spheres of influence which were not permitted to build their own independent ironshark fleet. One of the lesser causes of resentment in Carolina against their Meridian colonial masters was that Hermandad nations such as Carolina fell into this category: the nation that had invented ironsharks was forbidden from possessing them.
This supreme irony is the closest that the world has ever come to anything close to Resnais’ ‘Underwater Prohibition’ dream. If the notion had not seemed remote enough, the centrepiece of the California-hosted WorldFest 1880 was the final nail in the coffin of Resnais’ idea. As the Californians launched a display of firework rockets across the Hidden Gate [Golden Gate] to form an arc of fire like a heavenly rainbow, an apparently inconsequential merchant steamer steamed through the centre of the arc. At this point, she seemed to have engine trouble and sank soon afterwards. As the watching foreign dignitaries cried out and called for help, their Californian hosts told them not to worry. Minutes later, the steamer resurfaced. California had successfully disguised a functioning ironshark as an ordinary surface ship. The message was clear to the three powers who faced off one another in California: Russia, the UPSA and the ENA. California could defend herself, and none could be certain where her defences lay. All of Resnais’ planned inspection regimes had been rendered worthless. And, of course, it also meant that the Hermandad moratorium was not so enforceable as the Meridians had hoped...
The impact of ironsharks was not purely a military one. As noted above, Mr Watson’s act had come at the ‘alienistic moment’, a time when audiences worldwide were primed to hear more of this startling new technology. An explosion of scientific romances followed, the so-called Submarine Rage: the biggest movement in the genre since the Automaton Craze ignited by Cuthbert Lucas earlier in the century.[3] The quantity of the writings produced was remarked upon by many commentators: Michael Chamberlain, then a freshman MCP, commented ‘Apparently there are no stories left on dry land; if one was to judge our world by fiction alone, I am not sure if I could even attest to the continued existence of a land above the oceans’. Naturally, this led to the usual situation of a vast diversity in both quality of writing and how the setting was handled. One Submarine Rage story might be a blood-pumping military adventure tale, a hypothetical future war which would be fought beneath the waves, often layered with the patriotic fervour of Meridian-American tensions or Franco-German paranoia. A second might be a detailed, serious attempt by a scientifically informed writer to speculate on the nature of the deep ocean floor if a suitably capable submersible could be built.[4] A third might suggest the same kind of voyage to the depths of the ocean, but then imaginatively invent underwater civilisations of mermen who would follow the submersible back to the surface in order to conquer the civilisations of dry land. The best known of these ‘fantastic invasion bloodies’ is of course
The Abyssal Empire by Joseph Taillant (1870) which not only reinvigorated the Submarine Rage genre after a few fallow years, but also effectively spelled the end for traditional German ‘invasion bloodies’ being taken seriously by French society. Coming out in the same year as Tourneur’s fall from power, it was greatly symbolic that the invaders now had to become fictional beings, and indeed Taillant hints at a pan-human alliance against the Ondine with Germans fighting alongside Frenchmen.[5]
This political edge was likely partially responsible for
The Abyssal Empire becoming the iconic work that is still read today in many languages, but we should not neglect the point that Taillant was simply an excellent writer telling a compelling story. Despite this, however, it was Taillant’s work (along with that of many other writers) which prompted commentators to argue that ‘Submarine Rage’ was far too broad a genre to group such diverse writings under. Many of the more serious scientific speculators resented being grouped with a man who invented mermen virtually out of whole cloth, not least because his book was so much more popular than theirs. The scientist and literary critic Gustave Mansart suggested a new form of literary classification between ‘hot-blooded’ works, whose first priority was to tell a gripping story, and ‘cold-blooded’ works, which primarily strove for accuracy and consistency. Mansart was more neutral in his intentions than many of his imitators, with ‘hot and cold’ too often becoming a vehicle for snobbishness by cold writing advocates rather than a simple descriptive classification. It is only in the twentieth century that the critical establishment has conceded that a hot scientific romance can be as valid a piece of art as a cold one.[6]
The Submarine Rage saw feedback into the public imagination. The
Lord Washington incident had made some people fear ironsharks, but as always a thousand fictitious ironshark attacks are more influential than one real one. In Britain the pages of the
Register and the
Semaphore in those years are filled with articles bemoaning financial difficulties for transport steamer companies which come regular as clockwork when a new ironshark thriller comes out and scares some gullible punters off the voyage. Questions were asked in Parliament, with Ian Biggs-McGifty, the eccentric Populist Burgess for Portsmouth Coastal, openly arguing that Submarine Rage books should be banned to protect the public from their own imaginations (and to secure his constituents’ livelihoods). Meanwhile his counterpart in the UPSA was the Unionist deputy for Asunción-VII, Domingo Orrego, who argued (from his safely landlocked constituency) that Submarine Rage books had the potential of leaking military secrets to the general public. He made extravagant claims that Portuguese-Brazil, safely squashed into the Hermandad as a vassal of the UPSA, was in fact working on an ironshark project based on these alleged leaks. Nothing ever came of the accusation, but it did poison relations within South America for a few years.
Yet not all the popular impact of the Submarine Rage was so negative. Not all the scientific authors discussing the potential of submersibles for ocean floor exploration were as dry as Taillant’s jealous opponents. Tales such as Jack Cusworth’s
Four Thousand Fathoms speculated about what the ocean floor might be like in an engaging way which aroused public curiosity. It was Cusworth’s native Britain that launched the first explicitly oceanographic mission in the form of HMS
Explorer, an obsolete bomb-ship which had been hastily renamed from her original name of HMS
Explosion.[7] Despite what public perception of the mission then and now has suggested, the
Explorer did not take a submersible with it, only a diving bell—a modern and innovative one, but not a powered submersible. Ignoring such inconvenient facts, the
Explorer’s year-long mission was a hugely significant milestone in oceanic exploration, sounding the Explorer Trench south of Guam, the deepest point in the Earth’s oceans. Captain Mitchell’s researchers discovered that the Trench was around 4,500 fathoms deep—thus the wild guess title of Cusworth’s
Four Thousand Fathoms had been unexpectedly close. The
Explorer was only the first of many ships launched to explore the ocean floor, both with and without submersibles. As with the WorldFest, in the years of the Long Peace it was a useful non-combative way for nations to compete with one another for the crown of public opinion. Public attention began to fade but was reawakened in 1888 when the American oceanographer Daniel Wynne successfully took the first deep-sea asimcon, giving a new sense of reality to the sketches produced by earlier researchers.[8]
This explosion in deep-sea research was not merely an act of nationalist competition or shallow public attention, though, but fed into the ongoing debate about Paleyan Environmental Breeding, the origins of life on Earth, and Neo-Catastrophist interpretations of inheritance. Some theories had predicted barren depths and were gradually disproved as more and more life—often mysterious, unpredictable, even horrifying life—was uncovered from the depths. Sadly, craniography and Superhumanism were not among them. Nonetheless, for a man who had sought to build his ‘Marvellous Innovation’ primarily as a scientific research vessel, Mr Watson might have had the last laugh after all...
[1] This excerpt follows on from the one in Part #188.
[2] This is rather inaccurate, as there was no formal ‘Germany’ at the time, only the Bundesliga, and 1854 was the year of the Treaty of Bordeaux recognising the conquest.
[3] Note ‘submarine’ in this context is used as an adjective not a noun, the original meaning of the word which is now little seen in OTL but remains the only meaning in TTL.
[4] As before, note the terminological distinction between ‘ironshark’ for military submarine and ‘submersible’ for civilian research vessel.
[5] Ondine is the French spelling of Undine, a water nymph from German mythology. Taillant’s Ondine are rather different from the original mythology, but the popularity of his work has mostly obscured the latter except in the eyes of experts (compare how
Dracula has confused the original vampire mythology in OTL).
[6] ‘Hot’ and ‘cold’ scientific romances are therefore loosely the TTL equivalent of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ science fiction. The terms are sometimes applied a bit more generally than their OTL analogues, however: a pure piece of fiction with no fantastic elements can have the terms used to describe it too. Sometimes this is fair, such as calling a military thriller ‘hot’ because it ignores a real-life weapons range limitation to allow a dramatic shot felling the villain. However, at other times it is used negatively as an act of snobbishness, such as using ‘hot’ to mean ‘inconsistent, poorly written’.
[7] Former bomb-ships were used in scientific expeditions in OTL, such as those of HMS
Terror and
Erebus, although the
Explorer’s mission is more akin to that of HMS
Challenger in OTL (which was iconic and influential enough to give its name to many other research vessels and a space shuttle). In OTL of course the Explorer Trench is called the Challenger Deep.
[8] It should be understood that ‘deep-sea’ here means ‘what could be reached in late nineteenth century diving bells and submersibles’.