Part #181: Dancing the Charleston
“And so let it began! Let young men bleed out and die on battlefields that fifty years from now only historians will be able to name! Let cities burn for causes that will be forgotten, for divisions that will seem trivial, for a victory that will be irrelevant, to our children’s children—for those of us who survive to see them…”
– Pablo Sanchez, 1849 letter to Luis Carlos Cruz
*
From “A History of California” by J. D. Peters-Vasquez (1989)—
The decision by Ferdinand VII and Antonio II to escalate the situation with the ENA was based on two fundamental miscalculations about the prospective war. The first was that the Americans would be unable to deploy sufficient forces sufficiently effectively to significantly harm the New Spanish position either the Californias or elsewhere. The second was that, as the ENA had to cope with the ongoing Carolinian secession crisis, the Americans would be distracted while the New Spanish would be able to give their full attention to the conflict.
It was the second of these misconceptions which would be disproved first. Indeed, it was only days after the steamer departed from Veracruz for Fredericksburg with the document declaring New Spanish recognition of the Kingdom of Carolina that a sailship arrived from Old Spain with news of the Second Spanish Revolution breaking out. If the winds had been more favourable and the sailship had arrived in time, then Ferdinand might well have chosen not to risk war with the ENA and history would have been very different. As it was, New Spain was suddenly faced with two difficult situations. At this point, however, the crackdown in the Californias appeared to be somewhat effective and the crisis there had not grown to the status of a full-fledged rebellion as was the case in Old Spain. Therefore, Ferdinand took the decision to deploy a fleet with some of the Kingdom of Mexico’s finest regiments to cross the Atlantic and subdue the uprising in Old Spain, which set off in late October 1848. He did not entirely neglect the Californias, but regarded them as sufficiently stable to wait while additional regiments were brought in from New Granada, Guatemala and Peru (as well as new ones being raised in Mexico). Ferdinand was supported by his four subordinate Kings, but not without some misgivings. The Kings agreed that it was vital to put down the rebellion in Old Spain, but privately blamed Ferdinand’s own attitude and policies for the rebellion in the first place…
*
From “The Great American War” by Alexander Jenkins (1972)—
Secretary at War Matthew Clarke’s track record in the conflict is pocked with bad decisions, but it is generally agreed that one of his better moves was to effectively delegate the entire Western aspect of the war to General Sir Lawrence Washington III.[1] Despite being dismissed as an aristocrat who had inherited his position by some Supremacists, Clarke was well aware that Washington had more than earned his rank and was particularly skilled with logistics, having ran frontier campaigns on long supply lines against the Chayiks and the Rapayo among other western Indian groups.[2] He was therefore an ideal choice for a man to consider the problem of how to bring troops from the ENA’s core provinces to distant California. Voyage by sea was thus far considered impractical given the uncertain nature of the seas off Carolina for the present. Overland trails existed, of course, and had been used by the American settlers seeking a direct route to seek their fortune in California, but they were perilous and had never been used to transport a whole army. There were two main choices. The Santa Fe-Gila River Trail would have the army set off from Fort Canzus (modern Occidentalia[3]) in what was then Western Virginia and proceed along the Arkensor River until reaching Santa Fe, capital of the Mexican province of Nuevo México, before then heading west along the Rio Grande through San Luís de Tucsón[4] and finally entering the province of Old California. Alternatively, the more northerly Oregon Trail would have the army also set off from Fort Canzus, but head west through the Rocky Mountains through the Nebraska River Valley[5] into Drakesland and finally then go south through the Golden Trail into California.
The two options both had advantages and disadvantages.The Santa Fe-Gila River Trail would have fewer potential Indian attacks on the supply train, with only the Keowa[6] making consistent raids, but on the other hand the Americans would have to fight their way through New Spanish garrisons at Santa Fe and Tuscón before they even reached California. There was also the potential of an additional New Spanish army marching north along the road from Chihuahua to Santa Fe and either delaying the Americans or cutting them off. The Oregon Trail on the other hand had no encounters with New Spanish troops but considerably more chance of Indian raids from the north, where the Thirteen Fires Confederacy of the Popular Wars had shifted their base of operations to the Red River Valley south of Lake Winipick.[7] It would take longer for troops to travel the Oregon Trail but they would have the advantage of staging from Drakesland with its military forts rather than having to march straight into California with New Spanish military forces potentially dogging their heels.
In an approach that typified his thinking, when faced with a choice Washington declared “Let us do both”. Although this is often presented in films about the war as an almost Solomonic judgement, Washington’s decision was in part taken due to a more pragmatic
Guerre de tonnere assessment that it would be problematic to send a large number of troops down either trail considering the limitations of resupply. Far better to split the load between the two trails, and Fort Canzus being the common starting point for both ensured that supplies could be sent by rail there from the rest of the ENA and then packed up on wagons for either trail. The fact that the staging would be taking place in western Virginia also served the political aims of the government in trying to rouse up western Virginian feeling for separation, contrasting the westerners’ enthusiasm for the conflict (in no way motivated by the sudden new market of soldiers and other military staff as customers for their businesses, of course) with the lukewarm attitudes of the eastern Virginians.
With three regiments called up from each of the four Confederations, Washington took the simple decision of sending the Pennsylvanians and Virginians along the southern Santa-Fe Gila Trail and the New Englanders and New Yorkers along the Oregon Trail. Naturally both sets of Confederations accused him of favouring the other but he felt that the troops’ personal experience on their own Confederations’ frontiers would better serve them if they were assigned to the Trail that was a closer fit for the terrain and climate of those frontiers.
Washington’s adept organisation meant that the deployment went swiftly. The Santa-Fe Gila troops were sent out first, exploiting the winter climate of the final months of 1848 which made that trail more tolerable. Of course the winter did the opposite for the Oregon Trail, meaning that the New England and New York troops would not begin their journey till the spring. The trail being longer meant that they never would have reached the Californias at the same time anyway, but this did exacerbate the division. By the time spring rolled around, of course, the nature of the war had changed dramatically, with the result that only two-thirds of the New York and New England troops ended up traversing the trail after all, the rest being recalled for operations closer to home…
*
From “A History of Naval Warfare, Volume 4: From the Great American War to the Sunrise War” by Gordon Yates and Thierry Guizot (1974)—
America’s actions in the early part of the Great American War—before many regard the war as formally having broken out, or at least being deserving of that name—were determined in part by the very different structural makeup of its Army and Navy. The Imperial Army had always been organised predominantly on a local basis, at first in the same county or city manner as its British progenitor and later on a Confederation-determined setup. While any given regiment would include the usual few soldiers originating from other Confederations, the vast majority of them were fairly homogenous. Because of this, all the regiments were theoretically ready to fight from the start of the war.
The Imperial Navy was another kettle of fish. Like the Royal Navy from which it had originated as the American Squadron, it recruited from all over with no discrimination as to the provenance of its sailors. It is true to say that this had become less and less true in the years of the Democratic Experiment leading up to the Great American War, with Carolina in particular becoming segregated—between a quarter and a third of the Navy’s ships were “Carolinian” with small numbers of sailors from other Confederations, and the remainder had almost entirely non-Carolinian crews. This was not so much a political decision at the time but simply that Carolina’s naval interests varied from those of the rest of the ENA. Aside from patrol boats on the Great Lakes and around the Acadians,[8] the other Confederations were mostly best served by contributing to the oceanic components of the Imperial Navy, ships of the line and frigates on the high seas to protect their trading interests. Carolina on the other hand was more invested in the riverine craft that would protect their trade both on the Mississippi River and throughout the West Indies. It had therefore been almost inevitable that Carolinian sailors would gravitate to that portion of the Navy and not the rest, and a self-selection had taken place. However, compared to the level of separation in the Army it was still a very mixed service, and even if the Carolinians were mostly segregated out, the Virginians were not—and Virginian sailors had to make a personal decision whether to obey their Governor and House of Burgesses or their Emperor and Parliament, and what exactly ‘neutrality’ represented. The Imperial Navy forces were hampered while this situation was sorted out, while the Carolinians had much less of a problem. Both sides built detainment camps to house sailors from the other who had been caught on ‘their’ ships, the Carolinians in Denbigh on the Flint River and the Americans at a redeveloped former prison in Cloudsborough Territory. Both camps were dogged with controversy about treatment of their former countrymen (or present countrymen in the case of the Virginians).
The paralysis afflicting the loyalist Imperial Navy was demonstrated when the government received news of Ferdinand VII’s fleet leaving Veracruz and heading for Old Spain. While the rebellion there was not particularly related to America’s own war aims, the government decided that an attack on the fleet (which was heavy with troopships) could represent an easy victory for the sake of morale and a defeat to help bring New Spain to the negotiations table later. However, Admiral Benjamin Franklin Barker was forced to admit to the Cabinet that he did not yet have a sufficiently large squadron of ‘cleaned-out’ ships yet that he would trust with the operation. This prompted a set of withering jibes from a furious Thomas Whipple and the suggestion by the Emperor that there was another option: a small but functional British fleet under Admiral Thomas Kincaid had escorted him when he had arrived in America the previous year, and it was still there, having taken part in joint operations with its American counterpart. The Cabinet agreed, humiliating a red-faced Barker who vowed to prove them wrong and began conspiring with Secretary at War Matthew Clarke, the only member who seemed to understand the difficulties Barker was facing.
As for Kincaid, he was unenthusiastic about the idea from the start and, when Frederick gave him his orders, replied “Sir, I will do this because you are my Emperor. But this is not my country and this is not our war. I do not see how this will benefit the people of Great Britain. But I will do it.”
And he did: but reluctantly. Kincaid’s fleet sailed to Bermuda and raided its larger New Spanish counterpart as it crossed the Sargasso Sea from Havana, striking at long range with rifled cannon, shells and the occasional rocket. It was more of an irritation for the New Spanish, with three troopships being sunk (though many soldiers and crewmen were rescued) and two warships being damaged. In return the British ships took some light damage and HMS
Democrat lost a mast, but crew losses were light. The majority of the New Spanish forces reached Old Spain, but the British had certainly inflicted more losses than they had taken.
It wasn’t enough for the American government, who were outraged that Kincaid hadn’t sought the decisive battle they had wanted for the papers. The public fervour had been sufficiently whipped up in preparation for this that Kincaid was attacked in the streets on the way to the Cornubia Palace for a hearing and almost lynched before he was rescued by passing constables. The incident inspired Pablo Sanchez’s pamphlet “War Mania” which was later adapted and expanded into a chapter of the same name in
The Winter of Nations. In the end Frederick sent him back to Great Britain where, under pressure from the Americans, the British Admiralty court-martialled him for ‘failing to do his utmost’ to stop the New Spanish reaching their destination. Comparisons to the fate of Admiral Keppel were made by the more historically-minded papers.[9] Public opinion in Britain did not concur with this decision and there were protests by many who agreed with Kincaid that ‘this is not our war’. This was really the start of, as Greville put it, ‘the Atlantic turning into a sea of bad blood’ and can be considered the ultimate point of origin of the Third Glorious Revolution. In the short term, however, President Wyndham backed the Americans’ cause even as his age and the strain of his position began to undermine his political skills.
The damp squib of the Kincaid intervention was music to the ears of Admiral Barker, who had by this point ‘cleaned out’ a decently large fleet and approached the Cabinet with a proposal. Barker detailed how minor skirmishes had already broken out between loyalist Imperial and Carolinian ships operating in Virginian waters. Virginia was attempting to deploy ships of its own to try and serve the Owens-Allen/Quedling agenda of diffusing such conflicts, but was hampered by the fact that most ships containing Virginians did not contain a majority or even plurality of Virginians and thus those ships had remained loyal to the Imperials. Virginia was having to build ships and recruit crews from scratch, and practically speaking this would have to take second priority to the Army. Therefore, there was an opportunity to engage the Carolinians at sea, and though the Carolinian navy was large, it mostly consisted of smaller craft. There were rumours of larger ships of the line being built in the Carolinian naval yards at Charleston and Maubela.[10]
Rather than simply trying to decisively win a battle at sea for morale’s sake as the government had wanted, Barker argued that they had a narrow window of opportunity to stop the rebellion before it could proceed any further. The Carolinian General Assembly was based in Charleston, a harbour city that could be cut off by an amphibious descent. The nearby waters were patrolled by Carolinian ships, of course, but numbers were down while they ‘cleaned out’ their own fleet, and for now they were still using the standard Imperial patrol patterns that Barker knew well and could figure out how to slip through. The Imperials had the
Lord Washington, one of the first armourclad ships in the world, capable of standing up to anything the Carolinians could deploy, including the heavy guns defending Charleston harbour. They could do it, really do it, take Charleston in a single decisive strike and hold the General Assembly hostage.
Barker’s plan had often been misunderstood as an outdated application of the Jacobin “hold the heart” doctrine which had long since been discredited as overly simple, [?particul..?] [illegible] [?an?] [illegible] [illegible] [?…ionalism?] [11] In fact it was more a case of being born of the rather insistent northern misconception (even in the face of conflicting accounts by spies) that Carolina’s actions were determined by the rogue actions of ‘the Whigs’ who had stolen absolute power in Charleston by altering the voting system, and that the Carolinian people remained loyal to the Empire. Barker was convinced that as soon as the General Assembly was removed, the will of the rest of Carolina to fight would crumble, perhaps even welcome the Imperials as liberators. As said above, it is important to recognise that he was scarcely alone in this belief. At the time, isolated incidents like the Whitefort Revolt in favour of the Empire or the Great Uprising among the slaves of the Cherokee Empire (spilling over into Carolina proper) were treated as evidence that the General Assembly’s control over Carolina was shaky and ready to crumble at any time.
The Cabinet was divided. Clarke was enthusiastic about the plan, Martin a little less so, but Whipple thought it was too risky and Webster thought that they needed a vote by Parliament to get approval for such a drastic action. Barker argued fruitlessly that the window of opportunity was rapidly closing, that Carolinian patrols would soon become denser and use new patrol patterns, making it impossible for his fleet to slip through and make the surprise attack. Furthermore a vote, even in secret, would inevitably lead to word of the plan slipping out through some of the more porous Virginian Patriot MCPs. The Liberals remained steadfast though and Martin reluctantly shelved the plan.
The furious Barker was intercepted enroute to Byng House[12] by Clarke, who said he understood what Barker had told them better than the others and they would not get another chance at this. “Launch the attack,” he told him. “I’ll have Parliament vote on it even as your ships go in. It’ll all work out.”
Barker must have had misgivings, but he believed too strongly in his plan to argue even in the face of his Lord President saying otherwise. The fleet was ready. On November 30th 1848 the ships set out, deploying carefully from multiple dockyards and bases and assembling only on the high seas, out of sight of any fishing boats manned by skippers with negotiable attitudes to national security.
The fleet assembly was accomplished only by the application of a complex but effective new flag signalling code inspired by the now ubiquitous Optel (indeed some ships even had small shutterboxes built into their masts, but these were considered too difficult to operate and prone to breakdowns for major deployment). Optel might be necessary for the fleet’s success, but it could also doom it to failure, as Barker well knew. His plan involved landing troops from troopships north and south of Charleston and sweeping in from behind as the fleet moved into the harbour to pocket the city. If one of the observation stations on the Carolinian coast spotted the fleet coming (particularly the troopships), the Carolinians would be able to mobilise before they were in range and potentially evacuate the General Assembly before Charleston could be encircled. Therefore it would be necessary to silence the Optel towers. Barker accomplished this by sending groups of carefully-picked Marines, guided by spies, out in longboats to infiltrate the areas in question under cover of darkness. Rather than dramatically blowing them up or anything else that might risk attention, the Marines simply smashed up enough of the mechanism of each shutterbox to render it inoperable, thanking their lucky stars that the Carolinians had not yet upgraded to Electride Lamp shutterboxes for night use and that their operators were asleep rather than working through the night. They left illiterate scrawls about Caesar Bell across the towers to suggest that the actions were the work of black rebels and cleared out. By the time the troopships approached in the wee small hours of the morning, the observation posts found their shutterboxes would not respond and they were unable to warn Charleston of the attack.
And so the whole affair might have succeeded, had it not been for the treacherous march of progress…
*
From “12 Inventions that Changed the World” by Jennifer Hodgeson and Peter Willis (1990):
In 1848 only a fool would deny that telegraphy—as Optel was simply called at the time—had changed the world. Whereas once it had taken days to send a message across a country, Optel could do it in hours, sometimes even minutes on the best networks. It was a system open not only to governments and militaries but to those ordinary people who could afford it, used not only for great affairs of state but for things as mundane as love letters home or betting odds. Optel had created great employment opportunities for the blind and a new growth in the study of mathematics at university as companies competed to produce ciphers that were harder and harder to crack, in a perpetual arms race with those more nefarious interests who worked to break them. It was clear that telegraphy would only go further and further in the future, with new innovations, new kinds of shutterboxes, colours and lights, faster turnaround. Yet it is striking when one looks at future predictions made at the time that everyone thought superior telegraphs of the future would look much like Optel. There is even a memorable scientific romance tale,
A Selenitic Signal by Georges Beauchamp (1845) which imagines the twenty-first century with a base on the Moon signalling to the Earth with a huge chequered grid, each square the size of France and ‘flipped’ by legions of workers assisted by steam engines, while the Earth returns the signals with a similar grid taking up much of the Sahara desert. Such tales may make us smile now, but they go a long way towards demonstrating how extraordinary and fundamentally
unexpected Lectel was when it arrived on the scene.
Lectel was not invented by any one person but was the product of multiple investigations along the same lines in different countries. In France, work on electricity was focused on the electrolysis of what had once been thought to be singular elements using the Luns Battery developed by Jacob Luns and Johan Buysse.[13] As a consequence of this, while suggestions for the use of electricity as a communications method did exist, they were inevitably influenced by being viewed through the prism of this work. For example, Claude de Nassoy suggested that a signal could be sent by sending a current through a wire across many miles with the wire’s end attached to an electrode in a jar full of acid, which would produce bubbles of aquaform [hydrogen] gas that an observer would note. A more refined version of the same proposal exploited the fact that recognisable colour changes had been observed when electricity was passed through some chemicals, though the nature of these colour changes remained uncertain at the time.[14] However these would clearly never work for any kind of regular communication and certainly could never compete with Optel: they were scientific toys, nothing more. Optel continued to influence thinking over them, with the belief that at least six wires sending on or off signals would be needed to correspond to the hexameric [6-bit] code that the most common type of Optel shutterbox afforded.[15]
It was in Carolina that the first ‘modern’ Lectel system was proposed by Robert MacLean and Jack Naughtie, a railway engineer working in Ultima [Atlanta] and a lecturer in science at the University of Corte [Milledgeville] respectively. Naughtie’s genius was to realise that given the speed with which a gauge measuring electric current could register an ‘on/off’ signal, there was no need for multiple wires—a dimeric [2-bit, binary] signal could transmit data via a code just as fast as Optel, which had a broader bandwidth but more of a delay in transmission between towers. A wire by contrast could send a Lectel signal continuously across the country. The concept worked well in theory, but the problem they ran into was in insulating the wire. After experiments with rather impractical materials such as glass, they hit gold when MacLean encountered imports from the new rubber plantations in Guatemala that the Gulf Fruit Company was branching out into.[16] This insulation worked well and in 1848, after some smaller-scale experiments at home in Georgia, the two decided to go to South Province and set up a large demonstration wire to try and sell their concept to sceptical Optel companies. Given the actions of those companies in other countries in the Telegraph Wars that raged during the Long Peace era (ironically), it is perhaps just as well for Naughtie and MacLean that they never got the opportunity to demonstrate it. Or rather they did, but not in the manner they had expected.
MacLean had set up one end of the cable on the outskirts of Charleston and the second stretched across the fields ten miles away to the north, where it happened to be near one of the military observation posts…
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From “The Great American War” by Alexander Jenkins (1972)—
The arrival of the northern troopships was witnessed by observers who would have found themselves impotent to act, were it not for the fathers of Lectel experimenting with their new invention. MacLean offered his services to the observers, who were willing to try anything, and a message was sent by the two men’s prototype dimeric code to Naughtie, who at first was convinced this was some kind of joke message. But he was convinced and he acted.
It was fortunate for the Carolinian General Assembly that Naughtie was a well-known and respected scientist with much mainstream work, or they might have paused to argue. As it was, they took him at his word that such a fleet had been observed approaching (Naughtie was careful not to mention the exact means of the transmission lest sceptics disbelieve him). A popular historical myth says that when Naughtie burst in, the MGAs were debating what independent Carolina’s flag should look like and how much of a link to the mother country should be kept, with some wanting to remove the Union Jack but keep the Oak of England, and others wanting to keep the Oak of England but remove the Union Jack. The myth goes on to say that when Naughtie cried out “the yankees are coming!” the two groups looked at each other and cried “Oh d—n it, let’s just do both!” Amusing as this supposed explanation for the Lone Star and Palmetto banner is, as usual the historical record dampens it by showing that the debate had already finished an hour before Naughtie appeared to interrupt a far more prosaic discussion.
The General Assembly was therefore ready to evacuate even as the first gun reports echoed across the city of Charleston. Men and women looked up in fear as the pencil-streaks of shells hammered into the fortifications around the harbour. Admiral Barker had tried to take out as many of the gun emplacements as he could with small teams of Marine infiltrators before the fleet appeared and had silenced nearly half, including all the fortifications on Sullivan’s Island which were captured almost intact. So it was that although the
Lord Washington was certainly an intimidating sight as cannonballs rebounded impotently off its armourclad sides, it was not as impressive as the resistance put up by the
Périclès later in the war, which has more come to symbolise how armourclads obsoleted so much of the existing naval strength in the world and shattered assumptions. Compared to later naval descents, Charleston had been caught napping, perhaps drunk on the government propaganda that the yankees lacked the stomach and the will to launch such an attack. Much of the military force present in the city was captured before it could be deployed.
The government itself was not so complacent and was out of the city thanks to Naughtie’s warning, the jaws of Barker’s northern and southern contingents of troops closing behind them. Uriah Adams and Belteshazzar Wragg agreed to evacuate the government to the city of Congaryton [Columbia] in the short term, but would later bring it to the rail hub of Ultima—which of course would become the permanent capital of postwar Carolina.
Altogether the capture of Charleston was relatively bloodless: five hundred military deaths on both sides combined and a hundred civilians. Some damage was done to the city by shell fire and wayward rockets but the fires were put out quite swiftly, the local fire brigades cooperating with the new occupying authorities (in contrast to the fight-to-the-death portrayals of Carolinian civilians in most media). Barker had captured the Carolinian capital and secured the shipyards with their half-dozen partly completed warships. What he had not done, however, was take the General Assembly hostage as he had promised.
And hundreds of miles to the north, as promised Matthew Clarke was calling a vote on the Charleston intervention, phrasing it as though it was some hypothetical future plan. Once he had the approval of Parliament, then he could come clean.
Except that he had not shared his plans, by necessity, with the Liberal leadership, and Webster and Whipple decided that although the plan had some merit they wanted to water it down with amendments. So they voted it down.
Two hours later, news reached Fredericksburg by Optel that the attack had taken place, even as Clarke was trying to convince the Liberals to attend another vote. Emperor Frederick is recorded as exclaiming “Now this? Are there any Americans who still take orders from their government?”
Bridges had been burned, and the war had entered a new phase…
[1] Lawrence Washington III is the grandson of Fairfax Washington, himself second son of the original Lawrence Washington. Fairfax Washington was Commander-in-Chief of the British Army back when the American forces were still treated as an integral part of it, but the family moved back to America when he died shortly before the French invasion of Britain. In a slightly unusual move, it is the line from the second son that has preserved the name—likely because that line has tended to follow the original Lawrence’s military career, whereas the line from his elder son James have mostly been more political and business figures.
[2] In OTL called the Pawnee and Arapaho. “Chayik” is a contraction of
Chahiksichahik, the Pawnee’s own name for themselves, which means “men of men”.
[3] And OTL Independence, Missouri.
[4] The name Tucson comes from a Spanish rendering of a local native name and it seems likely this would be used even though the founding of the fort happened long after the POD. However in OTL the fort was dedicated to St Augustine rather than St Louis.
[5] In OTL this is called the Platte River Valley, even though it was named (a variant on) Nebraska first by French explorers predating the POD, and indeed this is what gave its name to the OTL state.
[6] Spelled “Kiowa” in OTL.
[7] The naming of the Red River comes after the POD of this timeline but seems a likely choice. Winipick is a contemporary alternative anglicisation of the French-influenced name “Ouinipigon”, which of course in OTL became Winnipeg.
[8] “The Acadians” is the term in TTL for what we would call “The Maritimes”. The TTL term is in reference to the now vanished French colony that was there, whose people were expelled and mostly ended up in Louisiana.
[9] In TTL Admiral Augustus Keppel was court-martialled after his defeat at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1783 (he was tried for treason and acquitted in OTL due to an unrelated political affair involving the American Revolutionary War). The exemplar for this sort of thing in OTL is the execution of Admiral Byng for failing to prevent the Spanish recapture of Minorca (which of course inspired Voltaire’s ‘pour encourager les autres’). However in TTL this never happened and Byng is remembered positively for his role in ending the War of the British Succession.
[10] Maubela is the name in TTL for Mobile, Alabama.
[11] Dr David Wostyn’s note: Another piece of amateur censorship. The original text appears to be ‘…particularly in an era of nationalism’.
[12] Headquarters of the Imperial Admiralty, equivalent to the Cornubia Palace for the Army.
[13] This was the case in the 1810s rather than the 1840s OTL due to the earlier invention of the Voltaic Pile (here the Luns Battery; note that as said in Interlude #11, the term ‘battery’ in an electric context actually predates the POD, but originally referred to Leiden Jars wired in series).
[14] Proposals like these also existed in OTL, but earlier on. Both the hydrogen bubbles and the colour changes are the result of redox reactions with free electrons from the electrode being used to reduce the chemicals present.
[15] This was actually
worse in OTL, with some early telegraphy proposals relying on having one wire for each letter of the alphabet(!) In fairness to the engineers and scientists in question, it wasn’t that they didn’t understand the idea of using codes for letters, but the rail companies they were trying to sell the machines to were leary about having to train operators to use them, hence the desire for WYSIWYG outputs even if they were extraordinarily more complex to engineer. At least in TTL the mainstream nature of Optel means that people are already comfortable with the idea of using and interpreting codes.
[16] This is the Panama Rubber Tree
Castilla elastica rather than the ‘true’ rubber tree
Havea brasiliensis, which is more associated with what in TTL is currently the Pernambucano Republic—Carolinian business interests have not yet extended that far.
