twovultures
Donor
The Belair War
The first balance that Puelco would see broken during his rise to power was not the balance between the British and his people, but the delicate balance of military power between the Spanish and the British. The Spanish were having great difficulty maintaining their empire. The loss of Germany a century and a half ago had made things a lot easier for them, and the rise of a wealthy plantation-owning class in their Netherlands ensured that at least one faction of that country would always back them up, since the Dutch depended on the Spanish navy to defend their interests.
But unrest was rapidly building up in Milan as the Italians complained that the Spanish overlords were bleeding them dry. Attempts to increase taxes in Austria and Spain itself were also being met with growing resentment, but the crown needed the money. Perennial campaigns against the Turks in the Mediterranean and Indian oceans and the Portuguese in Atlantic Africa were slowly bleeding the Hapsburgs. This was what drove their decision to find the ‘lost’ silver mines of the Columbias-to avoid the British, French and Portuguese, they would go around the continent of South Columbia.
When the town of San Francisco (OTL: Montevideo) was founded 1694 AD, it was in a region that had previously been explored. The Spanish even had captives who spoke the local language and could act as interpreters, so they thought they were prepared. So when the local people approached their settlement and greeted them in a lilting, Gaelic-accented English it was a very unpleasant surprise.
Through the interpreters, the Spanish learned that the British had made a settlement just across the bay. The Spanish governor Manuel de Merve [1] quickly decided that the best defense was quick offense and quickly rallied his men for a raid on Belair. His attack was marvelously successful: his cannons decimated the town, and the British retreated.
Holding the town was a different matter entirely. When the Spanish found the armory, they saw that all powder and almost all weapons had disappeared: the British had not fled in disarray but made a tactical retreat.
The in 3 days, they were back-with 200 Mapuche backing them up. Although Nahuel had not wanted to help the British, he had allowed Puelco and any who wanted to join him to come. Puelco’s relatives and anyone who had lost relatives to Spanish and Dutch pirates joined the British to kick the Spanish out. de Merve was forced to retreat to his boats and sail back to San Francisco, and the British quickly sent word to home. The Tudors took this as a challenge to their rightful supremacy over South Columbia; Britain and Spain were now at war.
The brief war would quickly show the weaknesses inherent in both empires. Edward VIII’s admiral Jareth Drake would rain hell on the Spanish in Africa, but in doing so left many of the ships carrying silver across the Atlantic to be captured by Spanish privateers. Edward VIII angrily recalled Drake and instead had Robert Stetson sail against the Spanish in the Atlantic. Stetson was a competent leader, but he failed to realize what Drake had: that the Spanish were in a better position than the English to take on South Columbia due to their strongholds in Africa. Without being harried, the Spanish African fleet was able to sail an army and supplies to Belair, which was once again bombarded and taken in 1698 AD. The town was quickly occupied by 500 Kongolese riflemen and Wolof knights, experienced mercenaries [2] who were able to hold off the inevitable Mapuche counterattack when backed up by the might of the Spanish fleet. The British dependency on silver and the Tudor habit of removing anyone who displeased them from power no matter how competent lost Britain a colony.
However, the war revealed Spanish weaknesses as well. Dutch privateers sailing from the Lesser Antilles, the Orinoco and the American river disrupted British silver shipments after Stetson took to the Atlantic, but the privateers sabotaged Emperor Maximillian V’s attempts to get a tax on captured silver, often fabricating tales of the British scuttling their own ships or of Native pirates forcing them to give up silver for safe passage. Of course, the Dutch demanded that Spanish naval resources be diverted to protect their sugar plantations and even that African mercenaries guard their plantations, with all the logistical difficulties that would entail (the Dutch considered Africans more competent and trustworthy than either Native mercenaries or Spanish soldiers, both of whom they suspected of being too sympathetic to Columbian slaves). The Hapsburg Empire was too divided, with too many competing interests to function smoothly in war and Emperor Maximillian V’s increasing taxes to pay for the campaign just exacerbated the divides.
Then, the unthinkable happened. The young and apparently healthy Maximillian died in 1699, without so much as a by-your-leave. Very poor manners for any monarch, and disastrous for an empire with increasing divides.
The war would end in a stalemate. Without pay, the African mercenaries in Belair packed up and left, many opting to go work for the Dutch planters in the Antilles Sea. The British quietly re-occupied Belair, but found that most of their serfs from the village of Tinguiririca had fled to the Pampas, and their ally Pikun was caught in a feud between Puelco and Nahuel. Everything returned to how it had been.
News of the stalemate disturbed the leaders of the Columbian nations who heard it. The whites had just fought a vicious, albeit brief war-but while their colonies suffered, their ability to hold the land they had taken had barely been disrupted. If anything, their greed had increased, as in the interim of the war the PKL, French and Portuguese had all made landgrabs-the French seizing the remainder of the tidewater region from the Tchirhaka, and the Portuguese taking control of the mouth of the Ataaxpaala (OTL: Mississippi) River while the PKL had moved to the mainland of North Columbia, taking the land with the aid of Christian M’icmaq allies.
Some of the Columbian nations near the front line of colonialism prepared defensively for what they now realized was an inevitable onslaught, gathering weapons and hiring European or African mercenaries to drill their troops. The exception was Tlatokan, which like the Spanish governor saw offense as the best defense and which would jump headfirst into the global practice of conquest.
[1] Hispanicized (and socially elevated) version of “Van der Merwe”
[2] The growth of sugar plantations in the Dutch Lesser Antilles and French Lucayans (OTL: Bahamas) has resulted in a decrease in demand for slaves in Macaronesia. The Wolof Empire and Kingdom of the Kongo now have a lot of unemployed warriors looking to make money, and monarchs who are eager to get them abroad to neutralize them as a threat.
Map Key: Dark Red: PKL (in northeast Columbia and Eurasia); Tlatokan (in southwest North Columbia and Meso Columbia).
Pink: Portuguese Empire
Light Green: Spanish Empire
Blue: French Empire
Light Red: British Empire
New Players:
In India, Brown is the new Kingdom of Pondicherry, while yellow is the new Republic of Goa (or rather, the Republic and its large, loosely-controlled hinterland). Both are freshly seceded from Vijayanagara, which remains as an inland rump state.
The Lavender kingdom going from Borneo to Mindanao in southeast Asia is the Sulu Sultanate, still alive and still kicking.
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