Sic Parvis Magna: ME's Crack at Draka 2.0

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MerryPrankster

Here's an idea:

Instead of rebooting an entire timeline, maybe write a fan-fic type story following Basil's adventures in the late 1980s?

He's a pretty cool protagonist and you could introduce the world through his eyes, so you could basically make it up as you go along. Less work that way.

There are Draka stories on fanfiction.net, so if you put it there (or just write it in this thread, since the public can view this part of the site), I'll write a blog review.
 

Municipal Engines

May 14 1657
Hawkins Estate, Swartland
Drakesland Colony

The chapel bells rang all throughout the estate. Hottentot bondservants were given a day off and some kegs of ale so they could join in the festivities. Beer and wine flowed like water and several hundred people seemed in very high spirits.

Thomas Drake leaned on his cane, sipping the strange drink his middle son, William, made for him: a decoction of the new Jesuit's Bark from America mixed with lemon juice and ale. The result was surprisingly pleasant and apparently effective against malaria to boot. He stood with John Hawkins, his distant relation by way of his father. John was the grandson of Francis Drake's second cousin. After some calculation long ago, Thomas had figured his friend to be his third cousin once removed.

The Hawkins family retained their sailing roots: John was a merchant in the increasingly profitable slave trade that gripped the colony. He bought the many natives the settlers dragged from the interior and eastern marches and sold them to the Americas. He had a good working relationship with Thomas's eldest son, Francis, who was a fearsome soldier and a keen slaver, venturing beyond the borders of Drakesland to collect tribute from savage tribes.

The festivities that day were to celebrate Francis's marriage to John's eldest daughter, Judith. It was small wonder that they had married; the two had grown up together as their parents were colleagues and friends.

"Oh, I almost forgot to tell you, John," Thomas began. "I've news from England regarding His Highness."

"Oh? And what has befallen our illustrious monarch lately?" John Hawkins said, his voice thick with irony.

Thomas grinned. "That is just the thing, my friend. Cromwell has refused the offer of the Crown of England. He cited scripture and was ceremoniously re-installed as Lord Protector. The funny part is that he has now greater powers and the whole affair had echoes of a coronation. I hear he wore a purple ermine robe and held the royal sceptre."

John scoffed. "At least he has the decency to maintain this republican farce of his rather than establish a dynasty. The last thing our king needs when he returns is to be beset by a line of tyrants claiming legitimacy."

While his friend was ever the royalist, Thomas preferred a more practical approach to where to place his loyalties. Like the other colonies, Drakesland enjoying such self-governance as it never had before, practical independence even. He would not mind at all if the state of affairs in England continued indefinitely. Indeed, he happened to agree with the Lord Protector's Independent views and hoped that they would permanently rub off on English society.

But he was wise enough to not let John know he thoughts.

Thinking it prudent to change the subject before John went off on another rant against the usurper Cromwell, he said, "Quite true, old friend. Though I wonder if the Cavaliers who settled here will repatriate themselves to England if and when the Stuarts are restored.

"It is certainly possible. I imagine they will return to their lands when the crown places them back in their hands."

Thomas frowned. "They will retain the lands we gave them to settle in any case. I will not stand absentee landlords. I may have to get a land reform bill passed in the assembly."

"I never thought you of all people had Leveller sympathies," John said, smirking.

"As poor a jest as they come," Thomas tutted. "In any case, I want settlers here minding the land, warding off the savages and reaping the profits from their own work rather than our cavalier friends escaping to England and taking the wealth of the land with them."

"Perhaps you can grant the lands to your guttersnipe orphans."

Hawkins liked to needle Governor Drake over his semi-philanthropic venture of gathering the orphaned beggar children of London and bringing them to Africa to find work, education and, eventually, homes. There was land to spare and few objected to their being granted land when they came of age. More controversy arose over the New Model Army veterans given land than those orphan settlers. Exiled Cavaliers and the retired Roundheads often came to blows, politically and physically.

"Perhaps," Thomas muttered non-committally. "In any case, I've the ghost of an idea forming to present to the Assembly of Citizens that may remedy the situation."

The Assembly of Citizens had been an idea of his, echoing the House of Burgesses that started in the Virginia Colony of America. By his adulthood, Drakesland had grown to such an extent that governing it by oligarchy selected by himself[1] was difficult. Working with the growing population of settlers in governing the colony gave them confidence and made them content in their lot, helped by calling them Citizens: a vague term that nonetheless was growing in popularity within the tightly-knit colony.

John scoffed. "You say that as if it will be necessary to have their consent on the issue. As long as the Company backs you the Assembly is a farce. We all know where the power lies."

"That may be so, but it comforts people to have at least the illusion of power." He shrugged. "Not to mention it would be difficult to run the colony if the colonists are uncooperative, do you not think?"

"You are the politician. I am simply a humble trader."

"How goes the business?" Thomas asked. "I hope the cargo my son provides continues to be to your liking."

His friend waved his hand in a blasé fashion. "The Hottentots are fewer every year. Though they submit more easily, they die in droves on the crossing. I have enough to keep our buyers somewhat satisfied, but there are more native souls closer to the colonies further up the coast. It is difficult to compete with the Portuguese in these things. I almost wish the Dutch held onto Luanda."

"We need more men from England," Thomas said, resolutely. "Veterans who can help us quell the raids and revolts and capture more natives to sell to the Americas."

"Not more of Cromwell's curs, surely?" John sneered.

"Possibly. Mayhap we can attract a balance of both Royalists and Parlimentarians."

"Too many and enemies would stand shoulder to shoulder," he warned. "We would have war amongst ourselves, or do you think that men would leave bad blood behind in England?"

"Then I would give them a new enemy. Organise more incursions east. The land these natives have is rich and fertile, and we must take it from them if we are to prosper." Thomas gazed out at the fields and orchards of his friend's estate. It was not enough. Their borders were too small; settlers would come only for good land and good land was in short supply. They needed settlers to protect themselves from the savage hordes at their gates, lest they be overrun. "I will have white men and women to bolster our numbers. Not just from England, but from Wales, Scotland and Ireland too. People from the continent must be drawn here too."

"Surely not?" John winced. Though a Royalist, he was hard pressed to accept anyone who didn't speak English with a proper accent.

"We are outnumbered by godless savages on all sides, who have proven unreceptive to civilisation and unquenchable in their thirst for our blood. We must either push against them or be driven into the sea, and to push we need strength that can only come from numbers. You need more slaves? Then we must have an army large enough to grind the barbarian tribes under our heels and bind them in chains. We cannot afford to be choosy on which white man comes to this land."

John nodded slowly, a grudging acceptance of his friend's logic. "I trust your advertisements in Europe are proving to not be a waste of coin?"

"They have been moderately successful so far. When I next meet a representative of the Committee, I will allocate them more funds and instruct them to expand their scope. We will see all kinds of settlers next year, I think."

"And what if their scope includes scum of the Earth dredged up from the slums and back-hills?" John asked with more than a little bite.

"Then we will have scum of the earth." Thomas clenched his fists. "Better a shield of the poorest and meanest civilised folk than letting these naked savages overwhelm us and rape and butcher our women."

John saw the fire in his friend's eyes. His first wife had been killed in a raid by the natives. He would do anything to prevent that sort of thing happening again, even if it meant taking the dregs of Europe, giving them land and swords and muskets and marching them on the barbarians.

"I will have a new army. Disciplined and fierce and united in purpose; the New Model Army reborn in Africa. We will have slaves aplenty once we crush all the savage tribes in the land, more than you can sell John." There was an iron cast to his voice now. Thomas raked his flaming eyes across the black-skinned bondservants and slaves on the Hawkins Estate. "Mark my words well, the time will come when these savages learn to fear the name Drake."

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[1]: For a time, the Drakes ran the colony like a personal fiefdom. They were prestigious and rich and so held vast influence in both English and Drakian society. Unlike most proprietary colonies, Drakesland was not converted into a crown colony with a governor appointed by the king. The East India Company held sway there, and the Drake Dynasty maintained a large enough stake over the generations for the shareholders and board of the Company to leave them to their business in Drakesland. It was through voluntary cession of power from the colonial proprietors to the colonists (or at least cession of the appearance of power) that Drakesland evolved into a colony more akin to the American colonies whilst still retaining a pseudo-feudal social structure.

[2]: The Committee for the Settlement of Southern Africa was the first iteration of an organisation that would prove vital to demographic and economic growth in Drakesland. Regarded as another eccentricity of Thomas Drake, it would employ innovatively early forms of marketing to attract colonists, though it often made use the indebted and the poor; it signed on indentured servants by the boatload, bribing or press-ganging "volunteers" to live a new life in Africa.
 
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MerryPrankster

Good to see it's being updated. Will there be little vignettes across the centuries, a founding-era story and a "present day" story intertwined (perhaps stuff Cassidy tells Basil, like how THE DOMINATION was a story the now-rich cop from DRAKON was telling his employee), or something else?

And I wonder what effect Hottentot slaves in the New World will have? They're not the same ethnically as the blacks brought from West Africa. The fact they die so easily augurs against them changing the makeup of the slave population on a large scale, but people in the Caribbean have Taino DNA and there's some early handicrafts that show a mix of Indian and African styles.

I like the foreshadowing and the real-life roots of Draka institutions like the New Model Army being the basis for the Draka military.
 

Municipal Engines

Just a little question to anybody still interested in this: what are the specifics of cultivating cotton, tobacco and sugar, and could they be cultivated on the coast of Southern Africa?
 

Gawk

just wondering if this is dead, we are some who eagerly await the word to still this suffering of the unknown
 

Municipal Engines

Drakesland Until the Restoration

Foundation, Settlement and Expansion: The First Few Decades

The original naval base of the Fort of Good Hope was located on the coastline of Table Bay. After recieving the colonial charter, the base was set to become a port-city and renamed Gloriana, in commemoration of Queen Elizabeth whose epithets included "Gloriana".

When Sir Francis Drake had arrived with the fleet that carried the first true settlers, the colony had already been expanded in preparation for their arrival. For common settlers, the proprietor of the colony-Francis Drake himself-allowed them relatively cheap leaseholds of expansive plots of land. For sailors and soldiers, he began the policy of granting complete freeholds to veterans. In the wake of the end of hostilities with Spain, this policy attracted a large migration of ex-soldiers and their families.

To cope with this expanding settler base, Francis bought land from the native Khoikhoi and San peoples, often both conflated to the Khoisan or, more derogatorily, the Hottentots. The main draw for the colony was the meat and the fresh water it could supply to passing ships and for more meat to be supplied more grazing land had to be obtained. This came first through legitimate purchases from the Khoisan, then from simple settlement and expansion into tribes' traditional pastures, then finally through naked force and wholesale capture of tribes and their livestock.

The colony was quick to expand its borders; more colonists meant more desire for land. Arable land was given to farmers for cash and food crops whilst the veterans pushed north to steal, swindle or extort grazing land from Khoikhoi clans. These men were the first of the bushrangers, one of the first traditional Drakan icons.

The Bushrangers

The bushrangers were part conquistador, part bandeirante and part vaquero. They were slavers, explorers, ranchers, mercenaries, militiamen and farmers. All were united by their adventuring frontier spirit, rugged lifestyles and impressive survival skills. They were shaped by the wild, hostile land to the north of the Cape Peninsula and shaped it in turn.

The veterans of the Anglo-Spanish War sought to carve out their fortunes from the largely unexplored land of Africa. Driven by the successes of the Conquistadors of Spain, they forged ahead to the interior of Southern Africa in search of cattle, land, slaves and gold. The cattle were for the lucrative export of meat; the Khoisans' own herds were of hardier stock more suited to the land than the imported cattle of the colony. They searched for land suitable for grazing or growing, as well as routes to sources of water or through mountains or, in particular, to the Gariep River. They hunted for slaves to either put to work in the rapidly growing farms and estates of the colonists or to sell abroad to the Americas. Above all, they hungered for gold, driven by greed and fuelled by mythic riches that had propelled so many Europeans in the Americas.

The bushrangers learned their skills initially from warfare and trial and error, but more than either they learned them from the Khoisan. The natives had been herding and hunting and gathering in the land for thousands of years and knew the secrets of survival. As payment for this sharing of knowledge, the Khoisan were eventually enslaved and killed by the bushrangers they taught. This knowledge proved vital for the bushrangers however, as the Karoo and Namaqualand were hard places to live, let alone conquer. As time went by, the bushrangers became experts in surviving on their own in these difficult lands and, if need be, using them to their advantage in a fight.

As the frontiers they explored and exploited became more settled and civilised, the bushrangers would either move on to stranger, wilder pastures or settle down as ranchers or farmers. With the great number of single women in the hubs of the Drakesland colony, they often went back to the exterior if the desire for wives arose. However, some bushrangers took to wife native women; enough had children of mixed-raced that it formed a recognised group that quickly became known as the "Bush Bastards".

These "Basters" (as the ethnonym eventually mutated into) did not attain the social or legal status accorded their fathers, mostly because colonial laws recognised only Christian forms of marriage. They found themselves unable to settle down with lands as their fathers and cousins could and, unable to become ranchers or farmers, continued their nomadic lifestyles or settled in towns far away from the main regions of the colony. The colonists, however, in their paramilitary response to insurgent resistance from Khoi and San people, readily conscripted the Basters into militias.

Some bushrangers and the majority of Basters travelled with their family and their livestock in a semi-nomadic pastoralist lifestyle. In addition to its herds, a family might have had a wagon, a tent, a Bible, and a few weapons, including guns. As they became more settled, they would build a mud-walled cottage, frequently located, by choice, days of travel from the nearest white settlement. These families were completely independent of official controls, extraordinarily self-sufficient, and isolated. Their harsh lifestyle produced individualists who were well acquainted with the land while still being more settled than the bushrangers.

The bushrangers were renowned for their fighting abilities. Their lifestyles and experiences ensured the men became skilled in lightly armed, mounted, skirmish tactics. Their experience in exploration led them to be widely contracted by the Portuguese and the Dutch for expeditions and by companies for defence of their factories and forts and for punitive actions against natives.

In addition to foreign powers hiring them, the Drakesland colony itself often called them up for campaigns against the natives, often conflicts brought about by the roughshod behaviour of the bushrangers themselves. For instance, the theft of cattle or taking of slaves by bushrangers often brought the whole colony under attack by vengeful Khoisan.

An increasing numbers of veterans of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms that came to the colony led to the increase in bushrangers as well as the normal militia of the colony. More importantly, it led to the refinement of horsemanship of the bushrangers; decades-old Drakeslander traditions mixed with the experienced, disciplined cavalry expertise of retired cavalrymen and dragoons. The disciplinary side of this military and equestrian expertise was especially evident in the former members of the New Model Army, who carried their puritanism and the "Good Old Cause" across the Atlantic.

Internal Politics

To understand the early history of Draka, one must understand Thomas Drake. He was encouraged to sail from an early age, mostly due to his father's legacy. His childhood friend, John Hawkins, was the more avid sailor and a keener businessman. While John stood astride the Atlantic, with one foot in England and another in the Drakesland colony, Thomas was a keen social resident of his native land and participated much in the political framework of the nascent colony.

He was regarded as an idealistic eccentric, who had a vision of domination of Africa and use of its resources to benefit all good Christian men. Early on in the colony's history, he was personally embroiled in Drakesland's conflict with the natives. His first wife was killed visiting a friend's farm by natives, which set him down a dark path.

His hatred of the native population grew over time and a more radical approach to them was taken. He was a noted egalitarian, open to working classes from around Europe, as well as religious tolerance. Alongside this openness, large, cheap land grants were given to settlers which attracted a great many of them. In exchange, he demanded militias and forbade weapons to be sold to the natives. Penal colonies were set up and indentured servants from criminals and debtors were used for labour deemed too important to be trusted to the natives or were used in penal battalions in the navy and the militia.

He also took orphans from Britain to Drakesland to educate or put them to work and give them land, an expensive venture that was only philanthropic in its goals. He also created and funded the Committee for the Settlement of Southern Africa, a quasi-governmental organisation that promoted the Drakesland colony for settlers and investors and coordinated investment and settlement. To combat absentee landlords who owned plantations in Drakesland but lived in England, having officials do the running of these lands for them, Thomas Drake enacted the Landholder's Propriety Act. This stipulated that the landholder must be resident at least half of the year, unless especially permitted by the authorities[1]. Persistent violation would result in the property being adjudged "abandoned" and it would be released or put up for compulsory sale, usually to another member of the family[2].

For the majority of the colonists, this act was tolerable since the veterans that made up the majority of the Assembly of Citizens were freeholders of their land and so were not affected. It was those merchants and gentry who leased land from Drake and the Company for business ventures that were affected and they sent members of their family to the colony to act as residents in their stead. This enabled an early empowerment of younger sons or women of the family who exercised legal right as landholders while the de facto owners of the land were in England.

This act and his many queer ventures made Thomas Drake a figure to be wary of in the colony and made him enemies in the metropole. Still, it was difficult to touch him with his remaining in Drakesland for most of his life and the control his exercised over the East India Company. His policy of neutrality during the unrest of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms made him less enemies than he otherwise could have made and prevented Cromwell or Charles II from attempting to take action against him.

Opposition to him in the colony came from sectarian agitators after the Drakesland Toleration Act of 1632 was passed, which was similar to the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 in that religious freedom for Christians was encoded in law, though it did not specify Trinitarian Christians unlike in Maryland. And also unlike in Maryland, the act remained despite the Roundhead victory in the English Civil War and the eventual Glorious Revolution.

The conflict between Catholics and Protestants was political and sometimes, though seldom, physical. Thomas accepted and encouraged refugees of all stripes from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (as well as the Thirty Years' War) and so the colony had some Catholics and some Protestants, often as neighbours or sometimes in clusters of farms and neighbourhoods. The majority were peaceable but the unrest in the British Isles often flared tensions within the colony and Catholics were often afraid of the Protestant majority and the notably Protestant Thomas who exercised near regal authority over the colony.

Two families dominated the colony: the Catholic Hawkins and the Protestant Drake. For the 17th Century, both were united in blood, friendship, business and marriage and the cooperation between the de facto leaders of their respective religious communities in the colony eased tensions between Catholics and Protestants. Sectarian colonial violence seen in Maryland during the Plundering Time, the Battle of the Severn and the Protestant Revolution led by John Coode never occurred in Drakesland. What violence there was were feuds by frontier-based veterans who exacerbated land disputes with old wartime grudges and religious animosity. The colonists achieved a kind of open religious acceptance and ambivalence of differences between themselves that Britain lacked, especially as religious hatred was turned towards the heathen natives.

Colonial Military

The militias of the colony were used for defence, retaliation (and pre-emptive strikes) and slave-taking. The disparate and disunited Khoisan peoples were quickly and ruthlessly picked apart by slavers from the Cape. By 1640, these natives were either enslaved or killed, destroyed by the white man's hunger for land and slaves. The survivors escaped into the Kalahari Desert, though English slavers continued to look for them, preferring their smaller, weaker band societies to braving the dangers of the larger, more united Nguni tribes to the east.

But since the population of Khoisan was only around 15,000 and spread throughout south-west Africa in pastoral bands, there was little desire by the Europeans to sell them abroad, instead putting them to work in the estates, settlements and farms around the Cape of Good Hope. To compete with the Portuguese slavers abroad, the Drakesland settlers needed a quantity of people to sell that could only be found in the tribes and clans to the east. These Nguni were bribed to attack each other for slaves to sell to the English settlers and soon wars were started for the express purpose of taking captives to sell to the whites. Weakened tribes were often then attacked and enslaved by bushrangers.

With its origin as a fort and military outpost to control naval shipping, Gloriana, capital city of Drakesland, was well defended against native incursions. The same was said of the colony up to the Great Escarpment, beyond which was the domain of the bushrangers. The eastern frontiers, stretching by the decade, were where the colony focussed its militia. As they expanded their territory they came into increasingly violent conflict with the tribes of the east and the bands of the north, with raids on farms and the death of women and children inciting the colony as a whole to bloody war.

The most significant military action the colonists of Drakesland took were mercenaries participating in the fighting in Angola during the Dutch-Portuguese War, helping the Portuguese recapture Luanda in 1647 and obtaining land grants in Angola in return for military service. These contacts in Angola helped Drakesland interests and the East India Company understand and influence the Kingdom of Kongo and the Kingdom of Ndonga and Matamba, which had sought to drive out the Portuguese with Dutch help. In 1661, the marriage treaty of Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal, placed Luanda in possession of the English Empire, as part of Catherine's dowry to Charles. This was largely thanks to lobbying from the Drakeslanders and the pre-existing presence of English mercenaries and settlers in the colony.

The military and slavery walked hand-in-hand since the beginning of the Drakesland colony. Where the bushrangers could not shatter tribes the militia were called on to do so. Slaves were taken in vengeful punitive expeditions and tribes were made to submit to colonial law and mastery or perish. The rivalry between the Nguni tribes made for temporary alliances of convenience with the English and resulted in little in the way of a united native front against the expansion of Drakesland, at least for the first century of the colony's existence.

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[1]: Exemptions for the act were given to those in militia service or travelling abroad for business or diplomatic meetings on behalf of the Company or the Crown. Sometimes landholders bought permits so they needn't go through the complicated legal drudgery of sending someone to hold the land for them, a power that could be abused easily and have their plantations stolen from them.

[2]: The Landholders' Propriety Act was later amended in the 19th and 20th Centuries to increase in scope and strictness in response to the changing times and social situation. 3/4 of the year a landholder must be in residence and the act of sending someone to be an official resident while still taking the profits was cracked down upon, especially as Drakan nationalism took greater hold on the Dominion.
 

SAVORYapple

Didn't realize there was an update. Very interesting way to go about social advancement for females and religious tolerance early on.
 

SAVORYapple

Municipal Engines said:
Thanks. Got some more bits in the works too.
Click to expand...

Might there be significant influxes of Jewish colonists as well, in the future? I'm thinking of the breakup of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but there could be a steady trickle regardless. I don't think Drake and Hawkins will be particularly picky, and with hostile natives the various religious/ethnic groups should be united regardless of conflict. The development of scientific racism in this TL should also be interesting, and would probably initially come out of the Domination.
 
traveller76

traveller76

Division

I am thinking in the port cities the various minorities will find spaces with various ethnic/religious quarters. Plus the demand for manpower on the frontier may make distinctions moot. I see a divide between those in the more settled/urban locations and those on the fringes similar between 'city-slickers' and 'hayseeds'.
 
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