The Isle of California

[ezgo394]

A very interesting design. While I'm not sure on the feasibility of the two turrets amidships, it's certainly intriguing!
Also, nice work on the carrier!

[Voyager989]

A Brief History of Aururia United
Prehistory and Early History:

~68,000-40,000 BCE: The first humans arrive in Australia.
~35,000 BCE: The first "Californians" are born, whence the sponge-like lifeform is known to have begun to colonise the human population. Before the land bridges sink, the entire continent of Sahul is known to have been so affected.
~8,000 BCE: The first evidence of wattle tree, sugarcane and root crops being intensively cultivated.
~7,000 BCE: The first evidence of intensive fishing of coastal waters.
~6,000 BCE: The first evidence of artificial wetland management and fish farming inland.
~5,000 BCE: "Civilisation". Small towns of 3,000 souls are wide-spread.
¬3,000 BCE: Development of Chieftainess-led city-states like those of Mesoamerica, with monumental architecture of the pyramid type from the period still extant in drier areas. Integrated holistic agriculture also of the Mesoamerican pattern.
~2,000 BCE: Relatively complex and sophisticated culture. Initial use of high complicated copper and bronze forms, but not for tools or weapons. Extremely complicated uses of rope-based tension begin, including the invention of the suspension bridge.
¬1,500 BCE: Confederacies of city-states begin to form, like the Triple Alliance of the Aztecs. Earliest experiments in the creation of copper weapons and tools. First regular use of string-and-hair based writing.
~1,000 BCE: The Sister Empires, one of the Papuan highlands, and the other in the southern part of the Dividing Range flourish, with widespread use of copper and bronze and extensive road networks. These two will dominate the land for the next thousand years in various dynastic incarnations, and introduce the concept of territorial rule, bureaucratic government, and nationhood beyond city-affiliation into Aururian culture. Seal Script based on impressed forms of hair-and-twine writing strings begins to be used in permanent inscriptions.
~180 CE: Hatepe erupts. Sister Empires era ends in chaos and war, establishing a common theme of Aururian history.
~200-300 CE: Lowland civilisations come to the fore, as the highland civilisations stagnate in the post-Hatape era, breaking apart into isolated city-states.
¬700 - 1000 CE: "Aururian Warring States" period, when populations and civilisation have recovered to the point of war and contest between a limited number of very large Queendoms in Aururia.
~1,000 CE: An empire based in the northwestern coast rises to dominance over her rivals and begins to spread control over the continent. Over the next hundred years, this Empire will unify, through diplomacy and war, the lands of Sahul.

Introduction to the rise of the Empire:

The Yhiist religion came out of the ancient polytheist beliefs of the Aururian motherland peoples. The religion holds a belief in Yhi, the Goddess of Sun, Light, and the Entire Universe; Wuriupranili, created from her tears upon Earthen soil, and impregnated also from her tears, with her daughter, Anjea, who leaves and intercedes for humans on behest of Yhi. From the polytheistic origins of the faith there arose a doctrine in the 10th century, progressiing after 900, among the various Queendoms of the lowlands that were fighting amongst each other, while the remnant highland city-states lay in isolated senescence. As the various small Queendoms consolidated into larger ones and absorbed the remaining highland cities, not dissimilar from the Chinese transition from Spring and Autumn to Warring States, there also arose a series of Sages, primarily in the north of Sahul Major, who refined the religious principles of the polytheistic religion into the Yhiist "Rites" (a term customarily used to minimise the idea of disruption from the prior belief).

This doctrine held that philosophically, Yhi must be the absolute creatrix of the universe. It was absurd and impossible for there to be multiple deities--the idea of multiple centres of omnipotence was a logical fallacy of the first order. Thus, Yhi originated all things. In this context Wuriupranili was, as the legends stated, Yhi's creation as well as wife, but not a true Goddess as a true Goddess had to be omnipotent and unending. Wuriupranili and Anjea, their daughter, had neither capability and though immortal beings of great power who lived in a higher plain of existence, were not truly worthy of worship: They were friends and intercessors to the interest of Yhi, in whose image women as demi-creatrices of life as mothers had been formed, thus Yhi herself being distracted by the needs and interests of women, could allow evil to lapse into the universe. It was the duty of rightly-living sisters of the Goddess to undertake a plan of the worship and understanding of Yhi because these gestures would keep Yhi focused on her own task of upholding the sacred world order; whereas if Yhi was distracted her omnipotence was for naught, and aspects of her creation could cause trouble and evil. Anjea, as the leader of the humans, was the chief intercesstrix. Wuriupranili, as the Lady of Water, was the object of Yhi's affection, and could lead her astray or help her to remain focused on her duties as the sovereign creatrix of the universe: Therefore Anjea may always be relied upon for help, whereas Wuriupranili must be convinced that upholding universal order is superiour to her carnal desire for closeness with the all-creating Mother.

This argument, which seamlessly fused the popular traditions with an empowerment of the Yhi clergy as all-powerful, and in doing so allowed action against the clergy of the lesser deities (without interrupting the popular rituals, which could be interpreted as not worshipping the other deities as such), soon created a movement of Yhiists in the north of Aururia Proper (Sahul Major). The Seven Sages of Yhiism led a line from the arguments of the Founding Sage Atara in 893 forward through six following generations. They were sometimes supported by the Yhiist priestesses but vigorously opposed by others, and suffered repeated suppressions, sometimes violent dissensions, through a century. Their preaching of empowerment toward land-mothers (free soil yeowoman who tended the Wattle-seed gardens of integrated holistic agriculture over many generations) prompted a great threat to the petty nobility who lived off their rent; hence the low nobility were the greatest opponents of the rise of Yhiism.

Finally, however, the last Sage Yturru put down "The Doctrine of the Universal Mother" before dying a martyr to an army of Landowners in western Larrakia. Her immediate disciples fled east. Here, the sovereigns of the Duchy of Canobie chose to side with the Yhiist Reformation Clergy who sheltered the disciples of the Sage Yturru and rose in revolt in the Queendom of Coolullah in the year of 1009. After five years of religious strife the Duchess Uruava of Canobie crowned herself Queen of Coolullah under the Yhiist Rite, replacing the prior dynasty. For the most part the subsequent spread of Yhiism was peaceful for another century, with converts being oppressed, certainly, but also gained primarily through actual argument and prosyletization on behest of the disciples of the Sages, rather than by armed force such as in the spread of Islam, as most Yhiist believers would flee to Coolullah, swelling its popular, rather than actively seek resistance against anti-Yhiist forces. Certainly the House of Tyinurru saw in the ideal of all humanity (by which we mean the Touched, here--as the existence of foreigners who were not so in the west of the Indies was only crudely understood by Aururian culture at the time, though trade relations were rapidly developing which would trade this) united in the Chorus of the Singers under Anjea as implicitly empowering the necessity of a unitary state--and Anjea, not revealed to the mortal world, needed a representative thus. This allowed the dynasty to articulate a unifying claim which justified acts of conquest in religious terms.

In the 1080s the Queendom of Djieri, who had traditionally worshipped a goddess oriented with the waters of the lake, moved against the popular spread of the Yhiist Monotheism in the lower classes with a series of repressive laws which for the first time included a death penalty. In 1088 the Queen Allirea of Coolullah, mother of Amarina the Great, used this as an excuse to go to war and express for the first time that ideology of the Universalism of the Singers. She had used the Yhiist doctrine to justify allowing common women to become war archers, displacing the old tradition of only the noblewomen having the time to devote to the incredibly complicated skill of using war-bows, and added a system of training to provide regular pikewomen instead of improvised pike blocks that were traditionally called up from levies to support the Empress. These War Brigades of local, associated women, a sort of Regimental or Thematic system arose, empowering the yeowomanry as a force of support for Coolullah. This allowed her to field a much larger professional army which totally dominated and easily destroyed the Army of the Queendom of Djieri in the War of the Arrow's Shadow, at the decisive battle of Amaroo in 1092.

A coalition of Larrakia and Paruku subsequently invaded from the west, fearing a Queen who had just deposed and annexed the entire realm of one of their Sisters. Both armies were however defeated in three years of war, and from 1095 forward peace uneasily reigned. In the Yhiist doctrine, however, was the belief that the Singers must be united under Anjea to properly keep the balance of the world--the Singers being the community of Yhiist Women (or Touched women more generally)--a world-unifying doctrine that morality and good order would only be upheld by Yhi if she were sung to by the whole of her creation in unified voice. This doctrine, created a vision of world-Empire which thoroughly entranced the young Princess of Coolullah, Amarina.

When Amarina came to the throne in 1103, she refused to maintain the religious toleration edicts of the Peace with Larrakia and Paruku and ordered all women in the lands of Coolullah and Djieri to acknowledge that Yhi was the Universal Omnipotent Mother, and that Wuriupranili and Anjea, though powerful supernatural beings, were only her creations. Larrakia and Paruku declared war, and Amarina was ready for them. She quick-marched west to the pass of Kakadu and met there the combined enemies of her enemies, deploying professional troops on both flanks in the high country, archeresses that covered an advance of her pike out of the narrows of the pass and allowed her to position her Noble Archers main body to dominate the field. The Queen of Larrakia died in battle and her daughter was taken as Amarina's Battle-Captive and wife (their children were restored to the throne of Larrakia as the first of the subordinate Queendoms).

Paruku rallied its defences, but being historically the smallest of the Queendoms in the Warring States period. Amarina marched on the city and battering its army aside in the crossing of the Umbrawarra Gorge, took Paruku to siege. The siege ended with a terrible slaughter by Aururian standards, the population refusing to yield, and Amarina subsequently swore that she would never again conquer and annex another Queendom. This oath, however, was in the context of the Yhiist universal ideology. Henceforth, there would not be absolute conquest, but instead the royal families of the other Queendoms would be integrated with her own by her own body -- intermarrying her captive sovereigns -- and restored to their thrones to rule by their own customs, as long as the ruling Yhiist-Universalist ideology of the State was upheld. In credit to Amarina's enormous organisation and military powers, over the rest of her great reign from 1106 forwards, she never once permitted a great slaughter upon her watch.

In the next nine years three more wars were fought, twice defeating an alliance of Watjubaga and Tjibarr and taking borderlands from them, and driving the women of Yuggera back across the mountains and establishing the border favourable to the old claims of Coolullah. However, the situation seemed stalemated... But in 1117, the Queen of Tanamerah, or the south of Sahul Minor, died, and her daughter, who had been promised to Amarina and betrothed to her in alliance before the Queen of Tanamerah had withdrawn the offer on account of the War of the Rites in 1103, voluntarily reentered the contract, marrying Amarina and willingly pledging her Queendom and sizable navy. This, her first love of her life, was the woman who invested her with the traditional accrutements of the claim of Imperial rule, using both the styles of the Northern and Southern (the Two Sisters) Empires, to achieve a universal pretence. With their galleys ranging ruthlessly along the coast in six years Yuggera and Wajuk were subjected and their Queens married into the dynasty. But contrary winds prevented the crossing of the Great Bight by any fleet, and the strength at sea of Yuduwungu was great. Likewise, a tremendous alliance of Yuduwungu, Watjubaga and Tjunini-Kurnawa made the southeast an ironclad line against her rule.

Amarina turned herself to projects of peace, namely the unfinished canal of her mother that was needed to unify the basin of Djieri with the rivers of the north. It would also allow the ships of Tanamerah access to the southeast, through Lake Djieri and the canals that Watjubaga had built into it from their innumerable interlinked rivers. The project was finished in 1127 after having been initiated in 1090, and an inland fleet gave Amarina the power to fight with enormous numbers of galleys against the inland forces of Watjubaga, in battles to rival the Chinese "Red Cliffs". The campaign's swiftness was spectacular; in two years Watjubaga's cities had fallen and in a single season she campaigned over the mountains to seize the capital of Watjubaga. The Queen of Tjunini-Kurnawa resisted until her fleets were defeated in the deep water Battle of Erith in the Bass Straits and finally in 1135 all of Sahul Major and Tjunini-Kurnawa was unified by the Empress Amarina the Great.

Still, the unity of the Sisters demanded by the theology of Yhiism was not complete. To the north, protected by an ornate fastness of incredible mountains, reposed the often very distinct Queendom of Biirungdêwata, with its croppage of taro and yams and profound cultural differences from the rest of the sphere of Aururian civilisation. Amarina sent fleets to the west and east, in the meantime exploring islands which had been unified in all or in part under the reign of the Touched -- colonies in the Moluccas, Timor, and Halmahera were found, whereas to the east the Solomons were found to be inhabited entirely by primitive savages, but Singers, not Beach-Apes, nonetheless. The fleets settled bases from which to control and exact tributes to bring these areas within the scope of the Empress, and then from them launched the invasion of Biirungdêwata. By 1144 with the Queen of Biirungdêwata married to her heir, Empress Amarina had completed her objectives. She ruled for another twenty years, codifying the law of the Empire and establishing to the Queens the right to henceforth choose from among her progeny her successors... A right easily given to them, now that she was the mother, mommy, or grandmother or grandmommy, of every living Touched Queen. The triumph of the Yhiist Rite completed and the Empire unified in law and by the system of canals that she had devoted her peace to building, the crown of the Imperial System was finished in her last years, an enormous capital of a hundred thousand women, Mayi-Thakurti, a planned city at the heart of the Empire and designed and fit for the job of being a supreme Imperial capital. The next hundred and twenty years were a time of peace, good order, and immense prosperity: The Golden Empire. But the Trickster's Older Sister, the Island Slayer, would rumble from her sleep again, and evil and chaos again stalk the land. Nor was the glorious construct of Amarina the Great alone in the world.

1257: The Eruption of Mount Rinjani on the island of Lombok spreads an enormous ash plume downwind, bringing about a year without a summer in even the northern hemisphere. Directly downwind, the eruption, probably the most powerful in the past 4,000 years, might well have wiped out Aururian civilisation were it not for the Wattle Seed being the agricultural staple of their diet. The stubborn trees could regrow from the roots and outlast the terrible effects of the eruption. Nonetheless, it caused immediate chaos, and the slow recovery led to a wave of peasant rebellions.

1265 - 1300: Several Queens are overthrown by rebellions, rebel leaders replacing them, and open defiance to the Empire results. The armies, unable to march or be sustained in the famine, fritter idly away, and California enters a period of senescence and war. For the next thirty-five years the Empress barely controls more than the capital, and can barely feed it. The population of Mayi-Thakurti plunges, Queens and Duchesses fight for power, and rebellions shake the Empire to the bone. The Empress Kolora, badly affected by her mother's depressive resignation at the chaos caused by the eruption of Rinjani, attempts little other than to hold on to Coolullah, and many of the Queens contemptuously address her as only the Queen of Coolullah as she was never elected Empress.

1300 - 1328: Kolora's daughter is cut to a different mettle. The Empress Arinya rides the recovery of agriculture through a series of hard-fought personal battles with rebellious Duchesses to reassert control over the old Djieri and Paruku crownlands. Most of the Queens are as crippled by a refusal of the Duchesses--the whole period of 1257 forward being called the Era of Duchesses in Aururian history--to obey as well. It was in this period that the Crownlands' had their system of nobility reformed to eliminate hereditarianism in ruling land, titles instead being granted for life by merit in the Chinese fashion, but the reform was never successfully extended to the Queendoms. After twelve years of war, Arinya has forced several of the rebellious Queens to re-acknowledge her authority, only for another volcanic eruption in Ecuador to cause a second year without a summer in short order. Though nowhere as bad as the first, it sets back her designs for recovery. She still manages in forcing the Queens at swordpoint to acknowledge both her Mother's and her own Imperial reigns as rightful and declaring her daughter Yara as the legitimate successor.

1328 - 1340: After the death of the Empress Arinya, her daughter the Empress Yara largely succeeds in reestablishing tribute by the remaining disobedient Queens, holding a quorum of the Queenly Council and starting to suppress and eliminate truculent Ducal lines which refuse to reestablish Imperial law and order. The process is again rudely interrupted, this time by the arrival of the Black Death. Though Aururians are enormously resilient to the Black Death by their biology, the plague nonetheless killed up to 15% of the population in some areas and perhaps 10% of the entire Imperial population; a small price compared to the 30 - 40% of some other areas of the world but severe enough to drive the Empire back into chaos. Yara spent the rest of her reign fighting rebellions and accusations the plague proved Yhi was displeased with her reign as the Universalist Matriarch.

1349 - 1380: The reign of the Empress Matari was agreed to by the Queens when Yara gave up pressing her own daughter and instead presented a grand-niece untainted by association with the Imperial Court. She was accordingly widely accepted and in a 31 year reign succeeded in bringing all the Queendoms back into the Empire except for Biirungdêwata and Tjunini-Kurnawa, which had again established themselves as fully independent states; Timor, Halmahera, and the Solomons having been forgotten by the wayside of the chaos of the Years of the Duchesses. Matari succeeded by 1356 in establishing this strong core to the Empire, and spent the rest of her reign in peace, reestablishing the regular bureaucracy and repairing canals. She was universally celebrated by the chronicles of the period as a wise and just Sovereign who proved correct the Aururian custom of inheiritance of the Empress being approved by the Queens.

1380 - 1409: Within its somewhat reduced borders, the Empire completes a full recovery, reestablishing a regular administration down to the lowest levels, and again providing peace and eliminating internicine warfare. The Empress Allirea crushes the Last Revolt of the Duchesses in 1389, and bans the maintenance of more than one regiment in total strength and not more than 100 archers by any Duchess outside of the professional armies of the Queens and the Empire. She focuses on the internal development of the nation rather than the expense of warring with Biirungdêwata or Tjunini-Kurnawa, which would require a great fleet to be built, and begins the maintenance of friendly trade ties with the Mahapajit Empire of the Malay Lands. Then, one day, on the coast of Larrakia, the sun itself is blotted out. The ghostly image of clouds obscuring a setting sun, the quaint disputes of Aururian civilisation are masked into the shimmering arrival of an enormous fleet of ships coming forth with pale men on the decks of the enormous junks, rigged with silk and banded in iron.

1411 - 1435: The expeditions of Zheng He to the southeast and then west into the Indian Ocean were primarily about stabilizing Chinese ocean trade routes and protecting the rights of overseas Chinese. They necessarily entertained close connections with the Mahapajit Empire in establishing its obedience to its tributary master in the Yongle Emperor. For six years the expeditions of the Ming had provided steady and fragmentary data on the existence of a great southern Kingdom of women. Thus between the Third and Fourth Great Voyages of Zheng He to the southeast and west came the First Aururian Voyage. The Aururians, not being known to the Chinese, were not part of the tributary system even notionally, so the great expedition was outfitted to conduct a reconaissance of the trading partners of the Mahapajit.

The Aururian sources do not record the great "Treasure Ships" often associated with the expeditions, but instead assert the largest vessels had eight huge sails of silk and were of a size appropriate in a junk for a displacement of 2,000 tons, thus corresponding with the "Horse Transports" of the official lists. This argument has been used as supporting evidence for the Chinese assertion that the enormous Treasure Ships were just Yangtze barges for the Emperor to review the fleets. Nonetheless, heavily armed with up to twenty-four bronze cannon, a vast array of ships from the two largest sizes of transports and two smaller sizes of warships swarmed over the entrances to the great gulf on which Larrakia sits. The Queen faced thirty thousand Chinese soldiers without warning.

The Chinese, for their part, were amazed that the stories were true: Here were dark-skinned people but unlike those of the coast of Africa, entirely female and living in a nonetheless comprehensive society. They in turns praised and denigrated: Tidiness and order and obedience in society contrasted with immodesty, unnatural occupation and interest. The Aururians for their part called the eunuchs people (That is to say, women), and likely thought they lorded over the men of the fleet as a matter of course, having not encountered a large body of castrated men in leadership positions before. Likely the Imperial Court in Mayi-Thakurti even thought that the Great Celestial Emperor was one at first. The Chinese, in providing horses, silk and clothes in general astonished the Aururians with the immensity of their gifts, and in turn provided the Chinese gold, which was taken as a token of tribute. No embassy was exchanged, however; Larrakia's Queen demurred that she herself owed her daughterly loyalty to the Empress in Mayi-Thakurti, whom the Chinese used the same terms to refer to as the Japanese Emperor.

The expedition returned to China, where the Yongle Emperor's court made plans, after the next regular expedition of the treasure fleet, to send another fleet to secure emissaries and the proper submission of the Aururians to the Chinese throne. This was again undertaken as an intercalendar separate voyage starting in 1415 and arriving at the port of the Imperial Capital in 1416. The fleet numbered more than 250 ships. Zheng He led a great expedition inland in person to the Imperial capital of Mayi-Thakurti, which in those times was a city of more than 200,000 women, overflowing in abundance of gardens and public baths and surrounded by walls, well-supplied by canal barges. This required a certain skill to secure the proper effect: Therefore demonstrations of a massed battery of 200 cannon, and of large numbers of rockets, were conducted for the Aururian court, 4,000 horses were presented as gifts, and Zheng He asked to see the largest storehouse in the capital. He then arranged for those storehouse to be filled seven times over with silk clothes for the Imperial court; in Aururia where only one plant produces fibers and they of not the best quality for clothing, the amount of wealth represented was easily worth its volume, not weight, in gold. This storehouse was also filled three times with fine China ceramics, and then again with tea.

In return, the Imperial Court submitted to the Celestial Emperor by the customary forms, and one princess of the house of Tyinurru was sent with enormous quantities of gold and a menagerie of the native animals of Aururia to the Ming Court as an emissary. It was during these negotiations that the Chinese discovered the process of Aururian reproduction, which was reported back along with the emissary. The only result of this however was a formal Imperial Rescript directing that men should not take Aururians as wives as it was unhealthy and improper for both sides. The emissaries remained with the court until returned home in a third intercalendar voyage in 1420. It was during this voyage that the Empress explained to the new set of emissaries, who went to the Imperial court, the problem of the refusal of Biirungdêwata and Tjunini-Kurnawa to properly submit to Imperial rule. There was great debate in Mayi-Thakurti over this request, but in the end the Empress saw an advantage in the fleets and the tributary relationship. The emissary again remained in China for a long time, securing in 1424 a special voyage outfitted for war. She returned with Zheng He, who first stopped in Palembang, and then the great fleet set out on a true voyage. First collecting a great number of Aururian archers from Mayi-Thakurti, the fleet sailed back around Larrakia.

Sailing favourably with the wind, it crossed the Great Bight and arrived in the southern ports, making a rendezvous with the local Aururian armies and galleys, and together sailed against Tjunini-Kurnawa, defeating its fleet in naval battle. Landing the troops on the shores of the island, the Queen at once submitted and the Empress' representative convinced Zheng He of her sincerity, avoiding for her the fate of being dragged to Beijing in chains. The fleet then sailed north along the east coast of Sahul, standing wide away from the Great Barrier Reef, and in doing so obscuring the existence of the Strait of Torres, which the Empress had desired to be kept secret from the Chinese. The fleet thus presented itself largely intact to the eastern capital of Biirungdêwata. Here the galleys outright surrendered without firing a shot, and the Aururian army was placed with no bloodshed, though the Queen fled into the interior, she would ultimately submit to the Empress in 1430. All together three years had been spent on the operation.

The Treasure Fleet then returned home to find an edict had been passed banning further voyages. This trapped the latest emissary in China from 1426 - 1433 inside of China, where she lived in the Imperial capital in her own estate as a guest of the Emperor. She was returned home during a stop in Larrakia on the Seventh Voyage of the treasure fleets, but was replaced by a new emissary, who after sailing on the voyage with Zheng He found herself stranded in southern China by the permanent cessation of the treasure fleet sailings in 1435 as the Confucian element wont out at court and Zheng He died. She was ultimately given in 1439 permission to outfit one of the veteran ships of the Seventh Voyage for a private journey home, and did so. The Ming did not receive emissaries again from California--the published records of China had shown the real nature of the state -- nor seek them out, until the very late Ming, when the Aururian state had begun to recover and respond to western encroachment.

1435 - 1501: A Peaceful Twilight.

Cowed by the ominous threat of the Ming Treasure Fleets, the Queens obeyed the Empress, at least nominally, for the next sixty-six years. In this period Chinese and Mahapajit traders traveled extensively to Larrakia, the official port for trade with the outside world, and the Empresses sent colonists and soldiers to the Solomon islands and reasserted Imperial authority in a land which while thoroughly Touched had not seen it since the 1260s. An age of absolute prosperity, it was also a time of extremely weak central authority. Driven by the Ming example the Empress was forced to sharply reduce the tribute demanded from the subordinate Queens, and they essentially acted independently of the Imperial centre.

As the memory of the Ming fleets faded, so did the fear of them, and the steady actions of the Queens to assert their independence again resumed. A fateful event finally occurred. The Empress Sinasina died in 1501 in childbirth (an extremely rare occurrence for Aururians). This meant her daughter, Princess Tallara, had not been nominated as successor. In the Irish fashion, inheiritance was through direct womb-descendants of the Empress Amarina, but any such woman could be the heir. The heir was chosen by the council of Queens, and then automatically succeeded after her mother. This made the system virtually ironclad, since normally the Empress simply compelled the Queens to accept her daughter as heir (though in rare cases the Queens had forced acceptance of another Tyinurru) on the girl's birth or well before the Empress died. Sinasina's death in childbirth however meant that there was no heir.

And the Queens were not interested in one. Having enjoyed sixty-six years of not merely prosperity but veritable independence from the Imperial throne, only the Queen of Larrakia, dealing with a growing surge of Islamic piracy as the Mahapajit collapsed in the Indies, had any great support for the restoration of strong Imperial rule. The use of Ming ships to reassert Imperial authority in breakaway Queendoms had severely injured the prestige of the dynasty, and as a result there was a great desire for independence which had not been seen before despite the religious ideology of the state, which by using foreigners had been somewhat violated. The result was that Princess Tallara grew up barely controlling Mayi-Thakurti via her ministers. Control was reasserted over the crownlands, but as Queens pursued petty disputes and border wars with each other there was no effective central government, no ability for Tallara to claim the Imperial crown, and no actual ability to reassert Imperial authority.

1501 - 1527: The Interregnum.

The result was a 26 year interregnum during the childhood of the Empress Tallara, in which Queens fought each other and annexed territory by war, conducted their own foreign policy, and set out expeditions to the Solomons and even beyond, encountering for the first time the Touched population of Kanaka and Fiji, which had spread out from Kanaka and the Solomons and partially but not entirely converted the local population. These were the maximal explorations of the age of the junk, conducted independently of central control. The Queen of Tanamerah in particular tried to assert control over the Solomons and ended up in a sustained war with the Queen of Biirungdêwata.

In the meantime, Larrakia was involved in an increasingly desperate struggle. Ignoring the Ming-era prohibition on Aururian conquest of western islands, she landed in Timor and built up there a base from which to attack Muslim raiders, ultimately controlling about half the island by the end of the interregnum. Fitting out large war-junks was of enormous expense, however, and prevented Larrakia from offering substantial assistance to the Princess Tallara. She turned north to Tanamerah, where she sought out marriage alliance after leading a small force across the border to the east to force Yuggera to submit, which had maintained a peaceful stance in those years and was not willing to war for the sake of independence. With Yuggera's Queen loyally contributing troops subsequently, the Princess, not having any rightful greater title and relying on her wife the Crown Princess of Tanamerah, launched a campaign through the south, forcing a quorum of the Queens to assemble by arrow's-flight after three sharply contested battles. They nominated her Empress in exchange for pardons, but she then shocked them by seizing their daughters to the capital as hostages, and sending out Imperial Intendants to force reforms.

1527 - 1535: Reconsolidation.

A second revolt was attempted, and a second army was sent to the south, crushing the opponents of renewed Imperial power. These battles, using cannons, rockets, crossbows and Chinese horses to augment the traditional archeress and pike, were some of the most terrible in Aururian history in terms of casualties, and broke the power of the southern Queendoms. Henceforth the Empress banned the keeping of armies by Duchesses that were of greater strength than 100 women, and allowed active, professional troops, as opposed to levies, of no more than one regiment from the defeated southern Queens. This established the basic format of the Queenly Militia or Territorial force that was readapted into a formal territorial army in the modern era. Tanamerah and Larrakia secured an exemption for naval forces, which led to the modern Naval Militia.

This time, in a surprise to Biirungdêwata, which traditionally expected invasions from the south to come by the sea, the Empress Tallara brought her army through the snowy mountains and cold valleys of the heights of the dividing range of Sahul Minor, and descended into the heartland of Biirungdêwata via land. This famous crossing of the incredibly treacherous mountains, likened to the Crossing of the Alps by Suvorov, allowed her to deliver her army against the western capital of Biirungdêwata at Dabra, and besieging the Queen of Biirungdêwata at once. This time her entire family was dismissed from the Imperial service and banished to the Solomon Islands, forced to intermarry with local Solomon chieftainesses, and a cadet branch thoroughly intermarried to the Tyinurru was placed on the throne instead. Satisfied by this, Tallara turned herself to Imperial reforms, creating an all-Imperial bureaucracy that could constrict the ability of the Queens to act independently by making the local tax collectors in their own realms answerable to the Empress rather than to the Queens. She likewise put the canal crews and canal mistresses, who collected the all-important central agricultural tariffs, under fully Imperial control. In doing so, she eliminated the ability of the Queens to fiscally martial resources for future revolts. At this point the Aururian state moved toward centralization, instead of the disintegration of the European Holy Roman Empire.

1535 - 1595: The Empress Tallara ruled subsequently for 55 years in peace, dying at a very advanced age of 88 in 1590. This period of strong Imperial rule brought about the creation of a new Queendom of Kokopo out of the Touched islands to the east, restoring regular rule therein. Daughters of the local Chieftainesses with the line of Biirungdêwata united to form the new monarchy, the Blonde-Women of the East as they were sometimes poetically called for the common feature of curly blonde hair which was much rarer in Aururia proper (through intermarriage the gene has since spread widely). Her daughter, Tallara II, followed her to the throne with her inheiritance having been long since secured. The only sour note was the absence of Tjunini-Kurnawa from the Empire, which had resisted further attempts at inclusion. Far from the Muslim threat or the warring of Fijians, Tongans, and Samoans newly discovered to the east, they were a low concern, and before she died Tallara had been more concerned with securing the conquest of Timor and making it yet a new Queendom, diluting the power of the Queens further by increasing their number.

In doing so, however, the Empire, once again prosperous, encountered for the first time rumours of new fleets of great ships of white men in the waters of the Indies, late in the Empress' reign settling near Flores. Likewise, around 1569 a group of them had reputedly come from a completely different direction: The East. These men had arrived at the Kokopo islands and treated with a local Duchess of the southern islands and been bought off to return home with gifts of gold and provisions after staying for several months and causing trouble by stealing from and harassing the local people. For two decades they did not return, and with the young new Empress worried about the activities of such men on Flores to the west (and not sure if it were good or bad on account of the blockade they had flung up against Muslim raiders), nobody noticed until one day a large fleet of many sail descended upon the Solomons, and raided and burned several towns. The news did not reach the Imperial capital until after the fleet had turned south, and arrived off the coast of the city of Neridah in Yuduwungu. It was to be a most fateful encounter.

1596: The Spanish.

In the far southern lands of the world there was commonly understood to exist the great continent of Australia, to counterbalance the weight of land in the northern regions. It was here that the novelist Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo set the story "Las Sergas de Esplandián" at the turn of the 16th century, telling of the great Queen Califa, who with her legions of Amazons upon Griffins, led a race of black women who needed no men and fought as men, and better than men, too, in a land crowned and anointed in endless quantities of gold. It was from the Portuguese in the early 16th century, only two decades after Montalvo's epic and during the time when Europe was flush with the mysteries of the conquest of the Americas, that legends began to pass in the seafairing towns of Iberia that there was indeed such a land, the land of the Amazons of the South, set below and to the east of the spice islands.

And in newly conquered Peru, the navigator Álvaro de Mendaña heard these legends filtering back into the colonies, including one, most prominent, which held the land of the Califa to be the land of the Lost Gold Mines of King Solomon, the land of the Queen of Sheba herself, which had been given back over to Paganism since the ages of the Old Testament. In 1567, Mendaña, the nephew of Lope García de Castro, the Viceroy of Peru, was given two ships and set sail from Callao Peru to the west, sailing much further south than the prior crossings which had followed the route of Magellan to the northwest. After many adventures and hardships at sea, his two galleons set into a marvelous realm of islands. Here, Chinese-style ships, junks, sailed between the different islands around double-hulled canoes of large size, all rigged with battened sails. They were filled with women, black skinned but sometimes blonde haired and curly, who wore almost nothing in the way of clothes. They had towns and cities of stone construction down to the shore, lacking in substantial defences.

He hove into one of the ports, and was presented to the Duchess of Makira, who demanded to know if he was from the Emperor of Chin. Instead averring that he was a servant of the Emperor of lands to the East, and representative of the Christian faith, he attempted to convert the locals. His men, causing trouble, led for the Duchess of Makira to order him out; to quiet his return journey, his ships were given gold, which was astonishingly plentiful and cheap throughout the markets of the land, both as pure gold for simple ornaments and gold alloyed with copper for other uses. Astonished, he returned rich to South America with tales of the immensity of the wealth of the Solomon Islands--the land of the black amazons had been found! And they were pagans who walked on streets paved in gold.

For the next twenty years, Mendaña, no fool, lobbied at court, refusing to sail again until he was given an expedition to rival that of Cortez, for nothing less would be sufficient in his design of conquest. Despite the enormous wealth which had been given casually as a bribe to make him leave, the great cost of the expedition nearly bankrupt him and required wide Royal lobbying. It was finally assented to on the design that it could spare Spain from the late defaults of debt caused on account of the adventure against Elizabeth. With this design conceived, four ships with priests, women and children for a settlement, were to be escorted by 11 ships from Peru, 18 ships sent from Portugal, and 10 ships sent directly from Spain proper, all fitted for war and carrying two tercios of pike and shot, 28 field guns, and 400 cavalry. With this force assembled he set sail from Callao Peru in 1593, and briefly occupying the main islands of the Marquesas, beat against contrary winds to arrive exhausted off Makira. Descending on the coasts of Guadalcanal the population of the towns fled inland as the Spanish landed, throwing down temples to erect a church and plundering gold and fine china left behind in their wake, seizing the yam storehouses for food and resting in the abandoned towns.

The information of the attack arrived to Tallara II, who by now was well aware of the great swathe the Portuguese had set into the western islands. Accordingly a powerful fleet was prepared to sail to the Solomons to fight the incursion of the white men, consisting of many war-junks of the largest type armed with bronze cannon. The fleet missed Mendaña, who after recovering the strength of his forces and interrogating locals for information, set sail to the southwest. He lost three ships wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, and thus rather than descend upon Yuggera turned south to where he could find ultimately the fine and large harbour of Neridah, city and duchy of the same name, within the Queendom of Yuduwungu. With 40 ships he arrived at Neridah, destroying a small Imperial naval squadron of junks in the harbour with the much heavier weight of shot of his galleons and bringing his men ashore to invest the old and decayed medieval walls of the tranquil city.

Duchess Yulubungu of Neridah was invited to accept the Christian faith and offered many prizes for turning over gold, including to become Queen of Yuduwungu. Playing for time she demurred in these things, offering instead to bring the Queen Balbringu of Yuduwungu hence for negotiations, saying she was too loyal to her Queenly Lady to act against her. Mendaña permitted this, and held a baptism for them both, wherein the Queen of Yuduwungu promised to rise in revolt against the Empress and deliver enormous tribute to the King of Spain. Mendaña soon suspected this was a trick, and turned his guns against Neridah when his scouts brought word of preparations to strength the medieval walls with a backing of packed earth. The Queen of Yuduwungu, raised her levees, but being the mass levee of yeowomanry rather than a professional army, it was thrown back by the Spanish, who met her in pitched battle and slew Balbringu the Queen of Yuduwungu in main battle when the Spanish caballeros penetrated the Aururian pike behind the fire of concentrated heavy field artillery at the battle of Kooragang. It had however been enough. her daughter met the rest of the levees to the arrival of the Empress Tallara the Second, while in the meantime Neridah painfully held out against the pounding of eighteen Spanish siege pieces.

The Duchess Yulubungu, trapped within her city, resisted any attempt or cajoling effort to make her surrender, and held all the more valiantly for it. Ulata, now Queen of Yuduwungu, set the countryside burning around Neridah and soon the Spanish themselves were also starving. The arrival of the Imperial Army saw a force of not less than seventy thousand women try to advance. The Spanish, outnumbered ten to one, were however in excellently fortified lines of circumvallation and contravallation and supported by the guns of their fleet, and the effort of the Aururians to break through, despite the horrific rain of arrows which "truly made the sun dark" to the Spanish, could not penetrate the lines and were bloodily repulsed. An attempt of the Imperial fleet to enter Neridah harbour was likewise repulsed by the anchored Spanish directing heavy cannonade against the ships which the Aururian ships could not mount a similar weight to, and Mendaña then sent out an expedition which defeated the Aururian fleet and sailed along the coast, ravaging and pillaging to bring back food for his besieging army that was itself besieged.

In this fashion the terrible dispute of the siege of Neridah continued for another year. Reinforcing Imperial squadrons blocked Mendaña's raiders from leaving Neridah harbour, and in desperation he accordingly tried to send the slaves and captives he had taken of the Aururians into Neridah to weaken them. When the Duchess turned them back, Mendaña ordered them all beheaded, and their heads thrown across the lines to the Imperial army besieging them from the outside "so that we may demoralize the pagans who have no hope in the hereafter". The bloody spectacle brought a furious attack from the Imperial army that was again repulsed, but likewise was the effort of Mendaña to counterattack, finding the impressive strength and power of the Aururian bow sufficient to punch through plate armour at point-blank range in the entrenchments (at 10 yards they could kill through plate), and wound many on the limbs at greater ranges, and combined with the generally valiant defensive resistance of the vastly numerically superiour army their defence was impossible to break through even after deep losses inflicted upon it during the repulse of the Aururian assault on the lines of contravallation on the day prior.

However, the resources of Neridah were not infinite, and with a year the food of the city was utterly exhausted; but living on rats and things grown there and perhaps on their own flesh the people had held out for more than eight months, refusing all the while to surrender. Finally, now weakened with disease and sickness and want of food, Mendaña launched an assault which overcame the battered down old walls, defending against a renewed Imperial relief effort, and punched through to put the city to a terrible sack in which the entire population was slaughtered, save a small number inside the citadel with the soldiers under the command of the Duchess, who held out in defending themselves. Yulubungu, resolving to die with her subjects, succeeded in smuggling her daughter to the Empress but in refusing to escape herself, held out another forty days in the citadel before Mendaña overcame it, burning the remains of Neridah and carting away the gold and silver of the city while throwing the mangled corpses into the bay and proclaiming it a victory for God.

A victory that could not be capitalized upon, as despite all of his efforts turned against the Imperial Army he could not break through the siege works they themselves had built, defended by cannon and rocket as well as bow and crossbow. Finding the ground impossible for an advance, Mendaña, astonished with the haul of gold and silver from Neridah, resolved to sail to the south where he now knew that the Queen of Tjunini-Kurnawa persisted in her independence from the Empire. Loading his fleet with the spoils of Neridah, he broke through the Imperial blockade with the loss of six ships and sailed south, leaving Neridah destroyed to its foundations in his wake. Entering Yanakie inlet he marched inland to besiege the great city of Yarram while sending couriers offering an alliance to the Queen of Tjunini-Kurnawa. The Queen did not immediately reply, however; Yarram proved just as willing to stand a siege as Neridah; and Mendaña was astonished when the Imperial army arrived, twice as fast as he thought possible, for while disadvantaged in many other ways the legendary foot cavalry of the Aururian professional troops could march with incredible swiftness across an immense network of roads of Roman quality.

Mendaña, seeing the situation nearly hopeless, fought in turn against two successive columns in the Battle of Yarram in an effort to retreat back to Yanakie. In both cases he defeated the successive columns, but could not avoid being encircled by the arrival of the third column vigorously attacking his force. With the other two arriving quickly, eighty thousand Imperial troops fought five thousand Spaniards. They resisted for two days and fifteen hundred broke through. The rest were slain in a day's valiant resistance, Mendaña among their number. The survivors fell back to the ships in chaos, and from the number of those slain the number of Conquistadoras -- about twenty -- were taken prisoner and given as wives to the noblewomen of the Imperial Court.

The remaining Spanish quarreled about who should lead them, the expedition to them not quite a disaster, for now all the spoils of Neridah were to be shared with many fewer survivors. Isabel Barreto de Castro, the wife of Mendaña, won out the contest, and directed that the fleet should sail south to Tjunini-Kurnawa where they might establish the planned colony in alliance with the Queen for a future expedition, and trade guns and cannon for more gold that the Queen might further resist the Empress. Arriving at the harbour of Murdunna, the fleet was indeed initially welcomed, and a colony was allowed to be established. But a few months later the walls being raised were assaulted in the night by Imperial troops that the Queen had allowed to arrive, the fleet blockaded the Spaniards into the harbour, and small boats seized several of the galleons in vigorous fighting. Isabel Barreto herself was captured and presented as a prize to the Queen of Tjunini-Kurnawa, who on hearing the terrible news of Neridah in the form of the Empress sending her the heads of those slain by the Spaniards -- and then to prove they were not invincible, the heads of the Spaniards slain at Yarram! -- had acknowledged her rightful suzerain and lain the trap for the Conquistadors. Proving once again their incredible ability, however, the Portuguese Almiranta of the Fleet under Pedro Fernandes de Queirós cut her anchors and led twenty-three ships in a thundering line with roaring cannons great in a two day long beat against the wind into open water under continuous attack, and then turned to the east and rode the Furious Fifties safely back to Chile, with half the plunder of Neridah and the survivors of the fleet.

Isolation would never again be an option for the Aururian Empire.

1598 - 1605: Gloriana!

Isabel Barreto de Castro proved an adaptable and competent woman. Adapted to her captivity, she moved energetically to turn herself from a hated butcher to a reliable noblewoman in the eyes of the Californians. She worked with her new wife and immediately proposed to the Empress the absolute necessity that, if the Empire wished to remain free, it must secure weapons from Europe and it must do so from its most natural friend, Albion, the Kingdom of England--ruled by Queen Elizabeth. Hearing of this, and having the astrolabe and the compass and captured charts of the entire world from the Spanish ships, the Empress Tallara II in fact readily assented to the sending of a powerful fleet to Europe. 22 junks of the largest type were despatched to the east, and proved themselves fully capable of sailing (there are some fragmentary records of prior circumantipolar voyages) to the Atlantic across the Antarctic ocean, and then north to England.

There the Aururian seawomen were met with astonishment and delight by the Elizabethan English of Portsmouth, with the great fleet laden with gold and spices of the orient in trade. In exchange they wished cannon and muskets, and these were purchased at greatly inflated prices, most proving to be older pieces of poor quality. Nonetheless, the trade went well, and with it, the Spanish were treated to the henceforth astonishing spectacle of one of their pagan target Empires instantly treating with their European allies, and returning home with holds laden with European arms, evading a Spanish effort to bring them to battle on account of bad weather. The expedition created an instant love in Aururia--or California as it was by then already universally known in Europe thanks to Las Sergas de Esplandián--for Elizabeth, the Elizabeth era, and all things Elizabethan and English.

With the first voyage successful, a second was outfitted, while the Spanish galleons were tested, and ultimately a unique hybrid Sino-European method of shipbuilding was constructed out of them by the Aururians, distinctive enough to be called the Aururian Galleon, and a type that persisted in variations as their main ship up until the end of the 18th century when more directly western designs ultimately won out, with some carried over indigenous innovations. These first voyages to England, however, were conducted entirely by junks, and the second great fleet brought back more arms--with the amount of money and spices in play, soon merchants from all over Europe arrived with them--as well as, in consultation with the captured Spanish women, a more aggressive effort to acquire the military treatises of Europe. A third voyage had some more limited success, the limits caused by the death of Elizabeth, far too soon to the Aururian eye, and the greater suspicion James, who desired peace with the Spanish (at least at first), levied upon their interest in guns and arms. Negotiations did as much as possible to provide non-military goods to the third Aururian trading fleet and as miserly a limit of weapons as possible, and sent them off as he traveled away to sign the peace with the Spaniards that brought an end to the hostilities of the Wars of the Armada, temporarily. Nonetheless, the image of England as the land of Gloriana and a friend in the wider world of Colonial politics to which they had now been opened remained for them, and to the English the image of the cheerful and guilelessly brave Amazons as friends against the Spanish likewise dimly lingered for future generations to kindle.

1600 - 1610: Troubles at Home.

In 1600 the volcano Huaynaputina erupts in Peru. By tradition volcanism is associated with dangers and evils and disorder in the Aururian religion, social history, and general cosmology. It has become in some respects a self-fulfilling prophecy, though in the last two major Indonesian eruptions the Imperial government worked aggressively to counter the popular panic. In 1600 the Empire was strong enough against external threats that rebellion from the Queens did not occur. The fleets were still dispatched to Europe. However, Huaynaputina brought forth a period of decades as the Little Ice Age descended onto the world in which Aururian agriculture would suffer reduced yields, at the same time that the Empress Tallara II issued a series of edicts from 1598 forward mandating shifts in production to begin the development of a system of water-driven pumps for reclaiming land from the sea and the development of wind and water mills; expanded cannon forges; and ultimately, the relocation of poor women and encouraging them to take on the job of coal miner, to supply the coke required for making iron cannon in great quantities.

Technical writings from England and the assistance of the captive Spanish women of education created a centralized Imperial plan to develop an iron industry like that of Tudor England in the Weld region, but using coal derived coke rather than charcoal. This first developed in the extreme south around Kaurna, where water transportation by canal and in the protected bays combined with availability of coal and iron through canal transportation to create the necessary characteristics for large-scale manufactury of both cannon and wheelock muskets. The last note is an important one -- the Aururian army, being relatively small compared to the enormous resources of the state (at twice the population, the Empress had no more troops in the 1600s than Louis XIV's France), the Empress considered the bow to still be extremely useful, and had an enormous quantity of trained archers. Accordingly it was not felt the typical matchlock was useful enough; it was used, but only in limited quantities, and native production and imports rapidly centred on the wheelock, which was felt to be reliable enough to be issued enmasse to professional soldier-women instead of crossbows. Thus a limited number of highly skilled women armed with wheelock muskets augmented the archers of the Empire, with both being covered by women whose arms soon roughly mimicked those of the grenadier, with grenade, axe, and armour to protect archers and wheelock-women at close quarters. Pike remained at the customary ratio for European armies of the time, and was slow to die, only being fully eliminated in the 18th century as in Russia and Sweden.

In the meanwhile, the effort to create this force required some real reordering of the national economy. This could take advantage of the marginal farmers finding themselves unable to support themselves, with yields reduced between the twin hammer of the descending ice age and the eruption of Huaynaputina, but it was unpopular, and the first large-scale peasant revolts since the late 13th century occurred as a result, forcing the Empress Tallara II to twice take the field in the 1605 - 1610 -- the first time the Empress herself had had to do so -- against peasant women arming themselves against relocations and economic dislocation. It was in these peasant revolts, some Aururian authors have asserted, that the first whispers of what was to become the Blackskirt anti-foreign ideology manifest themselves.

[Voyager989]

1610 - 1640: Struggling into the Modern World.

Aururian agriculture responded to increased wetness in the south and somewhat greater dryness in the north. The importation of crops from the Americas proved able to correct many of the deficiencies, and over the subsequent decades the challenges of the rough years of the early 17th century ended and the recovery of the Imperial economy, still largely based in agriculture, ensued. When James turned back to warring with the Spanish, he also reopened regular ties with the Aururians, who proved still willing to trade with England. The result was a very long duration relationship, crossing into the reign of Charles I, with the regular despatch of English trading fleets to Aururia which brought back spices in competition with the Dutch--a fact which naturally led to war with them as much with the Portuguese.

A new design of ship was produced, using a primarily European rig, with low castles as in the English racebuilt galleons, and a galleon hull above the waterline, but a hybrid of the hardwood junk with longitudinal stiffening wales and protruding keel in a V-hull, modified only to provide a false bow forward of the bow transom secured with chains, and a fullness amidship in the European fashion instead of the stern to improve handiness. Made watertight with internal bulkheads, the ship was completed thus to the waterline as a bulkhead-first hybrid construct, stiffened by internal torsion chains in the uniquely Aururian fashion, and then had the European-style upper hull stiffly supported by the waterline longitudinal wales. These wales bore the strength gun-deck, and the hull construction above them allowed the ship to be pierced for cannon, allowing for the mounting of a single deck of very powerful cannon, mounted relatively high above the waterline where the ports would not be easily immersed, with the extremely fine false bow being an extension of the outermost course of three courses of wood in the planking, and attached with torsion chains to the bow-transom of a junk internally, which was transformed into a collision bulkhead by virtue of this addition. A large box structure was built overhanging the stern transom, to partially protect the rather weakly attached rudder, which was controlled by chains to an indigenous developed wheel from the very first (though this wheel was attached directly to the tiller as in cheaper European designs of two centuries later), though Aururian ships normally sailed with entire spare rudders, as the design allowed an easy replacement.

These ships were rigged on the European lines, usually with four masts and the aftermost being a junk-sail instead of a lanteen, the other three full rigged. However, sometimes the ships crowded up to five full-rigged masts, these special vessels being built for the Antarctic trade, running with the wind around the world from one part of Aururia to another, so problematic were the contrary winds of the Great Bight. In the case of these ships it was sometimes a provision for all of the yards to be struck, and batten'd sails hoisted for beating against the wind into harbour, since the junk rig is self-tacking, this made the entrance of such a highly specialized large ship of 2,000 tons carrying a large cargo into port possible with a relatively small crew, making the expense of a second rig quite worthwhile. The mix of junk-rigged and conventionally rigged sails tended to persist until improvements in European rig in the 18th century on warships as a regular operating rig. One noteworthy result of the Aururian designs was a preference toward large single-deck ships, heavy frigates in short, over ships of the line which were anyway quite rare in Asian waters. Thus the huge Aururian ships seemed deceptively lightly armed, but in fact mounted a single deck of 18 - 24pdrs as well as small guns on the spar deck, with small castles in the style of a racing galleon. This made European powers dismissive of the Aururian fleet until it was actually encountered in battle; these ships were built as heavily or moreso than European Great Ships and thus could stand up to them, even with a smaller armament in number of guns.

The expense of this fleet almost necessitated adventurism with it. By the 1630s, the replenishment base in Tierra del Fuego served as a position from whence the Aururian sailors went north and in 1632 the Aururian Navy sent a fleet north to the ruins of the city of Valdivia in Chile, which was massively fortified as a base from which to support the Huiliche against the Spanish and to further raid along the coast of Chile and Peru. The voyages back to Aururia via the northern route by that time had led to the conquest of the Marquesas and several small island chains and the first integration of Polynesians into the Empire. Steadily more and more of Polynesian in a constricting circle, staring with the northern Marquesas return route from South America, would hence fall into the Empire with very little military effort. With a related effort being the war against the Portuguese in Flores and the other islands of the eastern Indies, overstretch soon threatened. Ming China was collapsing and Aururian traders were taking more direct routes to trade with the Ming, instead of going through interlocutors. With that came the demand for a stable base for the refitting of ships and maintenance of a defence against the Wokou Pirates of the Chinese seas. From this came the expedition of 1638 to Formosa, that led to the conquest of the Spanish fort of San Salvador and the maintenance of a colony in the northern third of the island for the next fifty years.

A subsequent expedition to Manila was successfully defeated by the Spanish, however, and ultimately the Empire retrenched to focus on the integration of Polynesia and the war with the western powers in the Indies; besides, the English Civil War meant a temporary cessation of trade with England, as the Republic refused to deal with the "Black Devils" and banned their ships from harbour; in that period Aururia saw its only good relations with France, which opened trade ties in turn until the Restoration saw an aggressive effort by Charles II to cultivate the Aururians as suppliers of spice. In the meanwhile, the Empire soon saw its adventures overstretched and financial problems narrow its focus onto East Asia, where great revolutions would soon end the Ming forever.

Aside: The Aururian Galleon, or an indigenous cannon-ship:

First, the keel is laid, which is a western style full-length heavy keel. The keel is cut from red ironbark as are the frames (the main transverse framings) and the three longitudinal wales at the top of the hull. That is the use of red ironbark. These are attached to each other with iron L-plates through which the wooden dowels are worked, so that iron doesn't penetrate the wood. The red ironbark is used for the dowels as well.
After that the red ironwood can be used to fill in the bulkheads, because the bulkheads are a structural feature, which will make the ship astonishingly tough. The iron L-pieces connect the frames, bulkhead, and then the longitudinally laid planks. Red ironwood is also used for the bow transom and the stern transom. Eucalypus will be used only for the bottom planks, beyond the turn of the bilge in the V-hull form that is being created. The planking is laid smoothly, but in overlapping strakes, and runs longitudinally, with interruptions in individual planks corresponding with bulkhead frames. There are three overlapping strakes of outer planking, two of which are actually structural and firmly attached at the bulkheads, thus contributing to the strength of the ship. The third is pure sheathing added to the other two.

A second defence against grounding is another strake of planks also made watertight and laid inside of the main frame planks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarrah So that the distance between the inner and outer edges of the frame planks is like a double hull. But it isn't filled with anything. To save weight. Then the Queensland maple is used for the upper planking around the waterline and the interior strakes (customarily two). In this way a total of five thin strakes of long planks are built up and interlocked with dowels until extremely rigid in the inner and outer hulls around the frames. The bulkheads are enormously rigid and contribute the main strength. At the top of the bulkheads are the three red ironbark wales. These run the whole length of the ship from bow to stern transom, the lowest being at the waterline and the highest at the top of the traditional hull. These are frame-thick reinforcements, used as an alternative to a keel in some Chinese construction, carried high and providing longitudinal strength. Interlocking with the frames they essentially provide a tensioned truss to support the hull--A shape the Aururians intimately understand-- It is on top of the third wale that the traditional European-style galleon construction takes over, and completes the gun deck.

Planks are laid across the top wale and the tops of the bulkheads to form the gun deck, which is therefore plenty strong, and a European-style hull can be built strong enough to resist giving way in a sea, so it's not a false hull, but a transition in building styles, when it is firmly affixed to the tops of the bulkheads and the uppermost wale. Between the wales, additional wood is worked in on the outside, so that the area of the traditional Aururian-Chinese hull above the waterline is four strakes thick, essentially providing an armour against lighter cannon fire. And collectively holding up the rest of the interlocking hull planks below it.

The last compartment fore and aft, Is also the longest and therefore to help resist hogging from the foremost bulkhead to the keel at the transom, a series of heavy chains are permanently fixed, and the same is done from the aftermost bulkhead to the stern transom. For the "false bow" the shape is inspired by the very narrow and pointed shape of traditional Polynesian canoe bows. This is reproduced with a false bow keelpiece that runs in a curve from the actual keel forward, with European-style longitudinal frames suspended on the wales connecting it to the hull proper, and then the planks interlap with the third strake of the outer hull, to create a smooth very hydrodynamic bow profile. The final strength to prevent it from falling off is provided by a series of additional permanently affixed chains connecting the false forward keelpiece to the bow transom of the real hull, and then a few more tensioned chains run from the top to the superstructure of the forecastle, which as in 17th century ships terminates aft of what appears to be the bow, but actually runs as far as the ship's real bow, the chains running from it serving to help tension the bowsprit (fastened to the true hull, but this creates a truss to support it), and a truss to complete the tensioning of the false bow, with the frame extensions from the wales providing the compressile resistance against regular drag forces. This turns the false bow into a kind of crumple zone for the ship. And the loss of the bowsprit is no great matter as spare batten'd sails are carried as ballast in chests at the bottom of the holds due to their weight, and can be rigged to the mainmast and foremast if needed. Both of which have a combination of traditional standing rigging and some chains, which means they are supported independent of the bowsprit. So in an Aururian rig the bowsprit can be lost without imperiling the stability of the masts. And a relatively heavy set of rig is carried from the bowsprit, as it actually relieves tension on the hull to do so.

The crew-size seems to be set by the need to strike the yards and get the battened masts up.

The stern is of course a transom, but there is an overhanging lip of the gun deck coming to a curve. So the stern actually looks something like that of Queen Mary 2 in certain respects. Chinese transom up from the waterline, then actually a continuously curved overhang for the gun deck. On each side would be a very large wooden joist, which supports the sterncastle, a single deck, with a massive square overhang. The joists protect the rudder as it projects down from where it is attached to a tiller and chains and a wheel for mechanical advantage on the tiller, like the old whaler's, and help support the large poop in the Chinese style afforded by the big overhanging quarterdeck. The sternchasers are mounted on the gun deck with the joists masking them to the sides, but hidden and recessed under the joists and the overhanging quaterdeck. The sterncastle of one deck has the steering gear inside of it, with a viewing projection coming up onto the poop from which orders are shouted down to the helm. Interestingly enough the joists would be hard to dislodge and the curve inside of them will tend to keep shot out from the gundeck, though the large poop itself will be somewhat vulnerable above that. At the end of it, supported by chains passed through the quarterdeck and affixed to the hull proper, will be the small steadying yawl mast.

The masts will be extended through to the keel as in a European ship. The fullness of the hull is reached more amidship as in the European fashion, and the length-to-beam ratio has become relatively long, instead of the very pudgy Chinese ships, though still fat by European standards; about 5:1 for the hull proper, plus the hydrodynamic bonus of the false-bow. Rather than tumblehome there is a step in the deck above the uppermost wale, usually the thickness of the wale, with the European-style upper hull resuming fastened to the inside of the wale and proceeding up to the spar deck. This step is excluded from the bow, and built over in the stern. So it's like the guns on the deck are slightly recessed, which is why the ships always carry two permanently mounted sternchasers and two - four permanently mounted bowchasers. There are various latex-like plants that can be used for sealing, along with resins and gums. The chain stayed rudder is vulnerable, but can be easily replaced.

She would carry her guns 8.5 feet above the full load waterline, versus 6.5 feet for a British 1st Rate of the 1780s at normal load. The ships are measured by the length of their gun deck, and the very longest may be pierced for 18 ports to the side, and thus bear a total armament of 40 x demi-cannon (two each fore and aft), besides 8 x 7-pdr bastard culverin to each side on the spar-deck, two forward, and four as murder pierces. For a total armament in the very large ships of 62 guns, not counting 1pdr swivels. These ships being of the same size as HMS Victory. The heaviest cannon able to be well-served aboard ship. In terms of builder's measure displacement.

The foremast and mainmast will each have three square rigged sails. One square rigged sail will be under the bowsprit. The mizzen will have a batten'd sail under a square rigged sail, the mizzen bonaventure, a batten'd sail, and the yawl mast a very small one. Likewise they innovated the open tension-stayed sail between the bowsprit and the foremast before the west. So the standard rig was 12 sails.

This type of ship would appear in 1620 and not be displaced from regular construction until the 1770s or 1780s.

1640 - 1690: The Limits of Adventurism.

The characteristic gun of the Aururian Army in the 17th century is a curious weapon. It is a wheellock, not a matchlock, with a single mechanism. This mechanism however is linked to an over/under set of barrels; relatively average in length, Aururian gunsmiths having discovered the uselessness of a particularly long barrel in a smoothbore. The gun tends to have some natural poured latex and pounded leather padding on the butt, and each barrel may be fired successively by a single mechanism to save weight and manufacturing effort, since one pan lid can only be lifted after the other already has been. This allows two shots on demand from a surprisingly light gun, no heavier than many single barreled matchlocks of European manufacture in the lightest version; the heavier version was meant to be fired from a stake as most European matchlocks were. These guns were used in relatively small numbers -- in the early 17th century firearms didn't exceed more than 1:4, which was also the ratio of pikewomen and grenadiers; archers still comprised 2:3 ratio of the Army. By the end of the 17th century, however, that ratio had been reversed with the firearm-equipped women reaching 40%, and the archers falling to 20%--and by that point, all of the archers were armed with pistols for penetrating armour at close range. The limited number of pike was used as a central defence against cavalry, the need not being greater since horses were so hard to transport in numbers among the islands of the orient.

This army, combined with horses bred from the good Chinese sort, was a distinct, unusual force. It was a truly professional force, like the old Roman Legions, in a way that armies of the 17th century in Europe were too fundamentally irregular to obtain. Because of this the army was relatively small; the Empire was only half as militarised as the French by ratio to population, for example, despite the notional number of troops available being four times greater on account of the entire population being seen as fit for arms. So it was that the force also had a corresponding much greater quality. This allowed, within the limits of their arms, small bodies to operate very competently. This was seen in the occupation of Valdivia in the 1630s and again in 1638 to Formosa with the seizure of Spanish Formosa, and the relatively easy way that small bodies of Aururian troops could defeat Polynesian warriors in the Marquesas and Tuvalu.

Conversely, however, difficulties were found in effectively projecting power. The Portuguese provided tenacious in the eastern Moluccas, and even after the loss of A Famosa were able to hold out with regular expeditions from Goa. The native warriors of Sumbawa--the famed Sandalwood Island--resisted conquest by the Aururian armies until 1685, and Flores was not decisively gained until 1690. By this point the Aururian navy was locked into combat with four Sultanates (Bima, Makassar, Tidore, Ternate), some of which were under European control, and the Dutch in Ambon. The later was a contest brought to an end by a negotiated treaty after the Glorious Revolution -- Restoration England had outright encouraged Aururian adventurism against Dutch colonies, but the tables had abruptly turned, and William secured a peace which guaranteed the Dutch East Indies in a broad sense. With the acquisition of Sandalwood Island and Flores the Aururian position was very strong, but for the next century the Sultanates and Ambon would remain out of reach, with a desultory war with Islamic bands continuing the whole while over Halmahera Island.

The Spanish also proved very hard to dislodge. Three times in the 17th century they were able to bring a siege to Valdivia, though it failed each time. They gave up--temporarily--in the 1680s as the Habsburg power in Spain reached its senescence, but the post proved costly. On the other hand, through the trade with the Mapuche it introduced the potato, corn, and coca to Aururia, and this was in its own way more than worth it to the agricultural potential of the Empire. The ready supply of guns also made the Mapuche peoples a terrible enemy to the Spanish, and failing to break through at the great Aururian trading entrepot which had grown up in the fortified lines of Valdivia, they turned to the extreme south, twice burning the far south settlements in Tierra del Fuego and sending the ship victualers and settlers fleeing into the interior. This, however, just facilitated the integration of the native peoples of Tierra del Fuego into the Touched population, making them that much harder to dislodge. Despite the great struggles and ultimate expelling of Aururian troops from Ambon, however, the century seemed a mostly positive one.

The only Spanish attempt against the Aururian mainland which was sent again occurred in the 1640s, and degenerated into farce with the revolt of Portugal from the Iberian Union in the middle of the expedition. Coming from the east, it did not break through the Aururian fleet and never actually succeeded in landing around its objective of Larrakia. The cost was heavy, and never once again was a repeat of the adventures of the conquistadors in the 1590s even entertained in the Spanish court. On the other hand, the four attempts on Manila in the 17th century by the Empresses all failed with losses, and the colony of Formosa, while a grand adventure for a time, proved unsustainable in the face of rising Qing power.

At first, the ejection of the Dutch by Koxinga removed all threat to the Aururian outpost in the north. The Aururians were nominally Ming vassals and Koxinga hoped for their support against the Chinese. The Aururian ships operating along the coast of China responded to the Qing Sea Ban by extensive trading with smugglers, and this began the first infusion of Chinese immigrants to the Empire, as the smugglers found that girls, considered worthless by Chinese culture, would fetch fine sums from Aururian shipmistresses. This trade, unable to be typified entirely as a slave trade (because every woman take was treated like an identured servant and by law had to be paid and made a freewoman in three years, but the Aururian hunger for labour was so great this was considered no real impediment to the trade), lasted for forty years in its first incarnation, and resulted in the establishment of Chinatowns in many port-cities of the northern Empire. The Qing Sea Ban was an open invitation to both Koxinga and the Aururians to harass the Qing, but in the end the Revolt of the Three Feudatories brought about a decisive end of Ming remnant and Han Chinese power. The Aururian government was never able to conceive of intervening on the behest of the Southern Ming, and ultimately the northern fortresses were brought to siege by Shi Lang in 1689. To the great surprise of all involved, they held out, but with the mainland now decisively Qing, the Aururians chose to negotiate, as it was clear forces were being built up for another great attempt at laying siege to the fortresses.

The final settlement provided for the cession of Qi'ao island in the Pearl River Delta near Macao as a trading post from which the Qing Mandarins could concentrate and observe the Aururian traders with caution and suspicion. In exchange, all of northern Formosa was handed over to the Qing, considerably improving their grip on the island. The final withdraw was in 1695, some years after the opening of the Factory on Qi'ao island. For the next 150 years, all Aururian trade with China would be limited to Qi'ao per the Qing policy with the Portuguese, but relations soon recovered viz. the harsh old Sea Ban days with the Chinese court. Northern Formosa, however, would be the first of several failed colonial adventures, some well known and others lost to obscurity. The rent of Qi'ao was established at 500 taels per annum, as with the very similarly sized Macau.

1690 -- 1717: Mary and Anne and War and Penal Transportation.


The nature of the modern state of the Californian Empire can largely be tracted to a 27 year formative span of relations with the English throne which broadly established the limits of Californian freedom of action in the 18th century and their own special relationship with the English throne, which is largely traced in Aururian histories to the reign of Queen Anne. This complicated period of exchange introduced Christianity formally to Aururia and established boundaries of "proper" behaviour from the Aururian elite which were to steadily come to predominant in Aururian culture for the next 250 years.

The Glorious Revolution was initially met with pleasure by the Aururian government, thinking that an unworthy successor to the able and friendly Charles II had been replaced with his niece Mary as Queen as in the days of Elizabeth. An embassy was sent with many fine gifts to instead find a Leviathan in Ermine, King William III, who also as Stadtholder of the Netherlands quickly disabused the embassy of anything but a stern intent to the Californian Empire. Threatening war, a treaty was signed in 1691 which secured Ambon and the vicinity for the Dutch in perpetuity, banned the Aururians from trading with the Hindu Kingdoms of Bali and Lombok, and directed them to acknowledge Bima, Makassar, Ternate and Tidore as vassals of the Netherlands, even though this was not patently true in many cases. Regular trade with England was also to be forbidden, and ships were ordered to put in to Bombay if trading with England and Ambon if trading with the Netherlands. In exchange the Netherlands would recognize the Aururian rights over Halmahera Island, Sandalwood Island, the Isle of Timor, and the Isle of Flores. These were sincere concessions, but the Aururians soon devoted most of their trade to arriving at the Danish and French Factories being established in India and relations with England were at the lowest point that would ever be known.

A series of five or six volcanic eruptions in 1690 including a major one in Indonesia contributed to the usual religious fervour in Aururia, though there was no impact to agriculture, which was considered a good omen. The decade was subsequently passed in peace, though the Empress was considered to be infuriated with the European behaviour, and further incensed toward the Catholic countries by the formal Papal declaration of anathema on the Touched Catholic populations of Flores and Timor. The Empire turned inwards until the year 1700, when a damaging major tsunami swept through its northeast territories, killing almost a thousand subjects in all and sinking many vessels and destroying shoreward structures.

In a state of peace--the Spanish were at the extreme limits of their senescence--and held at arm's length by the Europeans, they nonetheless had broadly acquired a scientific method and an educated class interested in using it. Possessing prior records of "orphan" tsunamis, namely one earthquake that badly damaged the Aururian fortress of Valparaiso which then prouduced an orphan tsunami in much of the eastern Empire, it was theorized that North America was the origin point of the 1700 orphan tsunami, and accordingly an expedition of nine galleons was sent in 1701. They reached Nueva California, founding a base at San Diego and then another at Monterey, as another objective of the expedition was to confirm the popular theory at the time that the Spanish had named Nueva California so because it actually contained a Native American equivalent of the Aururian Empire; accordingly, the forts were built to serve as bases for expeditions into the interior, where vague stories of large lakes which might be the base of populous Empires of women could exist.

After establishing the forts in 1702, the expedition sailed north, traveling along the coast of Oregon and Washington and then Vancouver Island. They charted several bays but missed the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca in extremely heavy fog, but generally recorded the incredible devastation of freshly ruined villages from the earthquake of two years prior, the collapsed forests, and other incredible evidence of massive ground subsidence. Though long neglected in western sources and in some cases accused of being an outright flight of fancy, by the modern era the expedition records, translated into English, finally became the de facto source of all information on the Great Cascadia Earthquake, and besides this on the pre-contact status and language of most of the Northwest peoples. The ships returned to the southern forts in 1703, carrying many orphaned women and others who, impoverished by the immense catastrophe, were sold by their relatives. They mostly settled at Monterey where an Aururian colonial city grew up to rival the main base at San Diego.

The expedition returned home to find the foreign relations of the Empire had profoundly changed in their absence. In 1702, to the great relief of the Empire, William III died. His heir was a woman, Queen Anne, the next full female sovereign of England after Queen Elizabeth I. Due to the trade relations developed in the past two decades between the Danes and the Aururians in India, her husband from the House of Oldenburg was also favourably disposed to the Aururians. Though his effort to succeed William as Stadtholder of the Netherlands might have destroyed this, it was roundly and viciously rebuffed by the States General, and Queen Anne shortly repaid the favour, by sending an embassy to Aururia, which was richly received, encouraging them to make a selection of a permanent ambassador to the Court of St. James and for the supply of spice to displace the Dutch in the English markets to at once begin to flow again. There were also other matters at stake, and the Empire would soon find out what these were: Europe was once again at war, and this time the participation of the Aururian Empire was desired.

In this conflict, an invasion of Peru on the behest of the Allies against France in the War of the Spanish Succession was greatly desired. The Aururians were promised the right to keep various territories, and proceed to conquer Chiloe island in Chile, to take Valparaiso and Santiago de Chile, and to advance into the highlands of Peru, actually occupying the city of Lima and being introduced there to the Coca leaf, which would ultimately be cultivated in Aururia proper. Beyond the taking of Lima in 1708, Manila was occupied by a strong fleet in 1710 after a campaign of four years. The designs of the Empress became greater: Certainly the whole of the old Inca Empire could be brought under the sway of her musketeers? The looting of the Peruvian silver mines had done temporary wonders for the Imperial treasury and accordingly the professional Aururian troops marched north, the objective reaching the height of proposing an overland offensive upon Cartagena des Indés. In India, the French Factories of Surat, Masulipatam and Bantam were reduced and conquered by a series of Aururian expeditions as well.

Meanwhile, in England, the court of Queen Anne found great favour for the Aururian permanent embassy. From 1704 forward it was in residence, and after several noteworthy cases, in 1706 an Aururian doctor was even allowed to provide some advice for the Queen Anne. She succeeded in getting the Queen to improve her diet and to resume exercising, her health and vigour responding well. This influence became a political point during the estrangement of Sarah Churchill and the Queen, but Anne was able to outmaneouvre the Churchills quite decisively with newfound vigour. An exchange of scientific knowledge flourished during the war, when English were admitted to the occupied heights of Peru. The Aururians, able to esort their own convoys, provided the luxuries of the orient to the English consumer and helped stoke the fires of interest into what was to become the notorious South Sea Bubble.

Culturally, Anne was responsible for introducing Anglican Christianity to Aururia, securing the right of the Anglican church to preach in Aururia and being instrumental in a broad Anglican ruling finding that the Bible's toleration for reproductive sex did include the Aururian customs. This allowed the propagation of the Anglican doctrine to the Christians of Flores and Timor, though missionaries would find the Yhiist cultural system quite able to resist Christianization in most of the Empire, some successful prosyletization would occur; the debate over the policy remains profoundly bitter to this day within some segments of Anglicanism.

The bitter war being waged at the same time, however, led to a bitter peace as the Queen of England found herself badly in need of an extrication from France with the Tories once again in power with the final sundering from the Churchills. At Utretch in 1713 the Aururian government found most of its conquests lost. The Spanish were required to accept decisively the Aururian annexation of Nueva California and to acknowledge the legitimacy of their settlements in Tierra del Fuego and the fortress-city of Valdivia in the Mapuche lands, but Manila and the whole of Peru and Chile were evacuated and returned at once to King Phillip and the new Bourbonist regime of Spain. The French factories in India on the other hand were also kept by the Aururian government.

Queen Anne lived until 1717, when she died of a massive stroke, and the throne necessarily passed to George I, the Elector of Hanover. Nonetheless, by this point the trade ties between Aururia and what was now the Kingdom of Great Britain were well-established. The architecture of the Queen Anne period was broadly imported to Mayi-Thakurti, and with it, the technology of canals, and the incipient development of the loom and the steam engine. Coal mining on a larger scale was introduced into Aururia where it rapidly displaced the use of wood due to the limited stocks thereof. English cultural values of the Queen Anne period became all the rage, and the importation of English literature commenced. The mourning in Mayi-Thakurti for the often unhealthy but proud sovereign of a far-away land was said to be as great as in London; she is revered as a Saint in the Aururian Church for providing a legitimate way forward for Aururian Catholicism after its forcible sundering from the Catholic Church proper, and a love for all things English in European culture followed quickly.

Another, darker legacy persisted, however. One component of the reign of Queen Anne that was passed only shortly before her death and which remained in force for more than a century was the provision of an Act providing for the regular replacement of the death penalty for women with Transportation in Permanence to Aururia. With the costs remitted by the Aururian Permanent Embassy in London, it would now be broadly lawful for the execution of women to be replaced with their Transportation as essential slaves to Aururia. "being damned to hell by their evident sins" they merited no consideration of mercy under the fanaticism of the 18th century Bloody Code, and it would take the rise of the Dissenting Pastors to call the practice blasphemy before God and reject the Anglican communion with the "perverted harlots of Amazonia" and begin the 19th century moralist push. For then next eighty years, there were a few voices of dissent, but no cultural resistance at all. Transportation, throughout the domains of the Empire, would be a typical punishment in lieu of execution, and treated no differently from it as a fate. This would lead to a large influx of forcible immigrants of English, Scots, Irish, and other origins to Aururia, and thereby strengthen the cultural ties with the Empire. Including the crime of "Unnatural Liasons" a total of 28,000 women were Transported between 1718 and 1800 to the Aururian Empire... With the number actually sharply increasing after that point despite the rise in criticism of the practice! (68,000 were transported between 1800 - 1853, when the practice was absolutely prohibited for all crimes except Unnatural Liasons, for which it was banned in 1868--plus another 4,500 Transported in the 19th century from Scotland and 11,000 pseudo-voluntary emigrants from Ireland.)

1718 - 1790: An Aururian Sideshow

The War of the Quadruple Alliance included the renounciation of Spanish cession of claims to Valdivia and Nueva California. The territories once again being claimed saw the Aururians retaliate with another invasion of Chile. This time, however, the Spanish colonial forces were in much better condition due to the Bourbon reforms. Valparaiso and Santiago de Chile were occupied, as was Lima after a siege of a year, but the war ended without further progress and the Aururians were again required to withdraw from the territories. After this, enthusiasm for participating in adventures in South America was at an all-time low point, and the government's sole objective subsequently was the obtainment of Chiloe Island, the thorn in the side of a way to control the South Cone.

The army for the moment remained a colourful panoply. It was 40% armed with the Aururian Wheellock Musket (the double-barreled weapon described before), light troops who could be used as foot scouts or, protected by armoured troops, a devastating fire component with shooting braces or forks. They carried a sword and target for protection, but had only a helmet, and no armour. Another 20% was still archeresses, who had a front-plate only that was able to turn musket balls, and a helmet, but in addition to their bow carried a double-barreled wheellock pistol for close in defence and a sword and target. This made them heavy infantry, often drawn from the ranks of poorer noblewomen or respectable yeowoman and still eagerly using the bow as a useful weapon. Another 20% was grenadiers, now armed with a single-barreled flintlock fusil of lightweight construction, with shield and half-breastplate like the archeresses, and carrying renades and an axe as well. The final 20%, like in the Russian army, were still armed with pike, as well as sword and target, and were also still armoured. In some cases these women were also now carrying pistols. The total strength of the army was 17 "divisions", named in the Chinese fashion.

Each 'division' was in fact a 6,000-woman brigade, which was the level at which subdivision occurred, with 1,200-woman units of each type of troop summing up to the total of 6,000. Though not formally attached to the division, a support element of 300 cavalry for scouting and screening and an artillery force of 4 x 6pdr and 8 x 3pdr guns as well as 24 rocket troughs was also functionally permanently attached to each division as well as 4 x 3pdr "howitzers" and 4 x 10pdr "howitzers"; these two weapons were in fact an independent development of the Russian licorne, somewhat between a mortar, a howitzer, and a gun with its own unique characteristics, and meant for smashing hill forts and mountain redoubts of the type seen in the fluid and unorganized pacific island warfare that the Aururians regularly faced; they had the same limitations in field battle as the Russian licorne and therefore did not add as much firepower as would seem to the division. Heavier artillery was limited to fortresses and the Empress' personal siege train kept at Mayi-Thakurti; for the Spanish Main expeditions dismounted naval guns had been used for the sieges. The Empress had, however, committed to improving the regular field firepower of the army, and the number of 6pdr guns was being aggressively doubled so that eight would be assigned to each division by 1725. This was at the time considered far more important than eliminating the pike, let alone the bow, which was still regarded almost sacredly.

The end of fighting with the Japanese Red Seal Ships had allowed the expansion of commerce in the Indies, but hostile encounters with the Dutch, Portuguese, and Spaniards remained. The fleets ventured further afield, though, tangling with the French colonies of the Mascarenes that would someday become part of the Empire, and also most especially establishing a large number of unsanctioned, privately run trading posts along the coast of Madagaskaria. These ports would ultimately see large scale intermarriage and the growth of a Touched population in the malarial zone of eastern Madagaskaria that would be later integrated into the Merina Kingdom, and the foundation of relatively sophisticated cities from which trade and piracy were undertaken without Imperial sanction, establishing the deep legacy of interconnection between Madagaskaria and the Empire.

Other than expansion in Polynesia to Touch and integrate the native peoples, and a securing the Muslim population of Halmahera and sometimes warring with the Sultanates of Tidore and Bima, which were claimed by the Netherlands but not at all controlled by them, the next twenty years were largely peaceful. Aururian ships became familiar sights in Quarantine in European ports, virtually the only non-European power (excluding the Ottoman Empire) to actively send ships to Europe, and a widescale spread of western technology and repair and expansion of canals throughout the Empire proper brought the era a lovely grandeur of peace. The first half of the reign of the Empress Barina was accordingly a time of great fondness. The colonies in the Americas, without any large population to bring into the fold of the Touched Sisters, however, stagnated. Two cities of about 8,000 each were their natural peak by the 1780s after 80 years of growth, with no real effort to control much of the countryside. Valdivia was hemmed in by the Mapuche, who saw the Aururians as a useful source of weapons against the Spanish but resisted any closer ties. The only area of the Americas to thus become more than an isolated port-fortress was Tierra del Fuego, which in this period completed the Aururianization of the island proper.

In the East Indies, Flores, Alor, and Dili Island began to develop under the interests and contacts provided to the Christian population, which was always a source of English fascination. Yhiism, however, mostly triumphed on Timor and Sandalwood island. The Dutch, firm in their control of Ambon and the surrounding islands, still had a substantial dominance of the spice trade, but fighting with Malay pirates provided an excuse for Aururians to steadily expand influence into other regions. By the 1750s the western part of Sumbawa, Hindu and sometimes ruled by the Kings of Gilget on Bali, began to pay tribute for protection from Biman raids. This led to the ultimate Aururianization of the region, and a spiral toward renewed hostility with the Dutch.

In the 1740s, Aururia was easily drawn into the War of the Austrian Succession, with English inducements bringing them to attempt the sack of Manila, Valparaiso and Lima, and try the conquest of Chiloe Island. The Bourbon Spanish of the 1740s, however, were a different beast than those of the War of the Quadruple Alliance, let alone the degenerate end-stage Habsburg Empire. A fleet was outfitted which defeated the Aururian squadron on the coast of Peru; a landing was made in Tierra del Fuego, though it was defeated and driven back. The defenders of Chiloe island badly repulsed the division sent to attempt its conquest, and the cities all stood their sieges. The Empire ended the war in profound embarassment, succeeding only in defeating a French squadron off the coast of India to maintain control of its three factories there against the efforts of the French East India Company to conquer them. The war ended status quo ante bellum for the Empire and made it look weak and unserious to Europeans again. This led to Army reform, including the introduction of heavier field artillery and finally the end of the regular issuance of the bow and arrow, the elimination of the pike, and the transformation of these units into regular fusiliers, as well as the creation of a heavy cavalry force associated with the Empress' personal troops which unlike the rest could nonetheless be sent out in squadrons into the rest of the Empire to fight in the European fashion. The naval defeats also led to the end of the age of the Aururian Galleon and the construction of heavy ships of the line on the western model in an aggressive new fleet programme. Both projects were however very expensive, and not at all complete when the world broke out into the next war--that of the Seven Years.

The Aururian Empire managed to maintain the peace for four of the years. The quick English victory at Plassey avoided the involvement of their Factories in India. In the last three it was involved in the conflict primarily against Spain, taking Manila in early 1762, defeating the Spanish pacific squadron, and landing in Chiloe, though any being defeated in the taking of the island. Participation in this war showed that the reforms to the Army and Navy had worked, and the country regained some confidence, though perhaps inappropriately. Water power for production of textiles was now becoming common in the Empire proper; the average home had glass windows, and the Pombaline System of Architecture as well as native improvements was fully implemented, requiring the reconstruction of older buildings. During the 1760s the construction of canals in the Empire even proceeded at a faster pace than in England, though the Great Bight Coastal Canal ultimately failed from the enormous cost of the elevation rises that had to be conquered in the far west. The Empire launched a series of campaigns against pirates, and began entertaining European explorers and scientists; Yhiist conversion of Timor, Sandalwood Isle, and the Melanesian islands might largely be considered complete, with significant inroads to Polynesia despite rising Christian competition.

Then came what is termed in Aururian history The Bourbon-American War. It was the high point of French and Spanish accomplishment. The Aururian Empire watched haplessly as their British friends lost almost all of their North American colonies to a series of absurd military decisions. They also soon found themselves embroiled in two separate naval campaigns, one against the excellent Spanish fleet sent to fight them off Chile that tested Valdivia to the limits and again almost conquered Tierra del Fuego. The second was against Admiral Suffren, who stood his ground off the coast of India, humiliated three Aururian fleets in seven actions, and conquered the three Aururian Factories in India, expelling them from the Subcontinent. An expedition to Ile Bourbon ended in spectacular failure with great loss of life, and then the Spanish sailed north from Mexico with an army that swept through the Aururian colonies of San Diego and Monterey.

The siege of San Diego led to the famed Carroula's March, though, where the eponymous commander of the garrison refused to surrender to the Spanish and instead broke out, covering the civilian population who had fled to the hills and marching up-country to Lake Tulare. From there they descended on the Esselen Colony on Monterey bay, driving the Spanish back temporarily, and again retreating. In 1785 after the end of the war, the remnants of this force and the civilians of the two colonies were living in a well-kept inland town built around the site of Fresno at the limit of navigation of the inland bays of the San Francisco system and evacuated back to Aururia; but that was the end of the Nueva California settlements, the entire region being reconquered and the conquest confirmed by the Spanish in victory at the end of the conflict. Conversely, both Ushuaia, the new capital of Tierra del Fuego, and Valdivia, stood long sieges and aggressive efforts to bring them under Spanish control.

In all of this blight and misfortune, there was one contrary wind. The Dutch Republic had foolishly added its armies and navies to the cause of American Independence after the failure of the League of Armed Neutrality, and the result, the so-called "Fourth Anglo-Dutch Naval War", resulted in utter disaster at home and abroad. Despite the best efforts of Suffren, the harbour of Jaffna was taken and fortified by the Aururians and held to the end of the war on Ceylon. In the East Indies it was much worse. Ambon, the famed "clean city" of the Dutch Eastern colonies, fell to a large Aururian invasion force covered by Twenty Sail of the Line, and Aururian fleets descended on the twin islands of Ternate and Tidore and crushed the Dutch tributary Sultanates, seizing both. A final fleet claimed Bima in the same fashion and landed an invasion force that marched through the interior of Sumbawa, continuously fighting for the next ten years to thorughly subdue it. With these conquests, a vast population of civilised Muslims was acquired, who, Touched into the Aururian Sisterhood, formed ultimately both a problem and the nascent core of two new Islamic Queendoms. The Dutch received back Jaffna, Buru Island to the west of Ambon, and the tiny but economically valuable Banda archipelago, but Ambon, Ceram, and the Maluku Islands proper, and likewise Ternate, Tidore, and Bima were hence forever Aururian, in a vast expansion of island territory in the Indies. The war, then, was very much a draw, with territory both lost and gained, but the population of the Empire was greatly increased for all that the cost in treasure was also large.

[Voyager989]

1790 - 1815: And the Whole World Turned Upside Down.

Rumbling up from Paris Streets in quiet collections of thinkers in salons and coffee shops there was a watchword -- revolution -- guiding up toward the overcoming of the ancienne regime, toward the fall of everything known in Europe. In Aururia, the stationary steam engine had become a thing of great popularity, firing the pumps that cleared mines and brought water up to the highest courses of canals set into the furthest heights of the land, barges hauled by elephant. This quiet and profound revolution of technology was a natural outgrowth of the chronic limitations of Aururian labour, which had always hungrily imported women from China and India both, as well as for a long time from western Java. The loss of the Factories had been particularly unpleasant in this regard as the trade in indentured servants had been high from all three points, its loss nonetheless drove the use of English technology and in this can be seen as an ultimate driver toward the development of the social-technology evolution of Tathra's Constitutional Empire.

Aururia likewise attracted attention from educated women of Europe in a concrete way for the first time. The Princess Vorontsova-Dashkova visited incognito but with the blessing of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia for example; it was revealed after her death that she had had a daughter with an Aururian Countess, one of the more outrageous examples. A nascent feminist movement dared make the argument that women in Europe could certainly accomplish the same things that had been achieved in Aururia, but was swiftly suppressed. The Aururian Empire was an uncomfortable reminder of the limitations of European ethnocentric views of the period, and the preferred method of dealing with them was increasingly becoming the sort of pseudo-scientific racial analysis which made much of the presence of blonde hair and paler skin and freckles in the native Aururian "Imperial Race" to separate them from both Asiatics and Africans and generally ignore the fact they were women.

The Empress Myuna was an old woman by those days, and her main action during the very short peace was the 1792 Pacific Northwest Expedition. In 1790 the Vancouver-Quadra Convention established the non-exclusivity of Spanish claims north of the 42nd Parallel in Nueva California, as the Spanish aggressive explorations to reestablish control and claims of the territory had brought them to the lands of the Hudson's Bay Company. The Empress directed this time the formation of a Company, on the grounds that the Vancouver-Quadra agreement and the Imperial Russian Ukase covering part of the territory generally confirmed it was terra nullius, and so due to the great demand for furs--the primary production of the old Nueva California colonies--new colonies were to be established in the Oregon Country, as long as they did not hinder the British operations of the Hudson's Bay Company. Referencing the old maps made during the 1702 Expedition a good harbour called Chinook Bay (now called Grays Harbour) lay north of two great bays with treacherous bars to the south of Nootka Sound (Willapa Bay and the mouth of the Columbia River), and this was selected as the point of the expedition. Aware of the risk of earthquakes in the region, the expedition of two frigates and two shallow-draft colliers worked their way up the river at the head of the bay and established the capital there. The Baroness Alikquita was made the first governor; she traced descent from women taken up from the shattered villages and spoke the local languages. The fortified town is today called Junction City in the United States' Washington State, with most of the original buildings still surviving.

After reprovisioning and completing construction of the town, the squadron sailed south, being repulsed from crossing attempts upon the Tillamook and Alsea Bars and missing the Yaquina Bay bar in heavy fog. The Umatilla and Coos Bay were entered but found unsuitable, and Coquille was found to need substantial improvement. Finally, just north of the 42nd parallel, they discovered in a nook in a rocky promontory (the modern Chetco Point) a river, the Chetco, who despite the narrow mouth was covered from the prevailing Westerly and Northwestly storms and could be entered in a southeasterly without difficulty as long as steering way was maintained. This meant the Chetco was open as many days a year as San Francisco Bay to a sailing ship, and with gingerly done guidance worthy of any helmswoman used to coral reefs, the four ships passed over and anchored in shelter. Here a fortress was built on the southern shore called Chetco Colony, subordinated to the Company Governor in Chinook, and gifts were widely distributed to the natives, which impressed the locals much more than where it was customary at Chinook through the Potlatch tradition, which was followed in the style of Zheng He's voyage with gifts of enormous bounty. Many Esselean from Montery Bay found the microclimate of the Chetco to be very comfortable, and these women who had for ten years been refugees without a home promptly re-settled on their native continent, contributing a large population to the southern colony.

Myuna, who had always been interested in exploration, sent forward a second wave to explore and integrate the islands of Polynesia, including building a series of forts on Rakiura and then on the north end of the North Island of New Zealand, building Myuna's Line across the site of modern Auckland to allow the North End dwellers to expand beyond the limits of the walls of their old forts, though raids from Maori War Parties by canoe would continue until the handover of the region to the British. She saw in both this and the Northwest Expedition a way for the Empire to match the vast expanses of territory then falling under the control of European powers, but the lack of free labour to drive overseas, indeed, the Aururian hunger for it on the contrary, made this an impossible undertaking in the end.

The fleet sailed for home, and arrived at about the time that the Empress Myuna received news that the whole of Europe had gone to War against France, and shortly thereafter, that King Louis of France had been executed by the Revolutionary Committee. The strongly monarchist Aururians were shocked and horrified; the French were traditional enemies, but the wanton slaughter of the entire family of King Louis was beyond any conception of what was normal in war. It bordered on universal blasphemy. Their embassy exchanged cordially to the British that they would act against all French possessions adhering to the Revolutionary Committee rather than the rightful Bourbon heir. The next twenty years would be nothing but war.

Aururian society by the measure of Europe was tremendously progressive. Part of the problem that led to the adoption of the steam engine and powered loom and water mills so quickly, as well as the extensive use of coal, was the utter lack of sufficient labour. The value of labour was chronically high, and accordingly the main thing that the Aururians bought from China beyond tea (since they were quite capable of making fine China themselves) was the importation of young women. The problem was that slavery per say was illegal in Aururia. The taking of battle-captives was a long custom but there were few of those from overseas, and the terms of release were strict. Convicts could be enslaved, and indeed this was normal practice, but only for fixed terms based on the severity of their crimes. Thus in the case of the Chinese women--and Indian women imported from the Indian factories, and Javanese women imported from the factory at Bantam--a contract of five years duration could be made. Five years of labour was allowed, but required the owner to provide food and shelter to the Contracted girl. Additional contracts could not be signed. The one advantage was that any children born during the five-year period could also be compelled to five years of labour after menstruation made them legal adults. However due to the rise of enlightenment arguments, in 1770 this practice had been banned for future daughters of contract labourers and a requirement for paying one shilling a month and giving five shillings to a woman at the end of her contract, amounts that would be steadily increased, was required, as was a mandate that indentured servants must be taught to read and write (albeit in any language whatsoever, not merely the Old Imperial of the Empire) or else paid five pounds at the end of their indenturement as a penalty for having failed to do this.

The hunger for labour-saving devices from England spurred renewed interest in English culture. The use of the English language which had once been the preserve of the elites and merchant classes began to spread throughout the countryside. It finally reached the point that very late in her reign the Empress Myuna mandated the teaching of English alongside Old Imperial as a written language (verbal proficiency was not required until much later) so that texts and written instructions on devices acquired from England could be properly understood by those expected to use them. Implementation of this decree would take many years, but it more or less guaranteed the imitation of many aspects of Victorian culture by Aururia in the 19th century.

The primary targets of the Aururian Empire were the Mascarene Islands. Santa Apolónia had been settled by the Portuguese when at war with the Aururians in the 1590s and being driven from Timor as a station at which to replenish ships when all of the Indies, even "A Famoso" in Malacca, were at risk from Aururian attacks. It had been developed with a mix of Malay, Indian, and black slaves under a Portuguese white population and had remained Portuguese until in a swift French descent of 1704 the island had been seized and renamed Île Bourbon, the name it holds to the present. Likewise in the 1590s a major settlement had developed at Île de France by the Portuguese, which was conquered by the Dutch in 1638, who like the Portuguese had a vested interest in a large and secure base far from the easy descent of the Aururian navy. This base was however seized from the French colony of Île Bourbon in 1710, and the occupation of both islands was confirmed to Louis XIV at the end of the War of Spanish Succession. Île Rodrigues was settled by the French in the same period, and the Seychelles followed. It was this tight collection of islands, collectively the Mascarenes, that were seen as the natural objective of the Aururian war effort in the early days. To facilitate the operations, in 1793 an expedition left for the Peninsula of Andranovondronina at the extreme northern tip of Madagaskaria and occupied it in the name of the Empress, forming a massive naval base which was rapidly built up by the Aururians with a wall across the neck of the peninsula and the great fortress of Andrakaka being built inside the bay thereof, where a fleet of twenty sail could be accommodated along with countless transports. The function of the base was obvious and in 1796 a detachment of ships from the French revolutionary government descended upon it in a preemptive attack which was strongly defeated.

After this naval victory, the fleet stood north to the Seychelles, conquering the French colony there and then seizing some of the Comoros islands from which pirates harassed local trade. Attention was then turned on the main prize of the Mascarenes proper. Using this base from which the fleet could refit and resupply a series of battles were fought against a fleet of eight French Liners provided to defend the islands. Though the contest was at first inconclusive in 1800 the Île de France was taken by the Aururians. The Peace of Amiens mandated that it be returned, but the Aururians refused. The godless revolutionaries had little sympathy in the normally reliably anti-Aururian religious sentiment of England and accordingly there was no concerted effort to make them give up the island. A fleet of eighteen sail was fitted to retake the island, but was defeated in two successive battles off Île de France and one off Andrakaka which brought much glory to the Aururian Navy. The resumption of general hostilities in Europe brought an end to the French counteroffensives, and the fleet at Île de France was built up and fighting two more battles finally ground the French down and took Île Bourbon in 1808; Île Rodrigues fell in the same year, and the conquest of the Mascarene Archipelago was completed for the honour of the Empire, an enormous far-flung reach into the western ocean which would guarantee an east African presence and involvement in the affairs of Madagaskaria for the century to come, with fateful consequence. The Creole population was integrated to the most part with the white French settlers largely fighting to the death against the Aururian intrusions in volunteer militias and many of the black men repatriated to East Africa. It was the closest that the Empire would ever get to integrating a white population and only the profound disorder and collapse of the moral and ethical order of Europe during the chaos of the rise of the atheist revolution of the French made it possible.

In the meanwhile, the war was taken to India. The Aururians participated in the assault upon the French colonies, and retook their factories in India proper at Surat and Masulipatam, and occupied these cities and fortified them. Pondicherry was also successfully occupied by the Aururians before the British could take it, and soon enough the occupation of Surat led to a war with Berar that lasted from 1797 - 1799 and led to a victory; the Aururians also participated in the British conquest thereof from 1802 - 1804, and were confirmed in the occupation of the city of Surat. When Denmark sided with the French, Tranguebar was taken by the Aururian forces in Pondicherry. At the same time Ceylon was occupied by Aururia in 1796 from the Batavian Republic, and the army was after securing the island at once recalled to invade the Carnatic at the request of the East India Company, as its Nawab, Umdat ul-Umara, was believed to have been aiding Tipu Sultan. In a three year war the Carnatic was entirely conquered and occupied by Aururian troops. The East India Company ordered the Aururians to hand the territory over, but they refused on the grounds that the British had agreed at Amiens to return the Mascarenes to France without consulting Aururia. The dispute almost led to a war between the company and the Empire, but the British government intervened to prevent it and after the resumption of hostilities with Napoleon came to the agreement that the Aururians would withdraw from the Carnatic and their possession of Tranguebar as well as Masulipatam and Surat would be recognized, as well as all the Mascarene islands, for having done so. And addendum to this agreement included the important measure that the maintenance of three forts in the Oregon Country would be permitted without prejudicing the Hudson's Bay Company claims. The total occupation of the Carnatic lasted from 1799 - 1806.

With the entry of the Batavian Republic into the war, the Aururians began fighting the Dutch fleet of 12-sail of the line in the East Indies. It was reinforced with three French sail of the line, and for a while maintained the unequal contest, but it in seven battles it was worn down and destroyed. The British, in the meanwhile, had landed at and occupied Bantam, and waged an overland campaign from the French factory there to conquer all of Java. The Aururian interests were more concerned with the east, where once the Dutch were smashed to pieces, fleets descended on Makassar and other ports in Celebes and took them. The Banda islands and Buru were next, and with the Bandas, enormous wealth passed from the Dutch to the Aururians. This led to the end of the Dutch position in the eastern part of the Malay archipelago, and with Raffles ruling Java, the Dutch colonies were for the moment entirely dispossessed. A war thence broke out with the King of Lombok, and half that island was seized in punishment, but by this point the Aururians were well aware of the practice of puputan and did not attempt to claim the capital or the whole island.

In 1814 an opportunity to avoid the problem of the puputan was achieved when two Kings of states on Bali, Karangasem and Buleleng, sent their armies and led them, in person, to eastern Java to fight the British sepoys. In this action the Aururians at the behest of the British descended on their home Kingdoms and took them, occupying the northern and eastern parts of Bali, and capturing the wives and daughters of the Kings, who to their humiliation led their armies in a series of teriffic fights with the British that ended only in their deaths; henceforth a permanent Aururian foothold was possessed on Bali, though control of the majority of the island remained uncertain.

On the coast of South America, the Aururians at first had to fight defensively against the powerful Spanish pacific squadron that had been built up to fight them. The Spanish, having largely won the Mapuche over to allegiance to the royal government, commenced a famed two-year siege of Valdivia which failed, the successful Aururian defence lasting until the Peace of Amiens. On the resumption of hostilities, however, the Spanish position collapsed at the arrival of an Aururian fleet which allowed for a march north to occupy Valparaiso and Santiago de Chile, which were turned over to the anti-Spanish guerrillas on the request of the British, and then attacked again when the Spanish famously switched sides on the invasion of Napoleon. This confused mess led to a unilateral Aururian withdrawal in 1812 as the government judged no prospect of gaining any territory from it. The need to help secure trade with Britain, however, led to a temporary occupation of the Falkland Islands which were then handed over to British settlement at the final peace. Raids were conducted from Chetco colony south against San Francisco and then Monterey Bay, but they could not break through the defences that the Spanish had erected at the Presidio.

The operations against Manila had more success, and the colony's main cities were occupied in 1806 with an amphibious descent and held until the final peace, turned over in 1815. Qi'ao's garrison temporarily took Macau during the brief perid of Portuguese obesience to Napoleon, just to hand it back over when the Qing directed they do so. The occupation of Mozambique likewise just lasted a few confused months before power was returned to the local imprisoned Portuguese. The only other action far from home was the Caribbean Expedition, in which seven large frigates were sent to the Caribbean to assist Toussaint L'Overture's rebellion against Napoleon, the sentiment against the blatant racialism of modern slavery having, thanks to the English literary influence, become decisive by that point in Aururian popular culture. This "Fleet of the Amazons" remains fondly remembered in Haiti, where it operated from Haitian ports against the much superiour French and acquitted itself well until the ill-fated Haitian enterprise of Napoleon was abandoned.

The humiliation of French manhood and military power in the Mascarenes was so complete that when 19-sail escaped from the blockade in a carefully planned action with the Royal Navy in 1812, it was universally thought by the British that they would give battle to the Royal Navy. Instead they sailed south, escaping the British squadrons, and after conducting some desultory colonial warfare, occupied Pemba in Mozambique and used it for a counterattack against the Aururian occupation of the Mascarenes. Again moving a large fleet to Andovobatofotsky the Aururian Navy fought four contests against the French without decisive result. The word of Napoleon's abdication led to a cessation of hostilities, and during the Hundred Days the 13 surviving ships of the fleet were already sailing home, where it was met by the British and virtually annihilated at the Battle of Baleira.

At the final peace, the Aururian Empire was confirmed in its conquest of the entirety of the Mascarenes in all four parts. It was likewise confirmed in its conquest of all of the eastern Dutch territories that remained. Makassar was ceded to the Aururians as well. The Dutch fortress city of Manado, however, had to be returned to the Dutch, despite the large local populations of Touched that had resulted from the twenty years of Aururian occupation. This set the grounds for the future war of 1890, as well as the unresolved status of the rest of Lombok, Bali, and Celebes. The acquisition of the Banda Archieplago was an enormous amount of wealth for the Imperial coffers, however, and the Cities of Tranguebar, Surat and Masulipatam were confirmed to the Aururian Empire. However, the British had to cede Bantam on the west Java coast and the city of Bencoolen on Sumatra to the Dutch to get them to acquiese to the economically devastating permanent loss of the Banda islands and their absolute monopoly on the production of Nutmeg and Mace. Accordingly, the British demanded Ceylon in compensation for these concessions to the Dutch, and so the territorial rearrangements in the East on account of the Aururian participation in the Napoleonic Wars were completed and Ceylon was ceded to the British by the Aururians who had occupied in 1796 in the year 1817.

A Review of the Empire in 1815 - 1820.

The Army of the Empire during the Napoleonic Wars retained the basic 6,000-woman division of infantry. It had, however, permanently integrated 300 cavalry as scouts and screening for the unit. The artillery was up to 8 x 6pdr, 8 x 3pdr guns, 24 rocket troughs, and 8 x 3pdr licorne and 4 x 10pdr licorne, as well as 4 x 12pdr coehorn mortars. This enormous artillery establishment reflected the needs of dispersed jungle warfare where attacking and defending strongpoints was far more important than regular field fighting. The infantry itself now consisted of three regiments of regular fusiliers armed with flintlock smoothbores with the bayonet. A fourth regiment was armed with a flintlock smoothbore and bayonet, but also had the axe and grenades of a grenadier. These women were selected for their size and strength relative the other three regular regiments. The fifth regiment was rifles; each regiment was divided into three 400-woman battalions and in this case two of the battalions were muzzle-loading rifles without bayonets, but notably also issued with a double-barreled pistol, a wheellock or a flintlock and later on a percussion cap weapon, for close-in personal defensive use and usually carried a dirk as well. The third battalion was issued with an Aururian derivation of the Ferguson rifle which had been adopted starting in 1790. This weapon shared its ammunition with the cavalry battalion, which was increasingly also armed with the Ferguson to provide quick firepower as dragoons, and otherwise carried a double-barreled short wheellock carbine and several pistols. This enormous expenditure in the cost of equipping the unit reflected the great reliance the Aururians placed on a small number of very disciplined and well-trained troops, and the number of divisions in the Army remained at 17 throughout the Napoleonic Wars. They remained excellent for fighting natives and even Indian armies, but were over-generalized and cumbersome against European opponents; however, there had not been enough opportunities at regular land warfare during the conflict, which had primarily been naval for the Aururians, to fully realize this problem. The lack of heavy field artillery was recognized as problematic, and in many cases guns outside of establishment were acquired and some of those in the establishment were left behind.

Culturally, Aururia had a developed banking system comparable to that of China. The open trade with the rest of the world drove innovation. The monetary system was based on three currencies--gold, silver, paper--which were adjusted annually, and starting in 1820 with the First Decree of the Empress Tathra, on a monthly basis. These currencies had different names--the guinea, the tael and then the pound, and the paper tael--which were based on contact with various outside cultures and gradually came to conform with English expectations. All were legal tender for all debts public and private, and they were at a fixed peg to each other adjusted on an annual basis. Because of this, an entire trade of women who would profit from transferring one type of money for another and then taking it to another region of the Empire where it was worth more, and trading it there to continue the process indefinitely in the so-called "Triangular Money Trade" evolved after the 1450s adoption of the rolling peg and paper currency. This native innovation led to the use of remittance draughts from businesses with multiple branch locations to allow money traders to move the currency without physically moving it. These remittance banks then took over the money trade, and in doing so largely smoothed out the differences in value of the currencies between different parts of the Empire, which increased the effectiveness of the Imperial peg.

Determinations of the peg for each year and then month were made on monthly, and then weekly, surveys of all official chartered market-towns of the Empire, with Imperial tax officials, who ultimately became specialized in the job (and have been argued to have been the world's first professional economists), took surveys of the prices paid for and received for goods in the chartered market towns. These surveys were recorded and sent to Mayi-Thakurti to make a determination on how the currencies had shifted in value relative to each other, and then the peg was adjusted for the next year. This rolling process had begun after Tallara, as part of her bid to revitalize the Empire, had decreed that instead of solely in gold, all debts could be remitted in paper, gold, or silver currency for the paying of taxes, at a rate that would be determined at the beginning of the year by Imperial decree based on the value of each in the preceding year. This drove an economic system that from 1550 forward was increasingly sophisticated, and meant that the money-traders, for instance, soon found another need. The system had the negative effect of making savings very unpredictable and dangerous, since rapid inflation of one type of the three currencies could result in the destruction of that portion of savings when the peg was adjusted. Money traders therefore would offer to take currency from a woman and give her a note promising that amount back, plus an additional sum, at the end of a fixed number of years. These private bonds allowed the money trader and then banks to make money by shifting one type of currency to where it was worth its maximum value, and the profit on the time series of transactions resulting from this paid the yield on the bond when it ultimately came due. This insulated savings from inflation and led to capital accumulation, which made the rapid adoption of the steam engine and water-powered mechanical milling technology in the 18th century at the hands of yeowoman entrepeneurs entirely possible.

This system had by the 1815s allowed for integration with most of the concepts of modern European banking and the joint-stock company relatively seamlessly, and for the government to raise money with bond drives in critical situations. The economic efficiency of Aururia served to allow for technological compensation for the profound labour scarcity that continued to dog the Empire, and ultimately served to create a basis for industrialisation.

Socially the war had left Aururia regarded with some apprehension in Europe. Though it had slid unnoticed at the time, the conquest of the Mascarenes resulted in many postwar lurid accusations. Against these was measured the aggression with which the Aururian Empire turned against the East African slave trade, resulting in several wars with Oman (which ironically became the closest friend of the Empire among modern nations) and the coastal Swahili states. The Aururians also contributed ships to the West African patrol, and money for the purpose of resettling freed slaves in Africa. But most notably was the even-handed behaviour of the squadron of seven frigates off Haiti, which had stayed there for 3 bitter years of raiding and war against the French. By that point, the Emperor Dessalines turned on the white population and began terrible massacres, ordering their total extermination. The Aururians responded bitterly, launching raids against Dessaline's Haitian Empire on every point, and skillfully descending to rescue the white population of many cities. This brought about considerable good press in Europe that bought the Empire some measure of security against the more tabloid broadsheet style of accusation stemming from the "Rape of the Mascarenes" in the press of friendly states, though the French association of the Aururians with utterly savage and ruthless barbarism was quite well cemented by the war.

The next five years began in a peace the Empress deeply appreciated, having beforehand known only war. There was piracy suppression, but little else in the way of conflict, and the revenue in firs and increasingly timbers from her mother's Northwest project mingled with the trade to China through Qi'ao and into India through the regained Factories; large numbers of women from both of the later two places were brought and ultimately freed through indenturement in a practice that had yet to attract resistance from Europe or be equated with slavery, and the water-mill, the elephant hauled canal, and the steam pump and coal mine were staples of the era. The rule over the islands of the Indies was mostly handled by Governors-General, and plans to expand the Queendom of Timor that would be later interrupted were underfoot. Then the Biirungdêwata problem lifted its head again. Tambora erupted in Indonesia, causing famine in the Empire which had to be averted with desperate government efforts at shifting food around and acquiring it. Biirungdêwata was badly affected, and the old independence tradition reasserted itself. This time it had a new dimension: Women in Dabra, the capital, arguing that they should not have anyone between themselves and Yhi. This kind of religious Republic of the Covenant, more like the 1640s in Scotland than a modern revolutionary movement, caught on in the cities and saw an abortive rising, an argument that Tambora's eruption disrupted and delegitimized the Empire. The fleet was despatche to blockade the coast; the Queen of Biirungdêwata fled the capital and rallied rural farmers with coin sent from Mayi-Thakurti, since they were desperate for food. This quickly produced a sizeable army which allowed "The eighteen" to be suppressed rapidly; in the 19th century it was treated as more of a farce than a serious insurrection, especially since it was based on the urban areas. But the memory of it remained in Biirungdêwata, and would again cause problems in the future.

The Empress died contented, and her daughter replaced her--a Crown Princess who had been raised up, Tathra by name--in the Napoleonic rationalism of her age, who had watched all the changes around her, and was utterly determined to ride them forward. She was also fated to reign promptly into War, for not even the foolishness of the Bourbon dynasty in the Restoration could stifle the French bitter fury with the dark Amazons who had pried the Mascarenes from them and outraged the French settlers of the islands, and there, and in beautiful Tahiti, jewel of the eastern Pacific and not yet fully in the grip of the Aururian Empire, they determined on a reckoning.

1820 - 1824 Tathra the Magnificent, Part One: The French

To call the Empress Tathra "The Great" is to overstate at best the case. The Empire actually lost territory during her reign, in the form of the City of Valdivia, the North End of New Zealand and some sections of the disputed Oregon Country claims, hardly compensated by the acquisition of Tonga and the desultory advance in the Comoros and Indies that remained formally disputed until her daughter's times; the integration of Palau was as inevitable as its long and steady Aururianization since the days of the Philippine expeditions had dictated, if still valuable. Regardless of this quibbles, it was the image that mattered to the history of Tathra, and the Empire held its own in a war in which the Aururians were not a side-show but were fighting a European State in its full power in the main, and more to the point, the Empire industrialised. It built railroads (to Brunel gauge), it formalised its system of Queenly rule with the empowerment of new Queens to govern new territories creating a prototype for the hereditary subordinate reigns under a constitution of the latter German Empire; it created a first-class cannon foundry (that ultimately proved the only one in the world able to imitate the Yankee Ordnance rifles of the 1860s).. And then created six more... It became the only religion successfully prosyletizing in the world except for Christianity, and... She implemented by fiat a Constitutional system of the British type, deciding it was Necessary for the long-term survival of the Imperial order. This Gift, followed by the broad renounciation from politics of the Empress, arguably completely stunted the growth of any democratic tradition in Aururian society, perhaps permanently. And of course, finally, she advanced the cause of Touched Aururians of the Islamic faith in the Indies and elsewhere to the point that the protection of the Islamic religion in her reign established a default of religious respect that would stand for the forseeable future.

She was a shy and, to the Aururians who liked their Empresses strong of thigh and arm and properly curved (Who think the matronly power of Elizaveta Petrovna of Russia or Maria Theresa of Austria best among European sovereigns), thin and as we might call today, nerdy girl, a profound intellectual well-schooled in physics, astronomy, geography, and optics, and the corresponding mathematics, including the geometry of artillery, that the Yhiist tutors could provide. She then promptly fell in love with all things western and exploded into a volubious adult of letters and eager intellectual conversation. Figures at her court include the dashing Annya Countess Watimba, who by Letters Patent was lately confirmed in the title of her mother, the Princess Dashkova-Vorontsova, the mulatto Navy Captain who famously participated in the Siege of Riga for the defending Russians in 1812 and then accompanied the Tsar Alexander on the campaign to Paris; the Lady Auigugula who was famous for her scientific work in optics; and a sundry collection of others such as the daughters of the harem of the unfortunate last Nawab of the Carnatic, Umdat ul-Umara, whose Kingdom had been overthrown and conquered in 1799 by Aururian troops. European scientists in the main fascinated her, and some of the earliest examples of modern bridge and dam architecture appeared in Aururia as a result. They could not save her from dying young, however, but she made twenty-eight years on the throne count in a way that few could. Her reign began in her early twenties and was largely regarded as blemishless, except for the European disapprove of her multiple marriages, the last Aururian Empress to maintain several wives in common in the old tradition.

Tathra found herself with an immediate conflict with a regime she regarded as treasonously stupid. For many decades Yhiist missionaries had been spreading through Polynesia, and along with Aururian sailors and trading ships, had been interacting with the local population, converting them in two senses, a process driven by the severe problems with disease that the Polynesians suffered. The Touch of Aururians led to women much more hardy and resistant to disease in many respects, and therefore in the midst of plague could be a gift of life. However, the colonisation of Polynesia had been slow. The Marquesas and Tuvalu had been made Aururian in the 1600s, but Melanesian Fiji, partially Touched due to pre-Imperial contact with the Solomons, had provided a long-standing bulwark of warriors, and when it had finally been fully integrated in the 1700s, Tonga and Samoa were just as profoundly warlike and unyielding as New Zealand had become, which seemed a more tempting target which occupied many futile military efforts in those days, all of which were finally for want.

Tahiti, visited by Wallis and then Cook in the 18th century, had subsequently been heavily frequented by Aururians whose presence began to irrevocably change the islands. The French, recovering from the Napoleonic Wars, regarded the Aururian "conversion" of the beautiful and unspoilt Polynesians as abominable in light of the outrage of the Mascarenes. Catholic missionaries were repeatedly dispatched to the islands, and competition with Yhiist priestesses ensued. The Queen of Tonga, the islands having been the second of the Three Warrior Kingdoms to fully fall to Aururian intermarriage, petitioned for Imperial protection in 1819. The French, seeing a straightforward threat to the Kingdoms of Tahiti, Bora-Bora, Huahine, Raiatea, and Samoa, conceived the plan to bring them all under France as protectorates. A large fleet was despatched, and arrived at Tahiti. It promptly expelled all the Aururians from the archieplago. This, Tathra might have accepted.

But they also expelled the native Tahitian women who were already Touched, and to Tathra, that was a step too far, for it could only be a prelude to full annexation. She surprised the civilised world, and went to war. The French, still reestablishing the ancient ruins of Fort Dauphin on the southern coast of Madagaskaria as an alternative to the lost Mascarenes--and base from which to recapture them--were surprised and placed on a disadvantaged heel. Pushed back, what followed was four years of complicated naval and expeditionary warfare across the whole of the Indian and Pacific Oceans that was to end with no decisive or even conclusive result.

The French were besieged at Fort Dauphin on the southern coast of Madagaskaria for the first six months of the war in desperate circumstances. Half the garrison of 5,000 died of disease or famine. Finally a thirty-two SOL force of the main body of the French Atlantic fleet arrived. The besiegers were smashed and the survivors sent back into the Malagasy highlands. The Aururian ambassador nonetheless managed to raise the Merina Kingdom against the French, but shortly thereafter at the Battle of Ile Sainte-Marine the French met twenty-eight Aururian ships of the line and inflicted a severe blow upon them, sinking three and taking three with the loss of two of their own. This battle opened the door for landings on both Ile Bourbon and Ile de France, but both expeditions came to nothing because the French, having not established the base at Fort Dauphin in advance, had no supplies in it for reinforcement of such an enormous fleet. Accordingly, twelve ships had to sail for home, and the Aururians were able to reinforce their fleet, and operating from the Seychelles and Andovobatofotsky Bay, defeated the remaining French fleet to relieve the forts on both islands after the Battle of Grand Port, and recaptured two of the Aururian ships of the line.

The second French expedition to Tahiti ended in disaster by comparison, when fourteen ships of the line were defeated by sixteen and four taken in the Battle of Moorea, allowing the landing of an Aururian army on Tahiti proper. This army was twice defeated by the much smaller French force, but ultimately the French could not capitalize on the victories as reinforcements could be regularly sent. The defeats prompted the major army reforms which followed during the reign of Tathra. The French force from the Indian Ocean which had been sent home for want of supplies was revictualed in Brazil and then sailed south again, laying siege to Ushuaia and occupying the town before going on to Valdivia. It was met by the Aururian fleet and turned back in the indecisive Battle off Chiloe, and then the Aururians landed a new force on Tierra del Fuego, leading to a desultory year long campaign before the peace. The French had in the meanwhile sent more troops to the Indian Ocean, and these were used to land near Andovobatofotsky Bay and try to penetrate the Aururian Limes cutting off the northern peninsula from the island proper. Under attack by both Merina troops and freshly reformed Aururian divisions, the result of the land campaign was indecisive, and the French had to settle for securing the construction of a new Fort Dauphin and the occupation of the Island of Mayotte.

In return, a futile expedition from the Aururian territories in India against Pondicherry ensued in which the city stood a year's siege. Generally, though, the French troops were unmotivated and suffering from terrible morale under the Bourbons, the Empress Tathra's scheme to liberate Napoleon against the Bourbons wisely went to nothing against her advisors, and the Aururians gained little glory, but so did the French. The treasury having been hurt by the three and a half years of conflict at that point, the Bourbons agreed to a peace where they were confirmed in Mayotte and Fort Dauphin; the Aururian Empire was confirmed in Tonga, and both agreed to respect the independence of the Society Islands and Samoa. The Empress Tathra at once turned herself to peaceful pursuits.

[Voyager989]

1824 - 1848, Part Two: Passing Trains.

In 1824 Tathra secured one peace, and cemented a second one. After signing the peace treaty with the French, she turned her attention to the East Indies. There, the Dutch insisted that the settlement of Singapore in Malaysia was illegal and that the British must give it up; or else the treaty with the British and Aururians would be null and void. This raised the prospect of renewed war, and the Dutch had most of Europe on their side. The British of course began to negotiate, the Concert being a primary in those times, and besides, the real Dutch intention was to obtain compensation for Singapore. The real objective was to receive the compensatory cession of Bangka and Biliton islands and besides confirm total Dutch control of Sumatra. The British were willing to oblige, but insisted on the cessation of the Dutch colonial settlements in India.

These had been of marginal value, but with the loss of Trincomalee, a problem presented itself. There was now no string of bases from which the Netherlands could send ships to the east to defend the Indies against the Aururians. Beyond that, the bases now also offered a chance of recruiting Indians to serve as sepoys against the Aururians; with the final loss of the East, so had all the fertile recruiting grounds for troops in the East Indies been lost as well. As a result they wished to keep the posts of Kakinada and Pulicat, the former the best port and the latter the Governorship, for recruiting of sepoys and maintenance of a naval station away from the heartland of the Aururian Empire for support of the East Indies.The British were prepared to make the trade to force Dutch recognition of the broad possession of influence in the Malay Peninsula and western Borneo to the British, but rather than press the transfer of Malacca in that region from the Dutch, instead insisted that the Aururians make a suitable cessation, as they had not conceded a sufficient amount in the 1815 peace compared to the British cessations on their behest (the British felt that the Dutch would not cede another inch in the East Indies as their position was already too precarious).

In particular, the British used the lever of the Dutch demands on the Aururians over the "North End" of the North Island of New Zealand. This area had been one of the primary areas of settlement in Aotearoa or New Zealand for the Aururians, commencing in the early 1600s, the other being Rakiura island off the South Coast. Starting in the 1780s, the British began aggressive efforts to settle and colonize, particularly on the unclaimed South Island. But only semi-organised British and even American whaling ship efforts fighting with a native population which--with Yhiist religious practices among missionaries over the past two hundred years--had real resilience to European disease, and the Maori's amazing ability to adapt and fight in the western style, or better than it, made it rough going.

The Aururians themselves had managed to build a large colony on the North End, but only by fortifying off from Auckland Bay north with a huge wall cutting across the narrows. Even then, it was a rough life that saw mostly only Touched Maori women want to stay long, and those who married them, on account of the constant aggressive raids from the Maori. They had nonetheless built up substantial walled towns and roads and watch-towers linking them everywhere; this pre-existing but lightly populated development was very desirable, and Tathra for her part agreed as she regarded it as having settled matters with the Dutch. After all, it confirmed all present borders in the Indies, and she ruled Makassar and the northern Kingdoms of Bali and half of Lombok; with this her claims to the rest of those islands were well-established, but it would later turn out that the Dutch thought no such things.

The concession she wanted in return was that the British recognize all of Polynesia and Madagascar as Aururian possessions, as well as the continent of Antarctica. The latter had been a home for the past two hundred years of the popular ice-harvesting trade, in which the rich of the hot cities of Aururia proper would pay enormous sums, gradually translating to falling prices but increased cargoes as the trade improved, for ice hauled year-round up and out of Antarctica. This led to a series of thin settlements on the island margins from which women sealed, hunted birds, and fished, and harvested the ice endlessly to supply the demands of an industry that now provided affordable cooling to the beginnings of a middle class. To the British this was too much; having signed the agreement with the Dutch, they pressed for more concessions on the grounds that they had themselves made major concessions for their allies.

Tathra, therefore, offered to solve a related problem. The Mapuche had ultimately sided with the Royal Spanish government and begun hostilities against Valdivia in the 1780s. Since that point, the colony of Valdivia had been in terminal decline. The Mapuche then stayed sided with the Spanish and fought against the Chilean revolt; the Aururians also supported the Royal Spanish government, and good relations resumed. Tathra, of privately liberal sentiments, desired to reverse this trend. The great feat of Admiral Cochrane in conquering the Royalist stronghold of the Island of Chiloe settled the matter; surrounded by an independent nation Valdivia could not be held. The British had just recognized Chilean independence and were also frineds to Chile. Perhaps the cession of the costly expanse of fortresses could please the British sufficiently? They indicated this was favourable, and for the cession of Valdivia to Chile and a formal hand-over of the Falklands to the Empire, the agreement was settled. It included the absolute Aururian right to the islands around Aotearoa including Rakiura, and the absolute right to reside in the rest of Aotearoa for business and trade purposes.

The Aururians then began negotiation with Chile for recognition of the new regime. These negotiations held out for the right of Aururians to reside in all of Chile for business and trade purposes, a term Tathra came to insist on in these exchanges to open up opportunities for Aururian women, who were usually instead assigned to quarantine without exception unless of the higher upper class, and forbidden from actually entering European ports. Formally, the cessation was further qualified: It would be given to the Mapuche who would be acknowledged as a vassal of the Chilean Republic. This led to the first peace of the Mapuche and the Chileans, which would hold tenuously until the Conquest of the Desert and with it a violation of the terms of the Treaty of Valdivia that many Aururians hold to this day has formally returned control of the city of Valdivia and its associated approaches and fortresses to the Empire. In exchange a formal British diplomatic note was also circulated clarifying two points: Firstly, that the Aururian forts in the Pacific Northwest were held in their own right, not through the British claim on the territory; and secondly that the Aururian government had a right to regard southern Patagonia as terra nullius, for there had never been a formal extension of Spanish sovereignty to the area. The Empress Tathra thought with this--and she made haste to establish several settlements, mostly of women from Valdivia--that she had secured a much larger future territory for the Empire, rather than an encircled collection of forts. But the Chilean settlement of Fuerte Buelnes would see the ultimate partition of Patagonia between Chile and Aururia (strongly contested by the Argentines and thus the source of several wars from that point forward), further obscuring the succession of the agreement. Likewise, the British, in abjurring from claims in Polynesia, would later still support the independence of various small Polynesian Kingdoms as not being contrary to this agreement.

The final point was an interesting one. The Pacific Northwest was now an area of substantial white settlement, but the Chetco river basin in the south of the Oregon Country was completely untouched, and so was the Olympic Peninsula, the only exception being the city of Port Townsend, on a subsidiary peninsula inside of Puget Sound, which the Aururian government readily abjurred any claim to with the American government. The three forts however, were seeing expanded activity. Aururian forrestry practices were traditional and strict and the expanses of land at both colonies filled with climax forest were exciting and profitable even as the fur trade died out; thus, steadily, towns developed around which efforts to penetrate the forests, establishing ties with the local tribes, were made. Since this land was of no interest to the farming oriented settlers of the 1820s, there was no conflict as of yet; but the agreement had established in principle that the Aururian claims were in their own right, and therefore ultimately created a problem with the American government in the 1840s when the issue of the Oregon Country had been settled in the main in their favour. Tathra, to her credit, also handled this crisis well in her latter years, and delayed both cession of the forts or any threat of war for twenty-five years.

The Empress Tathra was not to have a perfectly peaceful reign, however, after the end of the war. Rather, her navy outfitted expeditions to the West Africa station to hunt against slave-trading piracy. Though their resilience to tropical diseases and vigour in fighting slave traders was prominent and welcome, the effort both entangled them in some conflicts with Portuguese and Spanish settlements along the coast that were heavily involved in the slave trade. It likewise escalated calls to fight the other slave trade, that which left from the East African ports. This was easily suppressed with a ranging series of frigate actions in the early 1830s... To the New World. The problem was that much of the slave trade leaving the Omani ports went north to Oman and Arabia. This brought them into direct conflict with the Cabotage of the Omani Empire, the Thassalocracy of Muscat and Oman with its southern capital at Zanzibar. Said bin Sultan regarded the Aururian threat as extreme, and began using his treasures to outfit a large fleet for War, retaining some American advisors in the construction of the ships, fit out a fleet of fifteen sail of the line. It was these ships that established the blockade when the Sultan conquered Mombasa in 1837. The expansion of the slave trade this portended was cause for formal war, and the Aururian Navy annihilated the Omani Fleet at the Battle of Ngomeni off the Kenyan coast, and then sailed to Muscat to besiege the city. The Trucial Sheikhs of the Persian Gulf revolted and sought British protection against the Aururians; the Sultan himself was forced into a peace that ended the slave trade, gave the Aururians a post at Malindi on the Kenyan coast, and ultimately he relocated his capital to Zanzibar to remain control of the fading power of the Sultanate.

Shortly thereafter this, a squadron of the fleet was sent north to the island of Soqotra, which the British had just abandoned as uninhabitable by whites to move their attention for a coaling post on the run from the Red Sea to India (the overland trade was already making this important before the canal). Here Annya, the Countess Watimba and the Empress' friend, was allowed to send her marines ashore and overthrow the ruthless Wahhabee rule that had been established in 1800. A short war in which the Mahra and other Yemeni sultanates were swiftly defeated and their fleets of dhows burned ensued, and the Countess remained to build up Soqotra into a model colony with a railway, extensive water canals and cisterns, and a new port that could be used year-round. The island was ultimately thus integrated with the Mascarenes. The Empress, however, was interested in other affairs.

The first indication of this was the grandeur of conception of her plan for canals. Despite the already substantial network, her plans, powered by new developments in Civil Engineering, encompassed the construction of an enormous series of dams on high rivers, providing steady, reliable water for the series of weirs-and-canals to be set through the rest of the east, where the rivers flow long but slow. She began work--that would be thwarted--in completing the great western canal; completed canals unifying the whole eastern system; and expanded the feeder network. This system was also reinforced and unlike the British system, made able with the rehabilitation work on older canals that she directed, to handle steam traffic. Indeed, with the weir giving power to the loom as well as access to the locks for barges, Aururia was turned into a powerhouse of spinning, and only the transition of the English economy to one more focused on heavier industry prevented a serious rivalry over the matter from developing. In turn, it wasn't sufficient for her: To obtain the money for industrialisation of the latest sort based on iron and coal, she created a western-style Imperial Bank and used it to fund ventures in steam engine fabrication, and the earliest steamship lines which would develop regular packet service through the islands of the Indies and Oceania.

This tendency toward liberalisation was also reflected in the law. She published a series of commentaries on the Common Law system which, while not codifying it into a Civil Law code, in combination with a series of Imperial Rescripts, shoved the Aururian courts system toward that of Britain in a decisive fashion, in part to demonstrate that the British had no need to demand extraterritorial rights, and more out of a genuine belief it was most superiour and just. Raising her heir more along the lines of a constitutional monarch, it was clear that she was heading in that direction, and in essence writing a constitution which was her own view of how the United Kingdom had functioned in the period from 1820 - 1845, she promulgated the Constitutional Law of the Empire in that year, three years before her own death in her 50's, which created from whole cloth a system of Queenly Parliaments and the Imperial Parliament, with elections based on those already held for local city councils (and those open, not secret, ballot) in a prior decree from the 1820s. Combined with her aggressive building of European-style buildings inside the Imperial Capital of Mayi-Thakurti, her legacy was thus very well established. These laws created a profound change in Aururian society, both by empowering government to set morality (which led to the "high victorian age of modesty" in Aururian culture where women were forced to dress to standards of modesty that foreigners conducting business would expect, at least in the cities), and empowering people to complain about it after her death, ultimately starting a real voice in Aururian politics--the early parties were formed simply by observation and imitation from the United Kingdom and the belief it would unseemly for there to not be a Loyal Opposition. The Blackskirts or Traditional Union, as a spontaneous nativist development, would come later in the Parliamentarian era.

Tathra died having already inaugerated railway service in the Empire, beginning in 1838 and having had the Imperial government lay two thousand kilometres of track by her death ten years later (not counting private companies) to the immense Brunel Gauge. She was widely regarded for having brought "Law, Commerce, and Modesty" to the great Empire of the Amazons, despite her own deeply complicated record, having nine wives and an enormous number of children. Her daughter the Empress Pangari's mommy was a daughter of the Nawab of the Carnatic and she married a second Muslimah, an Imam of Ternate, as well. This resulted in the first great change in the Empire, creating a policy of creating new Queendoms to manage new lands and integrate new peoples on their terms. She split up the planned expansions of the Queendom of Timor, and gave it several semi-autonomous Duchies, a unique state also shared with Polynesia, which she made another Queendom (her grandmother having added Melanesia). From it she created a unified Sultanate of Bima and Makassar, and a second, the Sultanate of Ternate and Tidore, most famously by locking women from the lines in a fine set of apartments in the palace until they'd had daughters, as it would not be seemly to create so many small Queendoms.

The addition of two Muslimahs to the council and the Edict of Inclusion provided a profound liberal challenge to the Yhiist religious hierarchy, that Tathra admirably managed : Her doctrine was that as long as the Singers were in the Empire and united under the Throne, they might sing against evil with Anjea even if they did not believe in Yhi directly. This extended to even vaguely theoretically monotheisms like that of the Bali-Lombok-Sumbawa region, which her daughter followed in her stead and also created as a Queendom. The fourth that Tathra elevated was the Mascarenes, under a child claiming both French and Comoros-Arab noble blood, which would have been a scandal under any other than the sterling reputation that Tathra had built for the Empire by the time she died, surely the time it was best regarded in Europe, even to the point that their involvement in the Argentine-Cisalptine wars and civil wars that occurred as a sideshow to Tathra's later reign was not greatly opposed. The woman had, however, to a great extent shoved the Empire outside of the comfort zone of her own people, and in the traditional yeowomanry the explosion of commercial conceits and industrialisation clashed with their understanding of how the world ought be. Too loyal to immediately complain, as the population began to understand the importance of the electoral democracy that Tathra either gifted her daughter to or saddled her with, this would change.

[Voyager989]

1848 - 1879: Pangari with Rail and Ironclad.

The Empress Pangari is a vividly but un-fondly remembered figure in Aururian history. The Empire mostly lost territory during her reign, with the only gains coming in the consolidation of Polynesia after the terrible and confused Second Franco-Californian War and the violent adventure of "The '73" which remains a thing of legend in the annals of the Aururian Empire. She died before the victory in the Araucanian War, which was enjoyed under her daughter Camira (despite the succession process allowing for someone else from the dynasty to be made Crown Princess, it last happened in the 18th century). She also lived up to the constitutionalist dictates of her mother's design, and were it not for the French would have likely lived a very quiet life.

For most of her reign two parties--Conservative and Liberal, or Tory and Liberal--contested in a simulcra of the British party system. Voluntary resignation of older stateswomen after a single term in office and genteel campaigning combined with the pressure and consensus of the Open Vote characterized the reign of Pangari and little effort to produce alternatives existed. Successive governments grappled with a variety of social problems, mostly governed by the problem of Tathra's Constitution having prevented absolutely the process of Enclosure, and therefore empowering the yeowomanry (one of the reasons it succeeded) and peasants against dispossession that would drive them into the cities and provide a source of labour for industrialisation. One of the main ways to deal with this was in immigration. The promulgation of Tathra's constitution had established a phase-out of even indentured servitude, increasing the value that immigrants could demand for their services, but the demand was already so high that this scarcely impacted the demand for a flood of foreign labour.

From the three Factories on the Indian coast and from Qi'ao in China came the majority; smaller numbers of natives left through Chile and Peru-Bolivia. A supply of slaves who were liberated on arrival but sent off to a new land at once with a questionable level of consultation came from Malindi in East Africa. A final source was the Andovobatofsky Bay colony in northern Madagaskaria, whence came countless women taken as slaves but considered too unreliable to keep in the Kingdom of Madagaskaria. And it was the Madagascar Problem which would dominate government foreign affairs.

Starting circa 1800 the Empire of Aururia--having a century-long history of expansive trade and intermarriage with the east coast of Madagascar, such that it had become heavily Aururianized--had maintained a standing Embassy at the Merina Court of the Malagasy Kingdom which from the central highlands dominated the island, and it was here that it was said the Ambassador, a woman of Ducal rank in the Imperial Crownlands by the name of Uitala, was said by popular legend to have Touched Ramavo, the wife of King Radama who took the name Ranavalona when she succeeded to the throne in 1828 with two daughters (and, indeed, subsequently, all the ladies of the court, contributing to a late illness of the King Radama). Ranavalona had moved ruthlessly to secure power and expel the whites of the court, using as a fig-leaf the French presence at Fort Dauphin which had been established to fight the Aururians in 1820. She claimed the entire island--including the Colony of Andovobatofsky--but the Empire saw the opportunity, and paid her rent for Andovobatofsky and sent her guns and arms at first. Ranavalona ultimately proved to not be Touched by giving birth to a son; but for a long time the legend remained in popular Aururian circles. What she did was more interesting than that. The Aururian government of the time knew the truth, and simply saw Ranavalona as a friendly Queen; in fact, had she been Touched they might have been more circumspect for political reasons.

Ranavalona for her part astutely observed that the terrible problems of disease that the Merina army had when operating in the Lowlands were completely absent from Aururians present there, living in the eastern coastal regions of Madagaskaria, and understood from the Yhiist doctors provided to her court the medical connection. She closed the country officially to all foreigners, but in practice, some Aururians remained behind. Armed with the musket and cannon and drilled, Ranavalona crushed the old Merina army: She introduced an army trained in the north at Andovobatofsky into the country and slaughtered her opposition in the nobility in the Night of Bloodied Stones of April 21st, 1833. The army, uniquely, consisted of not merely women who were Touched, but also eunuchs, large numbers of them, criminals given a "reprieve" and purchased slaves and battle-captives. Calling it the All-Conquering Army, Ranavalona sent her force into the lowlands on fifteen expeditions. Taking to the field personally, her invasions crushed every single other nation of Madagascar while at home a secret police force manipulated an apocalyptic ideology to unify the Malagasy State. Half the population of the entire island was slain or enslaved, it was said, and combined with the influence of Aururian traders for the past 150 years was steadily giving the island a profoundly Touched character. Gradually even Ranavalona's allies became aware of the fact that the Malagasy State was gradually becoming the tributary heart of a vast array of lands Touched and conquered by an army not led by their own, though it was far away from the capital most of the time. The acknowledgement of her son held in abeyance the fears over Aururianization for a while.

During the Empress Tathra's reign any Aururian connection to the activities--for even trading was circumspect--was mostly contained. But the London Missionary Society ultimately became much more vocal in demanding action and re-opening Madagascar to missionary activities--and containing the activities of the Touched army. Protests that they had no control over it, that it was an indigenous development, gradually became less effective. The French also decided that they would have to intervene. In 1848 an expedition was launched... Just to be overturned by the French Revolution in Europe. Ranavalona's Army acquitted itself well at the Battle of Fianarantsoa, but it was by no means a victory and the French were confident until the lack of reinforcement forced them to fall back on Fort Dauphin after the twin battles of Talata and Mahasoabe. Ranavalona declared it to be Providence from her Ancestors and launched on a terror-campaign through the highlands of the south, burning every city that might have supported the French and crushing it to dust, slaughtering the inhabitants and despoiling the land. The girls were given over in the usual custom as wives to the All-Conquering Army and when possible ultimately integrated into it. It was a machine of war which could make any blush, even Aururians, led by a bloodthirsty tyrant by any measure.

It was getting to be all too much for the Empire, but the Aururian Parliamentary Government could not part with territory without the action of the Empress. Pangari saw a long game that would be vindicated. Andovobatofsky had an enormous naval dockyard including a huge cannon foundry for sake of fighting the French over the Mascarenes. It was massively fortified, could manufacture powder, even build ships of the line. The All-Conquering Army arrived, and the garrison commander signed a capitulation and sailed away. This action, with no whites present to witness it, was displayed as a grave loss to the government, which had to set about at considerable expense building a new Naval Dockyard at Grand Port in the Mascarenes. The connection with Ranavalona was sundered with sufficient veracity--the embassy at once recalled--that it was not until the 150-year rule lapsed in 2004 that it was revealed that the Empress Pangari handed the dockyard over intentionally to reduce European fury at the activities on the island and allay their concerns that the All-Conquering Army was connected with Aururian plans.

Ranavalona's succcessor proved less apt at controlling the terrifying force of the All-Conquering Army. The Third Franco-Malagasy War in 1856 when the French turned them back from Fort Dauphin and the south "in our own Anglo-Mysore Wars" soon followed, the experience being repeated in the Fourth Franco-Malagasy War of 1861, the year that Queen Ranavalona died, leaving the non-Merina cultures of Madagaskaria annihilated, the population Touched, and the UnTouched Malagasy population rapidly turning against the dynasty which had made it possible. Ranavalona's son made immediate peace, having always treated the French prisoners charitably, and acknowledged their "administrative" rights over Nosy Be and the south, which the French interpreted as sovereignty, and began to plot to spread their influence through the south where there might still be an opportunity to do so. The situation having stabilized itself temporarily, but the Malagasy state was riding a tiger it could not control.

At home, social problems were of a different nature for the Empress Pangari, moving with cold calculation on the issue of Madagaskaria. The most notorious was the problem of gypsies. Starting in the mid-18th century as a wave of summary execution penalties for gypsies and pogroms against them had swept Europe, the Empire's ships trading in European ports had started bringing back gypsy women, sometimes the local magistrates would just drop them off in cages, hoping to be rid of them so that they would not breed more gypsies. This was enough--and continued straight into the middle of the 19th century--that it produced a sizeable gypsy population, valued in part because of their abilities with horses, that Aururians traditionally hated. The Empress intervened in the building of a sentiment against them on account of their unsettled ways by handing over to them a large area of plains in the northern Crownlands and making the self-proclaimed Gypsy Queen an elective ducal title. This kind of subtle effort with the use of titles to force recognition of minority groups--she used them several other times for small ethnic groups in the hinterlands of the Empire--was a hallmark of the Imperial soft power of Pangari's reign, as the modern term would be.

She was also a great proponent of steam navigation, commissioning a powerful steam yacht for the Empress of the largest dimensions, patterned on the Vanderbilt of Cornelius Vanderbilt's North American Mail Steamship Line and laid in 1857. Following the friendship her mother had established with the famed engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, she secured the Aururian rights for many Brunelian inventions, including a pneumatic railway under Mayi-Thakurti. Most importantly though she became a backer of the Great Eastern Project with the private money of the Imperial estates, which were to sail primarily to the burgeoning colony of New Zealand, which was accepting a huge population for its relatively small size, but also to Aururia along the way. When Scott Russell offered the tender of the Great Eastern to 258,000 pounds sterling if a second sister were laid, the Imperial Chamberlain made up 200,000 pounds in difference of price. In 1864 the second ship was finished for the Aururian government just in time for the Great Eastern herself to be purchased by the government, then leased promptly to English concerns for use in laying the Transatlantic Cable. The second ship, the Great Southern, was used hauling Good Welsh Coal to Aururia and on the return leg hauling Aururian goods and foods to England. Both were fitted as commerce raiders during the Franco-Californian War of 1868 - 1871.

And, of course, it was under the Empress Pangari's reign that the Empire went into steam navigation in a great way. First, the enormous fleet of Steam Ships of the Line which were to be so useful to the Empire was built up to a strength third only to Britain and France; and the first ironclads were laid in British yards, four immense ships of the Minotaur-class that were to set the standard. The first steam ships fighting in the Imperial Navy came with the Great Siege of Montevideo, where the Aururians supported Montevideo against the Argentines and the Colorado. It was Pangari who led the charge to keep Argentina weak to avoid a war over Patagonia, negotiating with Chile to settle the border in the south amicably and turning the government's attention toward the Plate, with the ultimate policy of the elected government coming down to their own "golden legions" as those which supported all the insurrections and wars against Napoleon in 1800 - 1815; this fiscal support allowed the famed Dictator-turned-Emperor Lopez of Paraguay to build up his fleet of ironclads and use them to secure victory over Brasil and Argentina, force the independence of the Republic of Entre Rios, and install his supporters in the Colorado Party (who had switched sides) into Montevideo with the rendezvous of the Paraguayan fleet outfitted Sao Tome by the Great Southern after escaping Embargo in Europe arriving off the city to land three thousand European volunteers.

The government focused on trade, and finishing the integration of Polynesia. In the former category, Pangari's efforts to build contacts with the western-minded King Mongkut of Siam bore real fruit; the King aceded first to permitting Aururians to train the all-female Royal Guard (which would be progressively expanded as a force against coups by later sovereigns) and then to agree to financial investment which, with government backing behind it, came without the interest which made foreign loans unacceptable to him from other sources. This saw the construction of the Aururian-Siamese Main Line into the Shan States, which was completed by 1867 and linked them permanently into Siam. A similar effort progressing east from Bangkok, however, was not done when the inevitable war came, though the Royal Siamese fleet had several coastal ironclads purchased from the surplus of the United States and a modern munitions work securely further inland at Sukothai. Unlike in Europe, Aururian traders were welcomed in Siam, and the relationship blossomed to the level of fundamental economic interconnection.

Aururian traders could operate in China, but the situation was fundamentally more complicated. There, competition from Europeans was far more pronounced, and the government weakened by the First Opium War, in which Aururia had not participated. By the time of the Second War, however, the situation had changed. The Great Qing were incredibly weakened, and the Heavenly King of the Taiping Dynasty had taken Nanking. The radical ideology of complete equality between men and women that was pronounced in the halls of the Taiping Tingguo was appealing to the Aururian public, and for the first time with a free press Aururian papers held interviews with Taiping women who were serving as military commanders and soldiers in the Heavenly Army. When the British and French turned on the Qing for unrelated reasons, the government moved in, thinking substantial commercial interconnections like those being established with Siam could be made with the victorious Taiping Tingguo and the other European powers being involved would provide them the cover to act. Instead the Aururian war effort bogged down into a series of descents on the coast by small professional bodies of troops from the Navy and they quickly found that western interest in the Taiping Tingguo was limited by the desire for Opium profits that were impossible under the Taiping system. The other powers abandoned the Aururians without including them in the trading with the Qing, and the Aururians retaliated by supporting the Taiping Tingguo until the bitter end, the China Station's ships evacuating civilians from burning Nanking during the victorious Qing sack and destroying a fleet of war junks high on the Yangtze when the Steam Screw SOLs ascended under power. In the end though nothing could be done for the bizarre social experiment of the Taiping, which had started disintegrating almost from the first, and the Aururians settled for Lintin Island off Qi'ao in the Pearl and the Ladrones Archieplago with a direct confirmation of sovereignty and Most Favoured Nations status including a Peking emissary on the same grounds as the western powers. They quickly reverted to generally supporting the Qing against westerners, not sending troops during the Taiping Rebellion.

The American Civil War presented other problems. America continued to demand cession of the Aururian territories of the Olympic Peninsula about Gray's Harbour and the Chetco Colony; the Aururians defended the tribes settled in these areas and continued exploiting them heavily for timber and in the case of the Chetco, quietly for gold (it was kept very secret to avoid a rush, and the mines already established before whites entered the area). These far-flung territories, like Russian Alaska, were both an irritant and an opportunity. The pre-war Presidents had taken a hard line to them, but the prospect of the Aururian station frigate joining the British squadron at San Juan Island in 1859 had deterred any military effort against the prospect of a British-Aururian combination. Conversely, during the Civil War, President Lincoln found the Aururians useful. A large number of American ships were reflagged under the Imperial Ensign with the connivance of the Aururian government, which led to several attacks by Confederate raiders on these vessels and ultimately the seizure of the CSS Shenandoah in single-ship combat in the Pacific in response, though earlier the great career of the famed Alabama had not been interrupted by the Imperial Navy.

Playing both the Aururians and the Russians aggressively to deter foreign involvement, Lincoln sanctioned sales of arms technology overseas, including what the Aururians called the 10pdr Wrought Iron Rifle (commonly called the Ordnance Rifle in the American Civil War), which, produced in Aururia from 1862 forward, became the standard arm of the Imperial Army's field artillery for the war with France that began in 1868, and the Sharps Rifle. The Lincoln Administration's policy of working toward a peaceful buyout of these far-flung adventures of distant Empires succeeded with Russia, and were it not for the prattling of some in the Johnson administration that a war with the negresses could unify the country, a sale might have been concluded earlier, but was finally not achieved until 1875 during the Grant Administration when Aururia was buoyant from the victory in the '73, with the final handover in 1878. The terms of the treaty, thanks to the lesson of the Valdives handover, included strict reservation of privileges for the natives of the regions, which would be under continuous litigation ever since (most notoriously, the provision providing for the tribes to appeal to the Russian Government as a guarantor power of their privileges specified in the US-Aururian treaty, which had seemed innocuous to the American negotiators in 1874, became absurdly contentious during the Cold War). The US government considered it adequate, however, to secure the departure of the entire Touched population as a more important feature of the agreement than anything else; the Aururian negotiators were able to secure limited rights of residence for purpose of trade, which was opening small cracks in the cordon sanitare of the Lazarette for Aururians in European descended countries, but avoiding any permanently resident Touched population was seen as the main US victory beyond the base territorial acquisitions themselves.

But meanwhile the Great or Second Franco-Californian War had broken out in 1868. The proximate cause of the war was not in the Society and Windward Islands, though they had recently been annexed by the Empire, setting it on a collision course with the French over the un-touched Catholic minority populations left after the last war. Nor was the war based on some epheremeal French claims to Patagonia, nor to the anti-slave-trading fort at Grand-Popo near Dahomey, though the French certainly wanted the Aururian ships out of it even though they brooked no interest in the slave trade anymore themselves. The proximate cause ironically was the desire of the King of Cambodia, having aceded to a French Protectorate, abruptly throwing it off and asking to again become a Protected Vassal of the King of Siam. Mongkut found himself at war, and Pangari's Liberal government asked the Empress to declare war to defend Siam from the French for commercial purposes. Armies of more than thirty thousand Frenchmen and Vietnamese Sepoys were soon locked in a series of tremendous, European-scaled battles with modern rifled muskets and chassepots across Southeast Asia, and soon Aururian divisions arrived to reinforce the Siamese, as the Imperial Navy fought La Royale in a series of ironclad battles across the bays and islands of the Indian Ocean. Unable to keep the Aururians from reinforcing Siam, the French, operating out of Pondicherry in a last glory for French India, turned on the three Aururian factory-city-states and besieged and reduced them each in turn: Surat, Tranguebar, and Masulipatam were forced to surrender, with their defenders retreating into internment in British India after the cities were stormed from the beach by the French under the Napoleonic Eagles.

The French effort to run the artillery of the forts on the approaches to Bangkok failed, however, and the great French expedition to the South Pacific took Tahiti but was turned back by the second-line ironclads in October of 1869 at the Battle of Bora Bora. The Aururians landed a force in the South of Madagascar and laid siege to Fort Dauphin. The French held out, and accused the Madagaskarian government of failing to uphold their duties as a neutral. A new expedition came through the Suez Canal, and tried to storm the artificial harbour of Soqotra but was driven back by the defenders, and then turned south to the Comoros, occupying the islands and using its troops to reinforce the French garrison of Nosy Be, for the French regarded Madagascar's fate as inextricably linked to that of Aururia by this point. The King of Madagascar made to capitulate to the French and accept a protectorate and vassalage to secure himself against the All-Conquering Army; it acted first, killing its commanders and marching inland. A woman descended of a Queen of one of the lowland states was elected Queen in the burned remnants of Antananarivo. Naming herself after her mother, Queen Narova, she formed the "Mameluke Dynasty" of Madagaskaria which was to be responsible for the great tumults to come.

The French army was already ashore on the peninsula to the south of Nosy Be, and drove inland in three Flying Columns toward the capital of Antananarivo to seize it by Coup de Main before Narova could organise the defence, and finish ruthlessly suppressing the Malagasy nobility so as to secure her reign. Queen Narova was forced to retreat from the already ruined city as the French burned it again. She fell back to the south, retiring into the lowland jungles while burning the Malagasy cities around her when she fell back, fighting battle after battle in the highlands with the French before abandoning the false hope and heading into the eastern seaboard where malaria would fall the French for her, an army without a state, but an army that could for the most part maintain itself off a land most inhospitable to Europeans.

A two-frigate expedition finished the tiny sideshow and in 1870 reduced the Fort of Grand-Popo and took that place for the French Empire. An Aururian attempt to regain Tahiti was repulsed in the Second Naval Battle of Moorea, and Ushuaia fell in the southern Winter when reinforcements arrived from France. A brief war scare with the Prussians was ended by the French Emperor, Napoleon III, having been taken in hand for a series of four desperate gallstone operations from which he barely survived. The inability of the Emperor to take the field, and the news of victories overseas, was used by Eugenie as regent to succeed in only barely failing to follow Bismarck's provocations over the Prince Leopold; Prince Amadeo of Savoia was seated quietly upon the Spanish throne, and the French redoubled the war effort against the Aururians.

Next, a small bit of hope came when Qi'ao repulsed a small French detachment sent to capture it from Annam. It all scarcely seemed to matter though when the Eagles won a great victory at Siem Reap in late 1870, encircling and capturing two divisions of the Siamese army, which only escaped under the covering fire of a hundred Aururian 10pdr wrought iron rifles from their contingent in the allied army, a grand battery which threw back the French bayonets twice late in the evening to allow anything at all to survive of Siam's western troops. Descending quickly on Bangkok and flinging aside the allied army in six battles, it was forced to retreat north Sukothai. The French settled into a siege against Bangkok. Additional troops were sent from Europe to begin the advance north to Sukothai. The flying squadron was defeated in the Second Battle of the Sunda Straits in April of 1871 with two smaller ironclads sunk and one of the great Minotaur-class ships captured by the French. The naval advantages of the Empire disintegrated. Pangari and Mongkut sued for peace in August of 1871 before Sukothai could fall, with the remainign Society islands having already been conquered by the French.

The terms were terrifying. The French annexed the whole island of Madagascar, stripped all of Laos and Cambodia from Siam, and reclaimed their Mascarene and Seychelle Islands as well as the Indian Factories. They took every island they had claimed in the 1820 war, including Tonga. The petty-Queens of four Polynesian statelets still unorganized in the Empire were arrested by the arriving French--all had refused to flee--and sent as prisoners to Algeria, as was the queen of the Mascarenes, who also refused to leave the vast bulk of her territory and people on Ile Bourbon and Ile de France and Rodriguez. Directly descended from a French Marquis of the islands, she was treated much better, being allowed to take guards and handmaidens and other servants in great numbers with her to a comfortable exile in Algiers. The Territory of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego was taken as a prize by and proclaimed the Protectorate Kingdom of Patagonia and Araucania, and Napoleon III, having already acknowledged his rule further to the north, permitted the half-mad dreamer Orelie-Antoine I (who ironically had cooperated with the Aururian authorities beforehand) to repair to Ushuaia to use it as a capital from which a French protectoral Kingdom under a Frenchman could claim all of Patagonia and Araucania. The French quickly lost any support they might have gained with the distant Gladstone administration in Britain by trying to annex Samoa as well, which was not part of Aururia and in which the British had commercial interests.

The Amazons were finished. They were to never be anything important ever again. The French revelled proudly in the victory, and the troops were recalled home. The Emperor was recovering, and the "primacy of the Caucasian race and manhood over the affairs of the world" was utterly established. Pangari, humiliated and having had to force the terms on her government--the liberal party collapsed and led to an age of Conservative dominance for the rest of her reign and most of Camira's early years--declared her line of the House of Amarina the Great was dead forever. The House of Tyinurru would rule the Empire, but not through her body. She nominated Princess Rayen, one of her much younger sisters by a Mapuché wife of Tathra's, as the new Crown Princess over her own daughter, Camira. The gesture was clearly revanchist, since the Mapuché lands had been lost. Six ironclads on order in Europe were delivered in the coming months, the French paid the money they had agreed to for the territories, and several of the wooden-hulled ironclads championed by Admiral the Countess Annya of Watimba were completed as well. The Empire's overseas rifle orders were delivered in numbers, as well as an additional order of Ordnance Rifles from the US which had been held up before. Several additional ironclads were puchased from the United States--leftovers of the Civil War--as part of the Grant Administration's negotiations over the Northwest Forts. Some of these were supplied to Siam.

But Pangari was privately resigned, in a state of terrible depression at the course of events and seeing the Empire as bound to cease to exist, and with it her entire race, under the rise of Europe. Even with the brutal guerrilla war that Queen Narova was leading in eastern Madagascar against the French, she thought that the cause was doomed. Certainly they could not find a casus belli which would make the war start again? But they could, and did, and this time they would have help. In February of 1873, Prince Amadeo of Savoia abdicated the Spanish throne and fled back to his homeland. Bismarck acted at once. He badgered Leopold personally, arguing that Amadeo's abdication proved that "providence" had provided the throne of Spain for Prince Leopold and that the French had specifically backed down from their demand he not again resume the throne. The Spanish government, in a state of disorder but with monarchists still a majority in the Cortes, regarded the action as propituous, and declared their support for Leopold. He arrived in Spain on March 5th, 1873, at the port of El Ferrol on a Prussian ironclad, and make a triumphant journey through old Castille to Madrid. By the time he had arrived, though, his country was at war.

The French regarded the event with horror. It was a resumption of the old Habsburg encirclement. It was the very doom of France. The swiftness with which the event had been executed--the entire affair lasting less than a month--sent French diplomacy into terror. "So it is war after all," Napoleon III simply remarked. The French issued an ultimatum: Either the entire Prussia Rhineland must be ceded to the French Empire, or Leopold must leave Spain and abdjur the throne. The demand for Prussian territory being included made the withdraw of Leopold a pointless measure; it outraged Prussian opinion so much that the King had no choice, anyway. Exactly as Bismarck desired, war was declared on 22nd March 1873. Marshal MacMahon was sent with an army into Navarre to assist the Carlists who were already at arms against the Madrid Government. The southern Mediterranean coastal towns rose in revolt against the government. Leopold was crowned King of Spain in Madrid, his situation desperate, having only an attentuated and weakened Spanish Army, and with it, a force of two Catholic Prussian regiments of the defensive force of the southern Principality of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and a regiment of volunteer cavalry and a few artillery batteries, who fought as the German Legion in his service subsequently. Finding the situation utterly disastrous for the government, Leopold took the field personally against the Franco-Carlist Army, making a popular appeal to fight them as the Bonapartist Invasion of 1812 had been fought. The Armada declared for the new King and suppressed the communes in Cartagena. At Montejurra the new King and General Navarro were badly beaten by the Franco-Carlist army and forced to retire to Madrid, the German Legion having saved the army from general destruction with a masterfully fought action in the rearguard. MacMahon marched south toward Valencia. There he was defeated in a surprise reverse by a Leopoldine Army of General Valeriano Weyler that won a tremendous defensive victory at Cantavieja for which Weyler was made a Grandee of Spain. The victory, which threw MacMahon back onto Navarre (with later disastrous consequences as Weyler was rewarded with the Captain-Generalcy of Cuba, where he was a cruel and capricious tyrant), secured the survival of Leopoldine Spain as a political entity and allowed time for the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringens to rally the heartland of Castile to the national cause.

On the Rhine front the initial advance of the French Armies were met with jubilation in Paris, only to be reversed by an abrupt and series of terrible battles, culminating at the horrific slaughter of Woerth that reversed completely the French fortunes. At once they were on the defensive, and three huge Prussian columns fronted by the famed Mauser M71 drove the French back in battle after ferocious battle. The world watched as the Imperial Eagles were thrown back deep into France, even as MacMahon rallied his troops and launched an offensive that brought his army to the gates of Madrid despite all the efforts of the growing guerrilla movement in rural Castile against the return of the tyrant Bonaparte. The stalemate of Gravelotte/Mars-la-Tour soon followed, and Napoleon III, of renewed health after recovering from his gallstone surgeries, took the field in person with his army.

But the French Empire was not fighting only the Prussians and the Spanish. In the Philippines, Captain Pascual Cervera had arrived with a squadron of two ironclads, the Numancia and Vittoria, and joined the armoured corvette Mendez-Nunoz shortly before the end of the war, ironically due to a concern about Aururian provocations with some disputed islands southeast of the Philippines (the Pulau Archieplago, which was to be sold to Germany in 1898). Making a rendezvous with the three screw frigates and two screw corvettes of the Manila station in those days, they had cruised south when they heard word of the French ultimatum. Declaring that the government could not accept such a humiliation, he steered for Hai-Phong in French Indochina. The massively powerful squadron of six ironclads maintained there since the Second Franco-Californian War was his objective. He lay off Vietnam and tapped the British cable from Singapore to Hong Kong, on which he heard the declaration of War. At once Cervera's squadron descended on Hai-Phong and swung out their steam launches, fitted with spar torpedoes. The French had not completed a cable to Viet-Nam at that time, and so their ships were anchored at peacetime footing when Cervera personally led the launches into Hai-Phong harbour, breaking through the boom and sinking one of the ironclads at anchor. His men in the small boats boarded a second, the Amazoné, the captured Minotaur of the Aururian Imperial Navy, and fired signal rockets as his men set her rig and fired her guns into the arsenal of Hai-Phong, the ensign of the Armada Réal fluttering from her mizzen as the three Spanish ironclads descended into the harbour with the wooden ships at their heels, settling between the remaining French ironclads on one side and the wooden ships on the other, anchoring and pounding them in harbour with their boilers cold until a second ironclad sank, and then withdrew without loss successfully.

Sailing out of Hai-Phong with his captured ironclad under tow as her boilers made steam, Cervera won the most spectacular victory of the Spanish Navy in almost a hundred and fifty years. When his heroism reached Spain, King Leopold at once made him a Grandee of Spain and Duke of Manila. It created a great popular resurgence for the government of Leopold that helped allow him to survive the reverses of the hard war against MacMahon and crush the communes and the Carlists. And when the Empress Pangari found out about it a week later, she ordered the French ambassador to return the captive Queens in Algeria to their thrones, saying that the treaty had not given the French the right to disposses them. The French Ambassador answered, "Your Majesty, you mean to war, and no terms will be conceived which could prevent it, and so let us not maintain this pretence. I ask for my passport so that I may sail for Indochine."

The 82-year old Admiral the Countess of Watimba who had been made Governor of Soqotra and Comoros had been preparing for the moment, drilling the militia, which she then drummed aboard the interned ships of the Madagaskarian Navy and her own squadron and every civilian ship which could be secured in the ports at the moment word was reached. They descended on Grand Port and caught a single French sloop-of-war in the harbour, and began drumming militia with old muskets out into the boats to go ashore, covering them as they formed up with the guns of the squadron. The French garrison marched out to engage them through the streets of Grand Port, and the people of the city rose in revolt. The governor, taking his troops to battle, shared the death of King Pyrrhus of Epiros, when he was struck and killed by one of the tens of thousands of roofing tiles being sent hurtled down into the streets by the population. When the French formed up after marching through the town and half-burning it, the Soqotran and Comorosi Militias fired a single volley and charged with the bayonet. The French broke to an Aururian bayonet charge in the first time in all the history of their fighting, and as the remaining troops fell back toward the citadel through the streets of Grand Port, they were butchered to a man by the population, fighting with knives hammered to sticks and thrown rocks.

The event was celebrated as a general salvation in Aururia, and the Yhiist temples held great celebrations throughout the Empire, the reconquest of Isle de France being a propitious sign to the Empire. It also deeply concerned Pangari, for the failure to take prisoners implied a kind of savage war to the knife that in a French colony with actual French women and children--no settlers had been allowed on the thoroughly Aururianized Isle de France yet--could result in a disaster with the Empire's diplomacy with its Prussian and Spanish allies and the British. Accordingly she resolved to settle the matter of the other occupied territories by occupying French territory to trade for them. She ordered the outfitting of an expedition of forty thousand bayonets, seven thousand sabres of the household cavalry, and three hundred guns to Siam. Through the Spanish Ambassador she received an agreement for a Regiment of the Spanish Army of the Philippines to join them, as well as a second regiment of Filipino levees. The forces made their rendezvous off Singapore and sailed for Bangkok, with the Empress Pangari accompanying the expedition in person. King Mongkut of Siam had refused to consider joining the war again until the fleet appeared with the Aururian Empress and their Spanish allies standing off Bangkok herself. By welcoming the fleet into Bangkok he informally declared war on the French, and the units of the Siamese Army which had recovered from the last war formed up around the Imperial Army and marched on the old Khmer roads for Angkor Wat.

At the twin battles of Sisophon and Battambang the allied army swept aside the French border forces. The French forces in Indochina having been drawn down after the great victories, the French could not put another army into the field in Cambodia, and ceded the whole country. The King fled to Annam, and Pangari and Mongkut led the allied armies to occupy the whole country, and then crossed the frontier into Cochin China. At the battle of Tay Ninh they defeated the Governor's army in the open field, and took Saigon. They then marched north toward the Imperial court at Hué. The Vietnamese Emperor fled with his French "advisors", and the Spanish regiment requested and received the honour of being in the vanguard when storming the ancient citadel of Hué. Four days before, the Imperial Navy had defeated an arriving French ironclad squadron off Fort Dauphin in southern Madagascar, sinking two ironclads, which allowed the landing of a brigade of Marines to reinforce the Mameluke Queen, who at once marched with the ragged remnants of her army--down to 12,000 women, plus the Aururian marines--back up toward Antananarivo, taking the city's citadel--virtually the only part left after first she and then the French had burned it in 1870--on October 4th, 1873, and clearly established her reign as Queen Narova over a shattered and despoilt land.

Meanwhile in Europe after his severe defeat at the Battle of Reims, Napoleon III had been forced to fall back to the north, allowing the Prussian armies to descend on Paris. But instead of trying to invest the city, they had turned to encircle Napoleon III, defeating him again at Tergnier and Saint-Quentin. A final desperate counterattack occurred at Arras, and Louis-Napoleon led his remaining troops across the border into Belgium and exile. In response the French overthrew the Regent Eugenie and declared the Third Republic, news of which reached the Far East on December 16th, as the Prussian armies invested Paris in the snow and settled down to winter camps around the city. The government placed charge on Marshal MacMahon to save the country, who with withdrew from Catalonia and Valencia by ship, La Royale having won a great victory over the Armada Real at the Battle of Cape Palos on November 23rd and annihilated the main Spanish ironclad squadron with an overrated use of ramming tactics.

The Battle of Cape Palos had come about on account of the Spanish, having restored order and defeated the Communes in the south with a Royal Army under Weyler, having transported the Legion to Oran and having taken the city from the French which they had possessed until only 50 years before. One of the objectives of this operation was to support the insurrection of the Kabyle, which had erupted when the Spahis were sent to France to fight the Prussians, and the Queen of the Mascarenes had used the light circumstances of her confinement to escape, liberate the Polynesian Queens, and flee to the mountains before her guard could be increased after the rising. A body of foreigners having assisted the rising made it much more popular with the Kabyle, and made the rising general in the coastal mountains. Accordingly the Legion had been sent to Oran and taken it, with orders to march on Algiers and effect a union upon the request of the Aururian ambassador, where the revolt was very celebrated. The fleet on returning to Spain was caught at Cape Palos and defeated, though, and the Legion was cut off in Oran. When given the opportunity to surrender by the French, the commander spat on the parleyman's boots, and at severe privation, the Legion maintained the siege of Oran for as long as the siege of Paris!

With the French army having withdrawn from Spain to land, however, King Leopold combined with General Weyler and commenced the siege of Barcelona that winter while the Carlist Army was in its cantonments. The Carlist Pretender, hearing this, attempted a winter march to sieze Madrid by coup de main, but Leopold was able to return to the capital and defeat the Carlists at Second Guadalajara. The Carlists remained in the field in Castille, exchanging victories with the Royalist Army, until Weyler had forced the surrender of Barcelona and advanced on Saragosa in the fall of 1874. In the meanwhile the Government of National Defence threw army after army the Prussians while Paris tried to survive, and MacMahon fought a scholeric defensive campaign in the south of France. On September 14th, 1874, Paris and the national government surrendered, the commune rose into revolt, and the German Empire was shortly afterwards declared in the Hall of Mirrors.

The war, however, still offered few kindnesses. The terms were mixed at best. Cambodia was acknowledged as a French protectorate, but the borders were sharply reduced, the western half of the country being annexed outright by Siam, as was Laos, the princes dispossessed. Mongkut had died of malaria on the campaign north from Hué, and his son had wanted to leave for Bangkok to consolidate power quickly. Fort Grand-Popo in West Africa remained under the French in sovereignty, as did the cities of Surat, Tranguebar, and Masulipatam in India, which had been added in 1871 to enhance the grandeur of French India for the first time since Plassy. Pangari did not even attempt to negotiate for them. The south of Madagaskaria was confirmed in fact to France, at a line north Fort Dauphin to the coast on the western side, and several surrounding islands of Nosy Be, several narrow-necked peninsulas in the immediate vicinity on the coast, as well as the islands of the Channel of Mozambique south of Mayotte, and several nearby islets. The sovereignty and independence of the Queen had to be definitively declared and acknowledged by the French at two separate points in the treaty, a fact which they would later not respect. The population of Madagaskaria, insensibly mingled and Aururianized by the war, groped forward from the trauma into a new identity as the state was painfully rebuilt, an international pariah of savages and barbarians. In those days, of course, that did not stop men with an interest only in money in providing services for Queen Narova, and the state slowly began to reorganize and reequip itself. With its power established, the reputation would slowly sink away, and law and order again began to prevail.

The petty-Queendoms of the Society Islands were restored, as was Tonga, to the Empire, and the whole of the Mascarenes. There the French retained only worthless Tromelin Island. In Polynesia, only the Austral Islands to the south of the Polynesian petty-Queendoms were retained by the French. In the Americas, King Orelie-Antoine of Patagonia was met by a deputation of his almost entirely Touched population in Ushuaia and asked to declare independence after word of Napoleon's having been deposed in France reached Tierra del Fuego. He agreed, and the French were forced to acknowledge this as a compromise at the peace treaty (which was the cause of much bitterness for some Aururians that the Queen had not insisted on the return of Patagonia). However, Orelie-Antoine died without heirs of his own body, and instead had nominated Princess Rayen as his heir. The Nominated Crown Princess was again made Camira after the victory, by a deputation of Parliament after an acclaimation that Pangari had well deserved to change it the inheiritance back to the heir of her own body, and when Orelie-Antoine died Rayen succeeded him as Queen of Patagonia and brought the land back into the Empire. The French lost Oran and the coast around it to Spain, and were forced to agree to a treaty guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of the Kabyle people as a protectorate, not an integrated part of Metropolitan France as the Departments of Algiers and Constantine now became. This agreement was, of course, later abrogated. In ancillary agreements, Pulau was confirmed as Spanish and in return the Spanish presented the captured and re-captured ironclad Amazoné as a gift to the Empress.

The rest of Pangari's reign was marked by the quiet negotiations to cede the Northwest forts and by the continued development of ties with Siam and with the Kingdom of Hawai'i, and the beginnings of Aururian involvement in support for Peru-Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, as the fate of Patagonia and Araucania was yet far from being settled. At home, the wars caused a major recession, but it was shaken off and efforts to again modernize on the bedrock of massive state-funded railroad expansion, which also served to further reinforce and defend the heartland from the greatest fear of all--a French descent with flying columns like that effected against Madagaskaria--that led to a fort building craze in the Late reign of Pangari. She died nonetheless content, happy despite her health being wrecked by the expedition to Indochina in her 60's, her state in all indices but the colour and sex of her people, equal to a European one and in truth able to fight the French on even odds in a long war of naval and expeditionary attrition in a tremendous recovery of fortune that was all the more stupendous for how close on the heels of great defeats it had followed.

[Voyager989]

1880 - 1914: Camira of the Long Twilight.

It was very easy for the Europeans to pronounce the Aururians finished, "kaput", done for. During the Second Franco-Californian War, there was Jacques Berny on the walls of Surat, thrusting the Tricolor into the Ramparts. Admiral Edouard Bouet-Willaumez heroically wounded on the quarterdeck as the ironclad Couronne batters an Aururian 84 screw SOL at Moorea. Admiral De Lagraien pounding his squadron of ironclads past the Aururian Flying Squadron at the Battle of Sunda Straits in which a French troop convoy was carried safely through to Cochin. Antananarivo burning thanks to the Flying Columns of General Coulmiers. Marshal Canrobert's string of victories that brought his resplendant bayonets to the walls of Bangkok and sent the Siamese clobbered back up the river to Sukothai when the Aururian Amazons barely covering their retreat and the Siamese King fleeing his own capital. After a long time of playing with the men and the whites, the successes of the Aururians were for naught. Their Empire would in time decay as all the rest had.

The 73 hadn't changed the calculus. The French boasted that they still had territory: The Australs, Tromelin, more of southern Madagascar, Surat, Masulipatam, Tranquebar, Fort Grand-Popo. They had forced the independence of Patagonia, too, and maintained their claim on Cambodia. They had been fighting two European powers at the same time, one of which had contributed troops to the Aururian war effort. The loss of Laos and half of Cambodia back to Siam, the valiant resurgence of King Mongkut's army, all could be blamed on the failure to send reinforces from Europe. White supremacy was not at all dead; indeed, hadn't it even been a Spanish regiment which put its banners on the walls of Hué? The silent cession of the Northwest Forts passed naturally in the dying days of the reign of Pangari, who had done so much to make lie of this belief, but would not be recognized for it. She had at least the pleasure to obtain the retrocession of Patagonia to the Empire in 1878 before her death, even in the same year at the Northwest Forts had been ceded. The Empire's maps swelled and shifted countless times, and on her death, Pangari had at least held the edifice together.

Pangari died in bed, sovereign of her own land. In her death she remarked she was the greater than Napoleon III in that regard, and even at the time, every commentator had to acknowledge the truth of it. Her only daughter was 17, having been Nominated by the Council of Queens as Crown Princess only a year before her death. Pangari in her private life had been assiduously moral, married to the daughter of the Queen of Tonga with a member of a line of Kokopo Countesses (and meant that her wife's sister had been imprisoned in Algeria for two years), and Camira would always remark she would wish she had inheirited her mommy's fine curly blonde hair, that unique trait of the Kokopo islanders (though in more limited evidence in Aururia proper) which has steadily spread through the rest of the Empire.

Camira's reign would be in marked contrast to her mother's. Her mother had interfered some with the government still, for example resisting the idea of a major reformation of the Imperial Railways. Camira endorsed the plan, as well as the plan to standardize the Railways outside of Aururia proper on the Stevenson Gauge (only the private railways of Tierra del Fuego and the mining railways of the Pilbara refused to follow suit with the standardisation in loading and track gauges), and withdrew afterwards from active governance in the affairs of the Imperial Railways as being unseemly for a Queen to directly guide the affairs of an Imperial Chartered Corporation, even when she had a controlling interest in it through the Crownlands (both Tathra and Pangari had found it a convenient way to directly meddle in technology and economics and so were behind both the Imperial Railways and IIP&O). She turned her attention to encouraging the founding of a great string of universities and technical schools, which in the long term would directly serve to make the Empire less reliant on foreign intellectual capital. She visited Russia, the "disinterested" power to the south Pacific.

But her deep desire to maintain Aururia at peace and thus safe--the desire that ultimately made her abandon her somewhat quixotic courtship of the youngest daughter of the Emperor Lopez of Paraguay to avoid scandal--could not avoid War. And War came very soon, for the Conquest of the Desert turned into the Araucanian War with terrible swiftness come in 1881 when Colonel Conrado Villegas of the Argentine Army was ordered across the Rio Negro to conquer Araucania and Patagonia for Argentina. The Rio Negro being at the upper limit of the range of the Mapuche peoples, the rapid advance of the Argentines south toward the settlements made by the Aururians triggered countless black memories. The Mapuche, betrayed in Chile in the administration of Valdivia that had been promised to them by the Chileans at the cession, turned to the south for help, and the Aururian public was in the mood for some of their own revanche. The Aururian Army paramilitary formation "Patagonian Light Horse Brigade" met Colonel Villegas' expedition with their hand on the rifle-butt and the fighting was general south of the Rio Negro before the declaration of war could be made formal.

The Argentines were prepared for a fight, and managed to get south of the Rio Chubut, besieging several Aururian towns, before heavy reinforcements arrived from the homeland. Battling the relative cold of Patagonia compared with their own homes, and cumbersome against the light cavalry tactics of the Argentine Gaucho irregulars, but aided by the support of the Mapuche, a rolling battle on the plans ensued as the Aururians methodically drove the Argentines back to the Rio Negro... And then outflanked the defensive lines of the regular Argentine army, swelling with European volunteers promised land at the conquest, by using the navy to defeat the Argentine Armada at the Battle of Samborombon Bay and land troops south of Buenos Aires in 1883. This force defeated the Argentines progressively at the battles of Lake Limpia, Chascomus, and Brandsen, and then conducted a siege of Buenos Aires. However, the government and Camira hesitated in the face of European displeasure, remembering how easily the Empire's friends had retreated from any help in the Franco-Californian War, and warily refused to extend the siege to the point of closely blocking the cargo ships from further up the interior rivers of the Upper Provinces in Argentina carrying food and reinforcements into the city. Thanks to this the siege of four years was one in which the Argentine Capital and heartland did not fall to the Aururians; repeated in miniature the Franco-Prussian War, new armies in the northern fertile provinces were constantly being raised and sent south to try and break the siege, and failing, as Buenos Aires held on until finally there was a peace.

And the peace was a profoundly unsatisfying one. It provided for limited Argentine reparations and a withdraw by Aururia to the Rio Chubut as the new border. Native land tenure claims were not addressed, a fact that would be latter used for some revenge in the Second Patagonian War in the 1980s. But the reason for this was primarily that a great eruption at Manus off the coast of New Guinea had devastated several rich Queendoms of Aururia and severely hurt some major industrial infrastructure and caused an economic recession. Following on the heels, too, of Krakatoa only 5 years earlier, the old Yhiist religious tradition of associating volcanic eruption with evil and catastrophe was brought home, and Camira was intensely worried about internal insurrection, the old blight of the dynasty after such events. She encouraged the Ministers to make an easy peace, and in the end they did with little complaint because even the mood on the street was uncomfortable over the disasters. The Argentines, for their part, immediately turned it into part of a Great National Epic, which would help lay the seeds of a war a hundred years later.

The Empire turned out to be better than that. The recession hit hard and fast, but the charitable organisations of the Empire mostly dealt with the consequences. Those that they did not, served as a catalyst for demands for regular social services in the subsequent years which the governing system would ultimately find itself able to meet in the 1920s. The Great Samoa Crisis was resolved amicably (just to flare up again twice more before being finally settled with the partition of Samoa between Hawai'ian and Aururian portions!) after the Great Apia Typhoon. The Volcano did however launch the beginning of Traditional Union politics. It was taken as a sign the Empress' ministers were misleading her to such an extent that traditional forms of protest in the backwaters and traditional rural yeowomanry and outright peasantry of the Empire would be ineffective. Therefore, to try and reach the power centres of the Empire the "naked breast" protest movement transformed itself into the Traditional Union and began to field candidates to Parliament. Within 30 years they would be able to arguably win majorities, representing a rejection of submission to western interests--and western morality--and a celebration of all things of Aururia that Tathra had tried to tamp out with her Europeanization.

Part of the growing anti-western drive was on account of the British offer for "help", which consisted of substantial provision of gold and silver specie in exchange for the sale of the Fort of Malindi in East Africa and a 150-year lease on a naval station on the eastern half of Kangaroo Island off the southern coast of Aururia proper as a refueling station on the way to New Zealand from India. Camira encouraged her diplomats to seek an explicit right for Aururians to reside in the United Kingdom for both commercial and educational purposes, but beyond that the agreement, heavily encouraged by the British, it was ultimately assented to. Camira, blessedly, did not have to lose another inch of Aururian soil in her life... Instead, she was well-primed to win another victory. And at this treaty, she ironically set the grounds for the next war. Included in the text at Camira's insistence was, finally, an important concession from the British. A single statement: "The British Government will not object to the Californian Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Bali, Lombok, and Celebes."

The Netherlands had started a massive naval buildup in the wake of the Franco-Californian War of 1868 - 1871 on account of the terrifying sight of the huge fleets of French and Aururian ironclads of the largest size clashing in main battle in the Sunda Strait and several times right off the coast of Java. At the same time, to pay for their defensive effort to save the East Indies, they began to more aggressively assert claims to the bulk of Celebes and to Lombok and Bali which the Aururians thought had been settled in their favour, but to the Dutch, were not. The British agreement suggested that they were losing control of the islands, and triggered a panic order of warships in the Netherlands. As the ships began to be delivered, the government grew more belligerent, seeing the growing economic and technical sophistication of Aururia and politically feeling that the Indies would be lost if the issue were not soon settled. The British might recognize the Aururian primacy, but the rest of the world did not, and the Dutch government received encouraging noises from Germany and France. Accordingly, in 1894 when the Netherlands issued an ultimatum to the Hindu Raja of Mataram, who ruled the western half of Lombok (the eastern half having been conquered in the 1810s by the Aururians), they did so with the expectation that they had built their diplomatic and military position up enough to be successful. Instead, the Dutch received a protestation that Lombok was in the Aururian sphere of influence and they must withdraw. When the Dutch forces to land at Mataram were deterred from landing by the arrival of an old Aururian squadron of screw frigates that served as a tripwire to threaten war, the calls for war reached a fever's pitch, and an ultimatum for the Aururians to withdraw from Lombok was issued. Three days later, the two nations were again at war, and the British influence that meant contrary to their hopes the Germans and French, still smarting over the humiliation at Apia, did not join in.

The Dutch landed at Denpasar and trigged a puputan, the deaths of the independent Balinese courts being particularly tragic for the loss of the women. The Maharani of the north declared her revenge, sent an army forward that rescued some. These were militiawomen, the products of the creation of a Territorial Army to address the French defeat by massed conscripts in the Franco-Prussian War, and they fought surprisingly well. When the Dutch were pinned down by early machine guns and breachloading rifles from second-line troops and the small garrison with its magazine rifles, the war on Bali became trench warfare in miniature, and this bloody churn spread to Lombok. The concentrations of troops on Celebes, and population density and development, were nowhere near sufficient, and here the war degenerated into a series of savage raids, with the women of the Sultanates eagerly going after central Celebes as though it were Jihad. The Dutch resolved that the war could only be won by cutting the lines of supply on Lombok and Bali.

To do this, the fleet would have to advance. The Royal Netherlands Navy sailed forward with orders to occupy the Banda Archipelago and then sortie against Amobon and Timor to destroy the main Aururian naval bases there. As the Dutch fleet concentrated at Banda, though, a single local sloop slipped away to the north, and brought converging bows of steel in the water, well-equipped with quick firing guns. In the Battles of Rozengain and Pulau Run, the Dutch briefly held off the detached Aururian fleets, but failed to prevent them from combining. When falling back to the main anchorage at Banda, the Dutch opened themselves to a night attack by the concentrated fleet. The Battle of Banda, fought at close range with incredible discipline in the night, proved the Amazons were still quite capable of feats of arms: By evening of the second day, the Dutch fleet had nearly been wiped out.

It was the Dutch forces on Lombok and Bali that were besieged, and regular Aururian troops landed at three places along Celebes to begin properly securing the centre of the island. The Maharani was declared Maharani of Great Mahapajit and an invading army was landed on Java itself. This raised the highest order of panic in the East Indies, with the Dutch expecting the Aururians to conquer Java utterly. The disaster was total. But at the Battle of Jember, the Black Askaris of Dutch Assanteland and Sikh and Brahmin Sepoys of the Indies settlements held firm in the KNIL service and threw the Aururians back onto Banyuwangi. The concluded peace handed over Celebes, Lombok, and Bali, formally and absolutely, to the Empire of Aururia. The Navy had a decisive victory under its belt, and the army, invaluable experience with both irregular jungle fighting and trench warfare.

Flush with victory, the Aururian government buoyed forward in its recovery from the economic depression in the wake of the great eruption. Soon conceived was a natural project of the period, when railway ferries leaving from three locations, to the number of some sixty vessels, crossing between Sahul Major and Sahul Minor, could barely keep up with the traffic of the Imperial Commerce across the Straits of Torres. Camira was the most enthusiastic backer of the project. The Great Sea Railway across the Torres Strait was executed starting in 1896. It took until January of 1914 to complete, "and in most respects combined in difficulty and execution the simultaneous construction of four Great Pyramids, the Overseas Railway to Key West in the United States ten times over in amount of fill and causeway laid, considering the additional tracks, and twice over the great spans of the Quebec Bridge." Many Europeans responded to it with trite efforts to dismiss the true magnitude of what had been done. Others were grudgingly complimentary. Regardless, it was a real project of engineering execution and design, and some western feminists realized what it meant about the capabilities of the female--and predominantly black--Aururian mind; others could care less.

That the bridges were being built in the wake of another war scare--this time with the United States--meant that further effort was put into the fortifications to defend them. This involved both a war scar with the United States over Hawai'i, and Samoa, which then involved the French. The Plantation Revolution, the attempt of the White Hawai'ians to form a pro-US annexation government, was the proximate cause, and nearly saw an exchange of fire in Honolulu bay as the Aururian station cruiser defended the government, firing on the Planters' army and then training her guns on the Americans. The fact that the Rising Sun of a Japanese cruiser was sighted over the horizon and the Americans expected her to side with the Aururians was all that avoided an open breach. After this point, and the marriage of the Crown Princess of Hawai'i to a Christian Aururian Duchess, the Hawai'ian alliance was aggressively cemented in Aururian policy. The fact that the Samoan crises were only decisively settled by handing the larger part of Samoa to Hawai'i, thereby giving a conqueror of Hawai'i a prospective base in the heartland of Imperial Polynesia, further necessitated the Hawai'ian-Aururian alliance. The war avoided, though, was still something that Camira toasted.

The Empire tried at the start of the Spanish-American War of 1898 to secure the Micronesian islands by purchase to keep them out of American hands, but the Spanish refused to yield them, to the loss of the Philippines as a result. The distraction over Samoa did it no help, and nor did the Boxer Rebellion in China, to which the Aururians were sympathetic to the Chinese, but hapless; even the Armada Real took a bite out of China despite the loss of the Philippines. The subsequent French-initiated Samoan crisis of 1904 (in conjunction with a war scare in Southeast Asia over the Siamese frontier in Cambodia) was the final event which saw the partition and Hawai'ian sovereignty over the western isles of Samoa confirmed. It brought the first direct government investment in a Siamese war industry, instead of just encouraged private investment, which would ultimately become standard--free military aid to allies--but at the time was much more commented upon. It was decided upon, however, very wisely. The French provocations on the border, insults to Buddhist monks, and humiliation of Siamese customs personnel would only continue.

The 1911 War Scare was much more substantial, involving as it did actual fighting near Nosy Be--lately the home of the anchored Imperial Russian Navy on its fateful cruise to Tsushima--and in the south of Masagascar. The independent state regarded it as its own impending demise. French provocations on the Siamese border had in the meanwhile again become intolerable, and the Siamese prepared a general mobilisation. Camira felt that she had no chance to sanction her own government's desire to guarantee its allies. War seemed certain, but the Agadir Crisis intervened. Camira saw her chance, and engaged in a flurry of desperate diplomacy with Queen Ranavalona II (the daughter of Narova with a Princess of the Imerina line, to unify the royal claims), who she had broken off an engagement to as a young Empress. Perhaps in retaliation or simply out of duty, Ranavalona II drove a hard bargain, exacting innumerable special concessions for her beloved Madagaskaria, but the end was clear: There was a new Queen on the Queen's Council, of the highest precedence, and Madagaskaria voluntarily aceded to Aururia, fourteen years after the Maharani was formally recognized on the Queen's Council for Bali, Lombok, and western Sumbawa. By this point it was seen as move that would guarantee the continuation of improvements and civilised government in a Madagaskaria which had gone hopelessly to the Amazon race fifty years before, "an inevitable outcome of that savagest of mongrel blood, half Malay and half black", to the dismissive regard of the times.

The French, in renewed closeness to the British after the Spanish victory at Agadir brought the government to an end and pressed French pride to the breaking point, started isolating the Aururians in British circles as they began a massive expansion to their already booming dreadnought construction programme. The Aururians, betrayed by the British alliance in 1901 with the "Japanese Dwarf Pirates" they had fought innumerable battles with in the 16th and 17th centuries and their notorious Red Seal Ships, saw that they would surely fight alone and without British help. The famed Ekanduis yards finished importing anything they could need from overseas with government support; the Siamese increased the length of their conscription service from 18 months to 2 years. Madagaskaria's Royal Army, retained as a separate formation after accession, was raised to 3 divisions. The border provocations with Siam by the French in Indochina became intolerable. The slide to war seemed inevitable. The Aururians frantically purchased the great dreadnought "Rivadavia" building at Armstrong-Elswick.

The Empress called for the foreign news.

-- An Archduke shot down in Bosnia, but nothing much, really...

No mere 'crisis' intervened, this time.

[Voyager989]

1914 - 1926: The Empress and her Few Desert Cities.

1901 had brought a bleak sort of chill for the Aururians. Now heavily accultured to English values and expectations by the relentless demands of commerce, language, trade, and education in their upper classes, they had also counted on British assistance after the Dutch War to secure their admittedly minimalistic war aims. The British had assisted in the final settlement of Hawai'i, too, and were reliable defenders of the independence of Siam, having no desire to see the French with a border to Burma. But first the Anglo-Japanese accord of 1901 shattered the illusion that the English were a reliable ally. Soon after came another crisis. In the viciously fought Spanish-American War of 1898 the Armada Réal had exchanged a series of battles with the Americans in the Caribbean, but a surprise American descent on Luzon had seen the northern Philippines fall. A task-force sailed from Spain and arrived at Davao in Mindanao. In the end they did not come to blows, a negotiated peace ceding Luzon and Guam to the Americans and surrendering Cuba to independence. The Aururian government had tried to buy Spanish Micronesia but was rebuffed before the war; afterwards, the Spanish crown wobbled and governments changed rapidly, the Spanish salvaging national honour with involvement in the Eight Nations Alliance against the Boxers.

The Liberal government that consolidated power in the subsequent elections was faced with Mindanao and the Viscayas being an ungovernable money sink with Luzon and its settled Hispanic culture. They had been severely wounded by the First Morocco Crisis and Wilhelm's meddling in their efforts to secure control of Morocco, to the point that the family alliance between Spain and Germany had completely fractured. They sought a buyer for the islands, only to come under strong US pressure not to sale them to either Japan or Aururia. The British were uninterested and the Aururians in the end were able to buy two small atolls that had been settled with Touched but were legally Spanish, and confirm the Spanish recognition of their preexisting sovereignty over Palau and Yap; The Aururians pressured against France. The Russians were disinterested, as was Austria; the Ottoman Emperor offered to take the Muslim part of Mindanao under his protection, but couldn't afford to pay anything. In the end it came down to the Italians and Germans, and Germany was able to offer support for the Spanish annexation of Morocco in return, reversing policy from supporting the country's independence and agreeing in the future to absolutely support the establishment of a Spanish protectorate over all of Morocco. The government did not oppose the German purchase but regarded warily the input of yet another greedy power into the Pacific.

Then the Anglo-French Entente and the Agadir or second Morocco crisis left no doubt whatsoever that the British had other interests as far more important than their "friendship" with Aururia. Some dark grumblings suggested that the Germans might be better friends, even with the Kaiser's hysterical anti-Aururian rants that he could sometimes produce, particularly during the Dutch War. After all, the British were behaving based on Interest. At Agadir the Spanish had secured their main concession to a protectorate over the Sultanate in the interior, though four coastal port enclaves were given to the French, the area about Fort Lamy in Kameroun ceded by the Germans, and Tangiers put under international administration. The outcome was still a national humiliation to the French and it was widely believed by many in California at the time that they had only agreed to it on the promise neither Spain or Germany would intervene in a war between France and Aururia. Others argued this meant that securing exactly that--a German alliance--was critical to forestall such a conflict.

But the conservative government before the war and Camira knew better than to risk further European entanglements by shifting their alignment toward Germany and Spain. War against the French was already certain enough; better to just make sure the British would not be involved either way than to risk that very thing of turning hostile their long-term patron in the Empire. So the Aururians dutifully pressed down on trying to outbuild La Royale without initiating hostilities. A miniature naval race erupted in time to the larger one of Britain and Germany. This was not the country which in 1900 for the turn of the century celebrations had arranged a virtual two-month long shutdown of national commerce for the sake of completely switching the railways from vacuum brakes and chain-and-buffer couplings, a system to meet the rails of Sahul Minor on their terms with modern American-style equipment worthy of the loading gauge and the completion of a truly national system at hand. By 1914, after only 15 more years of explosive growth, the Aururian railways system had reached two-thirds of the length of track of the United States. It had become utterly unstoppable as an engine of commerce. The Empress rode the inaugural train under 3kV wire across the Torres Strait bridge to national celebration in that year, uniting the two halves of Sahul in all the pride of her domain over womankind. It was January, pleasant enough in the tropics. The world was at peace, though the rising tensions left the Aururians more prepared for what would happen next than most. Nobody was prepared for what happened next.

In 1914, industry was quite well developed--the munitions industry was by this point entirely native, even for the largest of heavy guns--though the chemical industry was still underdeveloped, the immense guano reserves of the country making this seem to not be a problem before 1914 when combined with the natural immunity of Aururians to diseases (observant and clever doctors do not necessarily make good chemists). Ekanduis was completing its fourth foreign order for warships, two immense 12-inch dreadnoughts for the Peru-Bolivian Confederation. The army had comfortably established its collection of modern battle-rifle and machine gun, and based on their prior experience one of the highest ratios of howitzers in the world. A prototype for a self-loading rifle had been issued, and the Territorial system was universally established through the Empire. Coast defence artillery funding was at its highest point ever. They were ready, but they didn't realize for what.

As the world slid into the war, Aururia initially remained aloof. It was just going to be a European conflict, and perhaps this time they'd even avoid being drawn into it. Indeed, for the most part, the Aururian government was extremely pleased that this deferred the advent of war with France, and accordingly a second set of their enormous Silver Sea-class battleships were ordered, to take advantage of the delays and disruptions La Royale would suffer in a land war and gain a definitive advantage for the next round with the French. If they were victorious or defeated, it might well be soon afterwards. The Empress Camira, relieved that war with the French was now unlikely, was however chilled by what came next: The Japanese declaration of war, however, created an insurmountable problem.

Aururia had long seen the central pacific islands as critical to forestalling a Japanese ability to threaten Biirungdêwata and Kokopo at will. But even more important than them, sitting within a hundred nautical miles of Aururian territory across narrow seas, was the German Colony of Mindanao and Visayas. The Empire sent an ultimatum to the Germans ordering that the islands be handed over (it included a promsie of enormous quantities of gold to be smuggled to Germany via the Ottoman Empire if they agreed to the terms), and mobilized the navy. The Southern Philippines and Micronesia (absent Palau and Yap, which were already Aururianized and had been recognize as Aururian territory by the Spanish in 1899) could be sold to Aururia, or there could be war. The Germans refused the ultimatum after the United States, smarting after the latest diplomatic row in 1912 over treatment of white planters and sugar magnates on Hawai'i, announced that Aururian possession of the Philippines would be seen as a hostile act and the German government could not be allowed to permit it. This blunt warning from the Wilson administration made Camira's constitutionally elected government hesitate until it was too late.

A plan put in place by Admiral Togo, the famed victor of Tsushima, had already had the main body of the Imperial Japanese Navy racing toward multiple ports in the Philippines. Even as the army mobilized for the siege of Tsingtao, the Japanese fleet raced into Mindanao ahead of the Aururians with the main body, while a secondary force of armoured cruisers swept over the northern Marianas and raced into the Caroline Islands. The Aururian government reacted in shock and consternation; fear of a war-scare with the United States if they acted was rampant in the government. Camira, infuriated, acted as commander-in-chief and overrode the government, sending the navy steaming for the Philippines and Carolines. It was too late to seize most of the islands. Nauru and the Marshalls fell to the Aururian squadrons, as did the archipelagos of Pohnpei and Kosrae in the east; but the Japanese steaming hard past Saipan had succeeded in getting to Truk first and were fortifying it. In the southwest it was worse, with the Japanese having landed systematically in Mindanao and the Viscayas. The Aururians occupied Miangas Island and the Balut Archieplago off the southern tip of the Philippines and then turned west. The Japanese soon found themselves in hard fighting with the German garrison of the islands and could not stop the Aururian navy from occupying the Sulu Archipelago to the southwest of Mindanao, and the Bancoran Islands in the Sulu Sea. Troops were landed at Zamboanga City in southwestern Mindanao, separated by a long finger-like peninsula from the Japanese armies, but nothing more could be done, though their rapid advance up the peninsula secured the whole of it for them, taking about one-third of Mindanao.

The action created a diplomatic crisis. The government quietly endorsed it after the fact, but in doing so, without casus belli, the Aururian Empire had committed an act of War against Germany. The problem was rapidly made worse. On November 10th, a German commerce raider doubling back to the Marshalls after coaling at O'ahu sighted an Aururian gunboat in the islands. Seeing the Imperial flag flying over a German colony, the Captain concluded that the two countries must be at war and opened fire. At the same time, the British promised at least a partition of Mindanao and a Japanese withdrawal from Truk and possibly Saipan to the Aururian Empire if they would formally make a declaration of war. The government, upset at Camira's actions that risked a constitutional crisis, assented to the agreement despite the advice of the Imperial government not to trust the agreement. On November 25th, 1914, the Empire was at war.

The friendly nation of New Zealand, which had overcome early hostility to accept grudgingly the close Aururian ties--and then become the second self-governing territory in the world to give women the vote--had sent several divisions from her bare millions overseas already to fight and die against the Germans and their allies. The British Empire was badly pressed. Hawai'i was sending what would become a division. The Siamese had offered to send troops to Europe and swiftly signed on to the declaration of War to, again, force the hand of the French. Could perhaps the Empire send some troops to guard the Suez Canal from the Ottoman offensive? The government assented, and three divisions went to Egypt, where they would remain until 1917, fighting to keep the Suez canal open against Ottoman offensives, and then counterattacking deep into Palestine. Along the way, a few Aururian cruisers stopped to land a detachment of Marines on Kamaran Island off the coast of nominally Ottoman North Yemen. The Ottoman garrisons on the coast fought; the Imam of Yemen was on the side of the Ottomans, or so it seemed. An expedition was asked for by the commander in Egypt, a paranoiac about her supply lines who worried about artillery, torpedo boats, commerce raids and submarines from the Red Sea coast.

The British had no troops to spare. They had suborned as an ally the Emir of Asir, but he had been driven back from al-Luhela in disorder. So a division of Madagaskarians landed at Luhela, stormed the city, and marched south, took Hodeid, pivoted inland toward Sana. The division was besieged after being bogged down on the approaches to the city. The Household Cavalry was sent to rescue them. They split the front wide open, captured Sana; while marines on the coast occupied the rest of Tehama including the storied old port of Mocha, and marched inland and took Ta'izz. The Aururians were occupying the whole of the Imamate and Ottoman Tehama by the end of 1915, destroying all organized resistance, though the rest of the war was a brutal struggle against the Yemeni manhood, who took to the hills to fight them. The advance into Highland Asir to the north to drive out the Beni Mugheid, the tribal clan that ruled it separate from the Emirate of Asir, a coastal state, and were reliable Turkish allies, would consume the next year. And now, unlike the tiny professional armies of the Aururian incursions in the 18th century in South America and India, this much larger army with a much larger cross-section of the population was well primed by the silent Traditional Unionist revolution in their recruiting bedrock to find the treatment of women in the country both utterly loathesome and their business and one that they had a solution for. A great train of Touched population ultimately resulted from the savage war to the knife that would endure in Yemen through 1919. True peace would take even longer; when the deed was done, the whole country of the Ziyadi had seen the male populace either flee or be annihilated.

This contest had not been undertaken in any state of doubt. Another one and a far more doubtful endeavour ensued in Persia. Aururian troops had been asked to secure the course of a railway--and for the Aururian government to provide the construction engineers and surveyors and all the equipment and rails and sleepers--that would stretch from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, and ultimately to the Russian Railway network, to help supply the Russian Army, in dire straits in the Eastern front in Europe. Again the Aururians marched forward, starting in early March of 1915 when the first units arrived at Bandar-e-Abbas. This time, the shock and horror of the Persians at the Aururian invasion brought renewed and aggressive resistance. The Persian government formally declared for the Triple Alliance and sent the army south. After a struggle against raiders and tribesmen further south than that, the Aururian troops managed to fight their way into Shiraz, disintegrating the Nizam units of the Persian Army like so much chaff while 1915 was still young.

North of Shiraz, they encountered the Swedish Gendarmerie and the Cossack brigade. The Ottoman expedition units created linkages and fought bitterly, briefly even throwing the Aururians back in the area of Shiraz before reinforcements arrived and the troops scattered. The Persian government fell; the Qajars were deposed and in October of 1915 the Aururian troops entered Tehran. The social backlash to local customs continued, just as it did in Mesopotamia, as the Aururian responsibilities was widened to the offensive on Basrah and then Baghdad. The Aururian army pursued the Ottoman troops back toward Tabriz while more reinforcements arrived in Mesopotamia and advanced north toward Baghdad. By 1916 Persia had been occupied except the far northwest and the Aururian troops were closing in on Baghdad.

Some in Britain complained the Aururians were simply creating new enemies. Their demands had been stiff, too. As the war escalated, they wanted guarantees of territory. The British had a map with a dwindling set of options, but at least Rhodes was dead. With strict guarantees of an extraterritorial route for a road and railway across the country, the Aururians were offered Tanganyika as a colony and accepted, in the wake of the British Empire's fiasco at the Battle of Tanga. The war turned into four years of bitter hell in fighting the genius Lettow-Vorbeck in his brilliant guerrilla defense of the country. Two Madagaskarian divisions, and then the third, rotated back from Yemen, would fight a war to the knife against him that lasted until after the German surrender in Europe and until a set of guarantees regarding the status of Tanganyika--and thus his men--were made to him. He returned home with all due honour, only to subsequent obscurity after the days of the Freikorps. It was not the most shining moment in the history of Aururian arms.

In the meanwhile, the Empress Camira knew that the war was going to be a kind of hell not yet before seen. It was rapidly descending into it, the summer of 1915 being the beginning of the real charnel house, and she pressed her government for more and more. Then crisis struck. The 21 Demands in early 1915 against China had brought about a near commencement of hostilities between Japanese and Aururian forces on Mindanao and in Micronesia. The dreadnoughts of the fleet had sailed, not for the Mediterranean, but for forward bases against Japan. Britain's two pacific allies were about to go to war. In the end, the Japanese folded on the issue, though the continued presence of Japanese forces on Mindanao and in Micronesia was infuriating. The issue was quiet for most of the rest of 1915, and then abruptly had flared up again.

In late 1915, Yuan Shikai, the constitutional president of China, declared himself the Hongxian Emperor and declared an age of constitutional Empire within the borders of the five races of China. The declaration was immediately denounced by the Japanese. They saw in a new Chinese Empire a threat to their objectives. They prepared to muster forces to directly overthrow Yuan Shikai and moved to align warlords against him. The Aururian government on the other hand welcomed the Hongxian Emperor, recognized his regime, and extended to him a series of interest-free loans to allow him to stabilize his government, finding a Chinese ruler who was not unfriendly to them as a profound advantage. The Aururians led to the charge in pressing other countries to recognize the Hongxian Emperor, and Aururian delegates were present at his coronation. Japan prepared troops to invade in favour of the "republican" warlords. Another war crisis occurred in the far east even before the end of the same year as the first. Missteps by British diplomacy worsened the situation, and the Earl Grey was forced out for Lord Curzon, who took an aggressive position on the subject.

Lord Curzon pressed the Japanese to accept the Hongxian Emperor, but forced the Aururian government and Chinese government to accept a compromise. This reverted the status of Shandong to that established in the 1895 Treaty of Shimosenski, essentially handing the peninsula to Japan as a colony; it also forced the Hongxian Emperor to turn Fujian, the province athwarts Formosa, into a place where all of the original 21 Demands would apply--but only to that province, which basically turned it into a Japanese preserve like Manchuria. After a bitter debate at Downing Street, the "traditional area of Arab principalities, Omani suzerainty, or Portuguese fortification" along the Persian coast might be allowed as an Aururian colony and a promise of the Imamate of Yemen was also made. Complaints and protest over allowing the land to the Black Amazons were muted by the desperate straits of the allies as the war marched on and Lord Curzon's own absolute need to guarantee a Japanese-Aururian peace. Yuan Shikai's reign as Hongxian Emperor was recognized by the British in exchange for his acquiescence, and the Japanese backed down on his efforts to consolidate rule. The Aururian Empire was now guaranteed Tanganyika, the Imamate of Yemen and Tehama, and a large but undefined area of Persia for their continued cooperation in and involvement with the war effort. In exchange, the deployment of naval forces to the Mediterranean and a renewed offensive in Mesopotamia was expected. The Japanese at the time considered the outcome a defeat, as there was every prospect that the Hongxian Emperor would succeed in making China into a strong and modernizing state. They were richly rewarded by fortune, though: He died unexpectedly in the middle of 1916 and left behind a weak son was profoundly uninterested in ruling the country. His son would rule for eight years, but over an increasingly fragmented and disintegrating China, before he was overthrown by warlords from the north. The treaty, meant to establish definitive limits of Japanese expansionism, had instead backfired and led to a much stronger Japanese position in China. But the agreement had bought peace between Britain's allies for the rest of the war, and for that Curzon was much lauded. The Aururians, who had signed a defensive alliance with the Hongxian Emperor essentially committing the Empire to war against Japan if they expanded further into China, would watch the KMT renounce it during their rapproachment period, only to rely desperately on their help--but short of a full war--when the Japanese hammer finally fell.

In early 1916, major offensives took place. Tabriz fell easily to the Aururian troops and they met up with the Russias in the far north of Persia. In Mesopotamia, Colmar von der Goltz fought a masterful defensive campaign, but was completely overwhelmed despite the caution of the Aururian troops facing him; by the summer of 1916, Baghdad was in hand and the army was marching confidently north, quickly approaching Mosul before renewed heavy fighting began. In the meanwile, though, casualties piled up from the offensives, and a dangerous undercurrent followed from them. The Traditional Unionists, excluded from the Coalition Government, began to say that the real thing that the Aururians were fighting for now was the idea that the Goddess had used the war in Europe to guide them to liberate the brutally oppressed women of the Islamic world. They had their own Muslimahs, after all, who were not at all brutal or oppressive; these muslimahs could join them, and their true objective was not some vague European concepts, but a liberation actually occurring on the ground, by which also the Empire itself must spread. The rural yeowomanry on who the war fell hard, with the refusal to extend conscription, was quietly beginning to see it as an article of faith that they wouldn't leave the countries they had gained in the war. The acknowledgement that this would be the case in Yemen brought forth a vindication of the ideal that fueled it into a great power in the politics of the Empire. The presence of female circumcision among the Kurds and coastal Yemenis fueled the ruthlessly of the Aururian troops and the certainty and righteousness of their cause in their own eyes, and guaranteed what followed.

Now with 21 divisions raised in the Army entirely through volunteers, in 1917 the Aururian forces around the Suez canal--which had before blasted the wells and advanced up both coasts to establish defensive depth--commenced a new offensive into Palestine. With the Ottomans overwhelmed everywhere by the still-capable Russian Army in the northeast, the Aururian troops advancing both toward Mosul and Lake Van on a converging offensive to the railway, and this offensive, the Empire was truly on the ropes; overstretched in every direction. The offensive into Palestine broke through, but then the Aururians were asked to leave Suez--their presence and a successful counteroffensive meant, after all, that the Empire might capture Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and that was not to be allowed at all. The Aururian troops filed back and left the Suez, handing the line over to the Indian Army from Gaza through Hebron on which the Aururians had been made to halt for entirely socio-political reasons.

Meanwhile in Persia the Aururian railway battalions had run the first train through to the Caspian in January of 1917 (with delays required for construction of snowsheds) over a terrifying series of switchbacks in the high mountains north of Tehran. Requiring one engine on each end of the train and the trains being limited to ten cars, there were at least two lines--one on each side of the chosen valley, since crews could work on both at once--to make it a bit less of a bottleneck. Supplies began to flow soon after that, but with the enormous difficulty in getting them up the Caspian and Volga and then to the front theatres, the effort was just too late to do anything to save the Tsar. Camira could only watch from a remove as the European royalty destroyed itself and then was destroyed again from within, while in the meanwhile the Emir of Afghanistan joined the war against her and flung his army into a series of rolling combats with the Aururian troops occupying Mashhad. There was some serious fighting and several relief columns were needed to reestablish the frontier. Soon, the Empress' own concerns intervened problematically. Threatened by the Tashkent Soviet, Camira insisted on sending troops to aid the Emir of Bokhara and the Khan of Khiva, two Russian vassals, from the revolutionaries. This led to a war with both the Revolutionaries in their myriad strips in Central Asia and the army of the Emir of Afghanistan which would suck troops away from critical threatres; she would be justly criticized for the action, which seemed borne entirely out of a royalist political paranoia, in later years, but really it was no less nonsensical than countless other decisions made in those times. It is important to observe that by this point in time the national unity government was collapsing over the rise of the Traditional Union, the deflation caused by the massive labour shortages to the hugely expansive wartime industries (even with a quarter million Chinese women arriving every year) and debate over the outcome of the war when such high casualties were being endured, and Camira was exercising the same kind of active role in the war which in 1914 had brought about protest, but now without complaint. It was this process which would guarantee an active role for Aururian Empresses in the future.

Mosul fell in 1917. The disintegration of the Russian Army of the Caucasus under a series of Worker's Councils and open infighting after the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich had been forced to resign by Kerensky brought the Ottomans breathing room, however, and they made no attempt to make a peace. In the meanwhile, old French concerns over Syria were raising themselves, and the French protested at the idea of an Aururian offensive occupying it. The British were at a loss of what to do with a large number of Aururian divisions which were available. Camira had her own ideas, possibly driven by her interest in intervening in Russia. She aggressively lobbied to the British, insisting her forces being used as one unit to seize Istanbul--she insisted on using the Islamic name--and nothing but Istanbul. They had to open the warm water access to the Russian Empire. And not only that, but she wanted payment for it: A guarantee of Shiraz, and further inland areas of old Pars in Persia, as a place of settlement for the quiet, unacknowledged reality of the now neigh-on a million Touched in Mesopotamia, Persia, and yet further afield in Central Asia. With word of the mutiny of the French Army in the trenches, the British assented to the plan, and alone, the Aururian Empire prepared to assault Istanbul.

Four old pre-dreadnoughts laid in the 1880s had their cylinders re-bored and re-lined, boilers replaced and superheated. They had 16.5in howitzers mounted in their old open barbettes in place of ancient 16.25in rifles, had their casemate guns and some armour stripped, and were heavily bulged. Combined with a force of Siamese river/coastal monitors for close-in work; several of their own 6-inch armed monitors, and twelve pre-dreadnought battleships, as well as specially prepared merchant ships as mine bumpers, log-loaded and encased in logs secured by chains, the force started up the Hellespont in October of 1917. "The first time since Troy that Amazons have fought in these waters!" came the prideful declaration, and it was true, and with methodical preparation, they rammed their way up the Narrows. An old Ottoman pre-dreadnought was sunk along with two cruisers in the Battle of Adatepe and Yavuz limped back to Constantinople. The Empress Camira led the expedition in person. Eleven infantry divisions and one cavalry division as well as a marine brigade were fronted against the Ottomans and progressively deployed after the naval breakthrough in Thessaloniki against the Bulgarians. The government vascillated: The Sultan fled, while the Triumvirate decided to make peace on whatever terms they could get, asking for an armistice. Yavuz ignored orders to remain in the city and sailed for Samsun and the coal fields. Camira offered generous terms; she promised the Ottomans could keep Mosul after the war despiting being occupied by her armies, and that Syria could be held by Ottoman armies pending discussions in its status. The Ottomans would switch sides, send one army into Russia, and another alongside her own troops into Bulgaria, and might be rewarded with territory in both cases.

For the Bolsheviki had seized power in Russia. All power to the Soviets! echoed the cry through the streets, and Camira at once wanted the veteran Ottoman Armies of the east and of Syria, the later under Mustafa Kemal, to march into the Caucasus, even as she sent her own occupation troops in Persia to destroy the Baku Soviet and seize the oil fields. Troops were diverted from Bulgaria to occupy the Crimean, the Navy wanting to secure the Russian Black Sea Fleet and forestall a German occupation of the peninsula. And in Istanbul itself, the allies, ignoring the terms of the armistice, demanded their own occupation zones, British and French and then Italian troops landing in quarters in the city. There was very nearly fighting when they tried to disarm Ottoman troops heading for Edirne (Adrianople). In the end, sanity prevailed. With the Sultan refusing to return to his capital, Camira oversaw the installing of Abdul Hamid the Second, the infamous Red Sultan, back in his Yildiz Palace. He made to vigorously execute war against Bulgaria and the Bolsheviki and comprehensively collaborate with the allies to try and save the Empire, but died of a heart attack only a few months later, leaving the government in disorder. Ultimately, however, a new Sultan based on Abdul Hamid's will was seated and the government coasted into a modicum of stability. In the Crimean, Aururian troops were quickly involved in heavy fighting with revolutionary elements, and striking workers were gunned down enmasse by the unsympathetic yeowomanry, as the Russian fleet was hauled away as a prize of war, guarded even against their own allies.

As if it were possible, things got worse. At home, Camira's population exploded in anger when they found out Woodrow Wilson's Fifteen Points, the Fifteenth explicitly saying that the "Californian nation" should not be allowed to expand at the expense of Arab and Persian civilisation, which had the right to develop under the guidance of European powers. Mass protests against the United States in Aururia ensued. The government supported the Empress in declaring they would never agree to abide by any of the Points. From that moment forward, relations with the United States disintegrated. Parliament collapsed into infighting amid absolute demands that Tanganyika, Yemen, al-Hasa, and even all of Persia be annexed by the Empire. Camira, distracted in Europe, nonetheless warily realized that she would have to have a reckoning with Wilson at the end of the war. At home, the Traditional Union was by this point--even the optimists were fearing they would win in the post-war elections.

Camira was focused on personally leading her army; not at home, she did not exercise any restraining influence over the development of the Traditional Union power bloc. She did however lead an Aururian-Ottoman Army to a series of tremendous victories over the Bulgarians, driving them back from the Long Walls in the opening offensive in March of 1918 and then defeating them again at the Battle of Adrianople after conducting a successful flanking operation across the river Evros. The Bulgarian government immediately sued for peace; May Day of 1918 saw general celebrations, and the Aururian army marched forward to join up with the allied forces in Thessaloniki for an offensive to liberate Serbia. Soon other problems intervened, though; divisions were drawn away to the Crimean to help secure it against German operations and the Empress soon found herself fighting a second Crimean War, and counterattacking into the Ukraine in the interests of the Whites. Two corps remained in the Balkans, but understrength, for the offensive up through Serbia and into Austrian Bosnia that was terminated by the Austrians suing for peace and shortly thereafter, the general end of the war.

Here in the Balkans, with organized governments and uniformed resistance, the Aururian troops had an excellent reputation as conscientious and respectful of the local population--night and day to the countries further east. The contrast would see the British willing to encourage Aururian landings in the Balkans in the Second World War, but terrified of their participation in the occupation of Iran in 1941. Unlike with the other powers, there were not nearly the same celebrations, as the intervention into Russia was identified as a fundamental continuation of the war. Peace was deferred. The Empress was badly looking for a way out of the fighting. She went to Persia herself--overland, through Ottoman occupied Caucasia--and ultimately settled on a desperate gambit. She secured the allegiance of the Emir of Bokhara, who was dutifully crowned Shah of Persia. Her troops smashed the Tashkent Soviet, occupied everything south of the Aral Sea and west of the Jaxartes. A massive new Persian Empire under the Emir was conceived, entertaining the bounds of Azerbaijan, all of Russian Turkestan, and Afghanistan, to compensate for the loss of the expansive territory in Old Pars and the Hormuzgan Coast that Camira considered as her right. Aururian troops remained in combat against the Soviets through 1919 stabilizing the situation as the Shah raised an army to defend his expansive domains and fight with countless local warlords and revolutionary bands that disputed central control.

Then, her work on the front done, the Empress traveled to Europe. Facing off with the King of the French, both became unlikely allies in marginalizing Wilson. The American President first demanded that the Aururians abandon all of their gains during the war except for Tanganyika, over which they could have only a Class B Mandate. Wilson conceded the Class C mandate over Tanganyika, then demanded that at most the Aururians receive only Class A Mandates over their other territories. Camira, personally present at Versailles, absolutely refused. A mandate for Tanganyika--though Mafia island would be outright annexed--of the Class C. Everything else would be annexed outright. Wilson outright threatened war, infuriated that the Aururians would be able to add territory not subject to League oversight. Public resistance in Europe to the Empress' demands was high. Even as Lettow-Vorbeck honourably trooped out his colours in Tanganyika, the fighting continued in Yemen, Persia, and the Caucasus, and it was a savage nature. The Sulu Archipelago had largely fought to the knife, and already been integrated. Camira forced the conference, overriding Wilson, to accept it as Aururian territory outright. As a compromise, the Micronesian Islands were made a Class C Mandate as well. Zamboanga City and the associated peninsula would become an Aururian enclave in the Philippines, also under a Class C mandate. The Aururians had to accept the bitter pill of Mindanao proper, the Viscayas, the Marianas Islands, and Truk, becoming Japanese, trading the British word over Truk for their support of the mid-east Annexations. Lest they ever be wrested from their control, however, Camira immediately made Yemen--encompassing the Imamate, Tehama, and the Asir Highlands--into a constituent Queendom of the Empire, under a dynasty encompassing descent from both the Osmanlis and the Zaydi Imamate. A Shahbanu was likewise named for Shiraz-and-Hormuz, becoming the Queendom of Airyanem. Mafia Island was made part of the Queendom of the Mascarenes, and the allies broadly recognized the Bokharan Dynasty in Persia. The Ottomans retained Mosul and some parts of northern Syria, and gained Western Thrace and the territories of Batum and Kars. The Empress went home, her health wrecked by the bitter negotiations over winter. Home, now, was the dry deserts of Airyanem, too, and she waited here to recuperate, and celebrate the success of her quiet financial and military meddling with Portugal, which had seen a few old ships of the Russian Imperial Navy steam into Lisbon with Californian gold and restore Manuel the Second when Oporto declared for the Royalists and a Royalist army crossed the frontier from Spain in the north.

At home, the postwar elections created a crisis that forced her to depart from her rest cure much sooner than she might have liked. The Traditional Union had indeed won, and their fiery Prime Minister, Wanthi Baradah, set an inexorable course. A massive new armaments programme including a huge new fleet programme was commenced to compensate for the Japanese annexations in the nroth. She demanded that Micronesia and Tanganyika be annexed and administered as extensions of Aururia proper, and that troops, instead of withdrawing, extract more concessions from the new Shah--he could receive help against the Reds, but only if he gave more territory to the Aururian Empire as a proper home fitting their new "Airyanemi" population of Persian Aururians. The civil service did everything it could to block implementation of the proposals. The government and the Crown were at odds. Camira was terrified of a war with the Americans despite the harsh line she had taken in Versailles; she thought Wilson's stroke an act of divine providence that had delayed it, and was deeply worried that though Wilson might have engineered a war no matter what, Wanthi's demands would bring one about from any American President.

Camira returned home. She found the government in a state of chaos with the Civil Service and the Traditional Unionists in a state of bureaucratic war with each other, and Blackskirt paramilitaries parading through Mayi-Thakurit. She decided that she had to act to decisively cement her power, and immediately Proruged Parliament. At Gunpoint, with the Imperial Guard. The Traditional Unionists were clubbed in a few cases, and on the streets in the days following, shot a few times. But they had dispersed quietly and peacefully from Parliament itself; a major crisis was averted. Camira implemented the agreements she had secured with hard bargaining at Versailles. But she herself remembered the fate of the other enclaves of the Empire.

She was not, in fact, completely unsympathetic with the desires of the Traditional Unionists. The border between "Airyanem" and Persia was drawn to the immense favour of the Aururians by the Aururian surveyors, creating a huge and self-contained country onto which a Shahbanu who could claim descent from both Qajar and Zand Dynasties could rule as any other Queen in the Empire With Parliament Proruged she immediately rammed through the creation of the new Queendom. She followed suit in short order with Yemen. Arranging a marriage which would ultimately produce a line of Khalifas descended from both the Ismailite Shia Imamate and the Osmanli Caliphate--a new Fatimid Caliphate of both branches of Islam--she secured the second Queendom. Ultimately, the Sulu Archipelago was made part of the Sultanate of Tidore and Ternate, completing the development.

Camira, during her rule over the Empire directly--the age of the Prorogued Parliament--created a Ministry of All Talents that went to negotiate the Washington Naval Treaty. The bruising agreements saw the Japanese forced to equality with the Aururian Empire; more importantly, the Aururians were held to have no restrictions on fortification below 5 degrees north, instead of the equator which was the line the Japanese had demanded, whereas the Japanese suffered expansive restrictions in their new territories along with the United States in its old territories (only Guam was excepted) and Britain (only Singapore). A provision allowing the maintenance of multiple training ships in practice allowed Aururia to quickly rearm to face the Japanese with equal or better strength, but the deeply unpopular treaty caused problems at home, and Camira turned her attention to the Traditional Unionists, rehabilitating them to smooth over the bitterness at the Proruging of Parliament, and holding new elections in which they represented the Shadow Government. She subsequently led a government that refused to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact and stayed cautiously aloof from European democracy except to drum up support for the Persian Empire, which she saw as an important buffer to the Empire's new Persian Gulf interests, and to try and support the Great Chinese Constitutional Empire until the bitter end in 1928. This outcome would have deeply frustrated her had she lived, but she was blessed by not seeing the Republicans once again victorious and so many concessions undone, and the personal family matter of her elder daughter Wundurra's nomination for the inheiritance and marriage to a Princess of the Aisin Gioro was a happy occasion. Her project in Persia against the Bolsheviki likewise outlasted her death, and was at least replaced by another monarchy.

In the meanwhile, wars continued to be fought in Yemen. Though the highlands were ultimately cleared, the death of the Emir of Asir had thrown his realm into chaos. A war over the Ilkhan of Ibn Saud was a victory for the Empire that ended in the annexation of the Najran Oasis, but it was a vast expanse of nothing but desert. The troubles in Asir saw a Saudi invasion, an Aururian counter-invasion. Propping the state up was fruitless. The Saudis retook Najran, but only briefly; the army, stiffened and supported by a growing web of roads and railways, counterattacked with plentiful air cover, took the oasis, and held on to the Asiri highlands. Lowland Asir, the Emirate, was still untenable for its government; the Aururian army marched in, and following Wanthi's recommendation rather than the foreign office's recommendation of letting a European power in, created it a protectorate, and applied for a Class B mandate over the territory after the peace treaty had been forced onto Ibn Saud. This quieted the outrage in Europe; a new era of democracy and scientific racialism was at hand, and with it, an utter lack of tolerance for Aururian expansionism. A Class B mandate guaranteed nothing of the sort could take place, unlike the integral Class C mandates elsewhere, and so, with British support the mandate was grudgingly accepted, and the Empire's frontiers stabilized.

And Camira, by bitter irony, quietly died of lung cancer in a country that had banned Tobacco Smoking since 1650. She died in 1926 before the Shah was overthrown or Yuan Keding in his increasingly nominal authority in Beijing, though would not have much minded the honest nativist Shia intents of Reza Pahlavi, though would have been livid as he negotiated away Turkmenistan east of the Oxus and most of Azerbaijan to the Soviets for recognition. Less problematic was his settlement to the insurgency in Afghanistan by handing most (but again not all) back to an independent Emir under British encouragement, and turning to internal development, his first railways built for him by Aururian engineers before the relationship, under nationalist pretents under lost Shiraz and Persepolis, swiftly turned bad. The agreements--made with Stalin in 1929--finally stabilized the fluid mid-east borders. At home, though, Biirungdêwata was stirring. Under the concern of deeply pessimistic military personnel with the Japanese annexation of Mindanao and the Viscayas and Truk and Saipan, the Queendom had been consigned as hopeless, a seat of war in the event of a conflict with Japan. Accordingly all government investment--which was growing in importance as a source of economic development in the economy--was withdrawn from the area, which should remain farmland.

This created a sowing of discontent, a discontent which would explode when the policy continued during the Great Depression, the only things being built were forts and militarily necessary defences. These government decisions led to a split in the Traditional Union--and with it the resignation of Wanthi Baradah as its leader--in 1931, between the Empire group and the Biirungdêwata group. The latter one, raising to prominence the long history of secessionism in the region, began to openly advocate for it. With the crash, a new crisis was fast coming for the new Empress.

[Voyager989]

1926 - 1938: The Crash and the War.

The war had changed the world profoundly. Aururian armies had fought on European soil, trooped through Belgrade, Sarajevo, Istanbul, Sevastobol, Adrianople. Only the Scandinavian countries and the United States continued the travel restrictions after the war (ignoring the independent Islamic states--Saudi Arabia, then Iraq--ironically Egypt never did despite the protests over the Aururian troops in the First World War; Persia only implemented them in the mid-30s). The US political climate at home with the high period of segregation and the KKK made anything--in fact, more tightening of the 1874 Agreements on residence for trade was attempted--except harsher reactions unacceptable. For most of the world now, though, it was possible for an Aururian woman of means to travel like a European. The three massive postwar liners of IIP&O for the trade for the trade to Madagaskaria and the west developed a fabulous aura, which by turns also attracted European travelers.

The 1920s saw the wholesaw adoption of an agressive Art Deco architectural and styling boom in the cities, the railways, the ships, to some extent the airplanes. The style, even in the more aggressive Art Nouveau and Art Moderné forms, suited Aururian taste, and it was nativized and used as the standard form for public buildings and most high architecture in Aururia up until the present. "Frank Lloyd Wright is the last effective penetration of foreign architectural styles into Aururia" is a common claim, and not entirely false. The modern concrete and glass public building is unknown in the Empire, in favour of steel and curved, stylized buildings, sometimes capped in stone.

Aircraft companies proliferated, and then concentrated to three companies, two of which are now state-owned. A few liner companies started and failed; IIP&O persevered. The government continued railway construction in the 1920s, and as part of the economic stimulus plan developed by Keynes for the Empire in the wake of the Great Crash. Urban concerns, with the large number of unemployed factory workers, began to be absolutely important in the period, which saw a considerable rise in support for the Labour party before it faded away after the governing parties were able to meet their demands effectively. The government undertook the legislating of scientific management, which included the ironclad limitation of the 40-hour week (with a maximum of 16 hours of overtime a month). Vacation time was for the first time a legal requirement and to social retirement insurance was added injury pensions and social medical insurance as a step toward the modern Imperial medical system. And mostly the governemnt, abandoning the bizarre and by now cumbersome adjusted peg between three separate currencies, went off metal standards and embraced fiat currency. Completion of the long unfinished Great Western Canal was realized for modern powered canal ships, and railway density would finally approach that of the United States (total mileage exceeded the US 1921 total by 1950, continuing to grow as the US mileage fell). A vast subway system for Mayi-Thakurti was built deep, along with a huge swathe of new approach tunnels for passenger rail traffic, a freight bypass loop, and a new Imperial Central Station across from the Imperial Palace; the world's largest and most modern airport with an incredible Art Deco design opened by the end of the 1930s.

One of the problems for the sharp and abrupt rise of workers' rights movements--and government's panicked acquiesence to them--is explained in terms of the extreme labour shortage in Aururia. This made factory workers extremely well paid, and always employable, as the labour shortage kept unemployment artificially low in good times and respectable low in bad times. This process had only accelerated with WWI. During the war huge numbers of native Indian women of Peru-Bolivia and even at one point Mexico had immigrated; the usual floodgates from China, after some trouble around the Xihai Revolution, had resumed in earnest. The Aururians in the Beijing and Tianjin legations had been fast friends of Yuan Shikai during the struggles after the Xihai revolution; he virtually paid for military and financial aid with the continued floodgates of immigrants to provide labour for the factories of Aururia from southern China. The Hongxian Emperor was at once recognized in 1915 and enraged Republican supporters had launched an assault on the Beijing legation after his death for what they regarded as a meddling attempt to see the Imperial title pass securely within his family less than a year from his coronation. His government had stabilized with the assistance of Aururian money (and possibly spies) and held on, but progressively weaker, until 1924. The immigration trade had continued after the war, but the KMT leadership that consolidated power under Chiang was heavily Christianized and regarded the immigrant trade as a form of slavery deeply insulting to China. Even when the KMT had shut it off in the south around the Qi'ao Territory, the Aururians continued it from the Tianjin Concession in the north. Chiang only was unable to stop a trickle of women smuggled across the border into Qi'ao after the success of the Great Northern Pacification Campaign, though that trickle was by other measures not at all small.

Relations had other problems with China, at any rate. After the Empress Wundurra came to the throne there was a problem lurking in the background. Her barely adult wife, the Empress Consort, was a Qing Princess who had been partially raised in Japan. Her influence in the government was said to be a reason for the Aururian recognition of Great Manchuoko when Puyi was crowned its Emperor in 1934, which resulted in a diplomatic breach with Chiang which wasn't repaired until the Aururians offered him unstinting financial and armaments aid after the full Japanese invasion, starting with the battle of Shanghai in August of 1937. Even until the end, however, the Aururian Empire made several efforts to force diplomatic recognition of Manchouko that led to a second break at the end of 1943. In the meanwhile, Wundurra oversaw the 1930 and 1935 negotiations for the London Treaties, in the First London Treaty forcing absolute parity with Japan, and in the second, positioning the Empire for large-scale rearmament with Britain and the United States. She was, perhaps under the influence of her wife, more profoundly confident than her mother.

During this pacifistic age, the Aururian Empire refused to disarm, using the crash and Keynesian economic theory to continue with a large naval and arms buildup. It was primarily hampered by the massive labour shortages produced by the end of Chinese immigration. When the economy recovered, the problems immediately resumed, and the Army simply didn't have remotely enough people. The situation was so bad in the 1930s that only the very finest western- and chinese- style restaurants were still open in large cities; everything else had been replaced by Automats to reduce labour demand (and indeed to this day the Automat is the norm, completely displacing fast food and even to some extent fast casual in the Aururian restaurant market). Even with these efforts labour demand once the economy had recovered after 1935 were catastrophically bad; some companies in the worst days had recruits on the dock for the arriving liners from Peru and Mexico, the only countries permitting emigration to Aururia at that point, who were able to speak Nahuatl, Quecha, or Aymara to help women fresh off the boat sign employment contracts while still on the dock. The intermittent and hotly debated provision of emigration from India to Aururia resumed after the British Government adopted a harder line against Congress, which adopted the same KMT "insult to national dignity" position. This helped ease the problem from the mid-30's forward.

In the meanwhile, the rest of the world tumbled toward war. The first brush with war for the Empire came with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Emphatically against it, it triggered Aururian rearmament (though they had never really let levels of high-valued goods fall), including a desperate attempt to boost weak enrollment rates in the military. The government supported Ethiopia at the League to the point of nearly coming to war with Italy. They only backed down under frantic British diplomatic pressure to try and preserve the Italian connection for the containment of Germany. In the meanwhile they began an airship resupply of the Ethiopian armies, an act which ultimately forced the British under constant Italian protest to deploy a wing of fighters to Uganda at great cost; it wasn't until one British aerocraft fired at an Aururian airship, causing damage, that the resupply operations actually stopped; they had continued until the very fall of Addis Adaba.

In the Pacific, New Zealand, undergoing a social reform transition from the early 1900s onwards, fully enfranchised the Maori population and began establishing a treaty claims process; in conjunction with full women's rights these social conditions were the result of the sustained interplay with Aururia in commerce and society which led ultimately to the Aururian Alliance in 1932 after the Treaty of Westminster made clear that New Zealand could not expect effective defence by the Empire against Japan. This great friendship, "A Pacific Special Relationship", was made strong and hard by the experiences of WWII, and since then, New Zealand starting in the 1930s began to treat Aururia as an equal. In doing so, the shared love of British culture was strengthened (to the point many times in the modern era some Aururian women will insist a Briitsh product or custom they use is from New Zealand instead) and reappropriated. The Special Relationship has on countless occasions seen a sometimes grinning and bemused Premier in Wellington acting as interluctor for Aururia in international spats and diplomatic initiatives, or the inevitable promise of "We'll talk it over, face to face" when pigeonholed by some protestor for some cause in Europe that the Aururians have flagrantly gone against.

That level of closeness started as a cold startegic calculation--that making the Aururians happy and being their friends was the only way for New Zealand to survive, hemmed in on every side by the Aururian Empire--and blossomed into their shared war experience. That same war experience tended to renew the Aururian friendship with Britain, and it is through that lens that the slide toward war began. In the meantime, the Empire almost went to war at home. In Biirungdêwata, the Empire had always been a tenuous thing. It had a history of insurrection stretching back centuries, and Camira's strategic defensive policies had inadvertantly sowed the ground of a new secessionist movement. The crash slammed into Biirungdêwata like a freight train, and it received no assistance in recovering from the economic effects like the rest of the Empire did, as the region was still assessed as vulnerable to Japanese invasion, so that heavy industry should not be located there. This led to destitution of what was once an extensive network of mines, and a large-scale revolt, including both Traditional Union and Communist elements. Several times in 1930 - 1931 protesters were actively shot by the government. This, in turn, contributed to even worse morale in the army. The average unit in the entire force was at 70% strength in 1933... Despite the depression. It collapsed to 50% as the economy recovered by 1935. In 1937, a double-dip recession began. In the meantime, the Biirungdêwata communists and Traditional Unionist-breakaway branch had agreed to an unholy alliance of sorts; they had started an underground movement, which culminated with the seizure of the capital, expulsion of the Royal family, and declaration of the Independent State of Biirungdêwata in December of 1937.

Wundurra, terrified of the prospect of a war of Sisters butchering Sisters, refused to immediately act. Though coastal fortresses and naval bases would continue to be garrisoned, like those in the American South at the Start of the Civil War, other garrisons were withdrawn. She asked Wanthi Baradah to return to politics to negotiate with the Biirungdêwata secessionist movement rather than move against it. The Japanese, watching the negotiations drag out for more than a year, interpreted the situation as weakness rather than caution and the intense sororal-sisterhood patriotism of Aururians, so hesitant to shed their own blood and so vigorous against the rest of the world. They decided that with Aururia this weak, its military buildup was farce; the country could be easily defeated. After all, wasn't the real reason for the failure to act the extreme understrength nature of Army units?

Hitler's violation of Munich caught the Empire, arming and supporting the KMT in a state of increasing tension toward Japan while trying to deal with the growing secession movement in Biirungdêwata by surprise. There was absolutely no response to the development; there were more important things to worry about. The negotiations quickly peeled the Highland Cities off from the rest of Biirungdêwata. The Empress' promise of a narrow gauge railway network for the extreme high altiplano of the Central Dividing Range was fabulously expensive, but all they needed to withdraw their support of the adventurism. Improved transportation, and industrial and economic investment, would largely solve the complaints of Biirungdêwata. An agreement was hammered out.

The Empress, reviewing the terms, and looking at her own reputation and the reputation of Aururian fading by the day, the Japanese and Italians providing Biirungdêwata with arms and openly treating it like a state (Japan to weaken the Empire, Italy in revenge for Ethiopia), could see no option. She refused to ratify her own agreement, leaving a shocked and stunned Wanthi Baradah weeping in the audience chambers; sent the army in, proroguing Parliament as her mother had done. The Biirungdêwatans who had thought the dispute was over were half disbanded, completely shocked, their morale will for a fight slipped out of them. There were 308 dead on a broad front advance; another two hundred and twenty suppressing riots in the capital. At the end of the day, the navy of Biirungdêwata surrendered after a desultory attempt at commerce raiding for amnesties, when the Empress... Firmly in control of the state... Then began implementing by diktat every single point of the agreement. She gave them all she had achieved in their negotiations, but by her fiat, not by a mutual agreement. New elections were immediately called afterwards, and it was good, for the new government, formed in July of 1938, would soon be needed to rally the people toward a war. The Army, at least, was at full strength by the call to volunteers to suppress Biirungdêwata, and the central authority of the state was decisively established, even when all the leaders of Biirungdêwatan secession were now pardoned out -- the strength of the Empire established and then tempered in mercy.

Wundurra, reconciled with Wanthi Baradah, turned to her and her other advisors, let the government find its footing. As soon as it did, the consensus of the Imperial leadership was clear. The Japanese were swiftly approaching Qi'ao, and they could not be allowed to get that close to it. They were conquering China; and to do that would give them utter domination over all of Asia. Aururia could not let that stand... And where the rest of the world had ceased to care and Chiang himself played a long game, they had to act, quickly and decisively. They formally sent an ultimatum to the Japanese in August over the outrages at Nanking and violations of neutrality from the bombing of one of the Empire's gunboats in the Yangtze. The Japanese, ignoring it, continued down the coast. In the taking of Guangzhou, they provided a casus belli to the Aururian Empire by refusing to allow neutral ships to leave port--a port which was, due to the lack of a declaration of war--lawfully not under blockade.

The Empire, already mobilising, at once declared war. The Great Pacific War that followed would rock the world back on its heels for what it was portend and contain, and set the stage for the broader and sprawling involvement of the Empire in what would be as a conflict called the Second World War.

[Voyager989]

"Melanippe"/"Black Princess"/"Polinitzi" CII series (CII1-CII5)
Crew: 5 (Commander, gunner, loader, driver, radiowoman)
Weight: 58 tonnes (60 tonnes in CII4 onwards)
Length: 9.33m (w/ 84mm AT)
Width: 3.75m
Height: 2.75m
Road Range: 150 kilometers (on internal fuel)
Armour: 160mm hull front @ 55 degrees, 100mm sides, 50mm rear, 160mm turret front (185mm turret front in CII4 onwards), 100mm sides/rear.
Armament: 1 x 100mm/L32 (84mm/L60 AT in CII3/CII4 series), 1 x 7mm co-axial (13mm ranging co-axial in addition in CII4 series onwards), 1 x 7mm hull MG
Engine: 1 x HCA-1010 V-12 Hoffmeyer diesel, coupled to torque converter final drive
Maximum speed: 26 kph (CII4 onwards capable of 32 kph with uprated engine)

Development of this vehicle began in March of 1939 to replace the existing CI series of infantry tank, as part of the first lessons of war with Japan. Development was regarded as equally urgent as the CC-series due to the manifest mechanical faults of the CI, and requirements were completed in June of 1939. The first boilerplate and turret-less prototype completed trials in December of 1940, with the first tanks entering service in August of 1941. One notable development was the 'power-pack' concept; engine, transmission, and final drive could be easily removed from the vehicle as a unit, allowing quick replacement with a spare. Teething problems were mostly overcome in the CII2 which began was prototyped in May of 1942, identified by a different, sloped hull front, with the (barely) 84mm capable CII3 entering service in March of 1943. The definitive CII4/CII5 series, usually identified by the new, larger and heavier turret, with rangefinder and 13mm ranging machine gun, entered service in November of 1943. Post-war, all 84mm tanks in Californian service were equipped with the new 100mm anti-tank gun. All units equipped with bottled air, overpressure and filtration systems, and deep-wading capability (5 metres for 2.5 hours) from factory. The CII4 series were regarded as the first step towards a 'universal' tank, suitable for wider use than with the infantry divisions. Maximum production rate achieved by the four factories building this tank was 1,185 a month, achieved with the new CII4 variant. Total lend-lease deliveries to the Soviet Union totaled 1,695 units.