Ian Watson: The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

On 13 November I was elected the first Prime Minister of Adaland in a landslide, thereby vindicating the platform of my Egalitarian Party and giving pause to Father Peruschitz’s Catholic Workers Party, Sir Cosmo’s Christian Entrepreneurs Party, Thomas Andrews’s Technotopia Party and Vasil Plotcharsky’s Communist Party. Two days after my triumph at the polls, I asked Maggie Brown to marry me. She’d done a splendid job as my campaign manager, attracting over eighty per cent of the female vote to our cause, and I knew she would make an excellent wife as well.

17 April 1914

Lat. 13°15’ N, Long. 29°11 W

The week began with an extraordinary stroke of luck. Shortly after noon, poking through the wreck of a frigate called the Ganymede, we happened upon a wireless set, plus a petrol engine to supply it with power. In short order John Phillips and Harold Bride got the rig working. “Once again I have the ears of an angel,” enthused a beaming Phillips. “I can tell you all the gossip of a troubled and tumultuous world.”

Woodrow Wilson has been elected the 28th President of the United States. The Second Balkans War has ended with a peace treaty between Serbia and Turkey. Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian Passive Resistance Movement, has been arrested. Pope Pius X has died, succeeded by Cardinal della Chiesa as Pope Benedict XV. Ernest Shackleton is headed for the Antarctic. The feisty suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst languishes in prison after attempting to blow up Lloyd George. Nickelodeon audiences have fallen in love with a character called the Little Tramp. A great canal through the Isthmus of Panama is about to open. The second anniversary of the Titanic disaster occasioned sermons, speeches, editorials and religious observances throughout the Western world.

Good Lord, has it been two years already? It seems only yesterday that I watched Mr Andrews unfurl his blueprint in the chartroom. So much has happened since then: the launching of the Ada, the consumption of Ismay and Murdoch, the reports of our collective demise, our decision to remain waterborne for the nonce, the birth of this republic — not to mention my marriage to the redoubtable Maggie.

Adaland continues to ply the Atlantic in a loop bounded on the north by the Tropic of Cancer and on the south by the Tropic of Capricorn. We last crossed the equator in late February. Mrs Wilde marked the event by organizing an elaborate masquerade ball reminiscent of the fabled Brazilian Carnaval. The affair was a huge success, and we shall probably do the same thing three months hence when we hit the line again.

At least once a week we find ourselves within hailing distance of yet another pesky freighter or presumptuous steamer. By paddling furiously and hoisting all sails — our spars now collectively carry ten thousand square feet — we always manage to outrun the intruder. In theory, thanks to our wireless rig, we have endured the last of these nerve-wracking chases, for Phillips and Bride can now sound the alarm well before we become objects of unwanted charity.

2 September 1914

Lat. 25°48’S, Long. 33°16’ W

Against the dictates of reason, in defiance of all decency, with contempt for every Christian virtue, the world has gone to war. According to our wireless intercepts, the Western Front stretches a staggering four hundred and seventy-five miles across northern France, the Boche on one side, the Allies on the other, both armies dug in and defending themselves with machine guns. In my mind’s eye I see the intervening terrain: a no-man’s-land presided over by Death, now on holiday from Coleridge’s skeletal ship and reigning over a kingdom of muck, blood, bone, mustard gas and barbed wire, whilst Life-in-Death combs her yellow locks, paints her ruby lips, and sports with the boys in the trenches. Between 4 August and 29 August, Phillips informs me, 260,000 French soldiers died the most wretched, agonizing and pointless deaths imaginable.

“I was under the impression that, since the Titanic allegedly went down two years ago, self-delusion had lost favour in Europe,” Mrs Wilde remarked. “How does one account for this madness?”

“I can’t explain it,” I replied. “But I would say we now have more reason than ever to remain aboard the Ada.”

Although the preponderance of the butchery is occurring thousands of miles to the northeast, the British and Germans have succeeded in creating a nautical war zone here in the tropics. Mr Phillips has inferred that a swift and deadly armoured fleet, under the command of Admiral Craddock aboard HMS Good Hope, has been prowling these waters looking for two German cruisers, the Dresden, last seen off the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, and the Karlsruhe, recently spotted near Curasao, one of the Lesser Antilles. If he can’t catch either of these big fish, Craddock will settle for one of the Q ships — merchant vessels retrofitted with cannons and pom-poms — that the Germans have deployed in their efforts to destroy British commercial shipping around Cape Horn. In particular Craddock hopes to sink the Cap Trafalgar, code name Hilfskreuzer B, and the Kronprinz Wilhelm, named for the Kaiser himself.

We are monitoring the Marconi traffic around the clock, eavesdropping on Craddock’s relentless patriotism. Two hours ago Mr Bride brought me a report indicating that the Kronprinz Wilhelm is being pursued by HMS Carmania, one of the British Q ships that recently joined Craddock’s cruiser squadron. Bride warns me that the coming fight could occur near our present location, about two hundred miles south of the Brazilian island of Trindade (not to be confused with the West Indies island of Trinidad). We would be well advised to sail far away from here, though in which direction God only knows.

14 September 1914

Lat. 22°15’ S, Long. 29°52’ W

A dizzyingly eventful day. Approaching Trindade, we were abruptly caught up in the Great War, bystanders to a furious engagement between the Carmania and the Kronprinz Wilhelm. There is blood on our decks tonight. Bullets and shells have shredded our sails. From our infirmary rise the moans and gasps of a hundred wounded German and British evacuees.

I had never witnessed a battle before, and neither had any other Adaland citizens except Major Butt and Colonel Weir, who’d seen action in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. “Dover Beach” came instantly to mind. The darkling plain, the confused alarms, the ignorant armies clashing by night, or, in this case, at noon.

For two full hours the armed freighters pounded each other with their 4.1-inch guns, whilst their respective supply vessels — each combatant boasted a retinue of three colliers — maintained a wary distance, waiting to fish the dead and wounded from the sea. On board the Ada , the children cried in terror, the adults bemoaned the folly of it all, and the dogs ran in mad circles trying to escape the terrible noise. With each passing minute the gap separating the Carmania and the Kronprinz Wilhelm narrowed, until the two freighters were only yards apart, their sailors lining the rails and exchanging rifle shots, a tactic curiously reminiscent of Napoleonic-era fighting, quite unlike the massed machine-gun fire now fashionable on the Western Front.

At first I thought the Carmania had got the worst of it. Fires raged along her decks, her bridge lay flattened by artillery shells, her engines had ceased to function, and she’d started to lower away. But then I realized the Wilhelm was fatally injured, her hull listing severely, her crew launching lifeboats, her colliers drawing nearer the fray, looking for survivors. Evidently some shells had hit the Wilhelm below her waterline, rupturing several compartments. A North Atlantic iceberg could not have sealed her doom more emphatically.