James Philip - Empire Day

The Santísima Trinidad’s four big guns were 38-calibre like her secondary armament of eight single casemate-mounted 9.5-inch weapons. Unlike the naval rifles carried by Royal Navy ships the Spanish ironclad’s guns were the originals, ‘shot out’ as long ago as the 1940s, and even in their prime had had only two-thirds of the range of the British Mark Vs. In her long ago prime the old Spanish ironclad had only been able to make sixteen or seventeen knots. Back during Lion’s second commission she had clocked thirty-two and a half knots – nearly thirty-seven miles an hour – running machinery trials off the west coast of Scotland and sustained a speed of thirty point two knots during a two-hour maximum power run.

“The Spaniard’s escorts look well turned out,” the King observed, enjoying this last moment of the day when he could get away with just being an old sea dog.

The latest class of Spanish destroyers – less gunships and more general-purpose frigates with a couple of guns forward and twin anti-aircraft missile rails aft – were German-built and looked a little top-heavy with their radar masts and boxy, aluminium-skinned superstructures.

“One good hit and they’re done for,” retorted the Commander of the 5th Battle Squadron.

“Maybe,” the King replied. For the moment the forest of smaller calibre automatic-firing anti-aircraft barrels carried by most large Royal Navy ships probably remained the best option for fending off air attack. But in five years’ time when the first of the new jet fighters and bombers came on the scene, perhaps precision guided missilery would be the only thing that could be relied upon to do the job.

The Navy certainly thought that was the way the wind was blowing. The next time Lion or her sisters went into dock for a major overhaul all their quadruple 1.7-inch mounts were going to be removed, new radars hoisted and short-range – two to four miles – surface-to-air – missile launchers installed amidships on either side of the aft funnel.

The King was aware that, as was their wont, the men of his protection detail had moved closer as he had been taking the air on the ‘exposed’ quarterdeck of the battleship. The nearby islands were swarming with colonial policemen and soldiers from the New York Garrison. The next nearest shore was well over a mile away; if some misguided fool wanted to take a pot shot at him from that sort of range through the morning haze good luck to him!

Oddly, it was at the very moment that this thought flitted across his mind that he heard a dull ‘clunk’ somewhere to his left. He might have heard another ‘pinging’ sound a second or so later but by then he was buried beneath a wall of muscular bodies, everybody was shouting and the thunder of booted feet on the planking of the quarter deck was deafening.

Strong hands picked him up and transported him as if he was weightless towards, around and behind the barbette of ‘Y’ main battery turret. Then, after the briefest of hesitation he was bundled unceremoniously down an ammunition loading hatchway into the heavily armoured innards of the giant floating citadel.

East Hempstead Police Station, Paumanok County, Long Island

I had been arrested under a warrant that permitted the Long Island Police to hold me in custody for seventy-two hours subsequent to the moment of my detention. Basically, I was going nowhere for the next few days.

The ordinary uniformed ‘bobbies’ at East Hempstead were unnervingly like their fathers, two or three decades ago when I had been a frequent caller and guest at establishments such as the brand new whitewashed, spic and span station on the Jamaica Bay Road just out of town, in former times and were, in the main, regular guys. Of course, years ago, there were no women in the police force, that was an eye-opener, being processed into custody by a female sergeant. She was hardly Sarah’s age, brunette, pregnant and not in the mood to be messed about by a shaggy-haired disgraced professor feebly trying to make light of his situation.

I tried to sleep but my neck was sore from being rousted out of bed and manhandled to the floor in the middle of the night. Oh, and I was worried about Abe. I had been worried about my youngest son since he was knee high, truth be known. Rachel had been too protective, too…nurturing; although that might just have been me being pig-headed.

When Inspector Danson had asked me about why Abe had chosen to study at Albany I had skated around the truth in more than one respect. Much though Abe and the other kids had loved those weeks we spent camping in the woods along the Mohawk River every year; I was a little afraid the sins of the father were about to be revisited on my family and suddenly I was thinking again of my old friend Tsiokwaris – in Kanien'keháka, the language of the Mohawk nation, ‘Black Raven’, and his daughter Tekonwenaharake, ‘her voice travels through the wind’.

Rachel had wanted the kids to be exposed to the ways and the traditions of the indigenous native peoples of the colony; I had wanted to plumb the natural well of dissent and possibly, revolution in the ranks of the People of the Flint – the Mohawks – and their brother nations for once upon a time, long ago, I had not been the pacifistic, armchair rebel of my later years.

Rachel and the kids had burned a lot of that revolutionary zeal out of me early on. After that I was a dabbler, a dilettante dissident and little more. At first, I saw the peoples of the Iroquois ‘league’, as the French called them, as the separatist movement’s natural allies. The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee – made up of the six tribes of the Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples had survived the rapacity of the first waves of nineteenth century Anglo-European colonization and retained their identity, their sense of being a people.

I think my old friend Tsiokwaris thought I was a harmless, amusing fool. He was wise and patient, I was anything but; the fact of the matter was that to the tribes of the Iroquois Nation the colonies’ ongoing respect for the sanctity of the tribal lands – south of Lake Eerie and Ontario and the St Lawrence, mirrored by the Dominion of Canada to the north – which had finally ended the Indian Wars in the late eighteenth century, meant that there had never been any real appetite in the Mohawk, or any of the other Iroquois peoples to wage war again on the white men. Other that is than when periodically, one or other of the cronies of colonial administration bigwigs in Albany attempted to grant logging or mining concessions adjacent to or infringing upon their ‘countries’.

As far back as the late eighteenth century the English had figured out that it was easier to live in peace with the Iroquois and the Algonquin and most of the other Indian nations than it was to get embroiled in a continental-scale never-ending guerrilla war which would sooner or later, bankrupt the colonies and the old country.

Tsiokwaris and his people understood that calculus and counter-intuitively, the drive to pen the native peoples back into their ancestral lands which had slowly gathered pace over the last thirty or forty years had suited the Mohawk just fine.

In retrospect Rachel and I brought our little family into contact with that other, indigenous New England of the native tribes at the very cusp of a sea change in the affairs of the First Thirteen colonies; that moment when co-existence, the byword – something of an article of faith – of generations of settlers for over a hundred years which had kept the continental peace was falling out of fashion.

In any event, I had come to understand that the Iroquois had a different, more elastic, spiritual connection to the land than was fathomable to most white men and women; and had no need to be lectured by a ‘settler’ – for that was what all white and black men in New England were to most native Americans of the North East – about the legacy of invasion and oppression.