lyonheart wrote:Wow sir!
No apology necessary, your explanation was quite interesting; I was just thinking along a different line of reasoning which seemed sound to me, (doesn't it always).
Thank you for responding to my post so promptly, and I'm sorry you were up so early. :-)
In fact, bless you for any response. :-)
I hoped providing an obvious physical obstruction might be an acceptable explanation, but your political handicap while clever and satisfactory does provokes more questions (you know how that works :-).
Will there be a map of the canal route in MTaT?
Why wasn't the non-use of the canal mentioned as proof by the Go4 that the temple etc wasn't behind the war?
How old is Silkiah, or when was it created?
400 or 500 years ago?
If the canal has been around since the creation, why were the locks built so small?
Why did it take until the 8th or 9th century to become a political objective?
I realize these questions may be answered in MTaT, but your data-dump prompts my busy mind.
Why is the canal so deep, if the ships or locks are so small (>140'?); is it the tidal effects I mentioned?
A 20' draft is pretty hefty (>10,000 ton British 8" treaty cruisers only had a draft of 21') since it prevents ICN warships in the USS Constitution range (1500-2200 ton displacement, NTM it also has a 21' draft) yet few merchant galleons would appear to have trouble using it for that reason.
If the canal is also narrow (30'?) that's another good reason its mainly limited to barge traffic now, but taking advantage of a 20' draft would seem to push for widening it long before the current crisis.
Once the Go4 or grand vicar had declared holy war, wouldn't it have been clever to build Dohlar's fleet so it could pass through the canal, then be fully combat loaded at the other end, ready to grab Tarot or help Desnar?
Since we learned about the treaty of 869 YoG made it a tributary of Desnar, I supposed it had some Desnar army units within it, particularly along its borders.
Dohlar apparently felt and feels threatened by Harchong, Siddarmark, and Desnar; yet if Silkiah was independent it should have provided quite a border buffer against Desnar.
Bringing Desnar so close to Dohlar barely 25 years ago should have ticked King Rahnyld IV off, or his father.
Could his father been 'removed' by church assassins, and his son encouraged to build up his debt to the church?
Otherwise Dohlar might have had some reason to prefer Charis over Desnar etc.
Certainly Dohlarian merchant galleons should have built to take advantage of the canal, while still being quite seaworthy if near 20 feet draft is possible.
If the locks are too small for most galleons, why hasn't the church replaced them with bigger ones, compelling all the merchant ships to pay mother church tolls directly; saving 150 days around Howard, speeding up commerce (and more tolls etc) so much I could see Charis offering to help pay for such improvements.
Are the ironclads able to fit the canal locks?
I ask because that's another detail (with good reason:-) you have yet to share with us.
Given what the sea-bees could do, could the ICN have created a similar force so temporary locks or weirs might be built to allow them to cross Silkiah?
I'm thinking of the 1864 Red river campaign escape here.
I'm sorry for all the questions, but they are stimulated by your great writing and messages.
Again, thank you very much for answering some aspects of such an intriguing story!
L
Lyonheart, if I wanted you to know all of that stuff, I'd already have told you, wouldn't I? You are, however, assuming some facts not in evidence and doing some misinterpreting.
(1) I never said that there
wasn't a physical obstruction in the way of connecting the gulf of Dohlar and the Gulf of Jahras directly; I responded specifically to the question of why the Salthar Canal wasn't used to transport the Royal Dohlaran Navy in the run-up to the Armageddon Reef campaign.
(2) I don't know exactly what maps will be in
Toil and Tribulation; I make suggestions and then we find out exactly what we're going to have time/resources to get in. The main emphasis in the upcoming book is going to be on the Republic of Siddarmark, so I would imagine that that's where the maps will be concentrated, and the Salthar Canal (and Grand Duchy of Silkiah) may or may not be included.
(3) The non-use of the canal wasn't mentioned by the Group of Four as proof that the Temple wasn't behind the war because drawing attention to it would simply have convinced people they had to be lying because their lips were moving. They'd already done everything that could be done to "prove" it was the Knights of the Temple Lands and not Mother Church behind all of this, and they weren't interested in drawing any attention to the "sneak attack" by pointing out ahead of time that they weren't using the canal. Since the allegations that the Group of Four was actually behind it have been floating around, they've chosen not to address the problem in part because they didn't want the fact that Silkiah was busy ignoring the embargo brought to public attention, for a lot of reasons. You may have noticed that they haven't said a great deal about Silkiah one way or the other — not publicly, at any rate.
(4) The
city of Silkiah has been around virtually since the Day of Creation; the
Grand Duchy of Silkiah is a much more recent creation, taking its name from the major city in the territory. The wars between the Republic of Siddarmark and the Desnairian Empire which led to the creation of the Grand Duchy began around 680, about 200 years ago, when Desnair invaded the Siddarmarkian province of Shiloh across what was then the unclaimed (and largely un-terraformed) South March Lands. There were several reasons for the invasion, but one of them was that Siddarmark had essentially turned the city of Silkiah into an overseas extension of the Republic, with local coasters transshipping canal cargoes across the Gulf of Mathyas to Trokhanos and Malitar Provinces. Desnair wanted the cargoes to go south, down the Silkiahan coast to the Gulf of Jahras; Silkiah didn't much like Desnair and preferred to deal with Siddarmark. The war between Siddarmark and Desnair
technically didn't have a thing to do with Silkiah or the canal; in fact, it had quite a lot to do with it, and everyone knew it, but it's not considered polite to fight over canals in Safehold partly because the construction and maintenance of the canals are both enjoined upon all sons and daughters of Mother Church as religious duties in the Book of Langhorne.
At first, the Desnairian cavalry crushed the Siddarmarkian militia and army. By the time the Third Desnair-Siddarmark War was fought, however, Siddarmark had effectively reinvented the Swiss pike square and proceeded to kick Desnair in the belly and then dance up and down on its spine for the next fifty years or so. By the time the Church intervened effectively, Siddarmark had pushed south into North Watch far enough to be halfway around the inland edge of the Gulf of Jahras. This is one reason why everybody on the mainland has been scared to death of the Siddarmarkian Army prior to the introduction of flintlocks and artillery, and a huge reason why Clyntahn was dead set against allowing Siddarmark to acquire any of the "new model" war fighting technology. ("They can already kill any other army on the continent, and you want to give them
rifles, too?! How crazy
are you?!”) As a means of separating the contestants, the Church created the Grand Duchy of Silkiah (out of land which was still largely uninhabited) and specifically demilitarized the Salthar Canal. And by "demilitarized," I don't mean simply that you couldn't pass warships through it, but that you weren't allowed to use it for military purposes of
any sort, which was intended to handicap future military campaigns by either side along the isthmus between Howard and East Haven.
(4) Did I
tell you how big the locks were built? They're a lot bigger than any of the "animal-draft" canals on Old Earth were, because dragons can draw greater weights. You will find out all kinds of things about the canals, why they were built the size they were, whether or not they're still being built that size, etc., in the next book, and I'm not going to tell you about them now. Sorry about that.
(5) What makes you think it took until the eighth or ninth century for canals to become political objectives? This particular canal was a major contributing factor for a series of wars beginning in the late seventh century. The canal itself was not of enormous importance until perhaps a hundred years before that
because there weren't any people in the vicinity. It was only as Trokhanos and Malitar in Siddarmark and the area around the Gulf of Jahras in Desnair began attracting large numbers of people that the
Salthar Canal became especially significant, since it was never intended for oceanic transport in the first place, which meant it was basically a "local feeder" system rather than one with huge strategic importance. That doesn’t mean other canals
didn’t have significant political, economic, and/or military importance before that time.
(6) Where did I say the canal is 20 feet deep? I didn't. I said that you couldn't get oceanic galleons, with drafts
in excess of twenty feet through them; I never said that you
could get oceanic galleons with drafts of twenty feet
or less through them. Oceanic galleons tend to have drafts of around 18-25 feet; therefore, what I was saying was that you can't get oceanic galleons — period — through them, that one of the reasons is the depth of the canal, and that galleons tend to be around twenty feet deep, which simply means that the canals have to be less than
19 feet deep or so.
(7) I'm not going to tell you how wide the canal is.
(8) Yes, it might have been,
but you couldn't get them through the thing.
(9) Desnair collects tribute from Silkiah; Silkiah is not a Desnairian possession. It is, in fact, specifically
not a possession of
either Siddarmark or Desnair. The tribute that it pays to Desnair was intended largely as a deliberate smack in the teeth to Siddarmark on the part of the Church when the Grand Duchy was created, in no small part because Siddarmark had . . . failed to note certain hints from the Church that Mother Church thought it would be a good idea for the Siddarmarkian army to go home rather than continuing to advance into Desnair. The tribute itself is pretty much nominal (it actually consists primarily of a requirement that Silkiah give Desnairian cargo passing through the canal a preferential rate), and it is officially justified not as a means of punishing Siddarmark for its hubris but as a way of compensating Desnair for the fact that it was not — then — possible to transport by canal from the gulf of Dohlar to eastern Desnair. It still isn't, for that matter, although there is now an additional canal link to the Gulf of Jahras from Hankey Sound, using one of the internal river lines, making the Salthar Canal itself less critical. Desnair still doesn't have direct canal connections between its northwestern provinces and the eastern portion of the empire, however, and the Gulf of Jahra’ canal termini are one of the big reasons the Gulf was so critical to the Empire's economy . . . and why the shipyards were placed predominantly there, rather than farther south.
(10) I didn't say Dohlar felt threatened by Harchong, Siddarmark, and Desnair; I said King Rahnyld can't
expand because he's surrounded by powerful kingdoms that wouldn't welcome his intrusion. I'm not sure why you think Rahnyld's father might have been removed by the Church, nor do I understand why the creation of a buffer zone between Desnair and Siddarmark should be seen as a threat by Dohlar. If Desnair was permitted to use Silkiah as a militarily occupied province, it would be a damned poor "buffer" against Siddarmark, wouldn't it? You seem to be leaping to quite a few conclusions about who owns and controls what in the Grand Duchy. And I can't conceive of any reason why Rahnyld of Dohlar would have favored Charis over Desnair when what Rahnyld wanted was to try and build a merchant marine that would allow him to expand his power and his economy in the knowledge that overland expansion was impossible for him. Desnair is not and never was a
maritime competitor to Dohlar, nor has Dohlar regarded Desnair as any particular military threat for at least a century or two.
(11) As I pointed out before, there
is no 20 feet of draft available, so no one was going to build anything except relatively shallow draft, small coasters — or barges — to use the canals.
(12) You do realize how capital intensive canal building in a muscle-powered civilization is, don't you? The expansion and maintenance of the canal system is a religious duty, but when it ain't broke, you don't fix it, and until Charis came along,
there was no international maritime trade worth talking about. You do remember what I said about Charis being willing to venture out of sight of land while no one else was? About how Charis got in on the ground floor of international maritime commerce? Charis had to build real
ships to carry its cargo because it didn't have nice, convenient,
calm canals. Its ships had to be able to handle oceanic or near-oceanic conditions, even on Howell Bay, and so it began moving towards the evolution of the "Atlantic" hull types before anyone else . . . except Corisande and, to a lesser extent, Chisholm. Nobody on the mainland (the only part of the planet that really counts, right?) was especially interested in sending commerce around the southern tip of Howard to trade with the "out islands," who didn't have much of a population, anyway. Besides, they were all uncultured, ignorant barbarians who probably painted themselves blue and scratched a lot in indelicate places, weren't they?
Once that started changing, the critical maritime routes established themselves with
Charis as the most critical node, not the mainland. It wasn't a case of Portugal looking for a route to the Spice Islands; it was a case of King Harrahld's grandafther and great-grandfather deliberately supporting the evolution of manufacturing (Safehold style) and then looking for
export markets, first and foremost, with
imports as a secondary concern. (And if you think you might see the hand of the Brethren of Saint Zhernau in there, well . . . . )
The blue-water sea routes people were interested in thus evolved naturally to connect Charis to Howard by way of Tarot and to both Havens by way of Siddarmark, Hsing-wu's Passage,
and the inland canal system. Look at the fact that I’ve said persistently that Siddarmark is who’s been supplying the Border States and Temple Lands with Charisian goods. Essentially, Charisian galleons deliver the goods in question to Siddarmark, where they are landed, broken down into smaller loads, dumped into the canal system, and sent west. And the intimate connection between Charisian and Siddarmarkian trade is one of the things which has made Siddarmark even more deeply suspect in Clyntahn’s eyes since the beginning of the Jihad. In many ways, the Republic and Charis have been joined at the hip for a long, long time, and he's been absolutely right, from his perspective, to fear that connection. He's also figured it was only a matter of time before Stohnar openly embraced Charis, especially if Charis continued to defeat every Church fleet sent against it, which means the Sword of Scheuler was actually (in many ways) as logical --- and inevitable --- from the Church's perspective as he claimed. (As an aside, I don't really think he's quite as much of a total loose cannon as a lot of readers seem to think he is. He's definitely Not A Nice Person, and he Has A Few Quirks In His Gallop, but underneath all that choler and hedonism of his, there really is a working brain. That's what makes him so dangerous. Don't forget, when you're evaluating his actions, analyses, and responses that
he has no clue about Merlin's true nature or capabilities or the existence of the Charisian "inner circle" he's up against.The existence of the sea routes described above is the real reason very few Charisian galleons — merchant galleons — had penetrated as far as the Gulf of Dohlar until the last twenty or thirty years before Merlin's arrival. (Remember the Charisian privateer out for revenge on Dohlar for what happened to his father’s galleon when Charis was first starting to get involved in shipping in the Gulf of Dohlar?) There's also a reason Rahnyld thought he could get away with excluding Charisian "interlopers" from the Gulf. Most of the trade in the Gulf of Dohlar was carried in relatively small ships serving as the blue-water connectors for canals into Dohlar and the Gulf of Tanshar. What Rahnyld intended to do, as the biggest and most powerful of the (non-Harchongian) realms with coastlines on the Gulf of Dohlar, was to turn the Gulf into a Desnairian lake in terms of merchant traffic. Harchong, the only possible local objector big enough to do anything about it, didn't care who the ships belonged to as long as the bureaucrats got their cut of graft off of the traffic, so the only real fly in his ointment were the increasing intrusions of Charisian galleons
carrying Charisian manufactured goods directly to consumers. (Especially in North Harchong, which — for various reasons — has fewer canals than most place.) Well, that and the fact that he knew that once he got outside the Gulf of Dohlar he'd be up against a worldwide Charisian merchant trading net that was growing steadily more all-pervasive and omnipresent. One reason he signed on so enthusiastically for the Armageddon Reef Campaign was his desire to squash Charis and (hopefully) supplant it as Safehold’s premiere maritime power.
Part of the reason for the Group of Four's concern where Charis was involved was that Charis stood outside the conventional Safeholdian model and was moving steadily
further outside that model even before Merlin turned up. The Church understood the primarily agrarian, canal-based, low-tech economies of the mainland. It understood how Harchong worked, understood (mostly) the rivalry between Desnair and Siddarmark, understood what Rahnyld was trying to accomplish in the Gulf of Dohlar. What it did
not understand (because it had no previous experience with it) was the emergence of a
manufacturing-based economy (even in its pre-Ehdwyrd Howsmyn incarnation), trading with the entire world directly, using its own blue-water cargo ships to do it. Charis was an island, thousands of miles away from Zion and the mainland, where "all sorts of things" were clearly happening, and whose geographic and (especially) oceanic isolation from the Church's traditional power centers left the Church with too few levers (in the Church's opinion) to "manage" the situation. Clyntahn clearly — and accurately — appreciated that anything outside the Church's model for controlling and manipulating economies, restricting dangerous quests for knowledge (like the Royal College), and enforcing rigid, mainland-style religious orthodoxy
constituted a serious threat to the status quo and, thus, directly threatened the Church's position of control. But he wasn't analyzing a pattern which had been in existence for 150 or 200 years — he was looking at a pattern which had begun emerging on a world level in no more than the past 60 or 70 years. A status quo, stagnant, top-down system whose controls and constraints have never been successfully or even significantly threatened in 800 years of recorded history can be just a little slow to recognize new and unprecedented threats, especially ones which grow as explosively (historically speaking) as the "Charisian problem" did. I've tried to make clear in the books that even though the situation that we see as of the Armageddon Reef Campaign is one which has obtained for many decades, it's still considered new and aberrant by men like Zhaspahr Clyntahn and that men like Zahmsyn Trynair are still coming to grips with the fact that the traditional ways of "managing" the secular realms don't apply to islands that don't share borders with other, potentially hostile neighbors and who are busy developing an entirely new economic paradigm, never envisioned by the
Holy Writ.
In connection with the Church's tardiness in realizing what it's up against in Charis, you might want to think about how preoccupied the Church was with the emergence of the Republic of Siddarmark as a significant threat — in the Church's eyes — to the
mainland status quo. The "out islands" were at best a threat on the horizon; having seen what the Republic did to Desnair, with what everyone (especially Desnair) considered to be the finest cavalry in the world, the Church was deeply concerned about what might happen if those same pike blocks headed west into the Border States. The fact that Siddarmark had ignored "hints" from Trynair's predecessors when the Church tried to whistle the Republic off Desnair didn't do a thing to make the vicarate any more confident of its ability to continue to "manage" Siddarmark, either. The fact that the Church couldn't understand why the Republic was determined to crush Desnair once and for all after 200 years or so of extremely bloody warfare which had begun with an unprovoked invasion of Siddarmark by Desnair may be another example of the Church becoming increasingly . . . desensitized to events outside its own ranks as the great Church dynasties became ever more focused on their own corruption and power seeking. As far as the Church was concerned, Siddarmark didn't have any
right to seek redress against Desnair after Mother Church had said "All right, that's enough!" and ordered both of her recalcitrant children to go back to their rooms. The fact that Siddarmark didn't seem to understand that self evident law of God and the universe obviously meant Siddarmark was a potentially dangerous rogue state that needed watching. So Siddarmark tended to monopolize the Church's attention while Charis was coming up fast on the outside. And then, when Charis
did impinge on the Church’s radar, the commonality of interest (mostly economic to begin with, but becoming steadily more pronounced in other ways, as well, by the time Merlin turned up) between her and Siddarmark only turned the two of them into mutually reinforcing threats in the Church's eyes. Which is the basis for Clyntahn's attitude towards both of them, if you read carefully.
(13) Do you really think I'm going to tell you whether or not ironclads — River-class or blue water — can fit into canals at this point?
(14) If the Salthar Canal were a river, maybe it could, assuming the locks themselves were big enough, but don't hold your breath waiting for it.
I'm going to go away now. Don't ask me any more questions. I have other things I need to do and you have a book coming out in September which will answer quite a few of them . . . and undoubtedly provoke still more.
