Reports were confused as to specifics; not so unclear about the essentials of the action which had subsequently occurred. A large number of enemy vessels – from the navies of New Spain (Nuevo Granada), Cuba, Hispaniola and Santo Domingo – had gathered in the waters off Mobile Bay, and although gallantly attacked with torpedoes by the Indomitable’s destroyers, approached ever closer inshore and engaged the valiant old battlecruiser in a three to four-hour gunnery duel.
Notwithstanding the arrival of the Devonshire’s squadron in the middle of the battle, and that the Indomitable’s eight 15-inch main battery rifles and modern fire control systems were, it was assumed, greatly superior to the weapons and gun-laying capabilities of her foes, eventually, she had been battered into a burning, sinking hulk as her magazines were emptied, and the Devonshire – badly handled with her own magazines running low – forced to break off the action and withdraw out to sea with three surviving destroyers.
Presently, the wreck of the forty-five thousand-ton battlecruiser Indomitable lay partially capsized in some forty feet of water off Galliard Island. It was feared that at least two-thirds of her fourteen hundred-man crew had perished in the great battle. Of her escorting squadron, only two, badly damaged destroyers survived, having been forced to take shelter beneath the guns of Mobile and Spanish Fort at the head of the Bay.
The Devonshire, meanwhile, with one of her main battery turrets out of action, having sustained as many as a dozen hits and suffered over a hundred casualties had, mercifully, outrun her pursuers as was, for the moment, running for the ‘safety’ of the Caribbean.
If the loss of Indomitable, four fleet destroyers and some two thousand men dead or missing was a catastrophe; the collapse of imperial naval hegemony in the Gulf of Spain presaged was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.
The worst of it was that it was a disaster which might not have happened had the Colonial Air Force provided even a few bomber or torpedo aircraft to support the beleaguered Indomitable in her hour of need. Moreover, despite the battlecruiser having been moored in Mobile Bay for well over a week the city’s dockyard, beset by alleged ‘labour disputes’ – shorthand for a mass walk out by the yards’ mainly Spanish-speaking and Cuban and Hispanic sympathising work force – had offered her only minimal assistance, and a supposed ‘lack of pilotage’ had meant the great ship had still been anchored in the lower, outer bay at the time of the attack, seemingly sealing her doom.
That this had been allowed to happen, or rather, circumstances had conspired to create the situation in which the Royal Navy had suffered its greatest defeat – the King was a man who believed a thing should always be called exactly what it was – since the middle years of the Great War over a century ago, was a national disgrace. A disgrace made all the more piquant because it had been well understood since the 1860s that a single capital ship, even one as powerful as the Indomitable, was horribly vulnerable to being ‘mobbed under’ by sheer weight of numbers and firepower of a fleet of individually, much smaller and less powerful warships. There was already angry talk at the Admiralty of traitors ‘down in the Alabama River Territory’ where the historic European settlement had been as much Spanish and French as British.
However, the recriminations were going to have to wait; for the present, the real significance of the sinking of the Indomitable was that the naval forces of the Triple Alliance now controlled the Gulf of Spain from the Delta to the west coast of Florida, and that there was probably a second, marauding enemy fleet at loose in the Caribbean which might, at any moment, threaten the Lesser Antilles and the whole chain of island colonies all the way down from the Windwards, through the Leeward Islands to Trinidad and Tobago, and the now seemingly precarious enclaves and garrisons, most of them distinctly under-strength and far flung, widely dispersed across tens of thousands of square miles of partially unmapped territory which comprised British Guyana.
Part of modern British Guyana was, technically, still Dutch, and in the west, French remained the first language. Wisely, the government in The Hague had ceded most of its obligations to London back in the 1930s, maintaining trading stations and harbour facilities without the onerous cost of having to defend or administer the colony.
At this distant remove, nobody quite remembered why the French part of Guyana had been quietly gifted to Britain in the small print of the Treaty of Paris. Contemporary thinking assumed that by the time the final text of the great peace settlement was agreed everybody was so cheesed off with the whole business, the one thing that all the parties could, or were will to still agreed about was that whatever typographical errors, cartographic anomalies or outright blunders remained, regardless of how catastrophic they might prove to be for future generations that survived in the two thousand-two hundred and eighty-seven pages of the ‘accursed document’, they all urgently needed to get out of Paris before another war broke out!
Bordered on the west by the Venezuelan Confederacy, a declared supporter although not full member of the Triple Alliance, and to the east and south by the trackless jungles of Brazil, the giant, chronically impoverished former Portuguese province desperately trying to steer an implausibly neutral course through the chaos enveloping the region, Guyana had long been, in Colonial Office parlance, one of those ancient imperial possessions the Empire would have been much ‘better off without’.
Problematically, there were quite a few such ‘possessions’ like Guyana that the ‘progressives’ in London might, in a more rational age – if such had ever existed – had they been given a free hand, unashamedly hurried to independence, or partitioned away between its nearest neighbours. But the right moment had never presented itself and besides, not even the Foreign and Colonial Office wanted to start setting ‘pragmatic’ precedents like that.
Goodness, where would it all end?
India had been stumbling towards dominion status for over fifty years; the last thing anybody in London wanted to do was to start, de facto, selectively calving off bits of the Empire when most of Canada, Australasia, and all bar the Cape Colony in Southern Africa had been successfully hived off into, to all intents, other than in matters of continental defence and foreign policy, self-governing polities. If the Raj could be induced to, more or less peacefully, go down the same route then perhaps the Empire might not actually implode under the weight of its accumulated burdens for another fifty years.
But of course, there was no such thing as ‘India’, there had not been since the time of the Mughals. The Raj was a collection of religious and ethnic states and principalities – over a hundred of them, although Bengal and the Punjab comprised some thirty percent of the land mass and about one hundred million of the four hundred and eight millions of the population – which, for reasons nobody had ever explained to the King, or anybody else’s satisfaction, the ‘natives’ allowed about twelve thousand Europeans and the eight hundred and twenty-one thousand men of the Indian Army, to pretend that they still governed.
It was one thing for Sir George Walpole, possibly the most learned historian ever to occupy the post of Foreign and Colonial Secretary, to aver that ‘India does not care who rules it and its peoples will never agree which among them ought to be primus inter pares, first among equals,’ arguing that ‘ in a funny way for us to sit in all the big cities and for the Viceroy, whoever he is at the time, poor fellow, to take the blame for everything that goes wrong, suits both the Indian aristocracy, the educated technocracy and the rapidly expanding educated middle classes perfectly. I know there is an apparent ground swell of something ill-informed people in the popular press describe as ‘Indian Nationalism’ but actually, the present arrangements generally support the aspirations, not to mention, offer a degree of security, to the people who have never really stopped ‘running’ India. And I don’t mean us!”