The Ships of Europe
The Venetian Arsenal, where more ships had been built than anywhere else in Europe.
A vessel that had just left those shipyards was now making its way into the Adriatic.
A colossal hull sheathed in black iron plates, crowned with enormous cannons.
“Hah... I helped build these, but they're really quite absurd.”
“They're massive.”
Were these meant to be the pride of Europe, its decisive weapons of war? Heavy warships, each only slightly smaller than a Blue Shark, sat low in the water.
Looking at the cannons lining their sides, one couldn't help but wonder how anyone was supposed to reload them.
Today was the day of their first training exercise.
「Grrooong」
“Wow... I can't believe this thing actually moves.”
“I'm terrified it's going to sink...”
They were so heavy that the ships were already half-submerged as they left port.
“All it would take is one high wave to tip these over.”
“Are we going to be okay...”
The ships already sat high on their center of gravity from the weight of all that iron plating, and now the enormous cannons jutted out from every side. The way the vessels rolled and lurched with the waves looked utterly nerve-wracking.
Perhaps it was because the sea was calm that day. Or perhaps it was a miracle of engineering. The ships made it out to open water and began their maneuvering drills.
「Sssshaaa」
“Still, once she gets moving, she's not exactly slow.”
“So what good does that do! It takes forever just to get up to speed!”
The ship pushed through the waves surprisingly well.
But then came the moment they tried to turn.
“Huh? Whoa! Turn slower!”
“Aaaah! She's tipping over!”
The outer side of the turn leaned so far that it nearly touched the water.
The ships hastily straightened their rudders. The crews were seasoned sailors, at least, and they had instinctively thrown the wheels over to correct course.
“Wow... this isn't going to work.”
“We'll need to load her up with ballast stone.”
Abandoning the drill entirely, the ships returned to port and began loading themselves with rocks.
It was an attempt to solve the problem by lowering their center of gravity. The result: their draft grew even deeper. A little lower still, and navigating the waters near Venice would have become impossible.
“Wow... if this goes down any further, we're going to hit water.”
“No way these things can ever sail to the open sea.”
Contrary to the sailors' misgivings, however, the ships handled far more steadily.
The rolling diminished, and the ships no longer listed badly while turning.
“Now, load the cannons!”
The enormous cannons were mounted on wheels, and six men threw themselves against each one to haul it back into position. Then they rammed in packets of pre-measured powder, and four men together lifted the massive cannonball into place.
“All guns loaded!”
“Yes, sir!”
A single broadside boasted no fewer than twelve of these enormous cannons. The bores were wide enough for a man to crawl into, but being cast of iron, their walls had become absurdly thick. Even on a ship this large, once the cannons were jammed in, there wasn't an inch of open space left below deck.
“Ugh, it feels like the water is right there in front of me. It's creepy.”
“Yeah, this is genuinely terrifying.”
When the gun ports were opened below deck, the sea seemed to shimmer mere inches away.
“Now, light them!”
「Fsss-sss-sss」
Flame raced along the pre-twisted fuses, eating its way toward the powder inside each cannon.
「Gulp」
The nervous soldiers swallowed so hard that the sound was like rolling thunder.
“This'll be fine, right?”
“Don't jinx it!”
The fuses vanished into the cannon muzzles in a puff of acrid smoke.
「KU-BOOM!」
“Guh!”
“Whoa!”
Fired with a truly terrifying roar, the cannonballs shredded the captured Ottoman ships that had been moored as targets to splinters.
The problem, however, was the recoil. The moment the cannons fired, the ship heeled so violently to one side that it nearly rose clear out of the water.
“AAAAAH!”
“Save us!”
「CRASH-CRASH-CRASH」
The ponderous cannons tumbled free, snapping their securing bolts and beginning to roll across the deck.
Tangling with the men as they slid across the listing ship, the cannons slammed into the opposite wall, and utter catastrophe erupted.
“Aaaaah...”
“Khh...”
Men lay bleeding, bodies crushed. Worse still, as the ship heeled over, the ballast stones that had been piled up to keep its center of gravity low all slid to one side.
「Rrrrrumble」
“Somebody help...”
“Hkk...”
The ship was listing too badly to right itself, and water was beginning to pour in. It was sinking.
With so many of them injured, the men below deck could hardly escape—
“Abandon ship!”
“Jump!”
The men on deck abandoned the vessel and fled, caring only for their own skins.
And so the ship that had fired the first broadside sank outright, leaving just thirty-one ironclads remaining.
“Put out those fuses, quick!”
“Pull the priming cords!”
The ships that had been belatedly preparing to fire had watched the whole disaster unfold from their decks, and were now scrambling frantically to stop their own launches.
It was truly a speechless sight. A ship, sunk by the mere act of firing its own cannons.
Carrying such large-caliber guns was a problem in itself, but the fatal flaw was that the center of gravity sat far too high.
The mood on the ships hastily returning to port was utterly bleak. Whatever pride these men had once held as Europe's elite, sailing the continent's finest vessels, had evaporated somewhere along the way.
「BANG!」
“What in God's name is this?!”
“...”
The admiral of the fleet was storming through the shipyards, breathing fire down the necks of his engineers.
“If the ship can't even fire its cannons, what exactly is the point of it all?!”
He had spent no small part of his life at sea himself, so he knew perfectly well that firing many guns at once could make a ship heel dangerously.
But for a ship to sink so pathetically was beyond infuriating.
“Can you still call yourself the finest engineers in all of Europe?!”
“We're deeply sorry, sir...”
“More importantly, what are we going to do about it?! Aren't you supposed to be offering solutions?!”
The admiral's fury had boiled all the way to the crown of his head. His face was so crimson it looked as though a jab of a finger would draw a steady stream of blood.
“W-well, then... what if we fired the cannons on both sides at the same time?”
“What?”
It was an utterly absurd suggestion—and yet it was the correct one. If the problem was the recoil, then firing both broadsides simultaneously would, in theory, cancel it out.
“Ha...”
“Or we'd have to make the cannons smaller...”
“Damn it all!”
The engineer wasn't wrong. Short of rebuilding the ships from scratch, they would have to weaken the guns.
And it was, in its own way, a fairly reasonable alternative.
“Hah... this is exhausting...”
“We're so sorry, sir...”
And so, from the following day onward, a form of gunnery drill began that was almost too ridiculous to believe.
Whenever a cannon was to be fired, the guns on the opposite side of the ship—no matter their target—now fired as well.
Space aboard was already tight enough, and there was no room to take on more crew, which meant reloading was consuming an enormous amount of time.
“Faster!”
“Cut the reload time!”
If they had any hope of making these ships useful, the reload had to speed up, and so the poor gun crews were being worked to death.
“Hah... hah...”
“Scrub faster! Your hands are slowing down!”
With bores that large, swabbing out the muzzles was no easy task either.
Should even a stray ember remain, the next charge could go off in their faces, so first came the wet swab—rammed down to clear the spent powder residue and smother any embers.
Then it had to be dried with a clean, dry swab, because any moisture would spoil the powder—and now that the bores had grown so enormous, these swabs and sponges had swelled into monstrous things.
“This thing is way too heavy!”
“Ugh... my arms have gone completely numb...”
Firing took but an instant; the preparation was pure agony.
The one mercy was that if the muzzles were swabbed properly, all that remained was to insert the pre-packaged powder charges.
Had they been forced to do it the other way—pouring loose powder, ramming it down with a rod, then loading the ball—they might have struggled to manage twenty shots in an entire day, no matter how long they fiddled with the cannon.
“Light them!”
「Fsss-sss-sss」
The soldiers watched the fuses burn down with the same sinking feeling—the brief respite would end, and hellish labor would be waiting for them once more.
「KWA-KWA-KWABOOM」
“AAAAAH!”
“Ugh.”
“Cough, cough—khh, the smoke's too thick!”
“I can't breathe!”
With every salvo, the ship filled with gunsmoke and lurched violently from side to side—enough to give even a sailor of several decades' experience a bout of seasickness.
And because the ship rocked so wildly, the cannonballs were now flying off in every random direction imaginable.
A coordinated volley against a single point could barely hit the mark even under ideal conditions; expecting these guns to hit anything at all was, in the end, a matter of pure luck, wasn't it?
“You can't even hit the target at point-blank range! Your training has rotted! No breakfast for any of you until you get your heads straight!”
Snarling as he watched the drills from the harbor windows, the admiral spun on his heel and bellowed the order.
These were men who ate a meager two meals a day as it was—and now he was demanding they cut even that in half.
“Hah... Admiral! Surely we must still feed the men, sir!”
“Do you have any idea? Every single shot they fire costs a month's worth of food!”
The admiral had been tasked with building a fleet capable of taking down Daehan's invincible navy—a feat that would surely be recorded as a magnificent achievement. It was after enduring endless lobbying and clawing his way into the position at last.
Damn it all! This can't go on!
He absolutely had to produce results, and the current state of affairs displeased him immensely.
Every single cannon shot swallowed an entire keg of gunpowder, and the cannonballs were no better. Each discharge literally burned through a common laborer's monthly food budget.
“When is the next powder shipment due?!”
“Not until next month at the earliest, sir.”
“Can't even train as we please! Argh!”
Even in Europe, saltpeter was produced by gathering human and animal excrement to let it rot, then scraping up soil from sheltered places where the rain could not wash through.
“Can't we get it from the colonies?”
“They say the technique is still too crude there. The quality is poor.”
“Hah...”
The work was filthy and foul-smelling, so no one wanted to do it—which was why it had been shoved off onto the colonies. Now, apparently, it was a problem of skill.
“Is there no other way to make gunpowder?”
“The scholars are searching diligently, sir.”
Scholars were indeed being gathered for serious research—but anyone who performed something even mildly strange was liable to be branded a witch or a servant of the devil and driven out, so men with real knowledge of chemistry were few and far between.
“Haaah... not a single thing is ready...”
Faced with such suffocating reality, the admiral's sighs only deepened.
“Can we not simply buy it from Daehan?”
“Well, you see... if war breaks out, Daehan will cut off our powder supply. We have to find a way to make it ourselves for exactly that reason, sir.”
“Grrr... Get out.”
“Yes, sir.”
How had it come to this—that he'd become an admiral only to fret over matters like manure? The ache in his head was unbearable, so he dismissed his aide.
「Clack」
“Whew...”
He drew out a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs—and the pain seemed to melt away.
“Mmm. There really is no cure-all like this.”
Then he fished a chocolate from his desk drawer and popped it into his mouth. Was the man not already a slave to Daehan?
And it wasn't just him. Everywhere in Europe, tea parties and smoking gatherings featuring Daehan's cigarettes and chocolates had become all the rage.
While the nobles feasted and drank on Daehan's goods and lived in luxury, the common folk suffered yet another bitter day.
“What? No breakfast?”
“The Admiral says no breakfast until the gunnery accuracy improves, sir.”
“You're telling them to do that kind of labor on an empty stomach?!”
The soldiers were commoners too. After training until their arms felt like they'd fall off, they came back half-dead from hunger.
But there was no supper either. They staved off the gnawing hunger and drifted into exhausted sleep, clinging only to the hope of the thin gruel they'd receive the next morning.
“Damn it all! This is too filthy to stomach!”
The soldiers had reached their limit. Dragging, swabbing, and firing those heavy cannons in spaces too cramped to even stand upright—it was pure misery, and now they weren't even being fed.
“Let's desert! We'll raid the supply convoys in the nearby forest!”
“Honestly, that sounds like an easier way to eat and live!”
Deserters began multiplying in Venice. And soldiers, after all—they naturally walked off with their weapons in hand.
Armed with muskets and powder, they began roaming the nearby woods, plundering and banditry their trade.
“Supply convoy! Attack!”
「BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!」
“Gyaah!”
“Gahk!”
“What the—?!”
When a horde of them swarmed from the forest in ambush, even the troops escorting the convoy had no answer. In mere moments the guards were cut down, and the bandit band seized the supply wagons for themselves.
“Oh! There's gunpowder and muskets too!”
“Whoa?! Gold coins! No wonder there were so many guards!”
“Aha-hahaha! What a windfall!”
Truly, Europe was a place where the storms never ceased.