1690-04: April, 1690
WAR ON FOUR FRONTS!
Gentle readers, the year 1690 thunders like broadside and bell as kings and corsairs contest two oceans and a continent, while omens and intrigues darken sky and chancery alike. From the Low Countries to the Irish Sea the great war grinds on, even as New England looses Sir William Phips with guns run out to chastise French Acadia and test the mettle of Bourbon frontiers. In the Caribbean, Spain’s Windward Fleet heaves back onto patrol while Port Royal’s quays ring with coin and clamor enough to shame Babylon itself. Yet sailors swear Veracruz wakes to the rattle of chains and the memory of children gone, that a ghost fleet walks off Santo Domingo, and that a storm in the Windward Passage neither moves nor tires. And in rain‑drowned Tortuga a flame‑haired captain named Scarlette Jane bought the house, raised a skeleton crew, and took a pale, lamp‑dark Night Wind back into the quarter whence she came. Take up this sheet and read on, for profit and peril
travel together this season, and every tide bears news stranger than the last.
WAR ON FOUR FRONTS!
Louis Throws the Dice as Kings, Cannons, and Coffers Strain in a Year of Iron
Make no mistake, readers: April finds Christendom locked in a grapple fit to crack crowns, as the Nine Years’ War stretches from the dikes of the Dutch to the passes of the Pyrenees, from Rhineland fords to the cold steel of the Channel. France, swollen with pride and powder, sets two great engines against the Spanish Netherlands while watching the Rhine with a jealous eye, for every river there is a blade at the Dauphin’s throat. The Grand Alliance answers in kind: William’s diplomats stitch Europe together with parchment and oath while his captains sharpen sabers for the campaigning season. Armies drill in the drizzle, magazines fill to the rafters, scouts slither along hedgerows with tales of Luxembourg’s maneuvers and Boufflers’ dispositions, and yet—mark it well—supply wagons groan as loudly as the guns. What does April bring? Not the grand set‑piece yet, but the dangerous dance that decides them: musters called and answered, fords tested, bridges measured for fire, and engineers in every theater taking the earth itself into their service. The word in every counting‑house is the same: coin is a weapon, and both sides spend it like blood.
Dispatches from the Low Countries speak of French camps multiplying like ant hills across Flanders while Allied columns shadow them, measuring stride for stride and praying to steal a march before the first full harvest of lives in summer. Veterans whisper that the ground remembers Fleurus and will drink again; quartermasters answer that flour and hooves decide more battles than drums. Along the Rhine, Imperial officers argue maps with the seasons, swearing to hold the crossings until the Danube front loosens its teeth; behind them, princes count regiments and bishops count souls. In Catalonia, frontier stones grow ears: the first raids trade villages for time, and both crowns wager that mountain roads will break men faster than muskets. Even Italy mutters in its beard; the Duke of Savoy weighs friendship like a jeweler weighs gold, knowing one promise too many becomes a chain.
Across the water, the war wears a different coat but the same face. New England suits its shot and trusts God as Sir William Phips clears Boston with guns run out to chastise French Acadia, a colonial thunderclap meant to echo up the Saint Lawrence and into the chambers of Versailles. French partisans swear Quebec will answer with powder and priest; English merchants swear the contrary and raise a subscription that says so. In the Caribbean, Spain’s Windward Fleet shows the flag on old patrol lines while privateers lick their teeth in Port Royal’s taverns and argue which convoy will be first to feel the season’s bite. Every admiral keeps one eye on the sky—and the other on his ally.
What should the prudent soul do? Read the signs as generals do. Prices rise on saltpeter, sailcloth, and horses; couriers ride in pairs; and even the most gilded chapels hum with low prayers for dry powder and steady hands. April is the whetstone. When the blades meet this summer—Flanders, the Boyne, the blue water of the Channel—remember how the month began: with spades in the mud, treaties clutched like talismans, and a world holding its breath as kings balance on a bayonet’s edge.
WAR IN IRELAND REKINDLED!
Jacobite Ashes Glow as French Gold, Priests, and Powder Stir the Emerald Isle
Readers, let no man say the Boyne ended it all, for though James’s standard fell in September of ’88 and the Treaty of Galway quieted the guns in ’89, April now finds the old quarrel breathing again in hedgerows and harbor towns from Munster to Leinster. The tale you know: James fled, William and Mary took the thrones in haste, and the Protestant Ascendancy tightened its grip—but the tale you feel in your bones is this: smothered embers make the fiercest flare when a fresh wind blows.
That wind comes off the Bay of Biscay carrying French transports and talk of paymasters, engineers, and Jesuit confessors versed in matters both spiritual and strange, for in March near six thousand of Louis’s veterans stepped ashore in the south to reopen the Irish question with muskets in file and coin in chest. France calls it a correction of an old injustice while William’s friends name it meddling with a matchbox in a hayrick, and every tavern between Kinsale and Kilkenny stands at attention each time a courier splashes mud on the door.
What do the London papers say, and what does the truth whisper behind them? Ministers burn candles to the wick and speak of emergency measures, regiments shaken loose from continental commitments, and a Channel watch tight as a drum, while Dublin calls out militia from Wexford to Tipperary and bids every loyal man choose pike or prayer as suits his courage and his conscience. The old score-keeping revives overnight: who paid tithes, who harbored a priest, who kept French letters in the desk with the baptismal candles, and who can swear his roof is his own in a season when roofs are counted like cattle.
From the countryside come the mutters that make chancelleries shiver: barns burned for tithe, parish schools shuttered with nails through the catechism, and garrisons sniped at from copses where the hedges have ears and the ditches remember names. They say the “Wild Geese”—those exiles who sailed after the last defeat—are trickling back by moonlight to trade old uniforms for new vows, and that French coin has a way of finding hungry bellies and hard hands when the wheat is thin and the moon is full. If you ask a man of Munster whether this is revolt or remembrance, he will shrug and say both, then ask which side pays cash on the barrel and leaves the altar alone.
There are stories to salt your meat: that certain Jesuits move with the columns and carry not only breviaries but curious boxes of instruments that sing without strings, as if the old faith had found new harmonies during the long winter of exile. There is talk that the Sun King’s whisper travels farther than his envoys, and that hands in Paris reach for thistles in Scotland even as boots in Ireland tramp the sod, for more than one rumor has a French purse crossing the North Channel in a bishop’s satchel marked as alms. And in the night when the wind swings west, the elders say the hedgerows hum a tune last heard before the Boyne ran red, which may only be the magpies—but men cross themselves all the same.
Mark the greater board as well, for this island fray is another square in the Nine Years’ War, and every square costs coin and blood in Antwerp, on the Rhine, and at sea. New England sharpens its own knives as Sir William Phips readies his squadron to strike at French Acadia, knowing that a fire lit in Ireland warms English hearts in Boston and chills French fingers on the Saint Lawrence in the same breath. If Louis means to split William’s gaze, he has chosen the right theater; if William means to answer on two fronts, he must find twice the powder and thrice the patience before the harvest is in.
So take heed, loyal readers: April’s drumbeat is not the grand battle but the deadly prelude—the musters, the marches, the burned granaries, and the proclamations printed in two tongues for one island that speaks in three. The next month will tell whether this rekindled flame gutters in the rain or climbs the thatch, but for now the smoke is certain and the smell of it is everywhere.
KIRK WITHOUT BISHOPS!
Parliament’s Hammer Falls as Highland Steel Rings at Cromdale
Readers, take heed: in Edinburgh’s marble halls the very bones of the Kirk are being reset, as Parliament sits to unmake the bishops’ yoke and restore the old Presbyterian way, while on the Spey the war‑drum thuds and men whisper that Cromdale will learn its lesson in fire. The tale runs back through a generation of sore hearts: bishops thrust upon Scotland in the Restoration days, Covenanters hunted on moor and moss, and the Act of 1669 that made a king supreme over kirk and conscience. Now April brings the reckoning—acts tabled to sweep away prelacy, to revive the ancient ordinances of 1592, and to set presbyteries and synods in their seats again, the better to bind parishes by elders and Word rather than mitre and manse.
Edinburgh’s closes crawl with rumor faster than rats: that certain bishops, refusing the oaths, are packing library and silver in the twilight; that Nonjurors hold secret liturgies by shuttered candle; that the Cameronians march to psalm‑tunes and require no drum but their own stern lungs. A clerk swears he handled papers to restore ministers cast out in the last reign; a printer’s boy swears he set type that repeals the king’s supremacy; and both cross themselves when the press groans, for they have heard Parliament means to fix the Kirk’s settlement before the summer campaigns draw steel. Patronage is the word that pricks every ear—a golden leash, some say, by which princes would hold devout men’s consciences; a necessary curb, say others, lest zeal outrun law.
While ink dries in the capital, smoke rises in the north. General Buchan’s Jacobite host has drifted like mist through Badenoch and Strathspey, kindled by sermons that call James their rightful king and by whispers of French purses heavy with coin. Sir Thomas Livingstone marches to answer, and the watchers on the Cairngorms count campfires below like stars spilled on the Haughs of Cromdale. At April’s end, herdsmen tell of the fiery cross carried at a trot from glen to glen, and of clans that promise to stand if the weather holds and their bellies are full. Market women say the salmon ran the Spey red at dawn—nonsense, perhaps, but it makes men check the flints in their pistols all the same.
There are omens enough to stock a sermon: bells in Moray said to crack when the bishops’ names are read, a white hare seen three nights by Grantown’s ford, and a book found in a kirk loft with the National Covenant sewn into its lining like a buried oath. In Aberdeen they mutter that an Episcopal church is a “Kirk invisible” now, yet its folk are stout in the north and will not barter their prayers for Parliament’s paper. In Fife and the shires south of the Forth, the Presbyterians answer that zeal is a better mortar than gold, and that a nation that kept the Covenant through sword and snow will not faint at a little ink.
Mark the hour, readers: April sets the stage with statutes and musters, and May will open the curtain with powder smoke. If Edinburgh finishes what it has begun, the bishops’ croziers will be museums’ sticks, and elders will weigh the souls of parishes as in the first reformation days. If Strathspey goes the wrong way, the settlement will be written again in blood on heather. Until the courier brings the next posting from the north, keep your ears turned to the wynds and your eyes upon the parish door—Scotland is choosing how it will pray, and men always bleed when kings and kirkmen argue over the same book.
VERACRUZ HAUNTED!
Bells Toll for the Living as Chains Rattle for the Dead
Letters out of the Gulf speak of Veracruz under a pall no priest can lift and no sentinel can explain, a city that sleeps with one eye open and both hands on the rosary. Parish wives swear that since Holy Week the dreams come like a tide—iron chains screaming in the night, children calling from the harbor, and a ship that knocks without lantern or crew. The sacristan of La Asunción says the candles gutter blue when the wind turns east, and dogs refuse the quay, planting their paws and howling at nothing men can see.
“San Juan de Ulúa breathes,” murmurs a cooper who mends casks for the fleet, meaning the fortress itself. He tells of watchmen who feel a weight upon the walls at the turn of the tide, as if something climbs from the black water and drips salt and sorrow along the stones. A clerk at the Custom House claims the tide ledger blotted itself—numbers there at vespers, run like tears by matins—and would not swear in daylight which ship’s name he saw written twice and then gone.
Merchants say cargoes are late but omens are early. Three nights running, a lantern far out in the roadstead burned as cold as a corpse’s cheek and would not warm a hand, and yet left a scorch on the gunwale where it touched. A pilot’s boy dove for a dropped line and came up with a bracelet of iron links tangled in his hair; when a smith tried to break them, the hammer rang like a church bell and the links wept brown water. Sailors took this for a sign and would not sleep aboard that night, crowding the chapel until dawn.
Ask the old mariner by the fish market about the voices. He will not say much, but he will tell you to stuff your ears with cotton when the surf goes quiet, for it is in the sudden hush that the harbor speaks. First you think it is rigging, then you think it is gulls, then you understand it is neither. Names are whispered that no living lips should know—lost sons, drowned thieves, and ships burned to their waterlines long ago. “A man who answers gets an invitation,” says the mariner. He will not say to where.
There is talk, too, of the Mulata—no one agrees which one, only that Veracruz has always kept room for a woman who walks between candle and shadow. They say a gaoler found a drawing of a ship where no ship could be, and that the wall tasted of salt when he touched his tongue to it. They say roses bloom on stone after certain storms and leave petals that bruise under boot but turn to cinders by morning. They say too much, as cities do when sleep runs thin and priests preach longer homilies than their flocks can bear.
And beneath it all, the rumor that bites like a norther: that a treasure fleet sailed from Havana and never kissed Santo Domingo’s pier, and that the Church denies it carried anything but tithes and wine. The dockmen do not argue doctrine; they only count the weeks and watch the sea. A cook swears he saw, beyond the headland, three carracks in line abreast with no wind in their sails and barnacles thick as armor up their sides. When he crossed himself, the foremost dipped its prow as if returning the salute.
Advice to the curious and the careless: speak softly near the water and shorten your name to a stub you can disown. Do not take chains out of the sea. If a bell rings where no bell should be, turn your back and bless the tide. If a lantern beckons cold, let it burn alone. And if you must pray, pray quickly—Veracruz hears every word, and of late it repeats them back.
Caribbean Rumblings
Mid‑April brought a convulsion of earth and sea as a mighty shock on April 16 rattled the Leewards—felt from Barbuda to St. Kitts and Nevis—with reports of walls down, mills buried, and a destructive rush of water that chased townsfolk from the strand before the bells stopped swinging. Port Royal’s piers still groan with coin and cargo as Jamaica’s wicked‑bright emporium thrives, its taverns bragging of prizes even while pilots watch the horizon with a sober eye after the tremor’s long roll. Spain’s Windward Fleet has shown fresh colors on old tracks between Havana, Veracruz, and Santo Domingo, a reminder that the Armada de Barlovento was built for months like these when corsairs sniff weakness and galleons must be minded like kings. Veracruz, say night‑watchmen and wives alike, sleeps light as chains clatter in dreams and children’s voices ride the tide, while priests deny any devilment and keep extra candles for comfort if not confession. Off Hispaniola, fishermen swear a ghost fleet paces the shelf at dusk, and in the Windward Passage a storm that never moves is said to listen for names and swallow the long‑winded first.
New England Loads the Guns
Let the Continent trade sieges and treaties—here in New England April bites with frontier teeth and harbor thunder: after Schenectady’s winter horror and the March sack of Salmon Falls, Massachusetts has answered with iron, commissioning Sir William Phips to sea and setting town drums to beating from the Merrimack to Casco. On April 28 the carpenter‑turned‑commander cleared Boston with five stout vessels and roughly 446 militia aboard—his 42‑gun Six Friends leading the sloop Mary, the Porcupine, and two ketches—bound to scour Penobscot and Passamaquoddy and then knock at proud Port Royal’s door. The waterfront swears this is only the first act of a larger design that points the prow up the Saint Lawrence, while land gossips claim Montreal will see Connecticut steel through the Lake Champlain corridor before the hay is cut, and every pulpit between Plymouth and Portsmouth prays that gunpowder stays dry and tempers do not. Mothers count sons, merchants count bonds, and the taverns count wagers on whether the French priest or the Boston broadside speaks louder in Acadia; for now the only certain thing is the roll of drums, the smell of tar and beef, and the white wake widening east of Nantasket as New England carries its quarrel to the enemy’s gate.
Shipping and Commerce: Port Royal’s quays hosted a bribed rumor that New England’s expedition would force French privateers to seek Spanish harbors, shifting prize markets and insurance rates for the season. Veracruz’s flota schedules and Manila link kept bullion, cacao, and silk flowing despite whispers of haunted roads and priests blessing mule trains “against the desert of the sea,” an irony not lost on carters. Merchants in Boston and Salem subscribed heavily to Phips’s adventure, wagering that plunder would balance ledgers even if treaties later sought to balance souls.
Prize Money and Prudence: Give the Windward Fleet its due and the privateers their shares, for fat galleons do not guard themselves. Yet mark the sea’s mood after the mid‑month shaking—soundings lie and shoals remember. Veracruz tells tales of chains and children; whether true or tavern smoke, let lanterns stay bright and tongues stay short near the quay.
From the Steppe and the Don: Couriers from Moscow speak of continuing tension along Russia’s southern marches, where Tatar raiders from the Crimea harry settlements near Izyum and probe Cossack defenses along the Don. The young Tsar Peter’s court measures distances and musters, laying groundwork for campaigns yet to come, while Ottoman garrisons at Azov and along the lower Dnieper keep watch on a frontier where neither peace nor full war holds sway. Cossack scouts report Turkish ships resupplying the fortress through the river mouth, and engineers whisper of plans for a fleet that might one day contest the Sultan’s mastery of those waters. For now, April brings only raids and counter-raids, but men who study maps see the pieces moving into place for larger designs when the season turns.
Ottoman Dispatches: News from the Sublime Porte runs red and gold: in April, the long arm of justice reached Ayaşlı İsmail Pasha—once Grand Vizier—who was strangled in exile on Rhodes amid charges of embezzlement and the recovery of fortunes seized during his brief, chaotic tenure. Grand Vizier Köprülü Fazıl Mustafa Pasha tightens the reins at court while garrisons at Azov and along the Don report steady resupply under the shadow of Cossack scouts and Tatar raids, a frontier duel the Ottomans have managed for generations. Sultan Suleiman II’s ministers boast of renewed strength after Belgrade’s recapture, yet every courier from Hungary admits the war’s appetite grows—more coin, more men, and more prayers in the mosques before dawn.
Tortuga: Dark Clouds and Scarlet Skies: On an all‑day deluge that unnaturally lasted 24 hours, Captain Scarlette Jane stepped into Port Cayonne, bought rounds at The Raven, and loudly called for hands to join her ship. Harbor men swore the Night Wind looked “like a ghost ship”—lanterns kept dark, wake thin as smoke, hull pale under sheets of rain—as the recruiting spilled from barroom to quay. Several witnesses said Scarlette Jane left with barely a skeleton crew the next day, setting sail for the same direction she came from.
Spend Now or Bleed Later: Let us speak plain: powder, sailcloth, and horseflesh are dear, but defeat is dearest of all. Louis wagers two fronts at once; the only answer is convoys fat with victuals and a treasury opened wider than our enemies’ mouths. Pay the sailors, arm the militia, and keep the Dutch close—alliances are cheaper than lost provinces. Those who quibble over taxes now will count their losses in children later. Spend the coin and win the summer.
Faith and Polity: Scotland’s abolition of episcopy emboldened presbyterian ministers and unsettled episcopal loyalists, with pamphleteers predicting either a purer Zion or a realm of covenants too brittle to hold. On the continent, imperial policy toward Serbian resettlement promised new garrisons and old grievances across borderlands where soldiers and saints have long shared the same roads. Clerics as far as Port Royal debated whether April’s Leeward earthquake was Providence or pressure, but no one denied the bells rang fuller that Sunday.
Drums, Not Doubts: After Schenectady and Salmon Falls, what sermon remains but this—load the carts, bless the men, and bid Sir William fair wind. The French carry priest and powder in equal measure; we must answer with psalm and shot both. Mothers, count your sons; merchants, count your bonds—Providence favors the prepared. Say your prayers on Sunday and your orders on Monday, for Port Royal will not take itself.