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THE EMPEROR'S
FLEET IS BURNING

A Tragic Chronical of Fortune and Destiny

By Christian Narkiewicz-Laine



'The Burning of the Turkish Fleet in Chesme Bay' by Richard Paton, late 18th-Century.


In the Year of our Lord, 1514, (as it was recorded and archived in a monastery at Mt. Athos), before the conquest of México, the poet was sent to the New World to create a series of maps and diagrams of a new, but existing region of the world that had never before been imaged.  In previous centuries, the lands and spaces were not a part of our modern day consciousness. These were new European territories inhabited by pagan savages with barbaric customs, strange rituals, and odd science.  The journey, too, was devised to avert conflict amerced by warring factions bent on claiming the territories by competing sovereigns along with their armies looting, pillaging and destroying civilizations older than ourselves.  Pirates, mercenaries, spies, conspirators, and assassins joined in the bedlam. This was a century of global conflict and blind chaos, where clashing civilizations, besieged by the madness of gold and hidden West Indian treasure, along with missionaries on the quest for conversion to Christianity, and the English at war with the Spanish, all of which wielded historical analogies to the fall of the ancient Roman Empire, particularly, if, in common belief that our past has a whiff of certain self-inevitability.

That year, too there had been a great fire in the Rialto in Venice and King Manuel I of Portugal delivered a huge exotic embassy to Pope Leo IX, including a white Asian elephant. Dürer had completed his famous engraving Melencolia I.  Also, the Battle of Orsha, the biggest battles of the century, Jagiellonian dynasty forces, comprising of Belarusians of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poles, defeated the army of the Grand Duchy of Moscow.

It was the same year that Pope Leo IX, before his death, predicted that the great apocalyptic Battle of Armageddon was not coming until 500 years had passed – sometime around 2015.

As historian and chief cartographer to our dear Emperor Maximilian I, and after receiving a patent from the crown, I set sail to the Americas in June on the Inmaculada Concepción, with its 50-70 tons cargo capacity and swivel-mounted, breach loading Lombards. which had just returned from another transatlantic voyage.

The entire naval flotilla consisted of approximately 20 caravels and several larger 100-ton flagships.  In addition to its crew of sailors and army militia, there were astronomers, botanists, architects, priests, meta-physicians, other poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, and geometers—all guided and directed by some shadowy notion of destiny.

Our ship was plagued from the start with heavy rolling in rough seas and poor stability impacted by the weight of its heavy modern artillery.  Midway on the Atlantic, several ships, including ours, were also leaking so badly from wormholes that there were colliding rumors that they would have to be abandoned.

We sailed directly to the isles of the Caribbean, first to San Cristóbal de la Habana, and then to Santa María la Antigua del Darién, in Columbia, the first city to be founded by Europeans on the Continent of South America.

The area was full of unwelcoming natives, and where for uncertain ages, wild monsters and savages alone had roamed joint tenants of its mammoth domains.  This was the world of the ancient Amazons, who had a long history, after the discoveries were made, and the progress of science had dissipated the darkness that first gave acclaim to the narration.

We could hardly flee such accumulated evils, such intolerable hardships.  Some of our numbers fell victim to them.  After crossing the mountains, new and unanticipated calamities from the weather awaited us, and scarcely less severe, having escaped the frost of the mountains, we were now to be destroyed by the rains of the plains.  For two months, the rains fell unremittingly; there was hardly ample fair weather to dry our clothing.  The sturdiest hearts sunk under such accumulated, such appalling difficulties and perils.

Now fate had distributed before me something much more valuable and conscientious.  I now held in my hands a gigantic and methodical fragment of the entire history of an unknown solar system, with its galaxies and its unchartered maps and encyclopedias, strange temples and palaces, the dismay of its mythologies and the shadows of its mysterious tongues, its foreign chiefs and monarchs and its endless oceans, its precious stones and its exotic birds and fauna, its alchemy and its fire, its theological and philosophical complexities—all joined together with scenes of carnage and peril.

We became lost in the New World twelve hundred miles from the Pacific Coast.  Among the many hardships we had endured, now seemed comparatively but small: we were forced to survive on berries and roots; some of us even devoured our dogs, horses, the most loathsome insects and reptiles, and the leather of our saddles and shoes.

The four thousand Indians, who accompanied us to transport our provisions, all perished.

Every district we encountered was marked by the progress of the Spanish in blood and mass slaughter.  In the last several months, sixty native caciques, or leaders, and four hundred nobles, were burnt at one time; and, to the complete horror of the scene, the children and relations of the wretched victims were assembled and compelled to be spectators of their dying agonies.  The common people were reduced to the most humiliating and degrading servitude.  All this, rape, pillage, and murder, was accomplished and solemnized by religious sanctions from Rome.

After taking control of several places, we arrived at Tumbes, situated about three degrees south of the equatorial line; here was a glorious temple, and palaces of the sovereigns of the empire.  The wealth of the country, the temples, the palaces, the infrastructure, religion, civilization, medicine, science, astronomy, and the prosperity of the inhabitants, was now, for the first time, fully unfolded to the scrutiny of the Spaniards; the rich abundance, in which many of the indigenous were dressed, the ornaments of gold and silver and feathers that decorated them and the more intricate and splendid ornaments of the precious metals that sheathed their temples, and even the common household paraphernalia, composed of gold and sliver, emblazoned their captivated vision, induced them that their unreachable aspirations were now within grasp, and that at last, they had finally found the land of Ophir—the country of gold.

All the wealth of the New World they coveted now lay before them.

Terrified at first of the sight of our white skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and the horror of the four-legged monsters the Conquistadors rode, the natives were reminded of their own legends that new gods would arrive and save them from the previous gods; and suddenly we were, in all our strangeness and dismay, welcomed by peoples whose fate would soon be  drastically transformed.

The Indian monarch arrived first, sitting on a throne covered with gold, adorned with plumes and precious stones, and was carried on the shoulders of four of the principal officers of his household, and was preceded by four hundred naked savages.  The monarch was revered not singularly as a sovereign, but as a divinity.

When the monarch arrived near the Spanish encampment, the commander’s chaplain explained to him in Spanish, which was interpreted, the mysteries of Christianity, the indelible power of the pope, and the allowance made by his Holiness of all the territories and countries of the New World, to the King of Spain.  He commanded the monarch to acknowledge the Christian religion, the authority of the pope, and submit to the king of Castile as his lawful sovereign.  Astonished and indignant at this unfathomable demand, the monarch replied that he was master of his own dominions.

The Spanish priest, turning to his countrymen in a rage, exclaimed: “To arms, Christians!  Against these wicked dogs!” The Spanish general, being eager to slay his victims and seize the rich spoils that lay before his eyes, gave his orders immediately: the martial music struck up, the cannons roared, the musketry fired, arrows filled the air, the horses galloped fiercely to the charge, and the infantry pressed impetuously forward, sword in hand.

The indigenous, half frightened out of their senses, not knowing whether their enemies were of the human race, or beings of a superior deity, sent to punish them for their crimes, were pursued in every direction, and immense numbers of them were slain  More than three thousand were slaughtered, not one single Spaniard, nor one wounded.  The plunder was so immense in value, the Spanish spent the night in that extravagant joy which a change of fortune so sudden and important in life was calculated to produce.

The savage sovereign was dragged from his throne to the ground and brought to the Spanish quarters and was subjected to a mock trail, and condemned to be burnt as a heretic: his last moments were embittered by a Spanish friar, who, although he had used his influence to procure his condemnation, and sanctioned the sentence with his own signature, attempted to comfort him in his hopeless situation by trying to convert him to Christianity.  Even at the end, monarch would not relinquish the adoration of the Sun.

Shortly before his execution and in a vain less attempt to satisfy his Spanish incarcerators, the savage monarch ordered all the gold and silver that had adorned the temples and palaces of his empire to be conveyed to the Spanish as a ransom for his liberty.  The gold and precious objects filled the apartment in which he was confined, twenty-two feet in length, and sixteen in breadth, as high as he could reach, with gold.

The night before he was burned alive, the piles of gold so inflamed the avarice of the greedy soldiery, that they could no longer be restrained, and they melted the treasure down, and divided it among the followers.  By morning, the monarch was tied to a stake and burned alive as the friar read him last Christian rites.

For the next several months, the sacked wealth of the Mesoamerican kingdoms was transported back to the Spanish vessels moored near the island of Gorgona on the Columbian coast.  We experienced the same treacherous conditions and environments we had mercilessly encountered on the inner journey into the highlands of Ophir.  Before approaching the harbor, the greed had so consumed the soldiers that a mutiny became evident.  When approaching the vessels, half the soldiers, several hundred, started to rebel and peremptorily refused to obey the orders of the commander, who used every tactic to restrain his men.

The first rebellion was severely dealt with.  There was no mercy by the Spanish conquerors, despite they being fellow countrymen and Christians; 300 insurrectionists were executed as rebels; and the officers, after a mock trial, were publically beheaded in the main camp.

This carnage, an affront to our known civilization, erupted a second rebellion by the remaining officers and common soldiers alike.   The whole camp became a panorama of confusion, fighting, and chaos. The disorder and pandemonium of the Old World now plagued the very depths of the New World.

It was at this point, the commander drew a line on the sand with his sword, and informed his followers, that those who wished to abandon their leader and the glorious enterprise, could pass over: only thirteen men, along with the friars and priests, remained with the commander while the hundreds of others took the fortune and headed toward the Emperor's Imperial Fleet moored nearby.

The small dauntless band of men loyal to the Emperor settled on the island of Gogona for over 20 years, constantly tortured with hopes and fears, and suffering everything, short of death, from an unhealthy climate, sickness, and want of provisions.  One by one, they were worn out by hardships and wasted by disease. They were never seen again.  The nearby indigenous peoples perished from flu and the smallpox epidemic imported from the Old World.

Knowing the fate of those loyal to the Emperor, I joined the insurgents as not to be abandoned in the chaos of this mysterious and unknown world.  I headed back with the mutineers to escape the isolation of being imprisoned in an incomprehensible, unsettled wilderness and a frightful, iron-clad destiny that could not be reversed.

The earth we inhabit is a mistake; everything around us is an oblique shadow of its hypocrisy.

Before dawn, the rebels now united by a new commander of the squadron decided to sail toward the new settlement of Panama.  Day and night, tempests, storms, hurricanes, tropical depressions obscured our every direction.  The principals of navigation, laws of the Universe, ferocity, the shower of meteors, even death turned against us. Instead, we were simply weakened and exposed to our now distant and uncertain enterprise and cast hopelessly adrift in the Southern Ocean and confined to a new found condition of total lawlessness to the State and to the universal order of things.

Months went by when we finally reached landfall on the Yucatán’s pristine coastline, and a decision was made to anchor in one of the peninsulas to find fresh water and desperately needed supplies.  Ironically, all of the gold and jewels of the Indian monarch were made useless; there was nothing to buy or barter for provisions.

It was at that point, in the horizon, a lookout spotted 15-20 ships of unknown origin on the high seas. As the flotilla approached, we recognized their emblem without mistake or hesitation.  These were pirates seeking, as our armies had sought, to sack the same stolen and pillaged Indian goods now our cargo.  Within minutes, our crippled ships fell prey as the victim.  Canons burst and roared, comet-like balls of fire pelted the dry hull of our ships, ripping the sails, and setting them ablaze. The once clear sky was now obscured by smoke and the smell of sulfur and saltpeter.  One by one the pirates boarded our ships; our men defenseless, now emaciated to mere skeletons, were quickly overcome.

The battle ensued from sunup to sundown.  Many of our men committed suicide rather than be held captive or sold as slaves.  By sundown, the conquerors were the conquest.  One by one our ships blazed into the dark, cold midnight.  Whatever gold, silver, idols studded with emeralds and gems the pirates could not recover now drifted back into the earth to be sealed forever by the oblivion of centuries of water.

As for my fate, the next few minutes were unclear, but decisive.  I knelt at the bottom of the boat and waited for the fire to consume the ceiling.  Suddenly, water flooded in around me, and I joined water to become part of the ocean.  I could see heaven above me, first a bright light fading into a remote darkness.

Time is an ocean that swept me along; but I am merely its water, it does with me whatever it wants.  At that point, I remember regaining consciousness holding onto the wreckage of a ship; and some 20 days later, I was discovered by a passing Portuguese man o' war.

Copyright ©2014 Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd.