A “scholarly article” surveying the key events in the development of flight in The Archipelago, where The Poison Sky takes place. This piece about the development of airships is written in-world, but is not part of the novel itself. Learn more about The Poison Sky here.
A great many mysteries swirl about the islands of the Archipelago, perhaps none more perplexing than the origins of flight. It may well be marveled at that man should so successfully have brought the wind to heel, that wood and canvas and the very air should have been harnessed, broken, and domesticated like a raging beast under yoke, a servant to mankind’s adventurous spirit. Few certainties attend this mystery, for what we know of flight’s history is but little, the subject more of legend and rumor than fact.
What is certain is that the air has contended with man’s presence for at least the last thousand years. The records both of Pepin and of the Venerable Gorshet on Sunrise attest to this. The former mentions some form of sailing basket buoyed by sursus gas, such as farmers use to this day: “Þe Ceorls wot moveth þe Kurman hither and thither be Hnapp sceu.” (A “hnapp sceu” in early Dawnic being roughly a “sky hamper.”) Pepin’s work makes no mention of sails, but Gorshet, writing just a century later, provides ample evidence that the employment of canvas for this purpose was well-understood in his day. The journals of Wellum Strake, of course, a further century thereafter, fill in a tale which hardly requires further comment, the details being so well known.
It is the events leading up to Strake and his famous adventure that will occupy this brief article. Again, one must understand the limits of what we know and therefore accept that our knowledge on this matter may never be complete. The origins of flight may prove to be as elusive as the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel.
Take a turn down Grocer’s Lane one evening. Listen to the songs, savor a glass of their finest sureau, that sour alcoholic libation which makes wreckage of so many lives, and you may just get an insight into where flight began. That the denizens of such an establishment may be flying high on their own vapors I do not doubt, but you’ll need to peer deeper into the glass – and pay attention to the music – to find the connection to our tale.
According to legend, sureau was invented – or discovered, if the story be true – by Esen, the wife of a drunken farmer named Cyrus. Cyrus, famed for his home-distilled brandy, came home every night abusive and drunk on his own decoction. Determined to put an end to her husband’s wickedness, Esen resolved to kill him, and the method she chose may have been the most important botched assassination in history. Rolling a barrel of wine down to the edge of the sursum at low tide, Esen uncovered it and left it for three days and nights as the poison mist flowed over and impregnated the liquor. She then resealed the barrel and returned it to its place, knowing that in its turn Cyrus would select the barrel for distillation and, knowing the farmer’s penchant for sampling his own product, poison himself before anyone else should come to harm. The distillation happened, but of course the effect was not at all what Esen had intended. The wine had indeed soured within the cask – one wonders that Cyrus did not smell the distinct putrefaction prior to distillation – and the distilled spirit, the first bottle of “sour water,” had its own creator as its first customer. Cyrus was knocked for six, to be sure, but did not die. In some versions of the story, the new intoxicant delighted him. In others it cured him of his alcoholism. (It is this latter version which can be heard in the barhouse bawdy Waking Cyrus which is strangely so popular in the neighborhood grocer to this very day. Perhaps it gives the drunkards hope that they too may someday be reformed.) As a matter of history, attested by countless mash bills and taxation records, Sunrisers distilled sureau as a drink (and as a cleaning agent) for some time thereafter, likely with no one ever guessing at any potential for the evil brew more interesting than that of solvent.
The next step in this history is the most remarkable; the more so because history – whether by formal account, by song, by legend, or by rumor – is utterly silent on the matter. From our modern vantage with an understanding of the philosophy of alchemy we can see what must have happened. But as to exactly how it happened, who caused it to happen, and what impelled them, we can only guess. If one were so disposed to resort to religious explanation, one would be tempted to claim divine intervention.
The principles of distillation are thus: one places a liquid in an enclosed pot termed by its practitioners an “alembic.” This flask is fashioned out of metal – typically copper I’m told – and has a gourd-like shape with a neck crooked like that of the swan. One sets a fire beneath the alembic, heating (but not quite boiling) the liquid such that it steams and collects in this crook-neck, settling against the relatively cool metal, then falling into a secondary basin called a “phile”. If the distilling matter is alcoholic, this distillate is far more potent than the original, the alcohol having survived the journey more readily than other ingredients of the source. This simple process forms the basis of brandy-making, uisge-making, and of course sureau-making, and has been understood since well before the time of Cyrus and Esen.
The innovation of civilization’s unheralded benefactor was to filter off the lightest portion of the distilling sureau. Perhaps this step was originally intended to improve the taste. To be sure, some adherents of the drink claim that sureau so-treated manifests a “smoother” flavor. (Your humble author is unable to comment with direct knowledge; he would never partake in such unseemly behavior, save for the sake of research.) Whatever the motivation, the vapor removed at this stage is today recognized as a far more valuable commodity: sursus gas. As with the decision to tap into the distillation process, no record remains to tell us who first thought to collect the gas rather than to simply dispose of it. It seems very possible that the two innovations occurred in quite short order. Sursus gas in a confined space, such as a barn, visits bad humors on any person who breathes it. On freeing it from the alembic, it would have been readily apparent to even the meanest observer that the air needed to be cleaned by venting to the outside. Would anyone have noticed how easily it filled a sack, or the effect that the trapped air had upon that sack? Again, we may never know with certainty, but what cannot be doubted is that someone did eventually make this observation, which brings us to Pepin and his hnapp sceu.
From Pepin’s observation we may surmise that the earliest use of sursus gas was in farming or common labor, essentially as a replacement for the wheelbarrow and cart. Common farm animals or laborers could more easily pull a sky basket through the air than a cart on wheels along the rough roads of the time. True, they were subject to the vagaries of weather and had to learn the rough, unforgiving science of ballast; in general, however, notwithstanding the occasional lost basket, this was a popular and straightforwardly useful innovation, one which quickly accelerated the economy of Sunrise and with it the prosperity of its people in every way.
In continuing our story, we must take note of one further natural advantage in Sunrise’s favor: the islet of Great Echo. For the reader who perhaps hails from other regions of the Archipelago and may never have visited Sunrise, it may help to lay out the geography, which is of no small consequence in this matter. The island of Sunrise is, in fact, two islands separated by a narrow, winding straight known as the Cut. The Cut runs from the northeast extremity of the island, beginning at the great cities of Anchorage and Willumsport, each standing on opposite edges of the rift, and ending southerly, just east of Senate House. Undoubtedly this divide was wide enough to deter the earliest inhabitants from migrating from one side to the other, but bridges (first of rope, later of wood and stone) have enabled passage since before the writing of the earliest histories. But close by Senate House runs a second cut, shorter but far wider than the first, and on its farther side lies Great Echo: a virgin land tantalizingly within view, but impossible by its distance to achieve by so obvious a contrivance as a bridge.
How the doughty men of that time must have dreamed of venturing forth to this unknown territory! It must have seemed as unattainable as the moon. But the sky basket, by now in common use, must have kindled in many an imagination the notion that what could be accomplished over the length of a field might also be managed over the space of a league. If a man might ride in a basket across the deadly sursum and come safely to land on that shore, what might he discover? What fame or riches might he not find upon his return? But therein lies the riddle: how could a man cross from Sunrise to Great Echo with the tools then at his disposal? And more perplexing still: how might he manage his safe return? That league – nothing but a ferry ride today – offered an obstacle no less vexing than Petra’s mythical giant. A distance too far merely to extend a basket out on a rope. Recall also that sails were either not yet invented or else very poorly understood. We lack specific detail of the event, but again the Venerable Gorshet provides us a clue. He writes “Þis olde Wolkan ridan his Bascat and Segilan to þe Land of þe Sund þe gear fif ond twentig ofter Gelrig be ceosan.” which we may understand as “Old Wolkan rode his basket and sail to the Land of Echoes in the 25th year after Gelrig was chosen.” Gorshet, as is typical in his reporting, entices us with scraps while denying us the body of the main meal, but it appears as if a man named Wolkan was able to contrive a sailing vessel that brought him to Great Echo (and back?) in the 25th year of Gelrig’s reign. This would put the first flight to reach another island about 1024 years ago, as we believe Gelrig’s reign to have begun around 200 to 210 years before Strake’s first voyage. It must also be noted that the name “Old Wolkan” is more than a little suspicious, being both an uncommon name on Sunrise and an Old Dawnic word for “cloud”. It feels as if there might be something fanciful at work: possibly a nickname, but also possibly not a completely faithful rendering of historical fact.
One must admit that the conquest of Great Echo likelier evoked more excitement before its advent than after. The islet was uninhabited and of little use economically. True, it now boasts several lovely villages and a strong trade in wool (their mutton cawl is without rival), but surely the adventurers who risked death to walk her shores dreamed of greater spectacles and riches the grazing of sheep. Be that as it may, Old Wolkan’s journey to Great Echo had proved two key facts. First, that such a journey was possible. A ship had been contrived that could cross from one land mass to another. Second, and this in its quiet way was just as important, another islet previously unknown to mankind lay hidden behind the first. This islet, dubbed Lesser Echo after the first, was similarly uninhabited and similarly lacking in exploitable resources. But it demonstrated a peculiar potential: the idea that there may yet be more lands to discover. And while some will surely have concluded that there was nothing of consequence to find, others took that small, tempting hint and – as is the habit of gamblers since the dawn of time – dreamed of a bigger prize.
For the next two centuries, Sunrisers developed the necessary techniques of sailing and airmanship with which they could ply the skies above and around their island. While their vessels were little more than elaborate sky baskets, the ability to move people and goods around the island kept the economy moving and provided occupation for fully a twentieth of the overall population. Settlements arose on the Echoes, but otherwise Sunrise moved on much as it had before.
But still the dream of undiscovered lands remained. One could look to the horizon in every direction and wonder what else might be out there. One could also – and many did – imagine the dangers of monsters and demons, or the more prosaic if ultimately more realistic dangers of winds, storms, and poison clouds. On occasion a ship would try its luck on the misty flood, and more than a few of these never returned. As we now know, once past the Echoes, the nearest island is three-hundred leagues distant – the work of a week’s sailing if one knows one’s course and destination – and of course these ancient airmen knew neither. Once a ship ventured beyond sight of land navigation became little more than guesswork. Couple that with ignorance as to whether there was anything whatsoever to be found and one might forgive the sailors of the next two centuries who never once spotted another patch of land. Wellum Strake is of course most noted for his adventurous spirit and the singular achievement of the Landing at Hanspyke, the first encounter between inhabitants of alien lands. But few remember that what made the achievement possible was his navigator, Autumn Grenvil, and her development of the compass and star charts. Grenvil had a philosophical mind before philosophy was conceived of as a science, and she precisely and meticulously observed the movement of the stars as Strake’s ship moved beneath them. She correlated that motion with the movements of a magnetized strip of iron, somehow ingeniously intuiting the connection that allowed her to maintain course and position more accurately than ever before possible. Her methodology (modified and refined, to be sure) remains the standard to this day for the tracking of latitudinal position. Longitudinal position remains a more complicated problem to solve.
Of course this article touches only briefly on a handful of key developments in the history of flight, a survey of some advancements while altogether omitting many others. For example, the many improvements in the methods of rigging sail and tackle, the discovery of a plethora of techniques that allow ships to exceed the speed of the wind or, more marvelous still, to sail into it, and the mathematically improbable innovation that resulted in most ships running two sacks hung alow the hull rather than the earlier variation which ran a single one aloft. If the reader will pardon the author’s necessary brevity, it should be seen that this article seeks to illuminate the key moments that made the current age possible, rather than the innumerable ones that perfected it.
It is difficult to conceive that the mighty sailing fleets of today owe everything to a drunkard and his long-suffering wife, to an unknown tinkerer-distiller, to countless, nameless peasant farmers, and to an “Old Wolkan” in a barely airworthy basket, to say nothing of Strake’s great navigator. In some ways, we are still those people: the recent discovery of Far Harbor in its way brings us back to the days of the Landing, or further back to Echoes’ crossing. We know so little about the world and there is still so much more to be discovered. Perhaps someone reading this – should the current calamity of contesting parties be somehow averted – may themself take sail and discover a new land, or find a reliable computation for longitude, or even redefine the philosophy of air as we understand it today.
The above article is world-building for The Poison Sky, a work-in-progress novel. As such, bear in mind that any of this might change before the novel’s final version is complete.
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