Giles Investigates

[ILLYRIAN]

Giles Investigates The 1st bit

He was searching for something that would interest Willow, he had almost given up when he found what he read as being the first Weapons of Mass Destruction, first used during the Siege of Antwerp in 1584 to 1585.

They were known as Hellburners. Though only mildly interested he did feign further interest when he discovered the word of Hellburners being used in the Spanish Armada of the year 1588. So looking into the history of it he read about the Italian engineer Federigo Giambelli.

He was hired and subsidised by Queen Elisabeth the first of England. That was when Giles began to be interested in the story. It was in the year 1585 that Antwerp was besieged by the commander of the Habsburg forces in the Spanish Netherlands.

He constructed a bridge some eight hundred meters long on the River Scheldt. To feed the inland cities the blockade of ships had to be destroyed. The spies of Queen Elisabeth’s forces found that Federigo Giambelli had planned the blow up the bridge.

Unfortunately the plan of using the ships Oranji, Post and Gulden Leeuw was turned down by the Queen suggesting that Fortuyn and Hoop be better suited, them being of seventy tons. The spies arranged for secret another secret meeting to take place where further agreements could be made.

Giles learnt of secret meeting where the Italian engineer and his team met with groups of men who wanted to help England. It was also a place where the English could travel to where the meeting would be held without their presence being felt.

A secret port was used where the ships The Fortuyn and Hoop were filled with masses of building materials with the ships being readied as a floating vessel. The main innovative section was consisted of employing a fuse of combined clockwork and flintlock mechanisms.

That was provided to the Hoop by a watchmaker of the city of Antwerp, the Fortuyn used a delayed fuse mechanism. Knowing that a massive explosion would be needed to destroy the blockade an oblong fire chamber was built for each ship.

The bay was fitted with a brick floor a third of a meter thick and five meters wide with the walls of the chamber were nearly of two meters thick. The chambers were filled with 7000 pounds of high quality gunpowder.

On top of the chamber was a mixture of rocks and iron shards then they were covered with concrete slabs, to keep the payload a secret the deck was built of a conventional wooden deck. Just to keep the secret secure 32 other ship were released.

The final two ships were The Fortuyn and Hoop, and only they were named The Hellburners. The Fortuyn hit the wooden bridge though the explosion did not take place. Not so for the Hoop, that exploded when contact was first made.

The ships it contacted were reduced to matchstick and the men on that ship were completely obliterated, the complete line of ship that formed the blockade ceased to exist while the explosion was heard and the ground heaved some fifty miles away.


To Be Continued.

 

[ILLYRIAN]

Giles Investigates Part 2


Having found what he had been looking for Giles was able to find the subsequent happenings. Some of the shipbuilders yards in the lower west of the country had their workshops taken over, old and worn out ships were taken to those yards in readiness for any attacking naval forces.

Word was received of a planned invasion by land and by water, word was given to special ship building yards to take the ship to boat builders north of where it was expected that the invaders would appear from. A dozen or more were ready to be put in play when the invaders were seen.

Come the day that the first fleet was seen as the morning fog cleared, knowing the reaction of the invaders because of the word of the initial Hellburners the Admiralty released three ship that would sail towards the fleet. Fear struck the invaders and they fled about.

The Hellburners had been laden with waste bricks and ballbearings, enough to cause panic though not enough to explode with the ferocity of the Hoop or the Fortuyn, not that the invaders knew that, though the fear installed in the invaders was enough for them to scatter.

So intent on fleeing from the Hellburners were the invaders that they forgot to mind the rocky coastline. The lighthouses had purposely been left with out any light and some of the invaders had their crew and cargo pilfered by people up and down the coast.

Word was received in a couple of shipbuilder that an army was about to cross the water to land down the coast from them. The ships that were used to land the army on the shores had the decks cleared so that horses and soldiers could be secreted on the warships.

Those war ships that were protected by many smaller ships as such was the store of food and the weapons supplies for an invasion fleet. The war ship that had been filled with tons of bricks and tons of ball bearings with enough water to make it seem as though it was a fire ship.

That was enough to make the enemy think it was the real thing as a mass panic took place when the invading ships turned to avoid being struck or were near to the fire ship when it exploded. The invading army was lost at sea and all its escort ship escaped as best they could.

Once the invading forces had been wiped out the navy set sail from the ports to chase the remainder of the ships of war. The problem for them was that the captains of those boats had little or no experience of those waters.

Falling foul to the currents many of them crashed onto rocks that were hidden below the surface and for those that survived they fell foul of the trade currents that forced them at that time of year onto the myriad of islands with masses of rocky outcrops.

All that the ships of Queen Elizabeth 1 had to do was follow the invaders until they had drowned themselves, then they returned to safety, the safety which was twenty miles opposite the estuary that would have led them to the port of Antwerp.

Giles was impressed at what he had read of what the navy had done.


The End