Since I suck at cartography, about how many miles inland is the water along the GA/SC coast there?
About twenty miles at the wide point betwixt Savannah and Charleston i'd say.
anyway, here is my app.
Nation: Moskito
Location:
History:
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When everything came apart, Nicaragua experienced the same travails which plagued most third world countries. The government was not equipped to handle the disaster as refugees fled inland. A lack of facilities, not to mention food and water, was complicated by the large number of displaced persons the government found itself responsible for. A desperate measure was passed in order to handle these duel problems, and a mandatory work detail was forced on those who did not fit into the surviving communites. Those forced to work were those made homeless by the destruction of the coast, mixed in with the jobless and prison-bound populations. There was another smaller group included in the mandatory worker population; foreigners. Two Caribbean cruise ships had been forced to dock on the east coast just before the sea swept in. This left the mixed foreign crowd of local Caribbean visitors, and American Businessmen and agents, to be combined with a crowd of listless tourists. It was the later that would lend their name to the pejorative native Nicaraugans would eventually give to all the mandatory workers; Turistas.
The mandatory worker laws were originally meant to be temporary, but the government never managed to get a handle on the situation. The collapse of the world economy ruined the currency of the Nicaragua, and the resulting inflation caused the surviving government to grind to a halt. It couldn't pay employees and enforce laws. Sheer inertia kept it going for several years, but its acts grew increasingly desperate. It was in one of its final attempts to reach solvency that the Nicaraguan government inadvertently set up the early beginnings of what would become the state and civilization of Moskito. Desperate for income, the government "Rented" the indefinite contracts of the Mandatory Workers, the "Turistas", thus turning a legislated emergency measure into a form of commercial slavery.
It did no good, and the government soon disintegrated. Without the law, those wealthy landowners who could afford to buy the contracts of the Mandatory Workers were forced to defend their property. They converted some Turistas into paid guards, and also hired their poorer neighbors for similar duties. Food and basic manufactured goods shot up in value as the remnants of old civilization were consumed, prompting those with money to put their Turistas into the hard work of making the damaged land arable again.
When they realized their situations were to be permanent, the Mandatory Workers attempted to force their freedom. This event would become known as the First Turistan War. It was a brutal affair, fought mostly in the lowlands along the Moskito Coast, and it was this conflict that sharpened this new form of society by creating a strict dividing line between classes. The landowners, their lives threatened, constructed a middling class of soldiers and freemen to divide them from the Turistas, who were degraded to a permanent slave cast with fewer opportunities to crawl out of their predicament.
The following generations went by with few events. Civilization in the highlands disintegrated and grew sparse. Small-scale manufacturing replaced what scavenged material was lost over time. A reliance on steam-power and other antiquated forms of energy replaced the old fossil-fuel based economics. Worried about another Turistan War caused the free classes to relearn the military arts. Land was cleared, and harbors were slowly constructed to make up for the difficulties caused by violent tides. With the old government gone, a new form of defensive government was put in place under the office of Mariscal. The Mariscal, elected by the members of the landowning class (now being called the Sangre Azul), was given command of their combined military forces, and legal jurisdiction over anything considered necessary for the defense of their people.
Their worst fears were answered during the command of Mariscal Juan Vicente Duque. The Turistas rose again, armed by a rebellious Sangre Azul from the south named Palo Paz. Paz died in one of the first battles of the war, but his rebels saw no reason to surrender to punishment reenslavement, so the war continued. Mariscal Duque developed new military techniques during this war, including the return of field artillery in the form of mortars and small rifled cannons.
The final battle was fought along the Kama river. The Turista rebels had been pushed south and surrounded at the coast near the sunken ruins of Bluefields. In their attempt to break out of the attack, they made a fierce assault on the Moskitan positions near the river. In the worst of the fighting, when it looked like the battle could go either way, a sick Mariscal Duque got out of his sickbed to help push cannon across the river for the last advance. He fainted and died on the field, but despite his death the battle was won and the Turistas were forced back in enslavement.
The Duque family has since received an almost religious devotion from the people following the death of their great relative nineteen years ago. In the same way the first conflict created their form of society, the second one had created a renaissance of construction and societal advancement. Juan Vicente Duque's brother, Antonio Duque, served as Mariscal for eleven years after his elder brothers death, until his own death of heart disease. The last eight years has saw Juan Vicente's son Juan Aureliano Duque serve in the higher office. Aureliano is an uncompromising man, known for his strong mind and personality just as much as he is for his strong temper. Under his command, long-distance trade has began to flourish, and his interest in architecture has brought several large building projects into the works. Steel-sided steamboats patrol the sea, while military reorganization brought on by his father seems to guarantee the Turistas will never revolt again.
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