Ganymede

Author’s Note

“Fun with Real History!”

As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, I’m a big fan of real history … and really making a mess of it. In my humble opinion, that’s half the fun in steampunk — adjusting the past to better fit my personal convenience, or narrative curiosity. So it should not come as a great surprise that a healthy dose of Actual Stuff made its way into Ganymede.

First and foremost, I suppose, it’s worth mentioning that Horace Lawson Hunley was a real person — a Confederate engineer — and the Hunley was a real craft. Likewise, James McClintock and Baxter Watson were Hunley’s partners, but my description of their subsequent descent into murder and hypothetical treason is wholly fictitious. Although Hunley was originally from Tennessee, he relocated to New Orleans, where he lived for many years. There, he did much of his developmental work on submarines, though it was the Pioneer (and certainly not the fictitious Ganymede) that was scuttled in Lake Pontchartrain.

The Hunley was built and tested in Mobile, Alabama; she was subsequently seized by the Confederate Navy and put to work against the Union naval blockade of Charleston, South Carolina, drowning five men on her first outing in 1863. She killed her second crew — eight men, including Hunley himself — in a routine diving exercise later that same year. Her final voyage took place on February 17, 1864.

This time, the Hunley earned a spot in history as the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy ship — the Housatonic—in battle. That was the good news.

The bad news was that mere minutes after signaling to shore that the mission had gone as planned, the Hunley vanished. All eight men on board were lost, bringing the Hunley’s final body count to twenty-six, including the five sailors who died aboard the Housatonic—which goes down in the history books, too, as the first ship ever successfully torpedoed into matchsticks.

The Hunley wasn’t seen again until 1995.

And because truth is so often stranger than fiction, it was discovered by legendary author and adventurer Clive Cussler, who found it buried just outside Charleston Harbor.

Today, courtesy of the South Carolina Hunley Commission and a private not-for-profit group called Friends of the Hunley, you can see the submarine itself at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston, South Carolina. I recommend that you visit http://hunley.org for more information on the craft, and details regarding tour availability.

The only other historic figure of note to actually appear in Ganymede is Marie Laveau, renowned Voudou practitioner and cult figure of nineteenth-century New Orleans. She passed away in 1881 at a ripe old age, surely in her late eighties, but authorities occasionally differ with regards to her date of birth, so I hesitate to offer an exact figure. Laveau is allegedly interred in a mausoleum in the Saint Louis Cemetery #1 in New Orleans, but people like to argue about that, too.

As for Barataria Bay and the Lafittes … much of that was on point, if a bit exaggerated.

Jean Lafitte was a French privateer whose dates of birth and death are likewise in dispute, but he and his brother Pierre definitely raised a lot of hell in the Gulf of Mexico in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After the United States passed the Embargo Act of 1807, Jean and Pierre moved their base of operations from New Orleans proper to Barataria Bay, where they took up pirating and smuggling. In 1814, America raided the bay and seized most of its assets — despite the fact that Lafitte had actually tried to warn the States about British shenanigans. In return for a pardon, Lafitte helped Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans against the British in 1815, and later went on to take up spying against the Spanish in Galveston, Texas.

Jean Lafitte may or may not have died in 1823, but Barataria Bay was a choice spot, and persons of dubious character continued to frequent it long afterwards.

If you’re from the Gulf Coast, you can probably list half a dozen things named after Lafitte off the top of your head. One of my personal favorites is the Old Absinthe House (often just called “Lafitte’s”) on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans. It was built in 1807, but like the above-mentioned historic quarrels, no one really knows for sure whether or not Lafitte ever owned it, visited it, or had anything to do with it.

Finally, a note about the character Ruthie Doniker, and her secret.

This ought to go without saying, but people with a variety of gender identities are not a twentieth-century invention. They are rarely discussed in traditional history books, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t present.

Case in point: Should you ever take the historic Underground Tour in Seattle, Washington, the gift shop at the end has a large black-and-white photo of the notorious prostitute “Madam Damnable” surrounded by several of her employees in a late-nineteenth-century parlor setting. As the tour guides will sometimes whisper to you, all is not quite as it appears. At least one of the ladies is a “man.”

Was she a transgendered woman? Was he a crossdresser? Was the truth something else entirely? Anything’s possible, and there’s no way of knowing now. But there was obviously a call for her services.