A Message from the Desert

By the 1880s, a reliable fountain pen had become as much a part of an officer's kit as his revolver, a small defense against the failures of the dip pen and the traveling inkwell. Few makers built that reliability better than Waterman's Ideal, whose pens turned up wherever the Empire's paperwork followed its soldiers and administrators, aboard troopships, in consular offices, in the sand outside Suakin, where a young Bennet Burleigh filed his own dispatches home. Ether flyer manifests bound for Syrtis Major list them too, packed into kit crates alongside sextants and revolver cartridges, proof enough that a good pen has to survive more than one kind of desert.

Lewis Waterman was an insurance man in New York, and company legend says he lost a client in 1883 when a borrowed fountain pen blotted ink across a signature page. Whatever really happened that afternoon, Waterman spent the following year working out why fountain pens of the period leaked and skipped, and in 1884 he patented a feed cut with three fine channels that let air into the reservoir as ink flowed out. The result held ink where earlier designs failed. The Ideal Pen Company, soon renamed for its founder, grew through the second half of the 1880s from a handful of pens sold out of a New York cigar shop into one of the largest pen makers in the country, and by the early 1890s Waterman's Ideal was the name to beat.

That kind of reliability mattered more than convenience once you factor in where the pens ended up. Empire ran on paper. Treaties with African rulers, dispatches from consular posts, orders passed down railway lines under construction from Cairo toward the Cape, all of it needed a hand that could write cleanly without an inkwell nearby. A dip pen and a bottle of ink survive a desk. They do not survive a saddlebag, a rail carriage, or a tent flapping in a khamsin. The self-filling fountain pen, and Waterman's version of it in particular, became standard kit for the officers, administrators, and correspondents who carried British authority into places that had no post office yet.

As a war correspondent, Burleigh spent the 1880s covering British campaigns in the Sudan for the Daily Telegraph, dispatches that made his name synonymous with the genre and, apparently, worth borrowing for a fountain pen advertisement. It's worth noting that Waterman's picked its endorser well. A pen that could survive the Sudan, or Mars, came with a built-in argument for surviving everywhere.

Bennet Burleigh (1840-1914)

Bennet Burleigh

BURLEIGH IS the Syrtis Major correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, a leading London daily, posted to Mars just as his paper once posted him wherever the Empire went to war. Scottish-born, he fled to America as a young man, fought for the Confederacy, was captured, escaped, and rode with a raiding party against Union shipping on the Great Lakes before the law finally caught up with him and sent him home in disgrace. He remade himself as a journalist and spent the better part of a decade following British arms through Egypt and the Sudan. He watched the campaign of '82 unfold from the canal works outside Ismailia, and three years later he was attached to the Desert Column on the Nile when Burnaby flew Gordon out of a besieged Khartoum by aerial launch, an escape that saved one man's life but neither the city's nor the column's. He does not consider himself a sentimental man, but he has watched enough relief efforts arrive after the fact to recognize the shape of the problem before anyone else in the room does.

Burleigh files fast, files first, and is not above petty sabotage to keep a rival correspondent's dispatch off the wire behind his own. He has no patience for Colonial Office caution and even less for a good story spoiled by a cautious editor, but he is scrupulously accurate about facts he can verify himself, having learned the hard way that a correspondent's whole worth is his word.

Reporter (Veteran NPC)
Att.		Skills
Str:	3	Fisticuffs: 2, Throwing: 1, Close Combat 2 (edged weapons)
Agl:	3	Stealth: 2, Marksmanship: 2 (pistol)
End:	5	Wilderness Travel: 4 (desert), Fieldcraft 3, Tracking 1
Int:	5	Observation: 5, Science: 1 (geography)
Chr:	4	Eloquence: 5, Linguistics 3 (Arabic, French, Spanish), Theatrics 3, Bargaining 3
Soc:	3	Riding: 3 (horse), Piloting: 1 (aerial flyers)
Motives: Ambitious, Adventuresome, Ruthless
The correspondent on a battlefield. Appearance: Burleigh is a stocky, weathered man in his late forties, thick through the shoulders from decades of campaign living, with a heavy mustache gone mostly grey and a Glasgow burr that thickens when he is angry or excited. His hands are permanently ink-stained, and he carries a battered dispatch case everywhere, along with a revolver he has owned since his American days and has no intention of surrendering to peacetime habits. His campaign clothes are practical rather than fashionable, patched more than once, and he shows no self-consciousness about it in company that would notice. He has a habit of watching a room's exits before he watches the people in it, a leftover instinct from a young manhood spent one step ahead of Federal patrols. When he smells a story, he becomes suddenly, disarmingly charming, a quality that has gotten him into headquarters tents closed to every other correspondent on three worlds. Background: Prior careers include soldier of fortune and journalist. Bennet Burleigh is 49 years old and is from the middle class

Heros von Borcke (1835–1895)

Heros von Borcke, in Germany, after the American Civil War.

Johann August Heinrich Heros von Borcke is known as the "giant in gray." Born to an aristocratic German family, he spent his childhood in Berlin and Halle before receiving a Prussian military education. Von Borcke was commissioned an ensign in 1853 and admitted to the Cuirassier Regiment of Guards as a cadet. He was then posted as second lieutenant to the Second Brandenburg Regiment of Dragoons in 1860. After obtaining a leave from the Prussian Army, he embarked upon the adventure of his life; sailing for Bermuda, intent on joining the Confederate Army during the American Civil War.

Speaking almost no English, von Borcke managed to secure letters of introduction to Confederate authorities, and slipped into South Carolina's Charleston Harbor via a blockade runner on May 24, 1862. He next traveled to Richmond, where he met with Confederate Secretary of War George Randolph, who presented him with a letter of introduction to Major General J.E.B. Stuart.

A deep friendship developed immediately between the two men, and von Borcke was made a captain in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States and later promoted to the rank of major. Von Borcke could be entertaining and told wonderful stories with his thick accent. His horses were as big as his extra-long sword, a beast of a blade forged in Solingen of Damascus steel. He rode with Stuart, who affectionately called him "Von," during the Northern Virginia and Maryland campaigns, acquiring a reputation for bravery. He served with Stuart in the Battle of Middleburg on June 19, 1863, where he suffered a severe wound. The examining doctor somberly declared the wound, which pierced the lung, mortal -- but von Borcke woke up the next morning determined to live, and he did. Placed on limited duty for the remainder of the year, he resumed his position on Stuart's staff in the spring of 1864. Heros was present at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, where J.E.B. Stuart was mortally wounded, and von Borcke sat at Stuart's deathbed, holding his hand, and promised to see after Stuart's widow and children. Von Borcke was promoted to lieutenant colonel in December of 1864, was voted the official thanks of the Confederate Congress, and sent on a diplomatic mission to England by President Jefferson Davis.

While in London, he wrote articles for the pro-Confederate Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The articles were later collected and published in book form as Memoirs of the Confederate War for Independence. When the Confederacy collapsed in 1865, von Borcke returned to his native Prussia and resumed his military career. He fought in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, receiving the coveted Order of the Red Eagle for his gallantry, but his old wounds continued to plague him, so he retired from the Prussian Army as Captain in 1867.

Von Borcke had three sons with his first wife, Magdalene Honig. When Magdalene passed away in 1883, he married her sister, and they had a daughter named Karoline Virginia -- named in honor of his adopted, and beloved, southern state back in America.

Even after the war, von Borcke's maintained a deep affection and respect for the Confederacy. So much so that unsuspecting visitors to East Prussia are often surprised to see the Confederate flag flying (next to the Prussian flag) from the battlements of von Borcke's ancestral estate in Geisenbrugge, Pomerania. In 1884, he returned to the United States for a reunion with many former friends and comrades, and presented his famous Damascus sword to them. The sword was later given to the State of Virginia.

Von Borcke is an aristocrat of some means, with a bent for adventure, meaning he could be encountered nearly anywhere in the solar system -- wherever the German flag is flown. However, his poor health (the result of his Civil War wound) makes Mars' dry climate and lower gravity an attractive option. His sympathy for the Confederate cause means that he may also be encountered wherever a Confederate expatriate community exists.

Army (Veteran NPC)			Lieutenant-Colonel Heros von Borcke
Att.		Skills
Str:	4	Fisticuffs: 4, Throwing: 2, Close Combat: 4 (sword)
Agl:	3	Stealth: 2, Marksmanship: 2 (pistol)
End:	2	Wilderness Travel: 3
Int:	2	Observation: 1
Chr:	5	Eloquence: 5, Language: 1 (English)
Soc:	5	Riding: 5 (horse), Leadership: 2
Motives: Adventuresome, Arrogant, Eccentric
Appearance: With curly blond hair, laughing eyes, and an engaging personality, von Borcke has an imposing presence. By nineteenth-century standards, he is larger than life, standing six feet four inches in height and weighing in at well over two hundred forty pounds. His stature, personality, and social status make him popular among his peers. However, he can also be a bit vain and difficult to get along with at times, especially for his servants. Although he recovered from the wounds suffered in 1863, neither von Borcke's physical strength nor his endurance fully recovered (having been Str: 6, End: 4 as a young man).

Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896)

To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything. ~Otto Lilienthal

The noted aviation historian, Sir Charles Gibbs-Smith, divided flyer inventors into two categories. The first he termed "Chauffeurs of the Air," because "they act as though flying is like driving a carriage." Maxim is perhaps the best example of this large category. In contrast, Gibbs-Smith said that "Airmen" are those who understand that the fluid medium of air makes flight a quite different proposition than land/water-based maneuvering.

Gibbs-Smith continued that the chauffeur-type tends to be concerned with obtaining sufficient propulsion, without worrying overmuch about factors like lift or control. While the airmen often work on gliders before tackling the problem of powered, dynamic-lift flight. Of all of the aviation pioneers who fall into Gibbs-Smith's prototypical "Airman" category, the German Otto Lilienthal best exemplifies those characteristics.

Before 1881, attempts to develop dynamic-lift flyers were occasional and sporadic. Lilienthal changed all that. His efforts broke the 'respectability barrier' that haunted serious efforts to develop dynamic-lift flyers. During the late 1880s, Lilienthal developed eighteen different models of gliders. His efforts received worldwide publicity, and his successes lent others the courage to follow in his footsteps.

Perhaps Lilienthal's most influential work is his paper Practical Experiments for the Development of Human Flight. This seminal work continued to influence dynamic-lift research for years. Before Lilienthal, building a heavier-than-air, dynamic-lift craft was widely considered to be the province of dreamers and fools; after it seemed possible to fly without the aid of liftwood or hydrogen.

Scientist/Inventor (Green NPC)
Att.		Skills
Str:	2	Fisticuffs: 1, Throwing: 1
Agl:	3	Stealth: 2, Mechanics: 2 (machinist)
End:	2	Wilderness Travel: 1
Int:	6	Observation: 6, Science: 5 (physics), Engineering 3 (naval engineering)
Chr:	4	Eloquence: 3, Linguistics 2 (English)
Soc:	4	Riding: 3 (horse), Piloting: 2 (aerial flyers)
Motives: Driven, Knowledge, Loyal
Appearance: Lilienthal is a distinguished man, slightly above average in both build and looks. He is well-spoken and is able to persuade people to his point of view, due in large part to his intelligence and command of the subject matter. His primary language is German, but he speaks English as well. His passion is aeronautics, and in particular, that dynamic-lift flight models are superior to static-lift (hydrogen and liftwood) models. His research has been focused on replicating flight models based on the study of bird flight.