Resolution Island

[Sovyet Gelibolu]

OOC: there are some geographical details here that are not reflected in the map. The map is wrong; it has given me territories I don’t control and taken away territories I do. If you want to know which territories the Great Lakes Council Republic actually controls, I advise you to look at its Factbook.

IC: The community of Churchill, near the border with Nunavut, on the coast of the Hudson Bay, had come a long way from the tiny town of eight hundred people it had been at the time of the Revolution. In the absence of an Atlantic coast, Churchill had become the Great Lakes’ major military port. There had been some attempts to set it up as a commercial port, but at the time of the Revolution, only the Hudson Bay Railway had connected it to the rest of the country, and trade, when not flowing along the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Lakes cities, went through Moosonee, whose Northern Ontario Railway connection offered better access. Instead, Churchill’s strategic location had made it ideal as the forward base of the Great Lakes’ High Seas Fleet. Churchill had seen the construction of all six Great Lakes aircraft carriers, plus dozens of smaller ships over the years. Now, however, the town of more than four thousand people was in an uproar, fearing that all its progress, and its identity as a community, might be stripped away.

The news that gave substance to these fears was that the Armed Forces Commission had transferred the base of the High Seas Fleet from Churchill to the long-abandoned and recently purchased Canadian naval base on Resolution Island. Well, the brass in Chicago might think that a good strategic move, but for the sailors in Churchill, it meant leaving their families, and for the community at large, economic dislocation on a grand scale. Churchill depended in the Navy. Public meetings had been held in the streets the past couple of days demanding that the decision be reversed.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, said decision-makers felt extremely foolish. The Foreign Commission had accomplished one of their major goals, and they had hurried to capitalize on it in a manner than now seemed very rash. They had spent the past two days coming up with what they hoped would be an acceptable solution, which they sent to Churchill. This proposal would split the High Seas Fleet into two bodies: the Home Fleet based in Churchill and containing a third of extant naval assets, and the High Seas Fleet, which would be based in Resolution Island as before. Churchill would also be given the exclusive right to construct new ships for the Navy for a period of ten years, after which the right would come up for renegotiation.

This didn’t satisfy everyone, particularly the sailors who still resented being based hundreds of miles away from their families, but the longshoremen and other land workers were satisfied with their monopoly on warship construction. Without their support the sailors (who were far from united, a third of them being satisfied with the measure) were unable to continue the demonstrations. The fleet would sail, and soon would occupy its new base.

Edited February 26, 2009 by Sovyet Gelibolu