Background
Historical context to The Unfrozen Sea: In 1904, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the Imperial Russian battle fleet.
A print celebrating the Japanese navy’s surprise attack on the Russian Port Arthur fleet.
In early February, 1904, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the Imperial Russian battle fleet anchored at Port Arthur, the Russian stronghold in Manchuria. The attack marked the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War.
Japanese gunners blasting away at the Russian Port Arthur fleet.
Although only nineteen months, this conflict altered the course of Manchurian history and cast a decades-long, slow-moving shadow across Asia and Europe and on the Russian, Japanese, British, and German Empires. Repercussions of that little-known war and its aftermath ripple throughout the world today.
In 1904, America was on the cusp of the twentieth century. Changes in American life, culture, and technology, both slight and profound, came fast. Some would alter American history. President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901; Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency. The same year, the American military joined other nations in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in China. In 1903, Henry Ford started a company to produce motor cars,
and two bicycle makers attached a gasoline engine to a glider and achieved a brief, power-driven, heavier-than-air flight. In 1904, America, along with other nations in pursuit of territorial footholds, sent observers to the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria.
In San Francisco, entrepôt for America’s dream of an empire in the Pacific, Deputy U. S. Marshal Temple Hayden began a search for Irene Watteson, a fugitive suspected of espionage against the United States. Her flight and his pursuit of her led them over five thousand miles across the Pacific to Manchuria, where war raged.
The Unfrozen Sea, my unpublished serialized historical novel of those events, begins here free to subscribers and followers as part of my Substack weekly newsletter, History and Other Lies. I hope you enjoy reading it as I much as did writing it. And I welcome your comments.