Reborn In 17th century India with Black Technology-Chapter 1216: The Panama Canal?

April 4th, 1704

The weather was warm, and it was a cloudless day, with the sun shining brightly onto a beautiful palace in Panama. The plants and trees in the garden were glistening with water, as if it had just rained in the morning, and the clouds had just cleared out. Amidst this beautiful blend of nature and human architecture, a regal, middle-aged man sat on a chair, with a map spread on the table before him.

His brows were knitted into a shape similar to a dried-up river bed, and he looked uncertain as he gazed at the map.

The man was none other than Agni himself, the Prince of the Bharatiya Empire, who had taken the task to defeat the Europeans in the Americas.

At the beginning, his mission proceeded extremely smoothly. The naval battle concluded far sooner than expected, and the enemy strongholds on the west coast fell one after another. Furthermore, he received far more support from the natives than anticipated, which only accelerated the process of de-Europeanisation over the last several years. As a result, more than half of the continent was now under the control of the Empire and its allies.

Unfortunately, the progress seemed to have come to a halt, and it was not because the Europeans on the eastern coast were resisting with great intensity. Well, that was also true, but it was not the biggest reason. At most, it could be considered one of the biggest contributing factors, right after the main reason, which was the geography.

The Rocky Mountains, which split the continent into two, acted as a formidable barrier, hindering the advance of the Bharatiya Empire. The Europeans capitalised on this advantage and had already occupied all the major straits and roads that served as bridges between the two sides of the continent, making it difficult for his troops to push forward.

And due to that exact geographical factor, even if the empire had the most advanced weapons, it could not bridge the gap with the Europeans, who had the advantage of the geography.

So Agni was currently pondering what could be done.

Ever since taking command of the total military operations in the Americas, Agni had solved many problems that came his way, be it handling the European citizens who were left after the European defeat, calming down some native tribes that wanted to massacre the remaining Europeans, mediating disputes regarding land and resources, helping draw the boundary lines between different powers, and all other sorts of things.

Thanks to his efforts, the situation in the western part of the Americas had completely changed, becoming one where thousands of flowers radiated their own vitality.

Various city-states, principalities, and small kingdoms have propped up like bamboo shoots after rain throughout the Western Continent, all with the support of Agni and the Bharatiya Empire. Due to his hard work, he was able to make the natives and the Europeans who settled in the Americas live together without killing each other.

But despite having so much experience and accomplishing so much, he is not able to, for some reason, overcome the geographical barrier that stood before him like a mountain that could never be conquered.

However, Agni was not completely frustrated though, because, despite all his success, he was not new to setbacks. In fact, he encountered a setback just recently when two city-states wanted to go to war over who could claim to hold a certain surname for the people of their tribes. In the end, Agni once again had to come forward and make peace between them by having both the people choose the same surname, but choose a different middle name, so that both tribes would be able to trace their lineage back to a single leader whom they thought was their ancester, while at the same time differentiate among themselves as a part of a different tribe with a different middle name.

Of course, this alone was not a major setback; at most, it could be considered a mere friction. The real problem was that, having witnessed the dispute, he foresaw many more just like it. He could almost smell blood in the air, city-states, principalities, and kingdoms going to war with one another for all manner of reasons. He then had an epiphany. Despite all the suffering the natives had endured, there was still no unifying thread that connected them all.

Sure, they all suffered under the same oppressor, but that would only get them as far as fighting for the same cause against an outsider, but that doesn’t mean they see people of other tribes as their own people.

It should have been obvious since the natives opted to form their own small city-states when they were given a choice, completely different from the Europeans, who chose to form individual principalities and small kingdoms. But with hindsight, looking back now, he seemed to have been in a misconception due to the unity all the natives showed while fighting against the Europeans and the extent of coordination they had shown.

Thankfully, despite the massive setback, he wasn’t too stuck on it because he could already see a solution, a solution he reached after coming to the realisation that although from the eyes of an outsider, all the natives appear to be homogeneous, as in they speak the same language, have the same dressing styles and culture; In reality, they were not.

He observed that it was exactly because the natives had no concept of living with someone that was not their own, that the constant friction between city states arose, and for the people who lived as if humans could not possibly possess anything and could only borrow from nature, living a life set between boundaries was, one, irritating, and two, reminded them of the resource constraints brought by being isolated to a certain boundary, a new concept that was foreign to them. The fact that even as they were being oppressed, they did not stay in one place for long did not help either.

He tried to empathise and asked himself, ’How would I feel if, one day, I can no longer swim freely across the lake as I wish and am instead confined to the size of a pond?’ If he were someone so dependent on the lake, if he had no choice and had to live with a pond, he would naturally desire a bigger pond, the bigger, the better. From that perspective, the conflicts seemed inevitable, after all, the readily habitable regions were still competed for and not too large.

But there were more things that he had observed. He noticed that while the natives were constructing a society reminiscent of the ancient Greek city-state model, the Europeans were sticking with the more advanced kingdom and principalities model, which were unsurprisingly functioning relatively well. He received no significant complaints or unrest from these smaller nations either.

Gradually, he came to a realisation: the evolution of the societal structure of the Native Americans was far behind the Europeans, so even if he could help them now, by the way things were going, the natives would once again reach square one, and they would end up being ruled by the Europeans even without the interference of the European continent.

Hence, the solution was right in front of him, to slightly fast-track their societal evolution.

Agni decided to do it through 3 different weapons: language, god, and culture. The first thing he did was to spread the various sports of the empire and have the various city states compete with and against one another to encourage integration and brotherhood, and second, it was to gather all the shamans of different tribes, study all the languages, and using the Bharati language as a base, create a new Native American language that would then be popularised throughout the tribes.

He even invited several linguists from the empire and language scholars throughout the eastern Hemisphere to help him out in this task, and thirdly, the gods whom the natives believed in were also catalogued, and using the Dharmic template of every being originating from a singularity of divinity, the native gods and rituals were made to be interconnected.

In order for his plan to work, he also needed to make sure that the natives were not completely educated yet, because once people are educated, they might see that the sudden rise of mythological stories and the new language the shamans were speaking about as an engineered ploy.

It was a pity that he had to avoid constructing schools, but it was worth it. After the new language is accepted by all the natives and after they see their gods as the same being but with different incarnations, there is a high chance that the frictions will disappear, and a new age of unification might kick off.

He was, in a way, looking forward to such a golden age. Agni had read about how his father had done something similar when he ascended the throne in order to unify the culture of the empire, and now he was being given the opportunity to attempt something alike.

With all of that considered, even if his original method of handling the natives might appear in hindsight as a setback, it could also, with the right approach, become a blessing in disguise. And he had already devised a recipe to turn it into one.

But for the love of God, he has been staring at the map on and off for the last week, and he could not think of a single good idea that could allow the troops on the western coast to breach into the Eastern Coast without having to sacrifice too many people.

’Tch!’

In anger, he pushed aside the map and leaned back onto his chair with a scowl, a sight that is rare on his usually stoic face.

’How good would it be if I simply jumped into the Atlantic Ocean so that the Eastern Coast could be directly attacked?’ He muttered with a bitter expression, then, as if a bolt from the blue, an idea hit him.

"Wait, why can’t I do that?"

His eyes widened, and he became excited. Can’t he do what his father did and dig a canal so that warships on the West Coast can directly enter the other side of the continent without having to travel across a whole continent that is more than half the size of Africa?

As for the location of the canal, he did not even need to consider it for a long time; the place where he is right now, Panama, is the perfect location.

The more he thought about it, the more right it felt. He quickly ran to his study room, took out a map of Panama, spread it onto the table, and studied it carefully. His eyes lit up when he realised that there was already a large lake covering almost one quarter of the width between the two oceans on the two sides of the continent, and that this lake was only a few kilometres from the sea. If a canal were dug there, half of the project would already be completed.

The other half, sadly, would still have to be dug manually, but the good news was that it was only around 25 km. With the advanced machinery of the empire, it should not take as long as it had taken to dig the Suez Canal. The only problem he noticed was that the canal would have to be cut through a lush forest, meaning the workers would be prone to diseases. Thankfully, he could classify the digging of the canal under war expenses, which were practically bottomless.

He could import all the medicines, mosquito repellents, and other supplies in tonnes if needed, or even manufacture them directly on location to meet all the needs of the people and maximise safety requirements for the workers, so that the chances of disease and infection were reduced to a minimum. He could also set up various quarantine camps if worse came to worst.

"All right, let’s do it." He made his decision. Then he suddenly realised that he was following in the exact footsteps of his father, albeit on a different continent. Thinking about it, he could not help but smile wryly.