Costa Bravo

Free State of Costa Bravo Estado Libre de Costa Bravo
Flag
Motto: "Trabajadores, unite!"
Anthem: The Internationale/La Internacional
Capital	Nuevo Puerto Hércules
Official languages	None
Local languages	a la brava
Ethnic groups (2019)	29.0% European 18.6% South Asian 16.0% African 10.9% Asian 9.6% Polynesian 8.9% West Asian 7.0% other
Religion (2019)	33.1% Liberational Catholicism 20.8% Buddhism 13.0% Hinduism 10.4% Islam 10.4% no religion 7.6% Judaism 4.7% other
Demonym(s)	Bravo
Government	Democratic confederalism (Devolved council democracy government on a confederated model with syndicalist traditions)
Stages of sovereignty
• Discovery by Europeans	1522
• Colonization by Spain	1580
• Ceded to Great Britain	1714
• Independence	1812
• Abolition of the directory system	1991
Area
• Total	54,700 km2 (21,100 sq mi)
• Water (%)	6.9
Population
• 2019 census	5,001,250
• Density	98/km2 (253.8/sq mi)
GDP (PPP)	estimate
• Total	ƒ800 billion
• Per capita	ƒ54,821
GDP (nominal)	estimate
• Total	ƒ700 billion
• Per capita	ƒ35,934
Gini	.13 low
HDI	0.933 very high
Currency	Costa Bravo Florín (ƒ) (FLO)
Time zone	UTC+3:00 (UTC)
Date format	dd-mm-yyyy
Driving side	right
Calling code	+666
Internet TLD	.cb

Costa Bravo, officially the Free State of Costa Bravo or Estado Libre de Costa Bravo, is a confederal democracy located on a chain of islands spanning the South Atlantic and Southern Indian Ocean. Costa Bravo was formerly a colonial subject of Spain and Great Britain. It declared independence from Britain in 1812. The current form of government dates to 1991 following a period of civil war.

Costa Bravo is governed from the ‘bottom-up’. Every community, ethnicity, culture, religious group, intellectual movement, and economic unit is autonomously organized as a political entity. All issues of daily life are decided on by the members of these organizations in consensus decision-making and direct democracy. Issues are put to the vote in an endless stream of referendums. This political apparatus is highly digital: votes are cast by citizens ‘on the go’ with their personal smart devices and computers. Political participation and voting are mandatory for all citizens. There is no head of state, but a ‘Representative’ may be provisionally appointed to conduct diplomacy on the people’s behalf (for example).

There is no official language. Media and daily conversations are in code-switched English and Spanish. This vernacular is called a la brava, or Bravo Spanglish.

The islands that are now part of Costa Bravo were colonized by Austronesian peoples between 500 to 1200 CE. Austronesian settlement lasted less than a century. Europeans independently discovered the islands on 1 April, 1522, when Juan Sebastián Elcano, the Basque Spanish explorer who completed the first circumnavigation of the world, was forced to shelter on Costa Bravo after being lost in a storm. The islands were claimed by Spain and colonization began in 1580.

Costa Bravo is the most remote nation in the world. In the 20th century, Costa Bravo played an outsize role in the Cold War as one of the leaders of the Third-World movement, a coalition of non-aligned countries in the Global South. By the end of the Cold War, Costa Bravo ranked as one of the most developed countries in the world, but to this day remains in the political sphere of developing countries.

Etymology

The name "Costa Bravo" is a corruption of the original name, which dates from the Spanish discovery of the archipelago during the first circumnavigation of the world. Noting the tumultuous waters and rocky coastline of the region's many islands, crewmember of the Victoria Antonio Pigafetta dubbed the place Costa Brava, Spanish for "furious coast". The name first appeared in Maximilianus Transylvanus's De Moluccis Insulis. The shift from Brava to Bravo occurred shortly after the British takeover in 1714, when the evolved form began began appearing in administration records. The original name continued in vernacular use until the early 19th century.

In 16th century Latin language accounts, the name is given as Ora Pravo, meaning "crooked coast" or "wicked coast".

Inhabitants of Costa Bravo are known as Bravoes.

History

Prehistory

The history of Costa Bravo prior to European discovery of the islands is imprecise on account of scarce archaeological remains. Estimated dates of initial settlement range from 500 to 1200 CE, approximately coinciding with the arrival of the first Austronesian peoples in Madagascar. These settlers came from Melanesia and Micronesia. The population size and specific cultural identities of the settlers are not precisely known. Only fragmentary skeletal and material remains have been uncovered. It is believed that settlement lasted for a few generations before collapse. Disease, political strife, or climate events have been hypothesized as the cause.

The Austronesian settlers are best known as the creators of the Satan Stone or Piedra de Satanás, a 3 meter tall oblate ovoid monolith carved from a silicate mineral meteorite. The stone was unearthed by farmers in the southern part of the main island in 1852. It has been on display at the People's Museum since 1900. The manner of its construction, its provenance, and the meaning of the glyphs covering its surface are all unknown. The glyphs are rendered in boustrophedonic text but resemble no other writing system in the world. None of the text is definitively understood. Some modern linguists argue it is not true writing but proto-writing, or even a more limited mnemonic device for genealogy, choreography, navigation, astronomy, or agriculture. There is continuing debate as to whether the glyphs are essentially logographic or syllabic, though they appear to be compatible with neither a pure logography nor a pure syllabary. The study of these glyphs, and the purpose of the Satan Stone itself, remains contentious to this day. The perception of the monolith as an object of Satanic power led to it almost being destroyed on two separate occasions in the 18th and 19th centuries.

European colonization

The islands were rediscovered on 1 April, 1522 by Juan Sebastián Elcano and the crew of the Victoria who completed the first circumnavigation of the world. In late March of 1522, the Victoria encountered a cyclone in the South Indian Ocean, which sent the ship into waters far to the south of her intended route. The crew chanced upon the archipelago now known as Costa Bravo, and there sheltered and provisioned for food and water. They remained on the islands from 1 April to 4 April 1522. The Venetian scholar Antonio Pigafetta wrote extensively of the wildlife and terrain of the islands. In his journal, Pigafetta christened the place Costa Brava and noted its approximate location. The Victoria arrived in Spain five months later.

Spain immediately laid claim to the islands, in contravention of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas which made the islands de jure Portuguese possessions. There were several failed ventures to colonize Costa Brava beginning as early as 1523. Only one such venture was undertaken prior to 1580, in which a flotilla of ships sailed from Seville in 1535 but failed to locate the islands.

The union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in 1580 revived colonization efforts, still to the exclusion of Portuguese interests, and a colonizing expedition landed on Costa Brava on 8 December, 1580. The colonists founded a small village on the east coast of the main island. This settlement was named Nuevo Puerto Hércules (after Port Hercules, Monaco) in honor of Isabella Grimaldi, Lady of Monaco with whom the expedition leader Ignacio de Zárate was infatuated. Zárate had volunteered for the expedition to escape a death sentence for invading the Lady's bedchambers six months prior. A collection of love letters written by Zárate exhorting the Lady of Monaco to marry him and travel to Costa Brava—an impoverished, malarial backwater—are today on display in the People's Museum.

Costa Brava encompassed an administrative unit consisting of all of Spain's possessions in the South Atlantic and Southern Indian Ocean. Costa Brava itself was organized as a captaincy and audiencia of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Although nominally no different than his peers, the Captain General of Costa Brava had significant autonomy similar to the Captain General of Santo Domingo.

One of the most notable leaders of Costa Brava, Captain General Nicolás Benalcazar, is today celebrated as a picaresque Robin Hood-type folk hero. His privateer fleet in the 1610s commerce raided British triangular trade ships. Benalcazar and his privateers were subject to censure from Spanish authorities considering the extralegal nature of Benalcazar's letters of marque. This caused a rift between Costa Brava and the Crown, ultimately leading to a strong culture of privateering on the islands that the viceregal government could do nothing to prevent. Benalcazar was stripped of office in 1617, after which he became a successful pirate. The Golden Age of Piracy was a high watermark in the early cultural history of Costa Brava. Costa Brava became a byword of a place of debauchery and murder. The "Cold Caribbean" was a moniker frequently applied to the islands. Located at the southern apex of the Pirate Round, Costa Brava was increasingly subject to the influences of cosmopolitan traders and pirates—and increasingly estranged from the Spanish metropole.

The War of the Spanish Succession in the early 18th century was the first global conflict to directly involve Brava territories. Cognizant of a widening cultural gulf between the islands and mainland Europe, naval forces in Costa Brava mutinied rather than support the Spanish war effort. Costa Brava was chaotic in the early years of the war. The disorganized population of pirates raided ports, ships, and each other across the South American, African, and Brava coasts. Nuevo Puerto Hércules exchanged hands between the Captain General and the independent factions three times before an expeditionary force of viceregal ships sufficiently put an end to the naval rebellion. From 1705 until the end of the war, Costa Brava experienced only intermittent pirate activity.

The war was ultimately devastating to Costa Brava's economy. Raids had destroyed infrastructure in and around Nuevo Puerto Hércules. After the war, the port could sustain only half the number of anchored ships as it could previously. This setback diverted a significant amount of trade to ports in South America and Africa. The transient population of privateers, disenfranchised sailors, and pirates went elsewhere. Costa Brava lost a full third of its population.

Spain ceded Costa Brava to Great Britain as part of the Peace of Utrecht. Costa Brava became the British Bravo Islands.

Whaling came to predominate the local economy under the British. During Spanish rule, whaling had been confined to marginal Basque communities in the region. By 1800 Nuevo Puerto Hércules was regarded as the whaling capital of the world. The abundant lesser rorqual was—and remains—a staple catch. Bravo whalers of this period were possibly the first to make landfall on Antarctica. Recent archaeological findings have uncovered whaling stations in the vicinity of Prydz Bay which may date as early as c. 1750.

In March 1740, the British Bravo Islands were subject to the sole land-based offensive by Spanish forces during the War of Jenkins' Ear. A band of porteño privateers from Buenos Aires raided Isla Roché y Las Últimas, landing a expeditionary force that seized control of the islands. Porteño merchants and contrabandistas hoped to create an additional trade route outside of the closed port of Buenos Aires in order to limit rival Lima-based trade. The islands were also a base of operations for Spanish privateers attacking the triangular trade route. By 1743, with the war subsumed by the War of the Austrian Succession, locals in Hueco revolted and reclaimed the islands for the British.

After a peaceful half-century which saw the total syncretism of Anglo and Hispanic culture throughout the islands, British relations with their Bravo subjects soured with the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars in 1803. To sustain manpower for the war effort, the British Royal Navy relied heavily on impressment from two main sources: American and Bravo sailors. Both populations had large numbers of career sailors and commercial fleets. Between 1806 and 1812, 6,000 American seamen and an estimated 20,000 Bravo seamen were impressed and taken against their will into the Royal Navy. Bravo women comprised over half of local whalers during this time as there was a shortage of men remaining to do the work. Whaler Leonora Toro of this period struck back against British Navy ships by disguising herself and her crew as men and then assassinating the officers of any ship that dared to pressgang them. In her most famous naval action dubbed the Fuego affair, she destroyed the HMS Spitcock with a fire ship, killing 20 British sailors.

The Fuego affair led to reprisals from the Royal Navy and colonial government. Leonora Toro was arrested in 1811 and executed along with 8 other women who participated in the affair (the remaining 20 crewmembers pled the belly). Impressment subsequently doubled; even some women sailors were pressganged along with the men. By 1812, sentiment in the British Bravo Islands had reached a critical low point. On 1 April, 1812, an uprising of women and young men stormed the Governor's Hall in Nuevo Puerto Hércules and presented a Bill of Redress or Carta de Reparación to Deputy Governor Gilbertine Rawls. Their demands were plainly refused. Scattered fighting erupted across the British Bravo Islands. Judging correctly that British forces were stretched too thin to suppress an uprising in the most remote settlement in the world, revolters unseated British authorities from power on every island within six months. The movement had began as a call for redress, not independence, but rapid gains shifted war goals. In February of 1813 the Bravo forces (leaderless and almost 2/3rds women) agreed to free 600 British soldiers and officials in exchange for autonomy from British rule. The Bravo Revolution lasted 10 months, resulted in 800 dead Bravoes, 300 dead British, and 20 British ships sunk to Bravo 4. Some 8,000 people (civilian and military) died from disease. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1814, many pressganged Bravoes finally returned home.