There was no question of the city’s buekorps, armed for the most part literally with crossbows, resisting a regular army with artillery but the impossible terrain and dreadful infrastructure gave the national government several days’ warning. Sea Expeditionary Corps landed at Eivindvik, thirty miles north ofīergen – the forts at Kvarven and Herdla, old though their guns were, made impractical the tempting armchair strategy of simply sailing into Bergen Harbour – and marched south almost unopposed, crossing Fensfjorden and Osterfjorden in requisitioned fishing vessels. The first stage of the plan, indeed, went without a hitch the North The opportunity for a quick knockout blow – a simple landing at Bergen to occupy the seat of government and demonstrate the vulnerability of the Norwegian coastline – would surely have been tempting to any government with colonial disputes to settle for the Irish, eight centuries of raids across the North Sea made the temptation utterly irresistible. The Irish, meanwhile, had been slow off the mark and had no convenient coastal claims in Africa from which to expand but they did observe that their ancient enemy’s navy was drastically weakened by the Global Hemp Shortage, and that the Ynglinga Hird – in any case a relatively tiny force mainly intended for boarding actions and longshore raids – was busy occupying villages in Africa and could reasonably be counted out. But in 1829 the Powers of Europe were suddenly clamouring for places in the Sun, the Teutons and the Russians (!) had both sent expeditionary forces to claim their slices of the doomed country, and the combination of “all the cool kids are doing it”, “do they know something we don’t?”, and “anyway there’s no Dang army anymore, we just have to march in and take over” enticed the Troll Republic to declare a protectorate and send an army to enforce it.

The O’Neill government did not, of course, give a damn about Dang, as such indeed even the Norwegians were not particularly rapacious for the conquest of Ghana and Togo, the dirt-poor and malarial provinces inland of the Norwegian Gold Coast, which they had sensibly ignored for the three centuries of their African colonial venture.

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