Daming pirates

It is precisely because of the speed advantage of a sloop like the Flying Fish that the Flying Fish is not only very suitable for use as a patrol ship and a privateer, but also very suitable for use as a fast cargo ship and a liaison ship. In the past, even though they used

For the faster bird boats and shuttle boats, if you go to Jilong Bay, it will take at least ** days for a round trip. Nowadays, if you use the Feiyu, the time can be shortened by at least half.

Once there is any enemy situation or major event in some places controlled by Sea Wolf, Nanyue Island Wolf Cave, which temporarily serves as the center, can get the news in a very short time and respond, buying more time to deal with the problem.

Therefore, once this kind of new ship is built in large quantities, it will be of great help to his Sea Wolf in the future.

So after Yu Xiaotian reprimanded this guy for his unauthorized actions, he let him go down to rest, and sent the Feiyu back to the cabin for another overall inspection to see the structural condition of the hull after this trip.

Did any problems occur?

And he immediately called Guo Fu in front of him and told Guo Fu that if no problems were found with this ship during this trip, this kind of ship would be finalized for the time being and put into mass production. At the same time, he would start to enlarge the scale and trial-produce 200 to 300 materials.

ship type.

In addition, because of the problem of the sails, Yu Xiaotian authorized Guo Fu and his craftsmen in the boathouse to install two masts on a new ship with a material of 200 to 300 materials. In addition to retaining the bow jib, they can experiment with using the Chinese style

The stiff sail replaces the gaffsail on the foremast and the mizzenmast sail.

This may affect the speed of the ship to a certain extent, but Yu Xiaotian's preliminary estimate is that even if it has an impact, it will not be very large. At least it will be much higher than the current Chinese ship types and not inferior to the ones currently used in large numbers in Western countries.

The speed of the Galen ship can be reduced a lot, but the difficulty of manufacturing it can be reduced a lot.

In short, this new ship, although its appearance is different from the shape of a Chinese sailboat, is still built using Chinese shipbuilding methods. It can be said to be a hybrid to a certain extent, but it undoubtedly has very good practicality.

Guo Fu took the order and left. When he returned to the boat house, he immediately started working with his men in the boat house again. With the completion of the Feiyu, the craftsmen in the boat house also received generous wages from top to bottom.

Reward, this has made the craftsmen of the boathouse even more motivated, and the entire boathouse has been caught up in a frenzied shipbuilding craze recently.

The two dockyards are no longer used for ship repairs of other ships, but are all used to start building this new type of ship. In order to speed up the construction, the two slipways on the shore of the dockyard were also used for the construction of new ships.

Shipbuilding is inseparable from wood, so the Board of Directors was ordered to increase the purchase of various types of wood to meet the shipbuilding needs of the Nanyue Island Boathouse. In addition to the pine and cypress wood commonly used in land-based construction of merchant ships, Yu Xiaotian, in order to ensure the quality of shipbuilding,

, they also spent a lot of money to go south to Guangdong, Guangxi and Nanyang to purchase solid teak in large quantities, and sent people to the Yangtze River area to purchase insect-resistant camphor wood as shipbuilding raw materials for the boathouse.

At the same time, the Tamsui River development plan that Yu Xiaotian had been thinking about for a long time began to be launched after September.

In the early days, he left a small number of tribesmen in Caojia Village and ordered them to explore the situation within a hundred miles along the Tamsui River. Later, Yu Xiaotian sent additional manpower to them many times in succession, so that they could be in the area of ​​nine.

By the end of the month, there were already more than forty people.

Caojia Village also benefited a lot from this incident. Although they had to take on the job of resettling these members of the Sea Wolf tribe, Sea Wolf did not treat them badly, providing protection to their village and at the same time providing them with

With a lot of needed supplies, Caojiacun no longer has to go to the Tamsui River mouth area every two or three months to trade with traders and be exploited by those traders.

Therefore, for both of them, they each get what they need and benefit a lot from each other. Caojiacun has gradually become the most important stopping point for Sea Wolf to go to the northern part of the west coast of Taiyuan Island. Even after August, the Sea Wolf tribe stopped the ship.

Unloading is convenient, and a small temporary dock has been built in a relatively hidden bay near Caojiacun, and a wooden trestle has been built so that ships can directly access the trestle to load and unload cargo.

As a result, Caojiacun has become the envy of some surrounding villages. In order to establish a good relationship with the immigrant villages in this area, Hailang purchased local specialties from them at relatively high prices, so that some nearby immigrant villages

Gradually, they became accustomed to transporting their remaining supplies to Caojia Village and trading with Sea Wolf.

As a result, Caojiacun quickly became famous in the local area and became a new trading town. To this end, the Xiaotianling Council established a fixed route between Caojiacun and Nanyue Island every half hour.

A ship was dispatched to Caojiacun every month to transport the materials needed by the local immigrants, and he purchased local specialties from them and transported them back to the land for sale, and he actually made a lot of profits from them.

Although this kind of business is just a small amount of money in the eyes of the Council or Yu Xiaotian, Yu Xiaotian still pays great attention to this business and requires the Council to try its best to meet the needs of immigrants in this area and price the goods at a slightly lower price to ensure that they can

While they feel that Seawolf's business is of high quality and low price, they can also feel the kindness that Seawolf specially gives them.

At the end of August, even an indigenous tribe east of Caojia Village, after hearing the news, also tried to ask the natives of their tribe to bring some local products such as deer skins to Caojia Village.

Trading with Sea Wolf is undoubtedly a very important matter for Xiaotian.

After he learned the news, he immediately ordered a native general trained by Li Qing to be transferred to Caojia Village. From now on, he would be responsible for dealing with the natives and strive to establish a good relationship of trust with them to avoid a large number of sea wolves in the future.

When I immigrated to Taiyuan Island, I had a big conflict with the local natives.

In September, after Yu Xiaotian learned that the two forts in Jilong Bay had been completed and could be put into use, he finally made up his mind to fully extend his tentacles to the Tamsui River estuary while operating Jilong Bay.

The Tamsui River is the most important river in the northern part of Taiwan Island. It has a wide channel and a huge amount of water. In addition to being able to irrigate the land on both sides, it also has good navigation capabilities. After preliminary exploration, Yu Xiaotian learned that from the mouth of the Tamsui River, sailboats can go upstream.

Then, sail all the way to the hinterland of northern Taiwan. After changing to a smaller sampan boat, you can continue upstream for a long distance.

The key is that Sea Wolf currently lacks a suitable estuary. The ships of this era are basically all wooden structures. There are sea maggots in the ocean. They like to attach to the bottom of sea ships, burrow into the wood and eat the ship's wood, causing internal structural damage to the ship.

, causing great safety risks.

To solve the problem of sea maggots, it is different from the general infestations on the bottom of ships. If it doesn't work, just drag them to the shore and shovel them down. They are hidden deep inside the wood and are not easy to remove. However, there is a good way to get rid of them.

, that is, regularly allowing ships operating at sea to enter rivers and soak in fresh water.

Sea maggots must live in a salt water environment to survive. Once they are in fresh water for a long time, they will die quickly. Therefore, fishermen and merchants use this method to deal with sea maggots.

Of course, pirates would also encounter the same problem. They were active at sea all year round, and their ships were often corroded by sea maggots. In order to solve this problem, they had to often take their ships to stay in rivers for a period of time.

After Yu Xiaotian started this business, especially after taking over Nanyue Island, the number of ships under his command gradually increased. Although there are now less than a hundred, there are at least sixty or seventy ships of various types. In the past, they could only be built in batches.

They turned into merchant ships and parked nearby at the mouth of the Minjiang River or the mouth of Mulan River in Xinghua Bay to deal with this problem.

However, there are certain dangers in doing so. The Ming Dynasty officials have always been wary of Japanese pirates and pirates like them. Although the officials and thieves secretly colluded, they were still very careful about them. There were many government troops stationed in these places and there were forts.

Or water camp control, pirate ships go to anchor there, and you may conflict with them if you are not careful.

Over the past year or so, although no big things have happened, small things have happened from time to time.

Therefore, Yu Xiaotian also needed a safer place to solve this problem, so Tamsui River Estuary became his best choice.

Focusing on the Tamsui River Estuary, in addition to solving the daily maintenance problems of his fleet, another important reason is his plan for Sea Wolf to build its own ships in the future.

Nowadays, although Nanyue Island already has a boathouse and has solved their daily maintenance and repair problems as well as building new ships, they are faced with the problem of wood sources. All the wood used for shipbuilding and ship repair cannot be found on Nanyue Island.

To solve the problem on the spot, we can only spend money to search everywhere. The cost of doing so is very high, especially for some aniseed materials. Because the Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan areas where aniseed materials are produced have been experiencing chaos in She'an in recent years, and the production of large-scale timber is relatively small, so that

The shipbuilding industry along the coast has also been greatly affected. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to find a few aniseed materials for making keels and masts, and they are still expensive and not readily available, so it is not easy to get them.

But Taiwan Island is different. Although Taiwan Island today cannot be said to be a barren land, it has never undergone any large-scale development and has been little affected by human influence. It is full of dense virgin forests, which can be used for shipbuilding during this period.

There are countless big trees in the sky.

In addition, the Tamsui River and the Dahan River upstream have abundant water and wide river channels, which make harvesting and transportation of wood very convenient. You only need to cut down the available trees along the upstream coast, drag them into the river and discharge them downstream, and you can harvest trees along the Tamsui River mouth.

The wood was caught and used for shipbuilding.

After calculating this, Yu Xiaotian was determined to bring the Tamsui River area into his control as soon as possible.

(As usual, keep asking for monthly tickets and see if you can get higher on the monthly ticket list this month! Thank you all, please!)