Dominate the Country

"This is a lucky moment. On the day before Christmas, the Discovery discovered this beautiful island on the endless sea..." James Cook leaned on the deck of the Resolution and blew a warm breeze. Hai Feng wrote down today's surprise in his pen.

It was Christmas Eve before Christmas, and his fleet, one of the two expedition ships, the Discovery, discovered this beautiful island in the morning light of the sun.

"The scenery here is beautiful, surrounded by coral reefs. The outer side of the island has heavy reefs and huge waves, while the inner side has gentle waves. The silver-white beach is all made of coral fragments and shines in the sun. When the tide goes out, the spiers of the coral reefs One after another emerged from the water, piled with jade, It is crystal clear and extends along the silver-white beach, forming a coral belt around the island hundreds of meters wide. The island is lush and green, with tall betel nuts, tropical yams with leaves as big as umbrellas, bananas, pineapples, bread trees, etc. Tropical tree species. Large areas of coconut palms are planted on the island..."

"…………"

"I can imagine how wet and cold London is at the moment. The taste of London in winter is terrible. But here, the sunshine is like Spain in summer, so wonderful! The boundless blue sky, the clear blue water, and the lagoon in the distance are like beauties. Gu Panshenfei's eyes were shining brightly, and he could clearly see a large group of colorful tropical fish swimming among the coral reefs. When diving in the sparkling sea water, the colorful, graceful and graceful living corals and coral reefs on the seabed are colorful, forming a strange underwater world. Some are like mountains, some are like deep trenches, and some are like Some of the city walls are like mushrooms... They have different shapes and thousands of sceneries. They are so beautiful that they are dazzling and intoxicating, making you want to stay here forever..."

Cook used all the beautiful words he knew to praise this island. This is God's guidance. This is God's gift. Let them spend Christmas Eve, when the sun rises in the morning, this very, very special Meaningful time discovering this beautiful island.

Cook could feel the change in the spirits of his crew. All the people seemed to have been manifested by God and given gifts personally. Everyone's spirit was so full, so full of excitement and upward energy.

Since leaving the UK a year and a half ago, Cook led the two expedition ships Resolution and Discovery to successfully return the Omar [people] to Tahiti. They set out from Plymouth and took one year and three months to complete. this task. [Tahiti is Tahiti, the largest of the Polynesian Islands in the South Pacific, claiming to be 'the place closest to paradise'].

Then Cook's fleet headed north, and he was always burdened with the important task of finding the Northwest Passage. Although the mission was unknown to his crew, it was a secret. The so-called Northwest Passage refers to the passage from Greenland through the Arctic Islands in northern Canada to the north coast of Alaska. This is the shortest passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The Northwest Passage is a route that Europeans have been trying to find since the beginning of the great voyages, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean via the Arctic Islands. The waterway is 800 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle and less than 2,000 kilometers from the North Pole. It is one of the most dangerous routes in the world, but it is also a road to wealth that can generate significant economic benefits once commercial navigation is enabled. Historically, this route was not opened until 1906. In order to avoid being blocked and tracked by his creditors, Norwegian explorer Amundsen secretly set sail on the modified 47-ton herring fishing boat "Jiaa". It took him three years to complete the arduous voyage.

It is still far, far away from this point in time. Moreover, the influence of this route is not strong. At least Chen Ming didn't know that there was such a route. He never thought about sailing from the waters north of Canada to Europe.

The one-and-a-half-year expedition has exhausted everyone in the fleet, but what happened today will bring an unparalleled spiritual boost and the greatest stress relief to everyone in the fleet. When they set off again from this island to the north, all the crew members of the two ships, Resolution and Discovery, will be as energetic as if they had just left London.

As for material supplies, look at the plants here. Areca nut, coconut, date palm, tropical yam and banana, pineapple, bread tree, etc., God, the food here can easily fill every space of the two ships.

Especially the bread tree, which is totally a gift from God.

The sailors who came ashore discovered this magical tree for the first time. It is an evergreen tree with gray-brown bark and thick thick bark. The leaves are large, alternate, and thickly leathery. This is not surprising, this island is right on the equator and there are so many evergreen trees here. But the miraculous thing is the fruit produced by this tree.

When the ripe fruit is cut open, the flesh is light yellow, like a peeled sweet potato. When cooked, it is very similar to a potato. It can be cooked together with bacon or grilled. All fruits, including the seeds, are edible. It can even be eaten raw.

Moreover, this magical tree bears a lot of fruits and has a high yield. Each tree is densely packed, and it is estimated that there can be hundreds of them.

As for the texture of this overseas tree, the wood is light, soft and thick, suitable for construction, and the sap is sticky. But compared to its fruit, Cook was even more surprised by the former. He gave this tree a name, the bread tree.

"This magical plant should be transplanted to the Caribbean, where the black slaves need this fruit very much." Cook wrote the last line with a pen. Then I picked up a piece of baked breadfruit from the plate on the side. It was sour and sweet, and tasted good. He picked up the glass again and took a sip of the wine in his mouth. Today was so comfortable.

They came to this wonderful place the day before Christmas.

"We should give this island a wonderful name."

"God allowed us to come here on the day before Christmas, to this beautiful island. Then let the name 'Christmas' be linked to this island forever. Just call it Christmas Island..."

Cook's call was echoed by many sailors.

On the rocks on the shore, British sailors set up piles of bonfires in preparation for the arrival of Christmas.

They brought down barrels of wine from the cabin, as well as barrels of bacon and vegetables.

The bread, nicknamed "hard thumbtacks" by the crew, was discarded and ignored. Weevils and maggots were infested among the rotten and moldy bread. Made from flour, salt and water, this super-hard bread goes bad very quickly. Before eating, the sailors would knock them twice on the table and wait until most of the bugs fell out before putting them into their mouths. For this reason, many sailors would wait until dark before eating bread because then they would not be able to see the wriggling maggots in the biscuits. There is no way, the space on the ship is limited, and there is no condition to bake bread for all the crew members on and off the ship. Only a group of officers headed by the captain are eligible to enjoy soft bread every day.

That's why countless sailors, after discovering the magic of breadfruit, went crazy and climbed down trees to pick all the breadfruit they could see.

Not even pineapples or bananas are more attractive to them than fruits that can last for a while.

This is the European sailing career in the 18th century. The sailors at the bottom of the sailing ship were really hard, and many captains and navigators grew up step by step from the bottom of the sailors. This is a good guarantee of the ‘quality’ issue at the middle level of European seafarers. The difficult growth experience and countless hardships have created the thick and tough nerves of the sailors, which has also created their strong character and brave spirit.

The sailors also had cured meats on the menu, but these cuts were so hard that they were inedible even after being cooked in water for hours. Later, some sailors developed a unique craft on these dark and hard pieces of bacon - they carved patterns on the meat and polished it into statues.

There is also cheese. Europeans like to eat cheese. Of course, cheese itself is also rich in nutritional value. The way to preserve cheese on sea ships is to soak it in tar, which makes the cheese taste disgusting. Sailors also had a daily ration of one gallon of beer, which held more water than water and could be safely consumed instead of water. You should know that drinking water is easy to spoil. The water stored on the ship soon turned green, sticky, and the smell made people vomit. So whenever it rains, as long as you don't encounter a storm, it's not a bad thing. At least they can still harvest fresh drinking water.

Therefore, encountering an island with lush flora and fauna on the sea is a gift from God.

Even James Cook himself, as a man with decades of experience in the Royal Navy, wrote to his family during the Seven Years' War in a tone of extreme dissatisfaction about the food on board: "We "I live on beef and biscuits. The beef has been in barrels for ten or eleven years. When I eat the biscuits, my throat feels cold because they are full of maggots. It's like eating pudding that has changed its taste."

On the sea, fish in the seawater are the only source of fresh food for sailors. Not only fish, but also dolphins, sharks, seabirds and so on. Tortoises and sea turtles are also popular and can survive for long periods of time without food or water in containers, providing another source of fresh meat. In this era of great voyages in the West, if you get sick on the ship, God cannot save you. The hospital bed on the ship is easier to kill than to save. Because the hospital bed was located several levels below the deck, there was no sunlight or fresh air. Captain Cook told his friends about the patient's experience, "You can only breathe the putrid smell expelled from your own excrement and sick body." , there was piles of filth all around them, and pests were breeding in them, eating them alive.”

One after another, the crew swam in the sea water and drank the sweet and clean water in the streams that flowed into the sea on the island.

Not to mention that there are such abundant food supplies here, but this clear water is the biggest and best gift to the hundreds of crew members of the Resolution and Discovery.

"Well, Charles, have you found any traces of the Aboriginal people?"

Before dark, Captain Cook's attaché, Charles Jack, led his men back to camp. A team of ten marines and Charles himself returned with several birds. They headed towards the interior of the island at noon, in order to find the indigenous residents here. This is a quite large island. Charles Jack was also an outstanding botanist in his own right. He shares a last name with the captain of the Discovery, except that the captain is not named Jack, but Clark.

Captain Cook saw Charles and his party from a distance, looking dejected. There were no missing people, and no one seemed to be injured. What happened to them? Not only did Captain Cook have doubts in his heart, but many crew members also stopped their shouting.

"Captain, we don't need to worry about the attacks of the natives now. We have advanced five miles inland in the afternoon and found no signs of human survival. Compared with humans, we should be more worried about the attacks of frigate birds." The latter is a ferocious large tropical seabird with a hooked beak and a wingspan of more than 2 meters. It is the fastest flying bird in the world so far (up to 400 kilometers per hour). Frigate birds often hover over the sea. Once they find a fish jumping out of the water, they will dive quickly and take away the prey quickly. Interestingly, sometimes this bird is too lazy to find food by itself, but relies on its superb flying skills to "block the road and rob" other seabirds of food. Therefore, some people jokingly call it a "robber bird."

And the small island in front of us is a paradise for birds.

Captain Cook had a charming smile on his face. No natives? This is a great thing. He can now declare that this island belongs to the Kingdom of Great Britain. Such things have happened more than once in this era.

However, Charles did not show a smile on his face, "But we found something worse than the natives on this island. One mile inland from this island, we found this!"

Charles took out a wooden sign from the quilt behind him that was obviously a man-made product at first glance. It was a white wooden sign with a triangle on it, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. In the center of the sign, a line of words was written in red dye, square characters!

"God, this is Chinese handwriting." Captain Cook shouted in surprise. This was really beyond his expectation that this beautiful island had been set foot by the Chinese first.

"Yes, Chinese handwriting. This abominable square characters."

Charles and Cook knew that the Chinese government had established four officially funded ocean exploration bureaus. In the middle of 1176 AD, this news had been passed back to Europe. And the Pacific Ocean was the scope of its second and third exploration bureaus.

"There are several such signs on the island, and there are even bigger wooden pillars."

"They should have also put up signs by the lagoon, but they were swept away by the wind and waves..."

Although no one present knew what was written on the sign, they could fully imagine what it meant.

"This is really bad news."

Captain Cook's joy was greatly reduced. He had planned to take the fleet here to rest for a few more days, but now it seems that he should leave this sad place as soon as possible.

The appearance of Chinese traces has weakened the "sacred halo" of this island. It's like suddenly knowing that the things you worship as gods are bones that people throw away after eating. Full of boredom!

"Zhujia Island, China!" Under the moonlight, the five big characters on the sign seemed to grin and laugh at Cook's delusion just now, and the line of small characters two sizes smaller below the five big characters, "Han minister Zhu Woli on September 25, the third year of Chengtian" also curled up the corners of his mouth...