In April, when the spring planting was over and the busy farming period was over, an endless stream of people rushed to the surrounding counties. People along the canal even came to the canal to wait for a job as a tracker.

In the late Ming Dynasty, the atmosphere was more open, and the inspection of roads was also much looser. Perhaps due to the sequelae of the Shandong earthquake, there were many more Shandong men in Tianjin.

For these men, the Tianjin shipyard is open to all comers, just because the shipyard's orders are getting bigger and bigger day by day.

In the past three months, in order to sell livestock from the north to the south and transport grain from the south to the north, Wang Chengen and Zhu Youjian discussed and asked to build another hundred large ships with 3,000 materials.

As a result, Tianjin Huangdian Shipyard, which only has 100 shipyards, has orders for more than 300 ships.

Among them, even a thousand-material ship requires more than a thousand labors, let alone a three-thousand-material, four-thousand-material and five-thousand-material ship.

With great difficulty, we launched four, five, and six thousand material ships in late March. However, less than half a month after launching, four of the six thousand material ships were required to return to the factory due to problems with the sealed compartments.

Fortunately, there were no problems with the 4,000-material and 5,000-material ships, so Huangdian requested to build thirty more 5,000-material ships.

However, an embarrassing thing happened. The timber inventory in Denglai Shipyard was exhausted one after another, so it could only wait for Nanjing Longjiang Shipyard to transport all the timber in inventory to the north.

After waiting for a month, in late April, the Tianjin shipyard continued construction, with hundreds of shipyards employing more than 300,000 people. For a time, Tianjin seemed to have become the second largest city in the north of the Ming Dynasty.

This kind of busyness will last for a long time, and every time a ship is launched successfully and enters the sea for a month for trial navigation, they will be assigned to the three-guard team of the navy.

Before the new warships of the Ming Dynasty were built and put into service, the main task of the three navy guards was to help the imperial horse supervise the emperor's shop and carry out the work of "trading livestock from the north to the south and transporting grain from the south to the north".

A large ship worth three thousand tons can transport hundreds of horses and thousands of sheep southward.

Since the opening of the exclusive official market of the Royal Horse Prison in Baima Pass and Daning Sanwei, thousands of cattle, sheep and horses have been sold every month.

With the millions of acres of pasture in Daning Sanwei and more than two million acres in Liaoze, the farm cattle sold are directly cultivated in Daning Sanwei, while the lower-grade horses that can be bred are directly cultivated.

Supply Daning Three Guards Cavalry.

Only sheep and horses that cannot be bred will be grazed in Liaoze, waiting for Huangdian ships to escort green salt from the Manshakou salt field in Yongping. Coarse salt will be transported by sea to various places in Liaodong and handed over to Huangdian.

Afterwards, the fleet sailed northward along the Liaohe River empty-handed, and put all the horses and sheep on board at Daning Zhongwei to escort them south.

Livestock from Daning and fur from Liaodong were transported southward by sea and sold in the Yangtze River Delta. They were then divided into two routes, one going to Zhejiang and the other to Fujian, and the other along the Yangtze River to Jiangxi, Huguang, and Sichuan.

This model brings huge benefits to the Royal Horse Supervisor.

In just the past four months, Nanban had more than 4,200 low-grade horses, more than 53,000 mutton sheep, and earned more than 207,000 silver.

Just this one item, the annual harvest is more than 300,000 taels, and the southern grain is sold in Liaodong. It is estimated that 12 million shi can be transported to Liaodong every year, with 300 Wen buying one stone and 700 Wen selling it.

More than four million taels were obtained.

In addition, the Yongping Salt Factory sells it to various places, and the silver earned from this is more than one million taels per year. All added up, just with reasonable resource allocation, it can bring the Huangdian an income of nearly five million taels per year.

Of course, with more income comes greater expenses.

The three navy guards could not take care of so many ships, so Huangdian also began to recruit sailors and ship owners. Sailors received a salary of eighty-two taels per year, and shipowners received a salary of one hundred taels.

The expenses of the sailors and shipowners alone amounted to more than 200,000 taels.

But even so, Huangdian's domestic demand for sea trade can still bring Zhu Youjian an income of more than 4.6 million taels.

The rise of Huangdian represents the liberation of a part of the labor force that has been cultivating the fields for a long time.

As usual, on the third day of May, Li Mao, the owner of Huangdian, took his three armed merchant ships with 3,000 materials and used sheep and horses to go south.

Yesterday morning, they had just finished their business in Quanzhou, but due to other fleets' long journeys, they had already bought a lot of livestock in Quanzhou.

Helpless, Li Mao could only focus on Zhangzhou in Fujian and Guangzhou in Guangdong.

Taking three boats with more than 600 draft horses and more than 2,000 sheep, they continued southward and arrived at Kinmen Island, which had just passed Quanzhou Prefecture.

I have to say that the offshore scenery in early May is pretty good. The sea breeze is blowing the soft sails of the ships, and the busy sailors on the deck are preparing to enter the Zhangzhou estuary.

But while they were busy, they didn't know that behind Wuwei Island in front of them, there was a fleet different from that of the Ming Navy.

If you look carefully at the Zhangzhou estuary, you can still see shipwreck debris on the sea surface, blocking the estuary.

"Colonel Reyes Zorn, maybe you need to take a look at this..."

On the deck of the main ship, an officer wearing a breastplate, a Western sword at his waist, and a ship's cap spoke to an officer who was sitting on the deck, bathing in the sun and drinking tea made from snatched tea leaves.

When the officer heard this, he put down the teacup in his hand, put on his hat, and said with a smile:

"Let me see if there are another Ming Dynasty ships coming to deliver goods."

"This ship seems to be different from the Ming Dynasty ships, and its firepower is higher than other ships. We may need to be more vigilant." The officer persuaded and handed over the monocular telescope.

After hearing this, Reyes Zorn took the telescope and after some searching, he saw three "huge" ships strutting on the sea five miles away.

Three three-thousand-material armed merchant ships, each with a tonnage of 925 tons, are equivalent to large Galenic sailing ships, but the number of artillery pieces is far less.

Reyes Zorn has seven warships and nine hundred soldiers under his command.

The warships are a large Galen ship of 1,000 tons and six small Galen ships of 400 tons. The large Galen ship has one twenty-four-pounder gun, one eighteen-pounder four gun, one twelve-pounder eight-gun, and eight

Four pounders, a total of seventeen pieces of artillery.

As for the six small Galenic ships of 400 tons, they were equipped with four twelve-pounders and three eight-pounders, for a total of seven guns.

In comparison, in the eyes of Reyes Zorn, the three Western-style ships flying the Great Ming Riyue flag, with a tonnage of about 1,000 tons, and only fifteen guns were very strange.

He wanted to determine the size of the three ships' guns, but the distance was too far to see clearly.

But there was one thing he saw clearly, and that was the sheep on the deck.

"Oh...how many sheep did they transport for business? They actually allocated a boat to carry fodder."

Reyeszon swallowed his saliva and was imagining how much he could gain if he captured these two ships.

Although there is a difference in tonnage, in terms of the number of artillery, compared with the number of artillery between the two sides, they still have more artillery.

For Europeans who were short of material and inflated due to the influx of large amounts of silver, two ships of livestock could completely drive them crazy.

However, Reyes Zorn still felt a little strange, especially since the Ming Dynasty actually started to imitate Western ships. This made him wary, and he even wondered if the Ming army had imitated warships.

If even armed merchant ships can be equipped with fifteen artillery pieces, then warships...

Thinking of this, Reyes Zorn felt suffocated.

It's just that he has sunk many Ming cargo ships, blocked the Zhangzhou entrance, and captured the Penghu Islands. It is impossible to retreat now.

Thinking of this, he immediately turned to the officer and said:

"Shoot these three ships. There are a lot of sheep on them. Be careful not to hit the gunpowder magazine."

"Yes sir!" When the officer heard this, he immediately turned around and started to pick up two small flags and wave them. While conveying the flag message, the seven warships also began to move.

At the same time, Li Mao on the deck also noticed something was wrong.

He saw some broken wooden boards floating over and suddenly had a bad feeling in his heart.

The coastal waters of the Ming Dynasty have never been calm, and pirates are often present.

Except during Zheng He's voyages to the West, when the entire sea trembled under the power of the treasure fleet, the Ming Dynasty Navy dealt with pirates and Japanese pirates during the two hundred years since its establishment.

"Signal signal, something is wrong, ask the gunner to clear the barrel and charge."

Li Mao greeted the deputy captain next to him, and at the same time, he felt increasingly uneasy.

In less than a stick of incense, the sound of cannons suddenly rang out in the calm sea, and then three or four stone bullets hit Li Mao's boat, punching several holes the size of a human head in the cabin.

"Beep! Seven enemy ships appeared at three o'clock in the northeast!"

The wooden whistle was blown, and the flagman observing the enemy ship shouted, and Li Mao also reacted and shouted:

"Signal, fight back!"

Li Mao was just an ordinary ship owner. Before joining the Imperial Store, he did business on the Yangtze River and canals. He had never dealt with pirates and was not very familiar with water warfare.

The only thing he knew was to fight back, because all the way south, they used strong firepower to eliminate the pirates along the way.

“Bang bang bang!”

The artillery sounded in unison. Compared with ordinary smoothbore cannons, the artillery with eight simple riflings made by the hook-and-cut method does not have high requirements for stone bullets, but its accuracy is slightly higher than that of ordinary smoothbore cannons, but only a little.

.

The Dutch fleet had more than 20 guns on one side, but only three stone bombs hit it, while the Huangdian fleet had 21 guns on one side, and the same three hits were fired.

The difference is that since the twenty-pound cannon is equivalent to the European twenty-four or twenty-five-pound cannon, one of the three hits was a stone bullet from the twenty-pound cannon. It was this stone bullet that

It directly penetrated Reyes Zorn's thousand-ton ship.

"**! What kind of gun is this? Twenty-four or twenty-six pounds?!"

Looking at the pierced main ship, Reyes Zorn cursed and commanded the fleet:

"Charge forward, there are not many of them, get on the boat and fight!"

As his order was issued, seven Galenic ships rushed towards Li Mao and his fleet.

Li Mao saw this and continued to order people to fire.

But unfortunately, in the two consecutive shellings, not a single stone bullet hit the opponent.

Fortunately, during the third round of bombardment, four stone bombs hit the Dutch fleet less than half a mile away from them. Reyes Zorn's main ship was hit by two shots, one of which was a ten-pound bomb that fell on the deck.

It turned into a ricochet and took away the lives of several people.

Raging sea waves...
To be continued...