Chapter 124 The next stop is the Freshwater River

Because of the speed advantage of the flying fish, a sloop, this flying fish is not only suitable for patrol boats and private boats, but also for fast cargo ships and liaison ships. In the past, even if they used a faster bird boat and a catching boat, if they run in Chicken Cage Bay, they will go back and forth. It will take at least * days. Nowadays, if you use the Flying Fish, the time can be shortened by at least more than half at the earliest.

Once there is any enemy or major event in some places controlled by the sea wolf, the Nanri Island Wolf Cave, which is temporarily the center, can get the news in a short time and react to buy more time to deal with the problem.

So once this new ship is built in large quantities, it will be of great help to his sea wolf in the future.

So after Yu Xiaotian scolded this guy for his unauthorized actions, he let him go down and rest, send the Flying Fish back to the boat, and conduct another overall inspection to see if there was anything wrong with the structure of the hull.

And he immediately recruited Guo Fu in front of him and told Guo Fu that if no problem was found when the ship ran down this trip, the ship would be temporarily finalized and began to be put into production in batches. At the same time, he began to enlarge the proportion and try to produce 200 to 300 materials.

In addition, because of the problem of sails, Yu Xiaotian licensed Guo Fu's craftsmen of the ship's boathouse to put on two masts on 200 to 300 new ships. In addition to retaining the bow triangular sails, they can experimentally use Chinese hard sails to replace the oblique truss sails and back mast sails on the head mast.

In this way, it may affect the speed of the ship to a certain extent, but Yu Xiaotian's preliminary estimate that even if it has an impact, it will not be very large. At least it will still exceed the current Chinese ship type, which is not inferior to the speed of Galen ships widely used in Western countries, but the difficulty of manufacturing can be reduced a lot. .

In short, although this new ship is separated from the shape of a Chinese sailboat, it is still built using the method of Chinese shipbuilding. To some extent, it can be said to be a mixed race, but it is undoubtedly very practical.

Guo Fu took the order and immediately began to take the men of the boat house to work hard again. With the completion of the Flying Fish, the craftsmen of the boat house also received rich rewards from top to bottom, which made the craftsmen of the boat house full of energy, and the whole boat fell into fanatic construction recently. In the boat boom.

The two docks are no longer used for other ships to repair ships, but are all used to start the construction of this new ship. Even in order to speed up the construction, the platforms on the two shores of the boat are also used for the construction of new ships.

Shipbuilding is inseparable from wood. The director's hall was ordered to increase the procurement of various wood to meet the shipbuilding needs of Nanri Island. In addition to the pine and cypress wood commonly used for the construction of merchant ships on land, Yu Xiaotian also did not hesitate to spend a lot of money to purchase solid teak in the Liangguang and Nanyang areas of Nanyang in order to ensure the quality of shipbuilding. Go to the Yangtze River to purchase moth-resistant camphor wood as a shipbuilding raw material for shipbuilding.

At the same time, Yu Xiaotian's long-awaited freshwater river development plan began to be launched by Yu Xiaotian after September.

In the early stage, he left a small number of people in Caojia Village to explore the situation within a hundred miles along the freshwater River. Later, Yu Xiaotian sent them many times in a row, so that they had reached the level of more than 40 people in September.

Caojia Village has also benefited a lot from this matter. Although they have to undertake the work of placing these members of the sea wolf department, the sea wolf did not treat them badly and provided them with protection. At the same time, it also provided them with a lot of necessary materials, so that Caojia Village no longer has to go to the Tamsui River every two or three months. In the mouth area, he traded with vendors and was stripped by those vendors.

Therefore, for both of them, they took what they needed and benefited from each other. Caojia Village has gradually become the most important landing point for sea wolves to go to the north of the west coast of Taiwan Island. Even after August, in August, in order to stop ships and unload cargo, they also built in a relatively secret small bay near Caojia Village. A temporary small dock was built and a wooden trestle bridge was built, so that ships could directly rely on the trestle to load and load and unload goods.

In this way, Caojia Village has become a jealous place for some surrounding villages. In order to have a good relationship with the immigrant villages in this area, the sea wolf purchased local specialties from them at a relatively high price, so that some nearby immigrant villages gradually began to get used to transporting their remaining materials to Caojia Village. , trade with the sea wolf.

In this way, Caojia Village quickly became famous in the local area and became a new trading market town. For this reason, Xiaotianling established a fixed route between Caojia Village and Nanri Island. Every half month, a ship was sent to Caojia Village to deliver the materials needed by local immigrants from their hands. China's acquisition of local specialties and transshipment of them back to land for sale has actually benefited a lot from it.

Although this kind of business is only a small amount of money in the eyes of the director or Yu Xiaotian, Yu Xiaotian still pays great attention to this business and requires the director to meet the needs of immigrants in this area as much as possible. The price of goods is slightly lower to ensure that they feel that the sea wolf is good and cheap while doing business, they can also feel the sea. The wolf specially gave them goodwill.

At the end of August, even an indigenous tribe east of Caojia Village, after hearing the news, tentatively let the natives of the tribe bring some local products such as deer skins to Caojia Village and want to trade with sea wolves, which is undoubtedly a very important thing for Xiaotian.

After learning the news, he immediately ordered a native trained by Li Qing to be transferred to Caojia Village. In the future, he will be responsible for dealing with the natives and strive to establish a good relationship of trust with them, so as to avoid a big conflict with the local natives when the sea wolf migrates to Taiwan Yuan Island in the future.

In September, after learning that the two forts in Jilong Bay had been completed and could be put into use, Yu Xiaotian finally made up his mind and began to completely extend his tentacles to the freshwater estuary while operating Chickenlong Bay.

The Freshwater River is the most important river in the northern part of Taiwan Island. The river is wide and has a huge amount of water. In addition to watering many lands on both sides, it also has good navigation capacity. After prior exploration, Yu Xiaotian learned that from the mouth of the Freshwater River, sailboats can sail upstream to the hinterland of northern Taiwan. After taking a smaller sang boat, you can continue to go a long distance against the current.

The key is that the sea wolf currently lacks a suitable estuary. The ships of this era are basically all wooden structures, and there are maggots in the ocean. They like to attach to the bottom of the sea boat and drill into the wood to eat the ship's wood, causing damage to the internal structure of the ship and causing great safety hazards.

To solve the problem of sea maggots, it is different from ordinary creatures attached to the bottom of the ship. If it really doesn't work, they will be dragged ashore and shoveled down. They are hidden deep in the wood and are not easy to be removed, but there is a good way to kill them, that is, to let ships operating at sea regularly enter the river and soak In fresh water.

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

Of course, pirates will encounter the same problem. They are active at sea all year round, and their ships are mostly eroded by sea maggots. In order to solve this problem, they must often take ships to the river to stay in the river for a period of time.

After Yu Xiaotian did this, especially after entering Nanri Island, the number of ships under his command is increasing day by day. Although there are not as many as 100, there are at least 60 or 70 ships of various types. In the past, they could only dress up as merchant ships in batches and berthed in the mouth of the Minjiang River or the mouth of Mulanxi in Xinghua Bay to deal with this. The problem.

However, there is a certain danger in doing so. The Ming Dynasty has always been wary of Japanese pirates and pirates. Although they secretly colluded with officials and pirates, they are still very careful. There are many officers and soldiers stationed in these places, which are controlled by forts or water camps. Pirate ships can be stationed there. If you are a little careless. Can conflict with them.

For more than a year, although big things have not happened, small things often come out.

So Yu Xiaotian also needs a safer place to solve this problem, so the freshwater estuary has become his best choice.

In addition to solving the daily maintenance of his fleet, another important reason for focusing on the freshwater estuary is his plan to ship the sea wolf in the future.

Although there are already boathouses on Nanri Island and have solved their daily maintenance and repair of boats and building new ships, they are facing the trouble of wood sources. All the wood used for shipbuilding and repair cannot be solved on the spot on Nanri Island, so they can only spend money to search everywhere. This is very costly. It's not some big materials, because the Yunnan-Gui Sichuan area has been causing luxury chaos in recent years. There are relatively little large-scale wood, which has also been greatly affected by the shipbuilding industry in the coastal area. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to find a few large materials to make keel and masts, and it is also priceless, and it is not easy to get. .

But Taiwan Island is different. Although today's Taiwan Island cannot be said to be a barren land, it has never undergone any large-scale development. It is still very little affected by human beings and is full of dense primitive forests. During this period, there are countless trees that can be used for shipbuilding.

In addition, the freshwater river and the upper reaches of Dahanxi are abundant in water, and the river is wide, and it is very convenient to harvest wood and transport. You only need to cut down the available trees along the upstream coast, drag them into the river water and drain them down, and you can catch the wood in the freshwater estuary and use them for shipbuilding.

After calculating this, Yu Xiaotian made up his mind to include the area of the Tamsui River into his control as soon as possible.

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