Reborn as King of South America

Chapter 301 Female Immigrants

The storm that had raged all night gradually subsided, and more than 30 ships of various sizes took advantage of the clear weather to sail south along the coast of Somalia.

The deck of the transport fleet was crowded with Chinese people who came out to get some fresh air. A gust of sea breeze blew away most of the foul smell that permeated the deck. Only in the center of the crowd could a strange odor be smelled.

After drifting on the sea for nearly three months, being able to walk out on the deck and breathe fresh air is a precious thing. Normally, ordinary Chinese people can only stay at the bottom of the cabin and suffer from the bumps, while the deck and upper cabins are reserved for the Foshan Shipping Association and those Han sailors who supervise the ship. Only in the early, mid-and late months of each month, ordinary Chinese people have the opportunity to come to the deck three times to change air and rest.

The owner of the transport fleet was not the Han Ocean Shipping Company, but the Foshan Shipping Association, which was composed of more than a dozen small but powerful companies in Guangdong and Guangxi. After the Opium War, taking advantage of the opportunity of the opening of the southern coast, Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian and other places set off a wave of going abroad to make a living. The traces of Chinese people can be found in Southeast Asia, the United States, Australia, Brazil, Peru and other places.

The increasingly large overseas immigrant population has driven the development of related industries. A number of industries engaged in maritime shipping, overseas employment agencies, and even human trafficking and trafficking have emerged in Guangzhou, Foshan, and Shantou in the Guangdong and Guangxi regions, and Fuzhou and Xiamen in the Fujian region.

In the rural areas of Guangdong and Fujian, human traffickers would buy the daughters of poor farmers for less than US$5, or about 7.5 Han Yuan. These traffickers would then resell the little girls to coastal ports such as Guangzhou and Fuzhou. These little girls would then be sold to comprador groups that colluded with foreigners and government officials. The comprador groups would then bribe the Qing customs officials with a sum of money, and those poor Chinese girls would be transported to Southeast Asia and America like goods, becoming tools for sexual venting in brothels or private slaves in wealthy families.

Smuggling and trafficking Chinese girls is a very lucrative business. After arriving in America, the average price of each Chinese girl can be sold in San Francisco for 200 to 500 US dollars, while girls with outstanding looks can even be sold for as high as 1000 US dollars.

Chinese women who became prostitutes not only suffered physical harm, but also the serious racial discrimination in American society made Chinese women lose their last dignity. In 1862, a smallpox epidemic broke out in San Francisco, USA. Although the proportion of Chinese people who fell ill was less than 5%, the investigation committee led by the US government still blamed the smallpox on the brothels in Chinatown. American public opinion blatantly declared that "the laboratory of infectious diseases is right in the heart of our city, emitting deadly toxins day and night, polluting our rich and smart streets. This Chinese tumor must be eradicated."

Even the American medical community, which prides itself on being scientific, rigorous, and benevolent, shamelessly slandered the arrival of Chinese prostitutes as the cause of the syphilis epidemic.

The dignity of overseas Chinese was trampled into the ground. At this time, the Qing government did not care about the situation of its nominal subjects at all. Instead, it accepted the conditions of the U.S. government and recognized a series of humiliating laws enacted by the U.S. government. As for the Han Kingdom, Li Mingyuan, on the one hand, formulated a response plan to evacuate Chinese Americans in the event of a falling out with the United States. On the other hand, he started from the source and used inducement, bribery and other means to support interest groups dependent on the Han Kingdom. With the help of their network of relationships in the southern region, he intercepted Chinese women who were trafficked to the United States.

The Foshan Shipping Association is essentially still a member of the comprador class, but because their employer is the South American Han country, the treatment of Chinese people on the transport ships is slightly better. Of course, compared with the comprador class that generally serves foreign companies, the treatment of Chinese people is a little higher, but compared with the Han country ocean shipping company under the command of the government, the treatment of Chinese immigrants is still much worse.

The Han government allocates a certain amount of funds to ocean shipping companies every year. Within the limited scope of funds, company executives have to pay the wages and salaries of crew members and sailors on time, and complete the immigration task indicators stipulated by the government. Therefore, in order to save funds, the executives of ocean shipping companies divide the remaining immigration funds into two parts after deducting the company's operating expenses. One part is used for the expenses incurred by the shipping company itself in transporting immigrants, and the other part is outsourced to intermediaries in the south of the mainland, who are responsible for transporting immigrants to transit stations such as Nanyang and Kismayo, and finally the ocean shipping companies take over and transport them back to the mainland.

Outsourced transportation tasks retain the most basic security requirements. Ocean shipping companies only station five to ten supervisors and one or two doctors on each transport fleet. Other aspects are the responsibility of the outsourced transportation company.

The Foshan Chamber of Commerce was responsible for transporting the last batch of immigrants from Argentina before the war. However, due to a storm at sea, the transport fleet was delayed for a month in the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal, so it was not until early July that the fleet arrived in the waters near Somalia.

More than 30 ocean-going transport ships carried a total of more than 13,000 Chinese immigrants. Due to the imbalance in the male-female gender ratio in South America, transporting young Chinese women was more profitable. Therefore, in addition to 4,000 young and strong Chinese men, the remaining nearly 9,000 people in the transport fleet were mostly Chinese women ranging in age from 12 to 35 years old.

The transport ships had limited space. In order to carry more immigrants, the fleet did not strictly follow the rule of separating men and women. More than 1,400 young Chinese men and women were mixed and assigned to three medium-sized transport ships. In order to prepare for possible chaos on the ship, five supervisors and more than 20 sailors followed the ship owner of the Foshan Shipping Chamber of Commerce to board and inspect the three transport ships. When they were about to arrive at the transit station Kismayo, the ship owner Liu He would hand over more than 10,000 immigrants in the transport fleet to the person in charge of the Kismayo transit station, and the transportation mission would be completed.

Inspecting the transport ships with more than 20 sailors behind him, Liu He's eyes swept across the decks of one ship after another.

Most of the Chinese immigrants on the deck came from the coastal areas of Guangdong and Guangxi, and a small number fled from other places to escape famine.

Disheveled hair, pale face and thin body are the common characteristics of all Chinese immigrants. And among the dense crowd, one can often see little guys about half a person's height walking back and forth on the deck.

Liu He could easily identify the identities of those little ones. Most of them were orphans whose parents had died, and a large number of them were poor girls abandoned by their parents because of their family poverty.

During the late Qing Dynasty, natural disasters and man-made tragedies continued. In many cases, no one wanted to buy children aged seven or eight, or eight or nine, even if they were sold. In order to keep the main labor force of the family alive, the girls who could not be sold were first abandoned by their parents and left outside to fend for themselves.

Merchants do not do anything without profit. The reason why those younger girls were allowed on board was because the Han Shipping Company paid 5 Han yuan per person to the Foshan Shipping Association as a price. Otherwise, Liu He, who was used to seeing families broken up, would never have the conscience to take them on board for free.

"Sir, another girl on the boat died."

In the medical cabin in the center corner of the cabin, the doctor spoke to the Han supervisor who came for inspection.

"This is the ninety-seventh one."

The other party sighed and said, "Doctor Sun, the fleet will arrive in Kismayo in one day. You and Doctor Li of the fleet should think of a way to save as many sick girls as possible."

"The children are too young to withstand months of sea turbulence. Doctor Li and I can only do our best. Whether we can save the lives of the remaining fifty sick girls depends on God's will."

"We'll save as many as we can. If we don't bring these girls back to their homeland, they will starve to death or freeze to death in the wilderness. The Central Plains homeland is in ruins. All we can do as overseas survivors is to save as many lives as possible and leave some fire for our country and nation."

(End of this chapter)