Wind Rises in North America 1625

Chapter 83 One Ship? Or Two Ships?

Autumn usually comes late on Vancouver Island, but once it arrives, the colors are exceptionally beautiful.

In mid-to-late October, the autumn colors reach their climax. The lush and green fir forest is dotted with red maple trees, making the entire forest colorful and picturesque.

However, the residents of Shixing Fort had no time to appreciate such beautiful scenery, because the busy autumn harvest season had arrived and almost all residents were busy harvesting crops.

Hundreds of acres of corn fields are already golden, as if the earth has put on a golden dress to welcome the harvest season.

The sunlight shines on the cornfield, creating layers of golden ripples, warm and bright.

A breeze blew, and the corn leaves rustled, as if whispering, telling the story of autumn.

The plump corn kernels are perfectly embedded in the cobs, looking firm and strong. The golden color seems to be shining with golden light, revealing joy and happiness.

With the voyages and trade of the Portuguese and Spanish, corn had already entered the Ming Dynasty through Japan, the Spanish Philippines and other places during the Wanli period, and there were records of its cultivation and consumption.

However, until the Tianqi period, corn was not widely promoted and used in the Ming Dynasty, but was only used as a exotic food or ornamental plant in scattered coastal areas.

Therefore, the Ming Dynasty immigrants, who had been eating corn for nearly a month, only saw the fruits of this magical crop for the first time when they were taken to the fields to harvest corn.

The whole corn plant looks like sugarcane and a bit like sorghum, but the fruits it produces are large and thick, and some corn stalks even have three corn cobs.

Wow, how much grain can this acre of land produce!

Break one off and take a sneaky bite.

Well, it's dry and hard, but it's chewy in the mouth and a little sweet.

However, the taste is far inferior to the fresh corn cooked a few days ago, which is fragrant, glutinous and sweet.

I heard from the gentlemen in charge that corn will be everyone's main food for a long time in the future. It is large in quantity and enough to fill you up, and it is also... nutritious.

Immigrants don’t really care whether it is nutritious or not.

What they care about is having enough food to eat every day.

Moreover, you can eat three meals a day!

After a brief demonstration and guidance from the old residents of Shixingbao, they let the new immigrants swing their sickles or machetes and start harvesting corn.

Compared with wheat and rice, corn stalks are only slightly thicker.

The old residents followed slowly behind, breaking off the corn cobs from the fallen corn stalks and throwing them aside.

Relatively speaking, the job of breaking corn is a little easier. You don't have to bend over or swing your arms hard to cut it, and you can avoid the irritation caused by the dead corn leaves sticking to your body.

They just need to squat on the fallen corn stalks, move slowly, and leisurely break off the corn cobs, remove the leaves wrapping them, and gently throw them into a pile.

In just half a day, nearly 100 acres of corn were cut down. Horse-drawn carts, ox-drawn carts, and chicken buses came and went, transporting baskets of corn cobs back to the drying yard. A group of half-grown children happily shuttled through the cornfield, checking the corn stalks on the ground to see if there were any leftover cobs.

Every time one is discovered, the children cheer enthusiastically.

"Was this the same scene during the autumn harvest season in the countryside in the past?" Wei Zhonglong threw the corn he had broken off aside, then sat down on the corn stalks, watching the group of children having fun in the fields, feeling a sense of fulfillment and peace he had never felt before.

"About that." Zhang Lifeng walked over to the kettle, poured himself a cup, and downed it in one gulp. Then he wiped his mouth and sat down. "I remember when I was little, every autumn harvest, after school, or on Saturdays and Sundays, I would go to the fields with my parents. However, in Hunan, we mainly grow rice, with some sugarcane, but less corn and wheat. Anyway, back then, adults and children alike would work day and night for the better part of a month. It was very tiring."

"Alas, there are still too few people in our Shixing Fort!" Wei Zhonglong sighed heavily.

"I estimate that with two to three thousand people, we can completely withdraw from farm work."

"If we can only bring back 300 people at a time, it will take ten trips to gather 3,000 people. That would take eight to ten years!" "Haha..." Zhang Lifeng laughed, "Have you become stupid from doing farm work? Besides the Breaker, we also have a Spanish galleon! If we go with both ships and load less cargo, we can at least bring in 600 to 700 people. In less than three to five years, we can gather several thousand people. Once the population increases, we can build a shipyard, or even rob a few Spanish galleons from Mexico. Wouldn't that increase our shipping capacity?"

"Oh, that's true!" Wei Zhonglong also laughed. "Then we'll set sail in January next year. How many ships should we send over?"

"The decision-making committee hasn't decided yet. They might be a little hesitant."

"Tsk, what's there to hesitate about?" Wei Zhonglong curled his lips and said, "We have 700 people now, at least enough to man two ships. It doesn't matter if we don't have experience. After the autumn harvest, we'll pull everyone onto the ship, take a couple of trips out to sea, and train for a month or so, and we'll be ready to go."

"That's easy to say!" Zhang Lifeng shook his head and said, "When we first boarded the Breaker, it took us three to five months to gradually master the sailing of the sailboat. You let a bunch of people with little sea experience sail a sailboat across the Pacific. Don't you care about your own lives? Are you going to send all the crew members of the Breaker to sea and abandon the whole situation in Shixing Fort?"

"Actually, sailing at sea isn't as complicated and difficult as you make it out to be," Wei Zhonglong retorted. "I heard from Zhou Yong that not all sailors on merchant ships and warships of this period were professional. Even the later-famous British Navy relied on conscription and fraud to bring homeless people, ruffians, hooligans, and other scum aboard ships to fill the necessary sailor shortages on a warship."

During the magnificent Age of Exploration, the wages of European merchant sailors were much higher than those of ordinary people.

For example, during this period, the annual salary of an ordinary sailor in the UK was between 11 and 15 pounds, while the annual salary of a professional sailor was as high as 33 to 35 pounds.

In comparison, a domestic worker in London earns only £5 a year, and a family doctor only £8-10.

But the problem is that sailors often have the chance to earn money but not the chance to spend it, their wages are often withheld, and their accidental death rate is extremely high, especially for sailors engaged in triangular trade.

The British at that time conducted special statistics on this, and the results were very disappointing: the death rate of their crew members was basically the same as that of black slaves. It was normal for 30% to 40% of the crew members to die in a round trip.

Moreover, in terms of public opinion, ordinary people generally looked down on sailors, ranking their social status below that of farmers, comparing sailors' lives to hell, and believing that even criminals on land lived much better lives than sailors.

After all, sailors are more likely to drown than criminals on land!
Therefore, whether it is a merchant ship or a naval warship, in addition to increasing the sailors' wages and benefits, all means are used to get "all young and strong men who are suitable for the sea" onto the ship.

Because, during the Age of Discovery, there were almost never enough sailor resources.

The British at the time estimated that "even if all the sailors in England were healthy and working at the same time, they would only account for about two-thirds of the manpower required for merchant ships and warships."

In this situation of manpower shortage, apart from hiring sailors from other countries, the only way is to find ways to recruit sailors from local people, and these methods are often very unethical, basically "cheating and deceiving".

When captains and unscrupulous "agents" are unable to find enough professional sailors willing to board the ship, their favorite way is to "hunt" those "bumpkins" who have lost their land due to the enclosure movement and have to go to the city to find work.

These young people from the countryside are basically honest, dull, and gullible. They don't know much about sailing and have beautiful fantasies about life overseas. They have heard countless stories about people making a fortune at sea.

For these "unlucky kids", the captains only need to give them fatal temptations and sweet words, and promise them generous salaries or give them a month's advance salary, so as to lure these poor rural kids to put their fingerprints on the contract that they can't even understand.

As for whether these young people have sailing experience or can adapt to life at sea, it doesn’t matter at all.

The captain's scolding, the boatswain's whip, and the beatings and kicks from the old sailors will quickly turn a rookie at sea with no experience into a low-level sailor or trainee sailor who can mechanically obey orders.

Because these rookies don't need to know much navigation knowledge or experience. They just need to follow the instructions of the boatswain and professional sailors to operate the sails, furl the sails, cast off the cables, lookout, clean and maintain the deck, plug leaks, lift and unload the ship's crane, open and close the cabin, and safely retract and deploy the pilot ladder and gangway.

The captain and some senior crew members are responsible for route planning and implementation, determining directions at sea, handling various emergencies and responding to emergencies, so these rookies don't need to worry about them.

The ships of this era had no complicated electronic equipment, let alone sophisticated instruments. Most of the work suitable for the crew consisted of crude benzene and machinery.

Well, as long as you have some strength and are honest and obedient, you can become a "qualified" sailor.

"That being said, the Wavebreaker and that Spanish galleon are not only completely different in terms of operation, but even their speeds are completely different!" Zhang Lifeng was very disdainful of the captured Spanish galleon. "It's not necessary to sacrifice the speed and time of the Wavebreaker just for the sake of the two ships traveling together."

"So what?" Wei Zhonglong's idea made more and more sense the more he thought about it. "Even if both ships travel at the speed of the Spanish galleon, it would only take two or three months longer. However, this is much more efficient than just one ship making the trip!"

"You seem to have some truth to it." Zhang Lifeng had already spotted a group of women carrying buckets of food coming through the cornfield. He stood up, patted his hip, and headed over to meet them. "But I wonder if we can absorb six or seven hundred people if we bring them back all at once. If the number of immigrants suddenly surges, we'll become a true minority. If we can't control them, it could lead to big trouble!"

"What a fuss!" Wei Zhonglong also stood up, looking at the group of young girls who didn't know whose "wives" they would become in the future, and he felt strangely excited. "Those we recruited are just a bunch of hungry refugees and beggars with little culture or knowledge. How can they organize themselves to fight against us? You overestimate them! For hundreds of years, have those overseas Chinese ever spontaneously gathered together to fight against the colonizers and local indigenous forces?"

"As long as we appear strong and powerful, these people will surely obey our arrangements and rule."
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(End of this chapter)