The Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty was extremely rebellious

Chapter 455: Dividing Japan and Setting Sail

After more than a hundred years of war, Japan has become a devastated place.

The area around Edo Castle is relatively good.

At least there is one of the largest plains in Japan here.

However, due to years of war, no one knows how many able-bodied men were captured, and no one knows how much food was requisitioned.

More importantly, in recent years, apart from the booming business of war, all industries in Japan can be said to be in decline. Most of the daily necessities have to be purchased from the Ming Dynasty, and most of the purchased items are divided up by various princes, and very few of them fall into the hands of ordinary people.

Therefore, the civilians here are also unable to eat enough and have no clothes to wear.

Wanli or the eldest son Zhu Changluo took over a mess, and it was difficult for the common people in Japan to even have food.

Moreover, the crops in various parts of Japan have just been planted, and the harvest season is still several months away. Most civilians have little food and cannot survive for more than a few months.

How to solve this problem?
As soon as Wanli issued the imperial edict, an unprecedented large-scale enfeoffment began.

This time he conferred titles on more than ten dukes, dozens of marquises, hundreds of earls, and hundreds of viscounts and barons!
He not only bestowed titles on people, but also bestowed upon them fiefs, Japanese slaves, cattle, sheep, horses, etc. He even decided where the main city of the fiefdom would be built.

Moreover, he allocated food and fodder, recruited craftsmen, and asked them to recruit young and strong Japanese slaves to build the city.

The main purpose of his large-scale enfeoffment was to get these princes and nobles to help guard Japan.

After all, these dukes and nobles all have their own personal guards, and in order to protect the family property they fought for with their lives, they will definitely try their best to prevent the Japanese from causing trouble.

It can be said that the more than 100,000 personal guards of these princes and nobles are more effective than the more than 100,000 elite Ming troops, and he does not have to pay for their food and wages.

As for the 100 to 200 million acres of land that were distributed, the Ming Dynasty no longer relies on this land tax. These princes and nobles also have to find ways to feed the Japanese slaves in their own fiefdoms.

This is equivalent to indirectly solving half of the Japanese slaves' food problem.

However, this is only a long-term plan and it is not feasible at the moment. These newly enfeoffed dukes and nobles certainly do not have enough money to buy food to feed so many Japanese slaves.

These dukes and nobles also had to wait until their fiefdoms produced output before they could feed the Japanese slaves under their command.

Therefore, he came up with an idea for these princes and nobles, which was to recruit young and strong Japanese slaves to build cities and roads, and he would provide the food.

They recruited young and strong Japanese slaves to work, and although they did not pay them, they did provide them with food. One stone of food a month was barely enough for a young and strong Japanese slave's family to have enough porridge and water to fill their stomachs.

Of course, just drinking porridge is not enough. Without some oil and water, it will not help you feel hungry and you will not have the energy to work.

Wanli did find a solution to this problem.

The solution is to live by the sea.

In later generations, this place became one of the world's largest fishing grounds, with millions of tons of fish caught every year.

If converted into kilograms, that would be tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of kilograms a year, and tens of millions of kilograms a day!
There must be many more fish in the sea now than in later generations, the problem is that they cannot be caught.

This is why most civilians in Japan, which is surrounded by the sea, cannot even afford to eat smoked fish.

Because there is no means of deep-sea fishing at the moment, fishing boats can only fish in shallow waters near the coast.

Moreover, deep-sea fishing requires large ships or giant warships. Small fishing boats going deep-sea fishing are seeking death.

Fortunately, Wanli was able to find ways to solve these problems.

They already have ocean-going warships. Although they are gunboats and not fishing boats, it is no problem for them to protect the centipede boat while fishing.

As for the fishing method, they can only rely on giant nets. Wanli ordered people to weave many nets that are dozens of feet in size!

There were still fences in the Ming Dynasty at that time, but the largest one among the common people was only a dozen or so meters in size. A giant net of several dozen meters could only be made by Emperor Wanli who mobilized a large number of craftsmen.

Early in the morning, as the sun rose, the harbor south of Edo Castle was crowded with ships and people.

The giant seine net that Wanli ordered the craftsmen in Xinzhou to make finally arrived, and they could go out to sea to fish.

On the navy flagship, the eldest prince Zhu Changluo was so excited that he almost jumped up.

It's not that he hasn't seen a 2,000-ton giant ship, nor has he never ridden on one.

The key point is that he had never gone fishing on such a huge ship, and he had never used a huge net to fish.

In fact, the huge Fujian ships are not fishing boats and cannot set up purse seine nets.

Wanli just took the huge Fujian ship out to sea to take a look, and also provided the navy warships to escort them during the voyage. If they encountered strong winds and waves, the navy warships would be tied to the huge ship so that they would not be blown away.

There were no distant-water fishing boats at the moment, and no one dared to go fishing more than a hundred miles from the coast.

After all, the small fishing boats of the people have two oars or even a single oar. It is a great achievement if they can row more than ten miles in an hour. It will be dark when they row more than a hundred miles. If the small boat spends the night on the sea, there is no knowing where it will be pushed by the waves.

Therefore, if you want to develop deep-sea fishing these days, you have to build large fishing vessels.

On the bow of the flagship, on the cabin as tall as a city wall, Wanli looked at the navy officers and soldiers who were loading huge nets and fishing gear onto the centipede boats and couldn't help asking, "Yunqing, do they know how to use purse seines to catch fish?" Deng Zilong nodded repeatedly and said, "Your Majesty, they do. Didn't you dispatch a thousand navy centipede boats to Japan to catch fish for smoking? They had already learned purse seine fishing from the old fishermen back then.

It’s just that the purse seine nets they used before were not this big. The purse seine nets they used before were more than ten feet in size, which was slightly longer than the centipede boat. Two centipede boats could use that kind of net to enclose fish.

This time our net is about sixty feet long. We need eight centipede boats to set the net and sixteen to haul it up."

what?
I seem to have forgotten to consider the cost issue!
Wanli was stunned for a moment, then asked, "How many people are needed to collect this 60-zhang net, and how much fish can be caught?"

Deng Zilong said without hesitation: "We don't need too many people to collect the nets. Just arrange about ten people on each boat to collect the nets.

As for the harvest, it depends on luck. In the past, they used a seine net of more than ten feet to catch fish. At the least, they could catch hundreds or even thousands of kilograms of fish. At the most, the net could be filled up, and one net could catch tens of thousands of kilograms of fish.

"A sixty-zhang long net can catch at least tens of thousands of catties in one net. If it can catch a school of fish, it's not impossible to catch tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of catties in one net."

This means that with one net, each person can catch at least dozens or hundreds of kilograms of fish, and at most several hundred or thousands of kilograms. This is a pretty good harvest.

Wanli thought for a moment and asked again, "How many nets can be drawn in a day?"

Deng Zilong estimated, "That depends on luck. Purse seine fishing doesn't actually take too long. It only takes about an hour to siege a school of fish, but finding the fish depends on luck. If you're lucky, you can find a school of fish within an hour. If you're unlucky, it'll take you half a day."

Oh, this means that if you fish with seine nets day and night, you can catch at least two nets a day, and at most five or six nets a day.

Wanli nodded slightly, then said decisively: "They are all ready, let's go."

Upon hearing this, Deng Zilong waved his hand and said, "Set sail."

Soon, ten 2,000-ton Fujian ships and two hundred navy centipede ships slowly left the port and headed south.

Fortunately, the wind blowing now is not pure south wind, but southwest wind. The sailboat can still borrow some wind power, and it is no problem to sail forty or fifty miles in an hour.

Two hours later, they finally sailed out of the harbor and arrived at the open sea or the ocean.

At this time, the navy officers and soldiers on the Centipede Ship began to skillfully throw small iron balls with ropes into the water.

They were detecting the water depth. A sixty-zhang net was about two hundred meters long. If the water was not deep enough, it would get caught if thrown in.

The water depth seemed to be a problem as well, because the water depth in the bay was only about ten to twenty feet at most, and the sea area near the bay was only about thirty to forty feet. They sailed south for nearly two hours before the water depth exceeded sixty feet.

It seems that we can't just ask for size, we also have to consider the water depth, and perhaps we need a 30-meter-long seine.

Wanli just watched and didn't say a word.

The next step is to use line fishing to find fish schools.

This guy, the world's largest fishing ground is really not exaggerated. The navy soldiers threw down a fishing line that was fifty or sixty meters long, and within less than a quarter of an hour, the fishing line was pulled straight and no one could hold it.

They worked together to pull up the fishing line and saw that the fish were all in strings, about a foot long, and they were all the same kind of fish.

This is the kind of fish that can be caught with a purse seine!
The fish hooks on their fishing lines are designed according to the size of the holes in the fishing net. Fish that are smaller than the size of the holes in the fishing net cannot swallow the hooks.

A fish this big is much larger than the aperture of the seine net, so we can start encircling it.

The navy officers and soldiers immediately connected the centipede boats bow to stern, forming four boats in a row, and connected ten rows in total. Then they spread the fishing nets, which were thicker than a person, horizontally on the four connected centipede boats.

Then two centipede boats on each side took the net rope and rowed it to the left and right, and the net began to sink into the water. It took more than a quarter of an hour to lower the sixty-foot-long net.

The side of the fishing net with the pendant was completely submerged in the sea, and the centipede boats on both sides then pulled the net ropes forward.

This doesn't take much time. It won't take more than a quarter of an hour to row two hundred meters towards each other.

The centipede boats on both sides were still rowing forward, and in the middle, fish were jumping onto the surface of the sea, and there were more and more of them, just like boiling porridge.

Then, eight more centipede boats surrounded the area, hooked the float of the seine net and pulled it up. They were pulling the fishing net up.

Now there is no need to row the boats, the boats can be pulled to the middle by the pulling force of the fishing nets. When the sixteen centipede boats gather into a long rectangular frame that is several meters wide and fifty meters long, the net can no longer be pulled, because the middle is densely packed with fish.

Next, you need to change to a long-handled scoop net, just like scooping porridge, one spoonful is eighty, one spoonful is eighty, one spoonful is eighty.

The navy officers and soldiers were scooping with great enthusiasm.

Wanli was also very interested in watching it.

It seems that there will be no problem with deep-sea purse seine fishing. One net will catch at least tens of thousands of kilograms, and ten nets will catch hundreds of thousands of kilograms. If 160 centipede boats work day and night, they can catch at least one million kilograms a day.

If you are lucky, if you cast five nets a day, that would be two to three million kilograms.

This is just a warship temporarily used as a fishing boat, and the 2,000-ton Fujian ship can only be used as an escort and watch the show.

If specialized large fishing boats were built, it would not be a problem for twenty or so large fishing boats to catch two or three million kilograms of fish a day.

If this kind of special fishing boat is mass-produced, not only will the problem of fish for the Japanese civilians be solved, but the fishermen of the Ming Dynasty will even be able to make a fortune from it.

(End of this chapter)