Ming East India Company

"What's your name?"

"king."

"I asked what your name is?"

"Your Honor, my surname is Wang, but I don't have a given name. My family is the only one in the village with the surname Wang. People used to call us Old Wang. After my father passed away, people in the village started calling me by my nickname, Gouzi."

"Sir, if you don't mind, you can just call me Wang Gouzi."

"This name is too unlucky." Bai Ye frowned.

"Let me see. You are the thirteenth household with the surname Wang that we have registered. Let's call you Wang Shisan (Wang Thirteen)."

"I understand." Wang Shisan nodded repeatedly, his tone filled with humility and fear.

"How many people are in your family? What do they do?"

Bai Ye questioned Wang Shisan in the tone of interrogating a prisoner.

"There are four people in my family, young children but no elderly. I am a seamstress, and my daily work involves applying oil to the seams of large ships."

Bai Ye looked at Wang Shisan in front of him. His hands were calloused, his skin was as dark as charcoal, and he was full of wrinkles. He really looked like an old hand.

Are you skilled in your craft?

"Your Excellency, my craftsmanship is second to none in Ryukyu."

"Yeah?"

A look of confusion appeared on Shirono's face:

"You're the tenth person I've met who claims to be second to none in craftsmanship on the Ryukyu Islands. May I ask, is the best in Ryukyu just fruit on a tree, which you can knock down one by one?"

"Sir, I'm absolutely telling the truth! I've already built over a dozen boats on the island, and they're all doing well at sea, never leaking a drop..."

When his skills were mentioned, Wang Shisan suddenly became excited. At that moment, his obsession with his skill ranking overcame his fear of the government.

"Let them find a boat and have a competition to see who's fastest. If I, Wang Shisan, lose even once, I'll make them call me 'Dog' every single day..."

"You're just calling me Gouzi now!" Wang Sanshi muttered softly from behind Bai Ye.

Seeing Wang Shisan's flushed face and trembling lips, Bai Ye nodded, his reaction resembling that of a craftsman.

He then silently wrote down the words "skilled" on the form.

When Bai Ye came out of Wang Shisan's house, he was covered in sweat.

"Today we've reached the seventy-fifth. Let's keep trying and try to make it to one hundred."

"Master, why are you doing this? We servants can handle the counting of the craftsmen. Why are you counting them one by one yourself?"

Wang Sanshi followed behind Bai Ye and said with heartache.

"What do you know? Prime ministers rise from the prefectures and counties, and valiant generals emerge from the ranks. How can you avoid being deceived by clerks and subordinates if you don't personally go down to the lowest levels? Don't you garrison soldiers know how harmful clerks are in our Great Ming Dynasty?"

After a period of visiting various places, Shirono finally got a clear understanding of the basic situation of the shipbuilding industry on Ryukyu Island.

There are three to four hundred skilled craftsmen on Ryukyu Island involved in shipbuilding, including carpenters, lacquerers, mast makers, rope makers, blacksmiths, and wood tanners.

Each year, they could probably build one large Fujian ship like the tribute ship or three to four medium-sized Fujian ships like the Malaysian voyage ship.

If we disregard the maintenance and upkeep of existing ships and focus entirely on building new ones, we could probably achieve a rate of 3 large Fujian ships every 2 years or 5 medium-sized Fujian ships every year.

Considering that Ryukyu is a small island nation with a population of only about 20.

This construction speed was quite good by the standards of the time.

However, Shirano was clearly not satisfied with this, because it was already the sixteenth century, the middle of the Age of Exploration.

While the West had already widely adopted galleons, the Ming Dynasty and Ryukyu remained stuck in the comfort zone of Fujian-style ships.

For Hakuno, it was imperative to acquire the ability to build galleons as soon as possible, to assemble a sailing navy primarily composed of galleons, and then to confront the impending Western invasion and join the Age of Exploration.

In his previous life, Bai Ye had been a factory manager for a period of time, so he had the ability to perform basic system analysis on some factories and industries.

When he used a systematic analytical approach to analyze Ryukyu's shipbuilding industry, he immediately discovered something was wrong.

The first issue is the raw materials.

There are many trees on Ryukyu Island and the surrounding islands, but most of them are softwoods of extremely poor quality, such as Ryukyu cedar and Ryukyu pine.

These logs are not only weak, but more importantly, because they grow on islands and are frequently ravaged by typhoons, they are extremely short and have no value for processing.

Even common goods like camphor wood used in the construction of Fujian ships had to be imported from the Ming Dynasty.

As for the oak and teak needed to build the galleon, that was simply a pipe dream.

Secondly, there are the ropes. For sailing warships, the importance of ropes is roughly equivalent to that of power transmission lines in modern warships.

Unfortunately, Ryukyu lacked the flax and hemp needed for rope making. They only had banana fiber ropes, which were far too weak for their needs. In fact, the island's rope makers purchased their ropes directly from the Ming Dynasty or the Eastern Ocean.

Then there's the crucial sail, which is the source of a sailboat's power.

However, the Ryukyu Islands could neither produce the ramie cloth used for Fujian ships nor the linen cloth used for building galleons.

The existing solution for the rigid sails of Fujian-style ships at Ryukyu shipyards is to import them from the Ming Dynasty.

It's fair to say that among all the raw materials on the entire warship, there were very few that the Ryukyu Islands themselves could produce.

This is why the Ryukyuans only began large-scale maritime operations after the arrival of the thirty-six surnames of Fujianese. They brought not only advanced technology from the East Asian continent, but also a continuous trade network from Fujian and Zhejiang to Ryukyu to make up for the Ryukyu's lack of shipbuilding technology.

If the manufacture of sailing warships was already giving Hakuno a headache, then the production of firearms, another major asset of the sailing navy, was causing him even more anxiety.

Because this thing can be summed up in one word: zero.

Ryukyu not only lacked the ability to process firearms, but also lacked the original conditions to establish a cannon and firearms production system.

Firstly, regarding the three essential elements of gunpowder, charcoal was plentiful, and sulfur was adequately supplied by tribute from the Amami Islands, but the crucial saltpeter was entirely dependent on imports from Japan or the Ming Dynasty.

Secondly, there was the ironware. Ryukyu had no iron ore or blast furnaces for iron smelting. Even the iron chains and anchors used to build Fujian ships were imported.

Since there were no copper mines, the Ryukyuans imported almost all the copper they used from neighboring Japan.

In other words, neither cast iron nor cast bronze cannons had the basis for manufacture.

However, Shirono knew very well that for a sailing ship in the Age of Exploration, without cannons as armor, it was just a walking ocean-going potato chip.

In conclusion, using Hakuno's industrial evaluation system, the shipbuilding industry on Ryukyu Island is nothing more than a complete assembly plant, with raw materials and markets both sourcing from outside the island, making technological upgrades extremely difficult—a dead end.

However, compared to the shortcomings in industrial resources, Shirano quickly realized that there was an even bigger problem in the Ryukyu shipbuilding industry—a serious mismatch of human resources.