"Manila, I'm familiar, what's Acapulco?"

After listening to the boss's judgment, Long Wu and Gao Jianxiong didn't react at the first time, and in the end, they still suffered the loss of less study.

"Acapulco is a port city on the Pacific coast of central Mexico, so you can understand it as the outer port of the capital Mexico City. Gu Kun was also willing to eradicate illiteracy for his subordinates, so he told the story,

"From 1565, when the Spaniards opened up the global silver cycle, until 1815, when the silver mines of Potosí were on the verge of depletion. At that time, the global precious metals trade cycle was as follows:

Spanish colonists mined American silver from Potosí and transported it from Central and South America to the port of Acapulco, which was the most suitable port for crossing the Pacific Ocean. Then in Acapulco, some local gold plundered from the Mayan and Aztec civilizations was added and transported to Manila.

And Zheng Zhilong, Zheng Chenggong, these Ming maritime merchants, would also sell tea and porcelain to Manila, and exchange the American gold and silver from the Spaniards in Manila. Manila merchant ships then sailed through the Indian Ocean to sell tea and porcelain back to Europe.

The ships we caught off the coast of Lanfang and in the Java Sea before belonged to the second link of this global trade chain, that is, those ships that had already spent their gold and silver and bought their goods, so the ships were all tea and porcelain.

And today's shipwreck probably belongs to the first link of the above-mentioned trade chain, that is, to Manila, Treasure Island, so there are so many silver coins on board. ”

"A boatload of silver coins?!" everyone's blood pressure soared instantly.

it, boss, this luck ...... It's so rebellious.

Even the most loyal subordinates couldn't help but shake their hearts for a while, and those who were relatively not so hardcore had completely fallen into envy and jealousy.

Fortunately, the sea is a world where the strong are respected, and everyone only dares to think about it.

Gu Kun's intuition had already made him feel the change in the atmosphere, to put it more mysteriously, that is, he could feel the "murderous aura".

He appeased appropriately: "It's not so exaggerated, when I was a teenager, out of curiosity, I studied the information of the Spanish silver ships, and the customs declaration capacity of the American silver ships recorded in the historical archives was only five or six hundred thousand silver pesos, and the gold was very small.

And because there are too many Mexican eagles, so don't expect too much from the value-added value of silver coins, it is estimated that these silver coins can only be shipped slightly more than one or two times more expensive than the current silver price. And how worthless silver is now, everyone also knows, 925 industrial silver is only more than 3 yuan a gram, not to mention that the silver content in the Mexican Eagle Ocean is not even 900. ”

After hearing these words, everyone's mentality was a little more balanced, but their minds quickly turned to mental arithmetic.

If the math is slightly better, the value of the silver ship mentioned by the boss has been estimated.

"The denominations of the Mexican Eagle Ocean are generally two pesos and five pesos, each peso weighs 16 grams, and the silver content is 14 grams, and the silver content of 45,000 silver pesos is 7.2 million grams, 7.2 tons...... That's too little, isn't it? A large galleon of more than 1,000 tons can carry less than 10 tons of coins?"

Gu Kun also saw everyone's doubts, so he put on a show openly: "Brother Gao, you go to my captain's room, put it in the second bookcase on your left hand, and bring the bookcase containing the files." The copies of the ancient seafaring trade archives that I read before are all in there, and there should be relevant records. ”

Gao Jianxiong hurriedly returned to the captain's room, and after a while, he brought over an iron box. Gu Kun called a few core henchmen to sit down and look through the search together.

These materials are about the ancient merchant ship trade information of all walks of life, and the silver ship is a very small example, Gao Jianxiong found it after seven or eight copies, so it is not surprising that some people think that Gu Kun came deliberately.

Gao Jianxiong looked at it with Long Wu, while analyzing frankly: "It turned out to be really less than ten tons, it's right to think about it, after all, several ships have to be sent every year, how can something as valuable as gold and silver have a higher output."

In this way, 500,000 silver pesos is about 22 million yuan according to the price of silver, and if the silver coin can be at a premium of one or two times the value of the silver itself, it will be 40 million to 60 million ......."

Long Wu thought for a while, and was quite puzzled: "If you calculate it this way, it is not worth many times more than the boats we caught in the Java Sea before." Looking at the information in the archives, Zheng Chenggong had to transport thousands of tons of tea in exchange for dozens of tons of silver. But now, it's worth about ......."

Gu Kun said with a smile: "I didn't turn my brain, that's because these things like porcelain, with the increase in value brought by history, far exceed silver coins." The blue and white porcelain of the Ming Dynasty can increase in value several hundred times now, while the Mexican Yingyang of the Ming Dynasty has only increased in value several times now.

And Zheng Chenggong made only a fraction of the global trade at the time: the price of tea in Manila was at least 15 times different from the price it finally shipped to Amsterdam in the 17th century. When you arrive in Amsterdam, you can only buy a few catties of tea for a pound of silver. ”

Gu Kun explained so much to appease morale and unify his thoughts before homework, so he didn't want to talk more nonsense.

"Okay, don't ask, let's get started! Long Wu, this time you dive to lead the way. Brother Gao, you control it on the ship first, I'll take a wired submarine down to take a look, and by the way, let's see if I can move some important boxes up - Xu Hu, you are responsible for watching the yard, and the goods that have been fished up are all gathered, and no one is allowed to unpack and check them privately. I'll check it out when I come back. ”

In just a few words, Gu Kun arranged the work.

Xu Hu was a soldier under Gao Jianxiong back then, and he served on Ganquan Island, because he was the first to be discharged from the army and transferred to work with Gu Kun, and Gu Kun tended to trust him when he arranged for the guards to harvest these jobs that did not require technical content but required the most loyalty.

After a while, Ryugo went into the water again with the divers.

And the stern of the "Nightingale", like a dock landing ship, opened a hatch to the sea, and a small wire-controlled submarine that was definitely quite sci-fi in the 90s sailed out of it.

Don't underestimate this electric submarine with only a dozen tons, this is the high-end equipment that Gu Kun spent extra money on when he was in Hekland, and it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This small submarine has a 2 km cable, so it can travel to a distance in a straight line from Mother Ship 2. However, the maximum depth is only 1000 meters, which is determined by the compressive shell, not the length of the cable.

The cable is as thick as an arm, and with the outer insulation and armor, it is almost equivalent to a human calf. Under normal circumstances, the power of the submarine motor is all supplied by the cable.

However, there is also an emergency battery pack on the boat, which can last for 15 minutes. In the event of an accident, cable breakage or power failure, the boat can quickly rise to the surface in 15 minutes with emergency power. Security is foolproof.

There are two robotic arms in front of the submarine, and there are not many joints, which cannot do any delicate operation, but they are enough to break the hull of a wooden shipwreck.

There is also a platform at the stern of the boat that can open and close the hatch, with a volume of only a few cubic meters, which is usually flooded. This design was originally intended to be used to store and transport some undersea scientific research discoveries, but when he arrived at Gu Kun, he directly became a porter of gold and silver.

It was the first time in Gu Kun's life to open this kind of thing, but he had experience in his previous life, and it was still very smooth to get started-

Before the rebirth of the previous life, these manned wire-controlled submarines have been eliminated, and the ones used by the ocean country are already unmanned remote control, just one operator sits on the big ship, watching the picture taken by the submarine camera on the screen, and controls it like playing a game console.

As for that kind of high-end goods, he has also fished several pieces, and he has also handed them over to the relevant departments in exchange for rewards.

So, can you not be familiar with the road?

And Gao Jianxiong, who was sitting on the big ship, was still a little worried when he first saw Gu Kun get on the submarine, but he was relieved to see that the image sent back by Gu Kun was very stable.

"The boss is really amazing, talented, the first time to drive an electric submarine can be so stable, old driver. ”

Gu Kun drove the submarine and quickly dived to a depth of two or three hundred meters, and then under the light instructions of Long Wu and others, he used a mechanical arm to drill through the outer wall of the cargo hold of the Galen ship, and then asked the divers to directly move the boxes one by one to the back compartment of his submarine, and then he quickly surfaced.

This is the biggest gap in salvage efficiency between submarines and non-submarines - when there are no submarines, the biggest constraint on the speed of operation is the speed of divers to float.

As mentioned earlier, if a diver rises too fast in the deep sea, air bubbles will precipitate in the blood vessels, leading to oxygen poisoning and death. So the process of the first time they fished something up and floated up, it took a full six hours.

With a submarine, there is no such problem, Gu Kun can dive once in 15 minutes, spend another 15 minutes to surface, and can fish in half an hour before and after, and can transport several tons at a time, which is much more comfortable than divers who can only carry dozens or hundreds of kilograms each time.

Long Wu and the others brought an extra four hours of oxygen cylinders this time to concentrate on guidance, while Gu Kun made 20 round-trips during this time, fished hundreds of boxes, and emptied the two most important cargo holds.

On the last trip, Gu Kun gave Long Wu their light signals, and asked the divers who were responsible for guiding and carrying them to call it a day.

A few hours later, Long Wu and the others slowly returned to the big boat, and Gu Kun had already counted all the harvests.

"It was a good job, and in the next few days we followed this rhythm, first moving all the boxes out of the cabin, and finally stuffing inflatable pontoons into the boat to salvage the empty hull as a whole. A thousand dollars for all today!"

A sumptuous feast has already been prepared on the ship to replenish the strength of the hard-working divers who have been diving for more than 10 hours, and other people have also arranged for other guests to play as therapists to relieve stress.

"Boss, are there really 500,000 silver pesos in these boxes? Long Wu was very curious about the fruits of his labor and couldn't help but ask.

Gu Kun prudently reassured: "I have estimated it, there should be all the fishing." At present, 30 tons of goods have been fished, but eighty percent of them are corn and potatoes, and I have sealed them all up and put them in the museum in the future.

If you think about it, you can understand that the Galen ship of more than 1,000 tons only transports 10 tons of silver, and there must be a lot of worthless cargo ballast. But don't be discouraged, potatoes and corn are also worth fishing, and they have historical and archaeological research value. ”