There are sulfur mines in Taiwan, this is a sure thing, otherwise Chen Zijian would not be too lazy to go north to look for mines.

In addition to Taiwan, there are also the Ryukyu Islands and the Wakuni Islands, which belong to the intersection of tectonic plates in this generation, with frequent earthquakes, numerous volcanoes, and particularly rich sulfur resources.

Three days after the Battle of Chikan City, Chen Zijian followed his guide to the northern sea of Taiwan Island.

The sulfur mine on the island of Taiwan is not a secret thing, and I found a few guides in Chikan City and came with them.

Looking over from the sea, you see a small volcanic island.

"My lord, Iwo Jima is in front of you, and when the Dutch didn't come before, there were rich merchants from the Jiangnan region who came here."

Sulfur is a kind of medicinal material in traditional Chinese medicine, and there is a lot of sulfur that Daming needs, at least black powder needs this thing.

Although the black powder of the Ming Dynasty is not very dripping, it also needs sulfur, and there are firecrackers used in festivals, which also need sulfur.

Daming also produces sulfur, but it is inconvenient to transport and difficult to mine.

It can't be compared with mining here, because mining sulfur on the island of Taiwan is not called mining, it is more appropriate to call picking, and the sulfur is exposed to the ground, and a piece of sulfur is a piece of sulfur under the iron tree.

The battleship cautiously approached the pirates, for fear of being hit by the rocks in the sea, not to mention the plank ship, even if the steel hull of later generations was hit by the rocks, it was not a simple matter.

Battleships belong to the adjustable draft, which is not a complicated thing. If you encounter strong winds and waves in the deep sea on weekdays, increase the draft depth to ensure relative stability.

In such shallow water, you can manually empty the water inside.

Not close to the volcanic island, there was already a smell of sulfur, there were not too many animals around the volcano, stimulated by the strong smell to stay away.

If it were an ordinary island, it might already be overgrown with plants.

The volcanic island is bare, with little vegetation cover.

Chen Zijian was the first to jump onto the volcanic island, and there were already predecessors who came to mine sulfur and threw away some tools.

With the strong smell of sulfur, it's no wonder that there are no plants left, this thing is a natural killer of living things.

"Good, good, good."

Sun Tao followed Chen Zijian for a period of time and saw that Chen Zijian was in a good mood.

"Chief, this?"

Don't look at Sun Tao's three coarse and five big, shooting is a good hand, and he can hit the target within 100 meters, otherwise he won't be Chen Zijian's personal guard, and he won't understand the sulfur.

Of course, he didn't understand sulfur, and the smell of it was the same as the smell of gunpowder, and he could guess what the connection was.

Chen Zijian: "You've been with me for so long, I don't know if gunpowder relies on this thing, this is the foundation of our volunteers." ”

"And sulfur has a lot of roles and is very important for the development of wasteland."

Not to mention anything else, sulfur is good for repelling mosquitoes, poisonous snakes and the like.

The volunteers slept at night and were often harassed by mosquitoes, and if the tent did not have a few pieces of sulfur, there would be no such problem, which used to be used to make gunpowder, and who would be willing to use it to repel insects.

Now that there is an adequate supply, it will be much better in the future, don't think that mosquito bites in the wild are not a problem, in this era, if you are not careful, it is malaria, and it kills people in minutes.

With enough sulfur, Chen Zijian plans to use such things as disinfection.

In the future, when immigrants come, they first come to a bucket of sulfur water to bathe, the key sulfur water is not harmful to people and animals, at most it smells bad.

However, compared with the benefits of disinfection, this is not good and can be ignored directly.

"Sun Tao, I don't need you here, take someone to look for it, I want to know the general situation of this generation of sulfur."

There is no need to mention the amount of sulfur in Taiwan, no matter how the volunteers waste gunpowder in the future, there is no need to worry about the stock of sulfur.

You must know that there is no way to mine sulfur in the large-scale mining of later generations, and now the mining of the volunteers does not have to worry about the problem at all.

Sun Tao "is the chief. ”

Sun Tao took a quarter of the people away, and there were guides, who couldn't help much here, so it was better to go out and look for them.

Chen Zijian walked in front with a hoe on his shoulder, and the guards behind him were accustomed to his approach, and they didn't look like they were the head at all.

It didn't take long to walk, there was bare sulfur just a few dozen meters away from the shore, Chen Zijian waved his hoe in the past, and dug out dozens of catties of sulfur in a few clicks.

"You guys start, the back ten transport ships, fill up and we'll go back."

With Chen Zijian's order, a group of good shooters put down their mini guns and started the work of miners.

Previously, gunpowder was limited, and the volunteers armed with Minnie guns only had 50 rounds of shooting training per day, and the rest were mostly used to raise guns and aim movements.

It is to learn the training method of later generations, with a brick tied to the muzzle of the gun, and the volunteers hold it still.

It is better to train in this way without gunpowder than to do nothing.

With a sufficient supply of sulfur, it will be different, and in the future, the volunteers will not train five hundred every day, and thousands of times will be sorry for the monthly money given by Chen Zijian.

How to improve marksmanship, it is fed by countless bullets, and there are also large consumers such as artillery, and the gunpowder used for training is simply bottomless.

Sulfur can be said to be a bottleneck in the expansion of the Volunteer Army, and its importance Chen Zijian personally came out to find it.

An hour later, Chen Zijian threw the hoe aside, and with his strength, one person could mine sulfur faster than twenty people. Let's put it this way, the sulfur excavated by Chen Zijian in this hour can fill a transport ship.

Chen Zijian was playing, but he was just interested.

"You go on."

Dropping a sentence, Chen Zijian explored the volcanic island.

The middle of the volcanic island is high and the bottom is about 6 square kilometers, although the area is small, but the sulfur resources are particularly rich, because the whole island is almost full of sulfur, and the sulfur can be carried away as long as you pry it here.

Because the whole island is made of sulfur, there are no living creatures in a few households, and not many animals like the smell of sulfur.

There are also many places on the island that emit white smoke, which is where the sulphur comes from.

The abundant supply of sulfur was very important to Chen Zijian's development, and in the military aspect, it ensured the consumption of gunpowder, increased the use rate of thermal weapons, and improved the accuracy of hitting.

The purpose of this was to win the war.

Sufficient gunpowder can speed up ore mining.

For example, in the past, there was a shortage of gunpowder, and limestone was mined, and the ore could only be mined by manpower. Hit with a hammer, this method of mining knows its speed.

With gunpowder, it's different, just use blasting, and then let the people carry it, you must know that Chen Zijian needs a lot of cement, and most of the limestone, limestone mining speed is destined to cement production speed.

One of these links is linked, and each link will have its bottleneck after development, and the current restriction on the development of the Volunteers is the supply of sulfur.

At present, Chen Zijian's chess game, as long as the sulfur is guaranteed, the whole chess game will be revitalized.

Don't look at Chen Zijian's development of the primary industrial system, the degree of difficulty is unimaginable to outsiders.

Chen Zijian came out once and solved Zheng Zhilong, the Dutch, who were blocking the road, and the pirate dens were cleaned up by the way.

All the way north, the pirates who were cleaned up by the way were considered unlucky. Evil comes from heaven in the house.

More than eighty percent of the pirates south of the Yangtze River were cleared, and the remaining pirates who heard a little wind fled away.

With the news of the navy going north, the wealthy businessmen and families in Jiangnan, who had not received news for half a year, finally felt bad.

Half a year at sea is nothing, but the connection between Jiangnan and Southeast Asia has not been severed, and with the news of the Northern Navy, the uneasiness felt by the merchants who did trade in the Jiangnan area was confirmed.

Moreover, it was no secret that things were going on in eastern Guangdong, and the news about the Volunteers began to spread among the merchants and officials in the Jiangnan region, which immediately caused even greater panic.

The anti-thief matter of the Volunteers was originally not within the scope of businessmen's concern, but now the Ming Dynasty is leaking rain everywhere, and there may be anti-thief news anywhere.

Because of the prosperity of trade in the Jiangnan area, the occurrence of anti-thieves is small, even if the people can't live at home and can't open the pot, but the business in the Jiangnan area is developed, and the people can get by. Give the poor a chance to eat.

However, the commercial development here has nothing to do with the country, although there is no anti-thief incident, and there is no silver tax on the Ming Dynasty.

Obviously, on the one hand, the business is developed, which should be beneficial to the Ming Dynasty, but the Donglin Party officials from the Jiangnan region have no taxes in the Ming Dynasty, and the taxes in them go into the officials' handbags in the form of bribes.

The incident of the volunteers intercepting ships at sea can be said to have directly touched the money bags of the Donglin Party, and the merchants could not do business, so they could not give them bribes.

But the Volunteers were in the south, and the Donglin Party officials could not do anything if they wanted to mobilize the Volunteers.

Even if the Nanjing court had troops, they concentrated in the north to confront Li Zicheng, and could not send troops to the south at all.

As for letting Guangdong Province clean up on its own, it is even more powerless, if it has this ability, do you still need to report it, and the credit for encircling and suppressing the anti-thieves has already been reported.

As for allowing the anti-thieves to develop and grow, the truth may be concealed from the current Tang King Zhu Yujian, who is an official, does not have that fool, and he has thought of the result earlier.

The official team of the Southern Ming Dynasty also set up corresponding officials like Beiping, with Beiping officials as the main and Nanjing as the auxiliary.

Now Beiping was replaced by the anti-thief Li Zicheng, and the Southern Ming court became orthodox.

After learning about what happened in eastern Guangdong, the cabinet, under the control of the Donglin Party, issued a document to suppress bandits, and transferred troops from Guangxi, Hunan, and Fujian to eastern Guangdong to clear out the volunteers and rebels.

If the volunteers were only making trouble in eastern Guangdong Province, the cabinet could have closed their eyes and could not see it.

But the Volunteers intercepted the merchants' ships at sea, and the forces behind these ships were the officials of the Donglin Party. directly moved other people's money bags, who doesn't have a temper and hates the volunteers.

Chen Zijian naturally didn't know that the purge document against him had been issued.

The Southern Ming court had already taken action against the Volunteers.