126 The Americas of the East Coasters (4)

After having a farewell dinner with his friends in Xinjing Port, Tian Xing took a Canadian merchant ship back to Mobile Port.

What was a barren port city many years ago is now doing quite well. Just as the two cities of Hungnan and Araukan embody the style of the Southern Railway, the Port of Mobile is also quite strong in the color of Air Canada. The city was full of sailors, merchants, and adventurers, who were active in the docks and commercial districts, or waiting for the landlord to be hired, or waiting for business to arrive, or planning to get enough men to venture inland (if gold and silver mines were discovered), bringing life to the city, and of course many troubles.

Of course, we can't ignore the large number of skilled workers, military personnel and managers in the city. Most of them were employees of Air Canada, repairing ships, managing cities and villages, and defending cities. They generally live in administrative, industrial and military districts — like a game, and the city was divided into single-function districts by Ding Yiyu, the first president of Air Canada, — less prominent and high-profile than those in the docks and business districts, but an integral part of the city.

Tian Xing's boat pulled a shipload of oak planks that had been dry for many years from the Free State and drove directly into the ship repair yard in the industrial zone. Next, the ship needed to be unloaded and overhauled, and Tian Xing, together with his entourage, took a carriage to the city to deal with some formalities.

The Ship Repair Yard Quarantine is a small sugar refining plant that is part of Air Canada. Raw sugar brought from outside the world is refined and reprocessed here, and then sold to nearby British and Western colonies, sold to dealers, or shipped back to China for sale.

It is worth mentioning that the raw sugar is basically produced and refined in the plantations outside Port Mobile. These plantations are now all part of Air Canada, using blacks as the main labor force, and the production is not too small or small, and it is also an attempt for Air Canada to go beyond its main business (import and export trade), and it is not without financial help.

However, for the time being, Air Canada does not have any urgent plans to expand the plantation, which is actually under the consideration of many aspects. One is that it may lead to conflicts with nearby Indian tribes, and the Indians of the North American continent are different from those in South America, they are brave and good at fighting, and they would rather bend than bend, and it is a headache to really fight; Second, it is indeed because of the lack of a sufficient number of slaves, and there are some policy obstacles in the outsourcing bar, which can only be carried out on a small scale.

So, taking into account various factors, the expansion of their own plantations was relatively slow, and in the end, they still purchased large quantities of cane sugar from Cuba and other places, and then shipped it to the port of Mobile for refining. To put it bluntly, it is to take advantage of a strong commercial position and advanced technology to purchase raw materials from other people, process them and then export them to other places.

There is also a wood processing plant next door to the sugar refinery. It resembles a sugar refinery, processing imported timber as well as drying and cutting wood from logging camps outside the city for urban construction and ship repair. The size of logging camps has shrunk in recent years, mainly due to a shortage of labor, which makes it impossible to operate as many logging camps at the same time, and only a few can be closed appropriately.

Tian Xing travels back and forth between Xinjing and Mobile all the year round, and knows this situation very well. Unlike the old-fashioned and conservative President of Air Canada, Ding Yiyu, Tian Xing does not mind purchasing slaves to run plantations, logging camps or even brick kilns, and he has even suggested that Air Canada's senior management use some special connections to apply for a license to purchase black slaves from the Government Council - in today's Eastern Coast Republic, large-scale procurement of white slaves does not require a license, but blacks do, and has been criticized by Menghu and others - even if he writes a guarantee to ensure that it will only be used in Mobile Harbor, First of all, the stall industry inside and outside the city will be supported, which will be the foundation of the company in the future, and it will be able to bring a steady stream of profits.

It's a pity that Air Canada President Ding Yiyu is a very conservative person, and he doesn't want to spend his favor to apply for a bullshit license before he retires. You must know that although he is the president, he does not have a stake in the company, on the contrary, Tian Xing's wife is a small shareholder of Air Canada, how can he be expected to take advantage of others.

"Mediocre people, corpse vegetarian people, what a mistake!" Although he had just had a drink with Ding Yiyu in Xinjinggang, Tian Xing still had a lot of opinions about this old man, thinking that a mediocre person like him had dominated the president of Air Canada for so many years, which simply greatly damaged the company's development.

The carriage drove quickly into the compound of Air Canada, and Tian Xing walked straight to the finance department with four entourages, and the company's finance minister had been waiting for a long time.

Tian Xing's trip was mainly to settle with Air Canada and clarify the accounts. As the largest colonial enterprise in the region, Air Canada also occupies a considerable position in the diplomatic activities of the East Coast Republic of China, at least the loans to the Free States on the East Coast are often implemented through Air Canada; In many cases, the arms and military supplies exported from the East Coast to the Free State are also allocated directly to Air Canada, which is transferred from the stockpile. As a result, there are indeed too many accounts to deal with between Lieutenant Colonel Tian Xing and Air Canada, which is expected to take anywhere from a few days to a week.

Of course, Tian Xing couldn't talk to the people of Air Canada in the finance department for a week, so he quickly finished explaining the matter with his entourage, and then took the carriage for the second time and returned to the business district again. In this district, he has an office with two people in charge of gathering information, passing on information, and sometimes negotiating with Air Canada on behalf of Mr. Tian.

He ended up spending a day in the office, dealing with a long backlog of important matters. One of the most valuable of these was the recent arrival of officials from the Spanish colony of Florida, which had recently come to ask the East Coasters for help in some arms and supplies, and it was said that they did not get along well with the British, and that there had been several skirmishes recently, and that even a few ships that were supposed to arrive had been lost. This may only explain the shamelessness and despicability of the British, who sent pirate ships to intercept and kill Spanish ships.

Tian Xing skillfully signed his name in the lower corner of the document. After thinking about it for a while, he added a mischievous sentence: "The relevant personnel will be specially handled, and try to negotiate with the Spaniards the possibility of selling the Florida colony in a situation of crisis or difficulty." ”

After processing these documents, Tian Xing can be regarded as having completed all the work. I saw him carefully walk around the office several times, and carefully looked at every corner. Then he walked to his desk, sorted out all kinds of documents one by one, and carefully put them back in the filing cabinet behind him.

After being in a daze in front of the filing cabinet for a long time, Tian Xingcai sighed lightly, strode out of the office directly, and without looking back, he went directly to the dock area in a carriage. The Ludang River, a new generation of all-steam-powered local vessels, has been anchored here for a month and will depart for the capital, Dongfang, in a few days. Tian Xing had already negotiated with them, asked for the positions of the five people, and then took this ship back to China.

And when it comes to the development of all-steam-powered ships on the east coast, it is really "blood and tears". The fate of the three early ships, the "Big Fish River", the "Tahiti" and the "Tierra del Fuego", can be described as miserable, either sinking into the sea, or returning to the shipyard for dismantling and overhauling, and never coming out again.

After these three vessels, the East Coast shipbuilding community's research on all-steam-powered ships fell into a constant pause. During this time, due to a lack of funds, the state-owned modern special shipyard once dismantled the project and diverted resources to other uses, because it is said that both the navy and several large shipping companies are insensitive to this large ocean-going all-steam-powered vessel. They did not trust such ships without backup power (i.e., sail power) and named only hybrid power, which put the modern special shipyard and the Tieling boiler factory that provided the supporting power propulsion system into a dilemma, which eventually led to the collapse of the project and the halt of research and development.

Fortunately, the central government saw that this was not a solution, so a few years ago, the budget was allocated from the scientific research funds, and the special investment was put into the research and development of all-steam-powered ships, and finally this year a verification ship "Ludang River" was built, and from the dock of the modern shipyard all the way north, to the Port of Mobile under the control of the Air Canada Company, basically there were no major problems, and it was relatively successful.

Next, the Government Council has promised that once the verification is successful, the specified trouble-free time is reached, and the reliability is proved to be better, they will specifically ask the two state-owned enterprises of the South China Sea Transportation Company and the East African Transportation Company to take the lead in purchasing six ships to set an example. This kind of thing is very slow to rely on the market spontaneously, and it may be more efficient to rely on administrative orders to promote it directly.

Compared with the ill-fated all-steam-powered ships, the iron-ribbed wood-hulled ships of almost the same batch of projects are also extremely difficult. On the east coast, the tall, straight, and solid Giant Logs were not difficult to obtain, and could even be said to be relatively easy to obtain, so there was no extreme lack of high-grade Giant Logs to use as ship keels as in the Old World. In such a situation, how could iron-ribbed wood-hulled ships become popular? To put it bluntly, the forest resources are abundant on the east coast, and they don't have any motivation to research the iron keel that replaces the giant wood keel. I believe that if it weren't for the central government's insistence on asking the Ministry of Science and Technology to allocate funds to support the project team on the shore of Xuefeng Lake to continue research, this project team would have been disbanded long ago, instead of still holding on half-dead as it is now, and even a verification ship will pop up from time to time to conduct research.

On June 24, 1683, Lieutenant Colonel Tian Xing and four entourages quietly boarded the all-steam-powered ship "Ludang River", and then went all the way south and south, passing through Huaiyuan Island and Jiaohe to Zhenhai Port. Here, the "Ludang River" drove into the dock of the Hyundai Factory for overhaul, and by the way, it also submitted various data for this voyage. Tian Xing and the others had long anticipated this situation, so they directly boarded a small steamer bound for the south at the wharf of Hekou Township, and finally arrived at the capital Dongfang Port later on June 26.

After returning to the old place after many years, Tian Xing is very interested in Dongfang County, which is becoming more and more prosperous, after all, he was born and went to school here, and he did not leave until he was twenty or thirty years old to travel abroad. It's a pity that the call for moving the capital in China is getting louder and louder, and many people want to move the capital to a city with unlimited development (Dongfang County cannot develop into a super-large city due to port and water resource constraints), which makes Tian Xing a little unhappy, and feels that the good memories of the early years may be destroyed by many people.

On June 27, Tian Xing rested at home for a whole day, and his wife also rushed back from Qingdao Port with their children to reunite. The family went to visit their father-in-law, Pu Ting, who had just been admitted to the nursing home due to illness, and talked all morning before returning to the city in the afternoon.

In the next few days, Tian Xing went to several departments, namely the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Trade, the Joint Staff Headquarters, the General Administration of National Intelligence, and the Military Police Command, and made a brief report on the work of the most difficult department in the past year, so that these departments could be targeted when formulating policies in the future.

The Gendarmerie Command was the department in which he would work for a long time to come. In this place where his father-in-law "fought for a long time", Lieutenant Colonel Tian Xing will start from the colonel deputy commander until he will take over in the future - it may be a bit inaccurate to say that the succession may be a bit inaccurate, because after Tian Xing returns, Pu Ting will definitely have to be transferred to other departments, or simply retire directly, and Weng and his son-in-law will both serve in key departments, and they are both senior cadres, which is really a bit too appalling, and it does not conform to the employment norms.

Of course, it is not excluded that Tian Xing will quit active duty in the army and work in another well-connected intelligence agency, the Syphilis Patient Statistics and Investigation Bureau, which is also a good choice. And once he goes to work here, if nothing else, he will focus on preventing commercial espionage and industrial espionage, and now that the technology on the east coast is developing with each passing day, I don't know how many people in the old continent are jealous, and the anti-espionage work really cannot be taken lightly, and it must be taken care of by cadres in the prime of life, Tian Xing is still more suitable.