Liao Meng climbed down the deck of the "Breaking Waves" a little top-heavy, he was a landlubber, and he was dizzy as soon as he got on the boat. After all these years, nothing has changed. Therefore, on this long voyage, he spent most of his time lying on the wooden bed in the captain's room of the "Breaking Waves" to recuperate. Now when he arrives at the wharf of Xinhua Port, when he steps on solid land, his legs are soft and his feet are weak - this is land sickness. However, fortunately, the symptoms are mild and can be persisted.

Seeing the soldiers under his command lined up on the dock at the sound of the officer's command, most of them seemed to be in good spirits, and the corners of Liao Meng's mouth couldn't help but pull out a wry smile. With the support of loyal orderlies, he was sent to a guest house in the city to rest, and as for military affairs, he was temporarily entrusted to Bai Shui, the deputy company commander.

After a few months of construction, Xinhua Fort is very different from before. Thanks to the completion and commissioning of a wheel kiln with a designed annual output of more than 40 million red bricks (currently estimated to produce more than 20 million bricks per year), the construction of Xinhuabao has entered a period of rapid development after the arrival of the dry season.

The first is the construction of the Xinhuabao urban area. From the end of February, Shi Qinjie ordered the slaves of the Eight Banners to start quarrying in the nearby mountains. Due to the karst terrain of this place, many of the rocks excavated by gunpowder are large. This large stone is suitable for both foundations and walls, and can be used with a little polishing. So, at the expense of their work, the Eight Banners slaves ventured into the upper mountains, mined large strips of stone, and then pulled them down the river in canoes to the wharf of the downstream timber processing plant, and then used several makeshift rough wagons to pull the stones to the construction site.

The large-scale use of these stones greatly alleviated the dilemma of insufficient tiles in this area and strongly supported the construction of the site. As of the beginning of this month (October 1641). The length of the walls of Xinhua Fort has exceeded 650 meters. This has reached the perimeter length of some small castles in the mainland. However, Shi Qinjie's requirements for Xinhua Fort were very high, and the city circumference reached more than 1,200 meters in the planning, so the current city wall was actually only about half completed.

In the face of such a construction maniac, Xu Gang, the commander of the garrison here and the commander of the 101st Company, once reluctantly told him that valuable building materials should be used on the three forts at the mouth of the headland, not to build useless city walls. Because in Xu Gang's view, the people on the east coast only need to build the fort at the mouth of the headland, and then block the narrow inlet and outlet channel. Then the enemy would not be able to attack Fort Xinhua deep in the bay, unless they abandoned landing at the mouth of the bay and instead attacked from another detour. But that would be more problematic, as it would mean that they would have to traverse at least nearly 20 kilometers of mountain roads – dense rainforest trails, which would be pure death.

Therefore, in Xu Gang's view, the construction of the walls of Xinhua Fort was completely useless. The rolling hills and dense primeval forests around Xinhuabao are the best barriers, and no one but the natives can know the roads in these dense forests. However, Shi Qinjie still insisted on building a complete city wall at Xinhua Fort, on the grounds that sooner or later he would have to wage war with the natives in the south, who had already established a feudal dynasty. Then it is best to build the city wall of Xinhua Fort, the only foothold of the people on the east coast here, as the safest of the city.

However, Shi Qinjie is not a person who does not understand things. Several forts at the mouth of the new Huaxia Bay are extremely important, and it is up to them to control the bay and keep the enemy out of the gate. Therefore. He also allocated three or four hundred Eight Banner slaves to him, and later Xu Gang returned with 101 companies to the south, and stuffed him with more than 400 Malay slaves. The 800 slaves, under the command of the overseer, began to build the forts while felling and clearing the grounds at the three selected fort sites.

It took more than seven months to build more than 20 gun emplacements one after another, and now as long as the guns are installed in place and the gunners are trained, the new Huaxia Bay is no longer an unobstructed place for people to enter and exit. In the future, when there are sufficient manpower and materials, the remaining gun emplacements will continue to be completed, and at the same time, the land defense fortress, the garrison barracks and the navigation lighthouse will be built one after another, in short, this is a long-term project.

The construction of houses in the city has not been left behind. In addition to the warehouses, hospitals, government offices, health clinics, weapons depots and other facilities that had already been built, several neat rows of residential houses had also been built, totaling about 100 units, which were divided into four residential areas by a cross of horses. Of course, these houses are far from sufficient for the city's many freedmen to live in. There were now more than 500 freemen in the city, most of them Irish men, and with the Malay wives assigned to them, the population was more than 1,000. Today's houses only meet less than a third of the housing needs, and most people are still crammed into damp wood-paneled houses, waiting for the monthly quota of building materials to come down and go to the "lottery". Those who won the number would receive 20,000 bricks, and then the person in charge of each residential area would organize the people of the whole district to use their spare time to build houses for them.

The day-to-day work of these Irish people is also extremely heavy. These days, they are either digging ditches, burying underground drainage pipes, processing timber in a timber processing plant, or building irrigation canals, but they don't have a moment to spare. Even when they were digging trenches, the Malay wives who had been newly assigned to them had to pick up the soil on the side, which showed the hardship of the work.

At present, the only impetus to sustain them is the announcement by the government of the new Chinese colony that the land will be allocated to them. This land is located near the Coconut Tree Creek Reservoir and is about 4,000 acres in shape. According to the regulations, each family can get a share of 10 acres, and all residents who are allocated to the land will receive 46 percent of the income for the first two years and 55 percent for the next three years, and the land will be owned by the individual after five years of continuous cultivation, and only 20 percent of the land harvest will be paid every year thereafter.

This system of distribution was instituted by the Ministry of Agriculture and enforced in the country and in all the overseas colonies, and although the first five years amounted to a great exploitation of the peasants who had been allocated to the land, the Irish did not see it that way. They are all landless peasants in China, and they attach great importance to the ownership of land, and when they hear that they can be allotted a piece of arable land that belongs to them in perpetuity, they are immediately excited, and even their work efficiency has suddenly increased a lot. Moreover, they were told that as long as they worked hard to earn money, they could also redeem up to 20 acres of land from the government at a low price of 5 yuan per mu. This equates to a maximum of 30 acres of arable land per household, which is absolutely unimaginable in Ireland. Therefore, their support for the government at this time was absolutely heartfelt, and as long as anyone dared to challenge the rule of the East Coasters, to challenge the desire of these Irish peasants for land, then they would dare to play with these people.

The 4,000 acres were opened up in April, just after the end of the rainy season. At that time, Shi Qinjie organized people to light a fire on the demarcated land, and directly burned the weeds, small trees, and bushes on it into ashes to fertilize the fields. After the burning was over, the farmers began to level the land, remove the pebbles, dig drainage ditches, etc., and when these were done, the farmers began to plow the land and sow seeds.

The brethren of the 101st Company of the Army were quite effective, and they won several victories against the Bezimisaraka in the south, not only capturing more than 2,000 slaves back before and after, but also bringing back a large number of hump cattle for Fort Xinhua. Just as these hump cattle played a huge role in cultivating the land, the slaves also played a huge role in building irrigation facilities.

The ground is mainly sown sweet potatoes and corn seeds, and four sweet potato tubers and one corn seed are sown per mu, and sweet potatoes and corn are interplanted. Both of these crops are deep-rooted crops that can absorb the fertility of deep soils well, and are very suitable for cultivation in areas with strong tropical leaching. Moreover, more importantly, these two crops are high-yield crops, just with the barren brick red soil in the new Huaxia area, if you don't plant some high-yield crops, you can really only drink the northwest wind.

In mid-April, Fort Neunewmont organized the Irish farmers to sow the seeds, and by early August they were ripe and ready for harvest. Due to the first year of land reclamation, the poor soil, and the lack of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the harvest was relatively cold this year.

On average, only 120 catties of corn and 430 catties of sweet potatoes were harvested per mu, which was far from the initial expectation of 650-700 catties of grain per mu. However, this grain is abundant enough for the New China Colony, which is not particularly populous today. About 250 tons of corn and 900 tons of sweet potatoes were harvested from more than 4,000 acres of farmland, which is enough for almost everyone, including slaves, to eat for a year. Not to mention that both light and heat conditions and water resources are abundant here, and the crop growth cycle is extremely fast. No, the last crop has just been harvested, and a new round of planting began in mid-August. These crops are expected to be harvested in early December, when the rainy season has just begun, and more than 4,000 acres of farmland will enter the rainy season fallow period after harvesting.

More than 2,000 tonnes of corn and sweet potatoes were harvested during these two growing seasons, and Fort Xinhuabao was finally able to travel thousands of miles from South Africa to transport grain. What's more, the harvested grain will also lay a solid material foundation for the proper resettlement of those Ming immigrants who will arrive in a few months. (To be continued......)