In the early morning after the rain, the air is exceptionally fresh. On the slightly cramped wharf of Tacheng Port, people are coming and going at this time, and they are very busy. Several large ships were in the process of being restocked, and it looked as if they were about to leave the harbor.

The fleet consisted of a steam engine sailboat, a fast cruiser, and a flute-type transport. The ship was carrying a dozen military horses, some weapons and ammunition, some mechanical parts, some merchandise, and about two or three hundred exiled prisoners. The prisoners were poor people convicted of crimes on homesoil, about half of them Guarani, and the rest were mostly Latino immigrants with high religious fervor and some English Protestants. According to the Spaniards, these were followers of the Lord who had suffered religious persecution from the East Coast, and they were arrested by the May authorities for violating the country's religious laws, and then sentenced to exile in Australia.

The Protestants in England, in particular, refused to go to the priests appointed by the East Bank Religious Affairs Office to perform religious services, and instead set up their own underground churches, and as a result, the organizers were shot without trial and ended up in exile. It is worth mentioning that among these people is a clergyman who was arrested by the May authorities for publicly mocking the Eastern Republic as an oversized "ethnic and religious prison".

The people of the East Coast had strict control over the gods and the management of all kinds of believers, and they promoted Taoism first in the country, followed by Buddhism and Catholicism, and these churches were all in the hands of the East Coast Religious Affairs Office and were registered with the Religious Affairs Office. For those Protestants and the very small number of Muslims, they have to be "wronged" that they have no place to perform their own religious rituals. You either convert. Either declare yourself an atheist. Either accept reality. Those who refused to accept the reality had disappeared into a secret prison or been exiled to overseas colonies. Among the exiled prisoners were several Muslims from the Maghreb, who had been reported and arrested for inciting their fellow immigrants to form an underground church.

Wei Boqiu, section chief of the Mei Organ, who was also chairman of the Naturalization Committee, insisted that it was necessary to cut off their ties with the old continent at the root, supplemented by other measures, in order to succeed in assimilation. And the first step is religion and language. With the increasing number of immigrants from the Ming Dynasty in China, the government has become more and more tough in this regard, and many "brutal" methods that were not dared to be used in the past have begun to be vigorously implemented with the gradual completion of the basic plates such as the student corps. Anyone who resisted was arrested or secretly executed without mercy, but fortunately there were not many Protestant or Muslim immigrants in the country, so there was no large-scale unrest. However, excluding some of the senior technicians who were amnested by the Executive Committee, there were still a considerable number of immigrants who were exiled to Australia along with the Guarani.

At this time, the prisoners were allowed to let loose on the deck, and they stared blankly at the busy crowd on land and the wagons carrying supplies, not knowing where the road was. Anda Fifteen stood on the turret by the dock, looking at the exiled prisoners. He said hatefully: "There are only seven hundred men in Tacheng Port, and this number continues to decrease every month. But it is frustrating that the only destinations for homegrown exiles are still the two ports in Australia. Now there is a great shortage of male labor in this large pit full of mosquitoes, snakes and insects, and the local people have released our pigeons twice, which is enough to owe us 500 dings, which is terrible! If this continues, by the time the people here are almost sick, in the event of a French or Dutch call, we will not even be able to get together the gunners on the dock batteries. ”

On today's New Huaxia Island, if you remove the power of the aborigines, there are a total of four and a half groups of outsiders. They are the people of the east coast of Xinhua Port and Tacheng Port in the northeast, the Dutch in the Tulare region in the west, the French people in Fort Dovan in the southeast, the European pirates and their mixed descendants entrenched on the island of St. Mary, and the Arabs and their allies in the Mahajanga region in the north.

Among them, the Dutch had only one trading post in Tulare, and traded some cattle, sheep, timber, and the like with the local natives. Of course, they would sometimes scavenge for slaves in the neighborhood to fill the population of Fort Good Hope. Faced with the threat of a riverine colony on the east bank, the Dutch East India Company had been trying to expand the population of the Cape Town colony for many years. They brought in large numbers of Boers from the country, and recruited large numbers of immigrants from North Germany, Ireland, and Norway, thus forming the backbone of Cape Town with these whites as the core. In addition, their High Court in Batavia ordered a large number of Southeast Asian Chinese to be exiled from Cape Town simply because they believed that the Chinese were good at farming, so they found a reason to send them to Cape Town to farm and graze the white people. In addition to the whites and Chinese, there are also a large number of Malays from the East Indies, and their close relatives, the Malagasy of Madagascar, and of course the Khoisan reds and Xhosa blacks. These people are the third class of people except for whites and Chinese, and they do the most dangerous and lowly work on weekdays.

In general, the Dutch were not very powerful in the area. Their trading post in Tulare was a small walled fort of mixed civil structure, with fifty or sixty German mercenaries stationed, in addition to a few Dutch merchants and their Malay servants, and the total number was no more than a hundred, which was reassuringly reassuring.

But the French in the Dovon area are different. Since 1642, when an expedition of several hundred men landed and established itself in the Fort Dován, perhaps stimulated by the colonization of Madagascar by the East Coasters, they have been bringing in a steady stream of people from the country over the past two years, and have so far carried two groups of nearly 3,000 men and women to the area. Despite suffering from disease, their colony of Fort Dovan still has a population of more than 2,000 white settlers, which is growing so fast that Shi Qinjie, who has always been plagued by the population, is jealous and his eyes are red.

With a population of 20 million in mainland France, the density is considerable, and many of the new generation of young people have no land to share and have become miserable proletarians. They either went to the army to fight, or they went to become sailors, or they tried their luck in Quebec or the West Indies, and of course they now had a new option - to pioneer in the colony of Fort Dovan. With such a dense population in France, it was not a matter of much effort to recruit thousands of landless peasants willing to go to sea in a certain area, so the colony of Fort Dovon developed quite quickly, many times faster than in history.

The French built a large brick and wood fortress here, and at the same time built forts, residential areas, lighthouses, docks, and farmland and lumber yards outside the fortress near the sea, which made the neighboring people on the east coast extremely worried, and even the Portuguese in nearby Mozambique were suspicious, fearing that these French would be greedy and covet East Africa.

There is no doubt that the east coast of the New China region and the French in Duofanbao were unfriendly, and the conflict between the two sides can even be traced back to the incident in the second half of 42 when the French went to Xinhua Port to discuss the opening of bilateral trade, and the captain of the New China Pioneer Team, Shi Qinjie, bluntly rejected the French, which made the apparent friendship between the two sides suddenly unable to maintain. From then on, the French concentrated on development, and at the same time traded with the nearby Dutch and Portuguese, and for a time there was no peace with the people on the east coast.

Unexpectedly, at the beginning of this year (January), a French-born technician suddenly disappeared in Xinhua Port with the structural drawings of machine tools such as hydraulic sawing machines and planers. He is believed to have boarded a foreign ship docked in the port of Xinhua to trade, and he was rumored to have reappeared in the French colony of Fort Dorfan. Although there was no direct evidence that the East Coasters had fled to Fort Dovon and that the French had orchestrated this despicable defection, the people of Xinhua Port still put the account on the heads of the French, and strongly advised the merchant ships of various countries who came to trade not to transport goods from the East Coast to Fort Dovan for trading, otherwise they might be sanctioned by the East Coasters.

Later, at the suggestion of the people on the east coast, the pirates of St. Mary's Island, with whom they had a good relationship, sent three ships south to circle around Fort Dovon, but were attacked by the French fleet and the shore artillery, and almost did not return. After learning that the French had a small fleet stationed in Fort Dovon and had a complete armed force, the port of Tacheng, as the nearest town on the east coast of Fort Dofan, immediately fell into a tense situation.

From mid-to-late March to the beginning of this month, Anda 15 filled up the 250-man establishment of the 1st Squadron of the Advance Squadron, which had been lacking due to illness and fighting, and at the same time increased the training frequency of more than 10 shore fire gun gunners on the pier. After doing this, he also sent people to Xinhua Port to ask for help, asking them to allocate some manpower and materials to come over, and as soon as possible, the unfinished section of the city wall of Tacheng Port will be repaired in the upcoming dry season, so as to be able to deal with all kinds of emergencies.

Kyle, who was temporarily acting as the government affairs officer of Xinhua Port, could not make the decision alone, and after consulting with several other administrative assistants, he finally decided to send 500 South African laborers here to repair the city wall. At the same time, they also sent 300 soldiers of the Eight Banners of the Island to help defend here, these so-called Eight Banners of the Island are the neighboring native tribes that have been subdued, and their combat effectiveness is basically equal to five, and their morale is also very good, with wooden spears and bows and arrows as the main combat weapons. These people had already arrived in Tacheng Harbor on these three passing ships at this moment, and although Anda 15 felt that most of them could not help much, he did not refuse the arrival of these people.

After replenishing supplies and fresh water, the three ships left the dock in turn, following the warm current of Mozambique and the northwesterly wind, heading southward towards Gushan Port in Australia. Once they arrive there, they will wait until the second fleet arrives there in early August, and then together they will organize a group to transport migrants to the port of Blackwater. (To be continued......)