On 5 January, the East Coast Falcon, which had returned from Colonia, also sailed into the Navy Yard for its final refurbishment. Major refurbishments included coating the bottom of the ship with a mixture of tallow and sulfur (to prevent plankton such as maggots), replacing broken sails and damaged gun carriages, and repairing leaky planks.

Under the impetus of Wang Qinian, the Joint Staff Headquarters also began to secretly recruit some reticent and combat-experienced demobilized veterans into the army at this time, and organized them into two outposts; In addition to them, a group of 150 volunteers were recruited from the police and militia systems of Dongfang County and Yazihu District; These two groups of 314 personnel have all the equipment for regular army operations, and they will temporarily accept the command of the navy and fight together.

On January 20, the Pasquier family's merchant ship "Butterfly" returned from Buenos Aires, and the Minister of Trade, Xu Xin, the deputy director of the textile factory, Ming Hui, and a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sun Bo, boarded the 500-ton armed merchant ship. They will go on a field trip to the island of Haiti and, if given the opportunity, return to Bordeaux with the Butterfly to see if they can open up the French market.

At noon, after a grand farewell banquet, the "Butterfly," accompanied by the two gunboats of the Republic of the East Coast, the "Eagle of the East Coast" and the "Red Trout," slowly sailed out of the port of Vostok, and then turned to the northeast and embarked on a return voyage.

In addition to being fully loaded with drinking water, food, gunpowder, shells, spare artillery canvases, and planks, the two gunboats, which have been renovated, also carried a total of 35 sailors and officers, 40 trainee sailors and alternate officers, 220 gunners, 164 men from two regular army posts, and 150 men from a company of the security forces, totaling 609 men. This force is really unbearable for the average smaller Spanish town. However, for the sake of secrecy, the traversers have not yet planned to carry out a landing operation.

For the candidates for this battle, Wang Qinian and the Admiralty also tried their best. They rowed through the officers who were familiar with navigation and had experience in war, only to find that there were only a dozen people such as Lu Ming and Wang Tiehammer, and among them, only Lu Ming and Wang Tiehammer had served as captains and commanded naval battles. Wang Qinian chose and chosen, but after the end, he still felt that Lu Ming was more reliable in all aspects.

Originally, Lu Ming, the oldest captain in the navy, had resigned from his post as captain of the "East Coast Eagle" and was devoting himself to the new year's enrollment and teaching plan for his navigation school. However, considering that Wang Tiezhu did not have such reliable experience in commanding sail warships as he did, and that there were many trainee sailors from the navigation school on board, he was dragged out again.

Therefore, the commander-in-chief of this small two-ship formation, which is named "privateer formation" in internal documents, will be Navy Captain Lu Ming. There were two deputy commanders-in-chief, one was Lieutenant Wang Tiezhu, the new commander of the gunboat "East Coast Eagle," and the second was Captain Xie Hansan, the army commander who accompanied the operation. Lu Ming took the frigate gunboat "Eagle of the East Coast" as his flagship, and at the same time, Lieutenant Julien de Eblore was transferred to the ship's first mate. As for the bulky and fat "Galician Exocet", it was left at home to be used as a transport ship, after all, the transportation between Zhenhai Fort - Vostochny and Vostochny - Colonia is also very heavy.

On 22 January, the three ships made a short stop at Zhenhai Fort, and the "East Coast Eagle" unloaded a batch of building materials and guns for the construction of forts there. Then, the three ships headed north again.

On 15 February, the fleet docked at the port of Recife in northeastern Brazil, now occupied by the Dutch, and set sail again after being replenished with some food and fresh water.

On 20 March, after nearly two months of long sailing, the fleet finally reached its destination, Cap-de-France (now Cap-à-Haitien), in the northwest of the island of Haiti.

Cap-de-France is located at the mouth of a river, and the port is home to a small number of dwellings, with less than 500 inhabitants. Mostly French, with a small number of Spaniards and English. The French ran their farms and plantations, buying slaves from English and Spanish traders as labor, and managing vast tracts of land along the river inland south of Cap-de-France.

Xu Xin and the others probably knew what the two ships of the Ludao Navy were doing with them, so they didn't say much, and they were separated on the spot in Cape de France. The three of them took a carriage with Julian and Mathilde to the Pasquier family's manor to investigate, while Lu Ming and others replenished some fresh water and food on the dock, especially vegetables and fruits, to prevent the crew from getting scurvy.

After replenishment, the two ships pulled anchor and set sail out of Cap-de-France into the warm Caribbean Sea.

The Caribbean has not been peaceful over the years, and there have been some sensational pirate attacks on a regular basis. For example, the "Drake of the Netherlands" - Piette Hahn attacked a silver-carrying fleet from Veracruz in 1627 and collected more than 800,000 pounds; In 1629, a Dutch fleet under Pat sacked the coasts of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo; Also in that year, the Jiangs attacked Trinidad; In 1630, Dirk Drutt and Piette Ita even blockaded the Florida Strait......

The success of pirates in the Caribbean led to a frenzied flock to the Caribbean with more destitute sailors. When Drake returned to England with hundreds of thousands of pounds of looted possessions, he was greeted heroically. It is described that almost everyone in the tavern at the time was talking about seafaring and wealth, and this trend soon spread from England to the European continent, leading countless young people to join the promising profession of piracy.

There were so many pirates in the Caribbean that in the thirties of the seventeenth century the largest concentration of pirates was probably Tortuga, about twenty nautical miles west of Cap-de-France. This small island of more than 100 square kilometers is home to hundreds of ships, thousands of pirates, and many unscrupulous merchants and dissolute dancers. It was not only a den for pirates to sell their stolen goods, but also a place for them to rest and resupply and pass on information, and the Spanish Navy organized fleets to fight against them several times, but it has not been able to eradicate the pirates here.

The privateering formations of the Republic of East Coast of China naturally do not go to Tortuga Island now, one is that they are not familiar with the place for fear of being hacked, and the second is that they are afraid of revealing their identities. Coupled with the fact that they had a few old pirate-turned-British and Dutch sailors on board as navigators, they were not afraid of being unfamiliar with the seas, so they left Cap-de-France and headed north, across the coasts of the Turks and Caicos Islands, along the eastern coast of the Bahamas, and then northwest towards the east coast of Florida.

The weather in the Caribbean in late March is already a bit hot, but everything looks bearable under the cool sea breeze. Julien de Ebrol, the new first mate of the East Coast Eagle, patrolled the ship from start to finish, and he was in high spirits as he had just been promoted to first officer. From the captain of the transport ship to the first mate of the battleship, it is not only a step up in rank, but also a big leap.

Moreover, this trip to the Caribbean to carry out privateering activities will not only continue to make meritorious contributions, but also greatly enrich his pockets. It is important to know that the rules set by the Executive Committee this time were that half of the proceeds of looting should be handed over to the state treasury, 30 percent would be used for the construction of ships and the introduction and training of naval personnel (including shipbuilders), and the remaining 20 percent would be distributed as rewards to officers and soldiers who participated in the battle, and in the middle, the officers would always receive a lot more than the soldiers.

At this time, the southwesterly wind was blowing on the sea, the ship was smooth, and the sailors were scrubbing the deck somewhat boredly, and only the lookout was still dutifully watching the distance. The gunners, dressed in white cotton-necked shirts, sat on the deck and chatted, some of them chewing tobacco in their mouths, which they had bought from the locals when they were anchored at Cap-de-France, and were quite effective for refreshment. At this time, the officers were all sitting in the bridge on the third floor of the stern and chatting, this is the area of the Bahamas where pirates gather, so Lu Ming ordered everyone to come up from the officer's lounge in the bilge to stand by.

Instead of wearing a navy uniform, all of them, whether officers or soldiers, wore white crewneck cotton shirts with no markings, in order to facilitate concealment of their identities.

The Bahamas at this time had only a few spontaneous settlements scattered among her more than 700 small islands. There are also few inhabitants, most of whom are pirate-turned-farmkeepers, and they are inextricably linked to the great pirate forces that now cram the Caribbean. Often, troubled pirates come to hide here, waiting for the news to pass.

Of course, there were also some powerful pirate forces that used it as a base to attack the Spanish colony of Florida, or ambush transport ships bound for St. Augustine, Florida in the direction of Mexico and Cuba at sea. These pirate gangs had one or two ships in small numbers, and more than a dozen, and they were haunted in this complex sea area, which made the Spaniards unable to guard against it and had a great headache. Many towns in Florida were forced to pay fees to notorious pirates in exchange for not being attacked.

Several seabirds hovered over the East Shore Falcon, which means that the ship has sailed near certain islands. In fact, according to the charts, ships are currently supposed to sail in the waters between New Providence and Eleutella. It's always a dangerous time, because some pirate ships may be hiding in the hidden bays of these islands.

Sure enough, the lookout quickly spotted the movement.

For mobile phone users, please read it on m.biquge.info.