In December, Madagascar has officially entered the rainy season, and in the Xinhua Port, Tacheng Port, St. Mary's Island Naturalization Port, and Bay Island Lobster Port, which are run by people on the east coast, there is a white and heavy rain everywhere. Endless rainwater pours down from the sky and fills rivers, streams, and lakes.

The karst karva terrain of the mountains could not hide much water, and soon the turbid torrents, carrying a large number of dead and deciduous trees and even wailing animals, rushed out of the valley with an unstoppable force, and then flowed downstream along the river channel that had been widened and deepened by people on the east bank for many years. The flash flood slowed down slightly after the torrent entered the Coconut Tree Creek Reservoir, but as the amount of water poured into the upstream became larger and larger, and finally approached the warning water level, the Coconut Tree Creek Reservoir had no choice but to open the sluice gates to release water, allowing these excess freshwater resources to rush into the new Huaxia Bay.

By this time, the mechanical equipment such as the water-powered mill, the hydraulic circular saw, the hydraulic planer, and the hydraulic hammer that had been built along the river had all ceased to function, and the workers were nervously standing on the watchtower, staring at the raging river to prevent them from accidentally spilling onto the shore.

Storms, lightning and thunder, flash floods, the power of nature is vividly demonstrated at this moment.

However, in the savannah area west of the central plateau of Xinhuaxia Island, the sun hung in the air like a blazing fireball, constantly projecting scorching sunlight onto the earth and scorching an object on the ground. The cracked land is smoky and thirsty, and herds of animals crowd the banks of the Cotton River, vying for water, the source of life. Some small animals are accidentally dragged into the water by the Nile crocodile (Malagasy subspecies) in the cotton river. Then disappear into the churning waves.

Today is December 15, 1648. For the cotton planters on the east bank of the Cotton River Port. It's just an ordinary hot and dry day. In the fields, a group of comoros, dressed in sackcloth (more accurately serfs), toiled in the fields, digging ditches in the scorching sun with shovels, while their sons and daughters grazed the goats and occasionally patrolled the transplanted cactus fence wall, which had been set up to prevent wild boars from scurrying around.

These Arabs and Bantu blacks were basically taken to the island by violent means by the people of the east coast. They wore long shackles on their feet and lived in hastily constructed nests on the edge of the farmland they had carved out. Through his own hard work, he has been able to generate benefits for employers on the East Coast (well, unpaid employers).

The East Coasters were "benevolent" serf owners, and they even allowed these serfs to continue to live with their original families, which obviously kept their morale from being too low. After the initial period of emotional instability, these serfs soon discovered that their living standards had not been affected much and had even improved slightly, except that their freedom had been restricted.

For example, they can now eat plenty of corn or sweet potato porridge, and occasionally eat some cheap pickled fish and shrimp when they are on their budget, even in the food-rich tropics. Not everyone can fill their stomachs. If the people of the tropics had had had enough to eat, the Dutch grain trade in the East Indies would not have flourished. There was famine there as well, and it was not much lighter than in temperate areas.

Under such a comparison of living standards, these people's grievances have also disappeared a lot, and now they feel that everything is okay except for the hard work that they can't adapt. In addition, their employers spontaneously united to form an overseer team, with weapons, armor and horses, and took turns to supervise the serfs, so that most of these serfs, who had already dragged their families with their families at this time, temporarily extinguished a lot of thoughts of escaping.

According to incomplete statistics, in the past seven months, the slave catchers on the east coast led by the notorious slave trader Ma Wanpeng swept across various islands near the Xinhua region, capturing a large number of natives to come to the Cotton River valley for sale as labor to develop the area. Of course, the Tacheng Coal Mine, St. Mary's Island Coffee and Pepper Plantation, and Xinhua Port Sisal Coffee Plantation are also its big customers, and a large number of Swahili people were sold to the major plantations at an astonishing bargain, and then became agricultural hired laborers in the legal sense of the Republic of China, and serfs in the actual sense, exerting every trace of their vitality for these plantations that were still in the initial stage.

In addition to these plantation owners and serfs who opened up the wasteland, some Ming immigrants have been arranged here one after another since August. These people are all new immigrants this year, and the New China Pioneer Team has "floated" more than 3,000 people according to the usual practice, of which about one-fifth (nearly 700 people) have been arranged in the Mianhe area.

Of course, these were freemen, both in law and in practice, who built houses in the territory of the Republic on the east bank of the Cotton River, which had been unilaterally demarcated: they were all mud walls, because there was a lack of corresponding building materials in the area. These adobe houses are not a big problem in the arid and rainless Cotton River area, and they will not collapse after a heavy rainstorm in the Xinhuagang area to the north. Of course, after the construction of local brick kilns and the economic power of the new immigrants, these houses will eventually be replaced with solid brick houses.

The new immigrants are mostly men, and only about a quarter are young women (older East Coasters who are childless generally don't bring them in unless they happen to be dependents of some young immigrants). However, compared with the local "happy", the new Huaxia region has never worried about the shortage of women, because the local governor Shi Qinjie has always thought about the people, and every year spends a lot of money to buy a large number of Persian and Baloch female slaves from Muscat merchants who have long-term relationships with the people on the east coast, and then sell them at a fair price to the Ming people in need - if you have financial difficulties, the government will even arrange a loan for you.

Today, the vast majority of the immigrants who have been transported from the Far East are still young and middle-aged men. In the beginning, the people of the East Coast at that time were mainly homeless people, and it is not surprising that the population of the time was mainly male; However, now that the East Coast has been able to plunder the population on a large scale in the Far East, the majority of the people transported are still young and middle-aged men, and this has to be said to be a matter of policy.

The members of the local Executive Committee have always believed that bringing men from the Far East would be more conducive to the development of the country. After all, there are so many tonnages of transportation, and transporting one more woman will transport one less man, and it is more difficult for men to create zào value than women, and it is also more helpful to control the country through the same clan of blood, so over time, it has become a basic national policy to transport more men and less women from the Ming Kingdom. Some radicals even declared that in the future, it would be forbidden to import men from Europe, only women, and that all men would be shipped from the Ming Kingdom, and that we would "grass" a new nation. Unfortunately, the number of women coming in from Europe has not been very good, so this rhetoric has never been fully implemented. Nowadays, there are still a certain number of white men among the new immigrants who flow into the East Coast every year, and the ratio of men to women in Ming immigrants is roughly maintained between 2:1 and 3:1, which is the norm of the current East Coast immigration policy.

At present, the population of the six settlements in the new China area is about 12,800 people, although the pioneer team continues to intercept the population every year, although the native people are exiling Indians here every year, and although the local people are buying female slaves every year, the harsh natural environment, the raging deadly diseases and the arduous work of clearing the land still cause a large number of laborers to die. Especially the exiled Indians, almost a group of people died, and it would be good to have a tenth of them survive.

According to statistics, in 1647, the mortality rate of the population in the six towns of the new China region was 13%, and even if the number of imported immigrants (Ming immigrants, exiled prisoners, and purchased female slaves) and the number of natural population growth were included, the annual population growth rate was only 1%, which is not at all comparable to the annual growth rate of 20% in the local area.

The number of 1647 is the same, and the year 1648 is not far behind. Therefore, the most Shi Qinjie has done in New China for so many years is almost to transform the environment and increase the population, but the results always seem to be not commensurate with his efforts, and every time I think about it, I can't help but feel very distressed.

With the government's intentional guidance, the plantation economy in the new Huaxia area began to heat up gradually in the past two years. There is no doubt that the demand for labor in the plantation economy is very huge, and this obviously led to the prevalence of the slave trade, and a large number of Comorians and Swahilians were captured on the island of New China (according to incomplete statistics, there may be nearly 6,000 people), and the wasteland and plantations were cultivated for the people on the east coast, which greatly alleviated the local labor shortage for a while.

After tasting the sweetness of armed slave hunting, more and more plantation owners in the New China area are now inclined to expand the scale of slave hunting and accelerate the development of the local economy. However, this voice seems to have been forcefully suppressed recently, because Shi Qinjie, the captain of the New China Pioneer Team, seems to be a racist who has a discriminatory attitude towards the Comoroians and Swahilis, who are mixed Arabs and blacks, and who has recently stressed on several occasions in informal forums that the capture of Swahili should cease when the labor required for the existing plantations is raised, and that it is not appropriate for the island to introduce people with black skin.

Therefore, under such a wind, the newly born slave trader group on the East Coast suddenly jumped to their feet, but they were helpless. Among them, Ma Wanpeng was even more disheartened, saying in public that he would return to his hometown to retire, and take out all the income obtained from the slave hunting for the construction of stadiums, theaters and other cultural and entertainment facilities.

And since Shi Qinjie thwarted the dream of the slave traders to turn New China Island into a paradise for blacks, he could not but take into account the shortage of local labor. Therefore, at his request, the native has now begun to use various means to expedite the exile of the Indians to the New China region. No, the expedition to Persia carried more than 2,000 Crendic prisoners and quietly approached their destination on December 15, 1648, the port of Mianhe on the island of New China. (To be continued......)