"The most romantic thing I can think of is to build a great city of our own on such a barren Gobi Desert; Extending the railway, which represents the most advanced technology of our country, to the Pacific coast, so that the will of our great east coast can be extended to the distance, so that the executive committee can ...... the sea" Captain Ventura stuffed the "Southern Railway Weekly" in his hand into a drawer, then straightened his clothes, walked out of the captain's room, and jumped on the pedal to the dock of Xingnan Port.

There weren't many people on the docks, and they were sparse. It seems that the farmers in the neighborhood who usually do odd jobs here (as dock laborers) have gone home to get busy, which makes the unloading efficiency on the dock a lot worse. In fact, today is November 15, 1650, and the most important day of the year in Southern Patagonia is ushered in: spring sowing, which undoubtedly brought a large number of migrant workers back to the countryside, and the wharves were suddenly empty.

As a side note, there are now more than 6,700 residents in Xingnan Port, most of whom are farmers, scattered in more than a dozen newly built villages on both sides of the nearby Xingnan River. With the continuous construction of flood irrigation reservoirs, more and more land has been improved on both sides of the river, and the cultivated land area has even exceeded 60,000 mu, and two-thirds of them have been set at the work meeting at the beginning of this year to plant sorghum, corn and other deep-rooted crops, of which sorghum, which is cold-resistant, barren-tolerant, and has a good yield is the main sowing variety.

With the sound of a whistle of "woo", the small steam tugboat that had just dragged Captain Ventura's "Sequoia" (the original Danish merchant ship "Green Oak", which was auctioned by Captain Ventura for 4,900 yuan) into the harbor untied its cables and charged a small tugboat fee. U-turn and left the dock berth. It was towed by a steam tugboat into the harbor for docking. On the east coast, there is also this kind of service in Xingnan Port. Of course, this is also unique in the world. This kind of service that greatly reduces the difficulty of sailing ships entering the port is still very popular with all captains, especially those who specialize in running the new China China route, as well as the flute-type transport ships of the South China Sea Transportation Company, it is very troublesome to enter and exit the port when the wind direction and ocean currents are unfavorable.

After the steam tugboat left, two more small boats approached. They are a steam water supply ship and a disinfection ship. In addition to carrying plenty of fresh fresh water, there are also some vegetables and fresh meat for sale, which is also a good service for ships that are in a hurry to return and do not want to stay in the harbor longer. As for the disinfection ship, because the new "Sequoia" is loaded with all kinds of cargo, it needs to be disinfected a simple procedure before entering the port to prevent germs from being brought into the port of Hungnam and causing the spread of diseases.

It can be said that at this time, Xingnan Port was the most advanced in the East Coast Republic of China in terms of hardware and software management, and many technologies were even pioneered. And some other ports in the country. Due to the early construction or lack of funds, it was not possible to modernize it on a large scale for the time being. Therefore, the port of Hungnam is destined to dominate the whole country - and even the whole world - for many years.

Captain Ventura came to the port of Hungnam for the first time. After resigning from the post of captain of the small steamship "Yiyun-007" to the inland waterway transport company, Captain Ventura quickly joined the South Atlantic Liner Company, which was jointly owned by several merchants, the Ministry of Communications, the Southern Railway Company and the East Coast Company, and was responsible for the transportation of passengers and goods on a fixed route between the port of Orient - Yancheng port - and the port of Xingnan: one ship each on the 1st and 15th of each month, and Captain Ventura departed from the port of Orient on the 1st of this month.

"94.19 tons of wheat, 40.62 tons of soybeans, 27.1 tons of corn, 9.9 tons of peanuts, 13,800 briquettes, 0.8 tons of coke, 41,000 red bricks, 0.19 tons of paint dyes, and 20 tons of steel bars; 1.9 tons of salt, 18.8 tons of soybean cake, 0.67 tons of soybean oil, 18.2 tons of dried fish, 39 tons of refined flour; 152 pieces of furniture, 0.17 tons of wax and candles, 0.47 tons of paper, 6,000 horses of various textiles...... "Xi Weio (Silvio), who used to work at the Romania Customs and is now a member of the Southern Railway Company, is carefully checking the amount of cargo on board, while his assistant is behind him using an abacus to quickly calculate the inbound duties that Captain Ventura's cargo needs to pay.

These goods were undoubtedly transshipped to the other side of the Pacific through the port of Shingnan, and were basically ordered by Peruvian merchants on the banks of the Maurin River. Today, more and more Peruvian merchants are opening their trading posts in that otherwise remote place, and the variety of goods on the orders offered to the east coast is also increasing, and the number of them is beginning to become extremely trivial. And every new order for goods meant the death of another handicraft trade in the Viceroyalty of Peru by the Spaniards, or the smuggling ships from Europe sold less goods - not absolutely, of course, because the Peruvian market was never saturated, and this market was always so hungry for all kinds of goods that the number of smuggling ships increased day by day, but it still could not satisfy the appetite of this huge market.

In other words, the East Coast-Peru smuggling trade has been booming for 16 months, and the market is still unsaturated. The goods brought in by the Spanish treasure fleet, the goods transported by foreign smuggling ships through the Caribbean, and the merchandise brought in by the Manila galleons (mainly luxury goods, with only one flight every two years, one or two ships of three or four hundred tons at a time, with negligible impact) could not satisfy the appetite of this standard colonial market, which had to import almost everything.

What's more, the pirates posed as the main warships of the East Coast Navy are now searching for and attacking smuggling ships from France in the Florida Strait, off the coast of New Granada and off the east coast of Mexico (many times inevitably affecting merchant ships from other countries), and the number of goods shipped from the Old Continent to Peru and Mexico has grown only (and may even be declining).

After the sweaty customs clerks had calculated the duties to be paid, Captain Ventura went to pay the taxes with a complacent look on his face, and then received a stack of bills of lading. The goods on the bill of lading were scattered throughout the dock yards, and Captain Ventura had to go to the various yards with his crew to pick up the goods he needed, and then transport them to the pier by flatbed railcars, and finally load them into the hold one by one with a steam boom.

The goods were equally varied, including 18.1 tons of dried tropical fruits, 19.3 tons of sugar, 36.1 tons of timber, 20.6 tons of minerals, 25 tons of fertilizer (guano), 56 tons of cotton, 18 tons of fine sulphur, 6,000 pieces of sheepskin, 8.3 tons of wool, 1,900 horses of Chinese silk and other bits and pieces such as cinchona bark - all goods ordered by local enterprises and merchants on the east coast, all of course from Peru.

After seeing the names of these goods, Captain Ventura suddenly became a head and two big: how many places do you have to run to get these goods in order! In desperation, he had no choice but to pull his sailors out of the dock tavern and the homes of Italian prostitutes, and then drive them to run with him to the various freight yards to collect the goods together under their disgruntled gaze.

In fact, it is no wonder that Captain Ventura lamented so much, but the cargo yard of Xingnan Port is too big today. I don't know what crazy the Southern Railway Company is, almost all of the Qiē in Xingnan Port are built according to high standards, such as the ice embankment - a total length of more than 1,300 meters, to prevent the shallow water area in the harbor from flowing into the channel and near the wharf after the shallow water area in winter, of course, in the future, after the reclamation of these shallow areas has progressed, and the coastline has been sorted out to reduce the drift ice, some of these ice embankments may be removed.

Another example is land reclamation - some areas in the harbor are affected by the sediment carried by the Xingnan River into the sea, and the silting water is shallow, and the direction of the channel is perpendicular to the direction of the winter wind (which is not conducive to navigation), so the Southern Railway Company decided to reclaim these areas in turn, and by the way, increase the area of the cargo yard. Moreover, after the expansion of the area of the terminal freight yard, it will be more convenient for the train shunting that will go directly to the terminal in the future, which will undoubtedly greatly increase the capacity of the terminal to import and export goods.

Some of the places where Captain Ventura is going today are the areas formed by land reclamation, totaling about 10,000 square meters, where sand and soil taken from the nearby Gobi Desert are then repeatedly compacted with rollers. The road to the freight yard formed by the land reclamation is concave with a drainage ditch in the middle and a cover on it. The drainage ditch is used for wharf drainage (seawater backs into the Xingnan River in winter, which is very easy to cause chain disasters), and at the same time, once a fire breaks out in the freight yard, it can also quickly divert seawater to help extinguish the fire, which is very convenient - of course, the above design is also unique in the ports of the Republic of China on the east coast of China, which shows its advanced nature.

"I don't want the Southern Railway Company to be really willing to spend money, and they are stunned to build such a jaw-dropping and magnificent port in a barren land like Southern Patagonia, and suddenly he compares it to other ports in the country." Captain Ventura said in an exclamatory tone, but his stomach was also constantly slandering the luxury and waste of the Southern Railway Company - also reclaiming land? If you build a smaller freight yard, you will die, don't you see that more than half of the area is still empty, so that Lao Tzu ran to the east to run to the west, not only tired to stink, but even the money for renting a flatbed rail car has paid a lot, which is really unlucky!

Of course, he was just whining. In fact, he knew in his heart that as the smuggling trade between the East Coast and Peru expanded, and the migration operations in the South Pacific deepened, these yards would soon be filled with all kinds of goods and people. In the future, the capacity of Xingnan Port, a modern port, will be limited by the extremely scarce local labor resources, but this is not something that can be changed overnight, and we can only try our best to improve it. (To be continued......)