April 30, 1649, Free City of Araucan. A large group of migrants in light blue jeans were walking out of the quarantine area, and while the ship carrying them was passing through the waters of Cape Horn, the crew reported that the migrants in the cabin had an infectious disease, and the captain immediately quarantined the sick until they docked at the port of Araucan.

Upon arrival, the only doctor in the port of Araukan, accompanied by a deputy chief of the health department of the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the Southern Railway Company, boarded the ship to examine all the migrants, and found that many of the people on board had measles, and some children had diphtheria, and were dying.

According to the investigation, the ship came from Lübeck and set off with 213 Livonian migrants on its destination in the free city of Araucan, on the Pacific side. Since the beginning of 46 years, the East Coast government has begun to introduce various policies to attract active immigrants, after all, the current East Coast Republic is very short of people, and the more people who can save the tonnage of the East Coast transport ship and come at their own expense, the more the better for the Executive Committee.

Self-funded immigrants to the East Coast are generally from Livonia. At present, the number of Vonians in the East Coast is increasing, and many of them have decided to bring their relatives and friends from their hometowns after settling down. After all, this place has been war-torn and now under the brutal conquest of the Swedish aliens, everyone's life is very difficult. Therefore, since many years ago, there have been people on the east coast who have been sending money to Riga through Guò East Bank's own network, and sometimes some representatives elected by everyone have personally returned to Livonia with the ship to organize migration.

This time, the migrant ship from Lübeck was dedicated to the migration business (and a shipload of East Coast specialties on the way back), and more than 300 Livonians packed the boat, only about 200 were alive when they arrived at Vostochny. The ship had already had an infectious disease while on its way. Forty or fifty bodies of migrants were thrown into the sea. After arriving at the port of Vostok. The East Coast Port Authority has carried out another routine disinfection of it. More than 100 newly arrived Ming immigrants were then stuffed into the ship, and they continued south to the Free City of Araucan on the Pacific side. In order to compensate for this freight, the East Coast Immigration Department gave the migrant ship an additional 20,000 yuan.

Unexpectedly, there was another outbreak of measles and diphtheria on the way to the ship, and a group of children with weak physical resistance died, and it is not known whether it was because the disinfection was not complete at the port of Vostochny, or if there were still sick people lurking in the crowd, but in short, when the ship disembarked in the free city of Araucan, the ship again managed to lose a quarter of its crew. The number of people is less than three hundred.

After everyone had spent 15 days on board, all sailors and immigrants who did not show symptoms were allowed to disembark. They will spend the entire month in the Free City of Araucan, during which time they will do some light labor, such as combing wool for the Southern Railway Company, planting vegetables and mowing grass. After the rest is completed, those Ming immigrants will go to the nearby designated villages to settle under the leadership of the staff of the Civil Affairs Department of the Southern Railway Company.

As for the newcomers who come on their own initiative (Livonian alone), they can not live in the villages planned by the government. According to the East Bank Government's incentive policy for self-financed immigrants, these people are free to choose from vacant commons, but not more than 30 acres. These lands do not have to pay any taxes to the Southern Railway Company for 20 years, but if they do not have the money to buy out the land they have chosen permanently (5 yuan per acre). They can choose to lease temporarily, rent-free for the first three years. Three years later, the Southern Railway Company asked them to charge cheap land rent, and it can be said that the conditions were very favorable.

In the case of migrants who are forced to settle in designated locations, new immigrants who choose settlements according to their own wishes and habits are more tolerant of possible setbacks - especially in the barren and unfavourable region of Southern Patagonia - and they are more able to deal with some of the shortcomings of their land.

On the contrary, for those immigrants who are forced to settle in designated locations, even if the harvest is caused by their own fault, they blame their superiors, and they endlessly apply for relief or simply ask to go out to work, often to the anxiety of local township officials.

The government will never be able to understand the actual needs of each person, and even if the settlements selected by the government are good but not favored by the immigrants, then in order to develop their careers, they should also be more recognizable to the resettlement sites chosen by the immigrants themselves, because perhaps these sites are more familiar to the immigrants themselves, more in line with their working habits, and their output will be higher. Therefore, in the view of Kang Caien, which is more focused on output and efficiency, it is not a big deal to let the migrants choose suitable settlements on their own, except for some areas where the company believes that settlements should be set up from a strategic point of view, other places are basically liberalized, allowing these self-funded migrants to choose freely (publicly-funded migrants are resettled in strategic points).

Of course, for security reasons, the Southern Railway Company still requires self-funded immigrants to live on the land of their choice as much as possible. In principle, there should be no less than 15 households per village (100 households per village in the local area), and for these villagers, in addition to granting them arable land, the Southern Railway Company also allowed them to graze in the state-run pastures designated by the government (usually where water and grass are abundant), and at the same time reduced the time for forced labor - just as the local peasants had to participate in the construction of roads and the army, the peasants under the Southern Railway Company would also participate in the construction of roads, railways, and ports.

Settlers who did not live in villages and settled on their own could not send their flocks to the state pastures to graze, and their forced labor could not be reduced. In fact, the actual workload of these solitary settlers has increased as a result of the reduced working hours of the settlers. Therefore, in reality, there are very few people who choose to settle alone, and almost everyone chooses to live in a place that everyone thinks is suitable.

The Southern Railway Company is persistent in promoting the construction of the Liangyang Railway and the two modern ports at both ends, because if the railway is not completed for a day, the Southern Railway Company will not be profitable for a day. If it is not profitable, how can it attract follow-up funds to enter the development and construction of southern Patagonia? The first thing to do was to secure enough labor to move forward with the railroad - not just slave laborers, but also a large number of formally settled freedmen who formed the basis of the local society on the East Coast.

Newcomers generally spend the first year living in their own simple shacks or adobe houses, although it is not excluded that some immigrants with good financial conditions can afford to buy some timber to build their houses. The timber was all produced on the state forest farm of Tierra del Fuego's beech fort, and of course it was not beech, which was too valuable to be used for shipbuilding, and half of the timber used to build houses was only second- or third-rate timber such as fir, but it was still unaffordable for most of the immigrants who had traveled long distances to make it destitute.

Once these two or three hundred newcomers have settled down, it's time to start preparing for their future lives. Cattle, sheep and other livestock can only be purchased from a small number of local residents, or from the Araucan natives who drive the sheep, or from the Southern Railway Company on credit (the East Coast Pacific Task Force, which has recently been preparing to withdraw from Chile, handed over a large number of cattle, sheep, horses and other livestock to the Southern Railway Company); Once they have livestock, they will have to prepare hay and then set up a small vegetable garden around their chosen dwelling to grow some of the vegetable seeds they have brought from the Old World.

In today's Free City of Araucan, growing vegetables is almost the most profitable way to go, because the commercialization is quite high. In addition to the vegetable garden, wealthy newcomers who can afford to buy farm tools or cattle and horses have time to clear their land and ditches and prepare to plant hardy grains such as buckwheat, rye or oats as soon as spring begins. They can help their neighbors reclaim some land for a fee, as long as they agree with them about the proportion of the grain harvest, and this kind of mutually beneficial thing is generally not refused.

According to the estimation of the Civil Affairs Section of the Southern Railway Company, in the first year, the immigrants basically belonged to the extreme poverty class; From the second and third years onwards, as the land is developed, they will begin to have the spare money to buy wood or bricks to renovate their houses; After four years, due to the steady production of the land and the fact that they were exempt from paying taxes, they would begin to sell some of the surplus agricultural products, and then buy cattle, sheep, farm tools, or daily commodities that they could not afford to consume before, and they would be officially settled, and they would be able to create their own wealth rather than receive relief.

There are talents who have a qiē, and what the Southern Railway Company lacks now is people! Especially at the moment when the construction of the two-ocean simple highway has been fully started, the thirst for manpower has been magnified to the point of infinity. The captains and foremen of the engineering department are asking for people from their superiors all day long, and in order to achieve their own goals, they even threaten that the construction period may be delayed. But what's the use? Now 90% of the immigrants are assigned to the East Coast mainland, and it is quite good for the immigration department to be able to leak some of the fingers and be assigned to the southern Patagonia region, which is still looking at Mo Ming's big face, and you don't want to see a hair if you change someone else.

However, perhaps the situation will be much better next year, because at that time, some experimental migrant ships will be driven in the direction of Australia, along the edge of the westerly wind belt to the east of the port of Araucan, these migrant ships will obviously bring a lot of fresh blood to the Southern Railway Company, so that the construction of the two oceans railway and port into a substantial acceleration channel. (To be continued......)