When it was almost four o'clock in the morning, Li Cang, who was on duty, woke up Zhou Hong, an intern on the next shift.

Li Cang was on the first shift of the evening, from 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. After staying up on the ship for most of the night, I was finally able to go back to the cabin and sleep. At this time, he felt very sleepy, and his body was also very cold.

Zhou Hong rubbed his eyes and woke up, took out his pocket watch and looked at it, it was almost four o'clock. He got up from the hammock, quickly got dressed, and then went to call the non-commissioned officer and sergeant major on duty.

By the time he had woken up, the captain had already whistled all the men at the hatch, and called the off-duty men to the deck for roll call.

After the name is clicked, the shift is officially changed.

The watchmen on the mast stepped down on the ropes, and the new lookouts climbed up.

Two sailors threw ropes into the sea and were measuring the speed of the ship.

"Twelve knots!"

The officer who had changed shifts there wrote down the work of the previous shift on a noteboard, and then took the sailors back to the lower deck to sleep.

The sailors on board were divided into two shifts, and every four hours had to be changed. The reason why the shift changes every four hours is to maintain enough energy, but in this way, people always have a little trouble sleeping. When Zhou Hong first got on the boat, he was also very unaccustomed to it, especially the interns who were teenagers, and they were even more sleepy.

Fortunately, after three months of polishing on the ship, everything has become accustomed to it.

There are more than 300 people on this fifth-class warship, and they have a clear division of labor, including officers, trainee officers, non-commissioned officers, sailors, artillerymen, and marines, as well as many technicians.

On the Wenzhou, a fifth-class warship, has a single-deck gun deck with 46 guns and a crew of about 300. With a displacement of a thousand tons, it can be considered a cruiser that can sail thousands of miles in a day. In particular, it has a strong endurance and is fully loaded and recharged, allowing it to sail at sea for months.

The Wenzhou is a new ship, which has just been built from a shipyard in Fujian and accepted by the Ministry of War. Delivered to the Navy. Tong Haifeng was lucky to become the first captain of this warship.

When the military department handed over the ship to the navy, it also sent a group of trainee officers and students to Tong Haifeng.

These cadets are all teenagers, but they are the seeds of the Navy.

In the words of the commander of the Navy, the Navy is a highly technical branch of the army, not comparable to the Army, so the Navy's training of officers needs to be long-term. As early as the emperor's approval of the naval expansion plan, they launched a naval officer training program, which included a naval cadet program, modeled after some of the European maritime powers of the time.

Recruit teenagers from the private sector. Select those strong teenagers with good backgrounds, clean family backgrounds, and all of them have been educated, send them to the Naval Academy for a period of study, and then send them to various warships for a long time of internship on the ship.

In the words of the admirals, through this method, real naval officers can be obtained. An excellent intern. After about ten years of internship on the ship, he finally swept the sand. If he survives and is not eliminated, then he can become a competent naval officer.

At that time, they could even go out and become captains of some patrol boats and gunboats, and after a few years of polishing, they could become captains of tiered warships.

There were ten such officers and students on the Wenzhou, and most of them were small landlords or wealthy yeoman farmers or wealthy merchants. has a good background, an innocent family background, and at the same time, they have been enlightened and studied since childhood.

It is still very tempting to become a trainee officer in the Navy. Once selected, enroll in the Naval Academy. Then he got on board and became a trainee officer. When they pass the probationary period, they can officially become officers. Compared with the road of thousands of troops crossing the single-plank bridge-style imperial examination, it is undoubtedly much easier, especially now that the Han Dynasty is prosperous and prosperous, and the external expansion is continuous, and joining the army is also the easiest way to get ahead.

But at the same time, the teenagers who will be sent are generally the concubines of the family, after all, they have to go on a warship in their teens, work hard in the sea storms, and even tear up with the enemy ship, which is quite dangerous. For their parents, there is no hope that the concubine will inherit the family business in the future, and finding a way out for them, even if it is a little more dangerous, is worth trying. But those who are really powerful are still reluctant to let their young sons be interns.

Zhou Hong is a native of Fujian, his family is a small landowner, and his father is also engaged in business. He has been studying since he was a child, but his husband also said that he is not too smart, and the road to the imperial examination is difficult. And he is the concubine of the family, and there are a lot of brothers in the concubine, and his father wanted to send him to the trading house as an apprentice, but later he accidentally learned about the plan of the Navy trainee officer, and I heard that at most ten years, once the internship period is over, at least he is a post-sergeant major of the ninth grade.

His father immediately felt that this was a pretty good way out, so he immediately took him to Fuzhou to report and take the exam, and finally he was able to pass and was sent to the Junior Naval Academy in Qingdao to study for a year, and then officially went on the ship for internship and became a trainee officer.

Zhou Hong, who is only twelve years old this year, is not tall, but he has been studying in Qingdao Port for a year, which can be regarded as a world opener. behaves in a style, and is also very military.

On this Wenzhou, although he is young, because he is a trainee officer, he can be regarded as the upper echelon of the warship, and the sailors and artillery marines must also salute when they meet him.

There were not only cadet officers on board, but also a group of cadet sailors, who were slightly older, all of them sixteen years old, but whose status was far inferior to that of the cadet officers. Most of these intern sailors are children of ordinary families, or even orphans who are being raised, and they come to the ship as assistants to those low-level sailors, usually doing dirty work, scrubbing the deck, rotating and so on.

Zhou Hong: Not long after they took over, the ship's carpenter and sail cable chief began the ship's overhaul work.

The carpenter is the technician on the ship, and there are many other technicians of the same kind, such as sail repairers, cooks, doctors, etc., these technicians enjoy free treatment on the ship, that is, they do not have to be on duty, and they can sleep happily at night.

The sail cable chief is a non-commissioned officer, not yet an officer, but he is already the head of the army, and he is only one step away from the officer. There are many such non-commissioned officers on the ship, such as sail non-commissioned officers who are responsible for sorting and storing sails and rigging, gun non-commissioned officers who are responsible for the management and maintenance of swords, guns and firearms, and supply officers; A carpenter in charge of repairing warships.

On some large ships, they may be sergeant majors, but on fifth-class ships, they are only non-commissioned officers.

The officers on the ship, from top to bottom, include captain, first officer, chief gunner, chief navigator, marine captain, etc.

The captain is the former lieutenant of the sixth rank, the deputy is the rear lieutenant of the sixth rank, and the gun captain is the left captain of the seventh grade.

The trainee officers have no rank, but they are regarded as the second sergeant major of the ninth rank, so their status is at the lowest level of the officers, and at the same time above all the non-commissioned officers.

While the carpenter and the sail rope were overhauling, the cook began to cook breakfast.

The sailors and trainees on duty began to wash the deck, which was their daily job, and it was necessary to polish the deck white and shiny, and then mop it with a mop, and at the same time to polish all the metal surfaces on the deck, and any excess cables had to be arranged and coiled into coils for use.

The soldiers on board were divided into two main groups, sailors and marines.

The sailors' uniforms were blue with white trim, while the Marines were blue with red trim. The marines were a little more relaxed than the sailors, who were divided into two groups, the deck group and the artillery group.

In peacetime, the artillery crew also has to help with some chores.

But whether it was a trainee officer, a sailor or a marine, all of them were divided into two shifts, and they were all four-hour shifts.

Zhou Hong was in charge of the ship's watch, along with four other trainee officers, while the captain was still sleeping on the ship, which was also one of the treatments of the captain and several other officers, who were able to have enough time to rest. Non-combat sailing watch, replaced by cadets.

Zhou Hong and his companions measured the speed of the ship from time to time, looked at the wind, etc.

By seven o'clock in the morning, the sailors had scrubbed the deck clean, and Captain Philip had finally come to inspect it. Philip was a Spanish bearded man in his early forties, with a long scar on his face, but he was an experienced sailor who had sailed from the New World to the East Indies for more than a decade.

He has been in the Han army for two years, but after all, he is a Yiren, so although he is older and more experienced than Tong Haifeng, he can only be the deputy of the ship and assist Tong Haifeng.

Philip has nothing to complain about, his family has now emigrated to Dahan, joined Dahan's household registration, his family has a job, although he is the deputy captain on the ship, but the salary is very generous, which makes him more satisfied.

At half past seven, the sail cable sergeant blew the whistle and put away the hammock.

At this time, all the sailors on the lower deck put away the hammocks hanging over the guns, and today the weather was fine, and the sailors took the hammocks to the deck and tied them to the side of the ship, which also worked, and if there was a battle, these canvas hammocks held tightly on the side of the ship also had the effect of blocking bullets.

Eight o'clock in the morning.

Captain Tong Haifeng finally got up, and after he washed up, he put on a blue navy uniform, a three-cornered hat, and an officer's sword from the captain's room.

After Tong Haifeng inspected the ships and saw that the accompanying fleet ships were maintaining their formation and sailing, he was satisfied and ordered to start breakfast.

A new day has just begun for Captain and Fleet Commander Tong Haifeng.

But Zhou Hong can get off work after eating.

Sailors on the morning shift were required to prepare lunch, assist the captain in repositioning the items in the storage compartment to improve the ship's center of gravity, and repair the cannons.

But for Zhou Hong, who is off work, he can sleep, chat, or read a book or write a diary in the morning. (To be continued.) )