On June 16, 1867, the port of Petropavlovsk was clear and cloudy, and there were no strong winds and waves on the sea.

A small fishing boat is leaving the port with sails on its sails, and there are about dozens of ships moored in the harbor, most of them small tonnage fishing boats, and next to these fishing boats are four or five warships loaded with artillery, but they are also small warships of several hundred tons.

Most of the buildings on the land are low, but they are all in a strong Russian style, and the largest is an Orthodox church.

Although the towns are small, there are not many people walking on the streets, which is quite rare in the coastal cities of the northern Pacific Ocean, especially the Far North.

It's a calm port town, lazy with a hint of blandness.

But these dullness quickly disappeared, so a faint wisp of white smoke appeared on the sea level!

Experienced sailors will know at a glance that it is a column of smoke coming from a ship with a steam engine, and the size of the column of smoke can roughly guess that it is a large steam ship with a tonnage of at least more than 2,000 tons.

The larger the ship, the larger the steam engine and the larger the boiler, the more coal and the larger the smoke column.

The columns of smoke from those little steamers are completely incomparable to those that appear on the sea today!

The pillar of smoke soon caught the attention of a sailor on the harbor battery, who pulled one of the soldiers next to him with a bearded face and said, "Look, what is that?" ”

The soldier next to him widened his eyes and looked and looked. At this time, the smoke column on the sea surface was becoming clearer and clearer. And immediately after this pillar of smoke, there are two other columns of smoke.

See these. The soldier's face quickly showed a look of panic: "What is that, could it be that the Chinese are here again?" ”

A few months earlier, a Chinese fleet had approached Petropavlovsk and had even carried out a small, symbolic shelling of the small port, alarming the Russian forces trapped on Kamchatka.

Fortunately, the Chinese did not carry out a landing or large-scale shelling last time, but quickly retreated.

And now, however, another fleet has arrived in Petropavlovsk.

In this place, at this time, a fleet of warships appeared. Think with your toes that it should be the fleet of the Chinese.

It can't be Russian, because most of the Russian warships in the Pacific have been sunk, and even if they haven't been sunk before, there are no such big warships, they are all small goods of several hundred tons, so the one in front of me has not yet shown the full picture, but the leading one is at least two thousand tons of large ironclad ships, it is absolutely impossible for the Russians to be their own fleet.

So is it the fleets of Britain, France, the United States, etc.?

It is also unlikely, let's start with the Americans, limited by the ocean-going capabilities of the US Navy and the long distance of Kamchatka on the west coast of the United States. It is possible for the Americans to send one or two ships to Petropavlovsk, but it is absolutely impossible to send a fleet over, because the US Navy at this time does not have this capability.

And there is little possibility for the French, although the French have a certain presence in Asia. But the navy is also generally weak, and his main warships are all deployed in the English Channel and the Mediterranean, and it is impossible to send many warships to Asia.

The British East India Fleet had this strength. And they have done this kind of thing, they came to besiege Petropavlovsk more than ten years ago. But now, unless there are special circumstances. Otherwise, the British would not have ventured across the Chinese coast and run to Petropavlovsk.

You must know that from Singapore to Petropavlovsk, you have to pass through the sphere of influence of the Chinese Navy all the way.

Judging from the current situation of the Imperial Navy's preparedness for the British Royal Navy, it is estimated that the Imperial Navy will make relevant deployments as soon as the main force of the British East India Fleet leaves the port, and the East India Fleet will meet China's main fleet as soon as it appears on the coast of the South China Sea.

If this one is not good, it will cause another fleet decisive battle between the two countries, so without planning a large-scale war with the Empire, the British will not casually let the East India Fleet enter the coast of China, so as not to stimulate the Chinese to think that Britain is going to declare war on the Chinese Empire.

Therefore, there is only one large-scale fleet that can appear in the waters of Kamchatka at this time, and that is the Chinese Navy.

The news of the discovery of the Chinese fleet outside the harbor was soon reported by these soldiers, and after a while, several officers appeared on the battery, each with a telescope in their hands.

One of the bearded Russian officers saw through the single-pass telescope in his hand that the first thing he saw was a column of smoke that almost obscured the clouds, and to the west of these pillars of smoke were many black warships.

Although the distance was still far away, this Russian naval officer could see at a glance that the battleship led by him was the Chinese Pangu-class ironclad ship.

The Russians and the Chinese Empire have been fighting each other at low intensity for many years, and some military intelligence on both sides has naturally been collected, and the Chinese Empire, as a close follower of Britain and France and other countries to develop ironclad ships, is not slow in time, and in the American Civil War, the performance of the USS Washington built by China has also attracted the attention of the navies of various countries.

Last year's Battle of the Pearl River Estuary really made the world powers aware of the Imperial Navy, and they naturally paid considerable attention to the two main ships in the Imperial Navy, namely the Pangu-class ironclad ship and the Yandi-class ironclad ship.

Although the specific performance is impossible to know too clearly, some superficial things can still be roughly known, for example, the Pangu-class ironclad ship in front of him, the displacement should be about 2,500 tons, and it has very obvious external characteristics, that is, the open-air rotating turret plus the secondary gun concentrated in the central part of the hull.

At the same time, the fact that the Chinese Navy has removed all the sails of the capital ships and only left the steam engine has also caused a lot of discussion among the navies of various countries. You must know that everyone still doesn't trust the steam engine very much in these years, except for a very small number of inland river and offshore warships, those ocean-going warships basically all have sails, even those 10,000-ton ironclad ships built in the seventies, most of them have sails.

The Imperial Navy's decision in 1866 to fully adopt the steam engine and abandon hybrid power was considered a very risky and irresponsible act by many contemporary naval figures.

In the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century, people's debate about sails was actually the same as whether aircraft carriers were equipped with large-caliber naval guns in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century.

For the design and construction of warships, although China is limited by its industrial base, it has not been able to do it as easily as Britain, for example, under the same tonnage, the power of the steam engine is obviously inferior to the steam engine of the British, but in order to narrow the gap with the navies of Britain and other powers, the Imperial Navy often adopts very radical and even immature technology, in exchange for some tactical advantages in performance.

You can say that the Imperial Navy is innovative, but on the other hand, this is also a helpless move of the Imperial Navy, if there are dozens of ironclad ships enough to crush the navies of various countries, who will use these risky technologies, not the same will use the cheapest, most mature technology.

Naturally, the Russians were able to find out some of the news.

Now with just one glance, he can be sure that the ironclad ship that came is one of the main ironclad ships of the Chinese, the Pangu-class ironclad ship.

The other ones behind them, although they can't be distinguished in detail, should also be those more than 1,000-ton sail cruisers in the Chinese Navy.

Previously, the Russian Navy had fought against these sail wooden cruisers of the Chinese Navy in the North Sea, although most of the time it ended in tragedy, but it was also experienced.

"You see, they have transport ships behind them, ten, no, they have more than twenty or even more transport ships!"

The enemy's fleet, in addition to battle warships, also has a large number of transports, and it is already very obvious that they are coming to attack Petropavlovsk.

And this offensive is not just to shell the port, but to land and directly capture the place.

This situation made the Russian troops in the port quite panicked!

After a while, the rapid bell rang in the small port city, and groups of Russian soldiers began to carry guns to the forts and other defensive positions.

The common Russians living in this port city are also in a mess!

The arrival of the Imperial Navy's North Pacific Task Force has sent this peaceful port city into a state of panic!

At this moment, on the Fuxi, the flagship of the task force, Li Binglong, like those Russian officers, was also holding a telescope to observe Petropavlovsk in the distance.

The telescope in his hand is the first generation of monoculars independently produced by the empire, and in the early years, there were no special optical lens enterprises in the empire, and the telescopes used by the military were generally imported.

However, telescopes are a necessity for the army, so it is natural to strive for localization, and everyone knows the principle of telescopes, and the key lies in whether they can produce qualified lenses.

The requirements for the accuracy of the lenses of the telescope are quite high, and the technical requirements for personnel are very high.

However, even if it is difficult, the military cannot sit idly by, and the three major arms companies responsible for the development of national defense technology cannot sit idly by, under the internal division of labor and coordination of the Imperial Asset Management Office, the Northern Arms Company began to prepare for the establishment of a lens factory, and then began to tap various technical personnel, and then developed and produced telescopes.

The telescope in Li Binglong's hand is a special monocular for the navy produced by the lens factory of the Northern Arms Company, and its performance can barely keep up, but the only disadvantage is that the price is extremely high, and the telescope with the same performance is at least one-third cheaper than this domestic product if it is directly imported from abroad, and this also includes the transoceanic freight.

Many domestic industrial products with high technical requirements are often more expensive than direct imports! (To be continued.) )