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In less than three days, Geng Jingzhong visited every place in Mawei. There are many things that satisfy him, and there are many things that he is not satisfied with.

The most satisfying thing is the results of the army's training. After half a year of hard training, the Mawei Navy consumed a large amount of military equipment and equipment, and the effect was very obvious. The daily perseverance in training has made all the naval soldiers skilled and full of energy. Strong self-confidence can be seen in them, although this self-confidence has not yet been tested in actual combat at sea.

The Marine Corps is also very good. The soldiers who were originally the Tigers, although they changed their names, did not reduce their combat effectiveness. On the contrary, after such a long period of seaside training, almost all of the soldiers of the Tiger Army have become like the three Ruan brothers who are proficient in water in the Water Margin. Of course, there are also a very small number of soldiers who are never familiar with the water and cannot go into the water, and it is worth leaving them in the barracks to work on land.

These marines will not need them in naval operations, and once they carry out landing operations in the future, their role will be greater. The navy and the marine army have their own division of labor and cooperate with each other, and under normal circumstances, the marine army does not go on ships. Moreover, the armament configuration of the Marine Army and the Navy soldiers is also different, and the Marine Army will be equipped with new muskets, broadswords and spears in the future, and basically completely eliminated. This was not the case with the navy, whose ships were not well manned, so it was impossible for them to all be armed with muskets. Even if a first-class warship were built in the future, it would have less than 800 people on board, and not all of them were combatants. If the naval soldiers really came to the side battle, it was inconvenient for the musket to be equipped with bayonets, so the naval soldiers were also equipped with waist knives, and the market carried out knife training.

Since the beginning of the year, Geng Jingzhong has implemented the assembly line operation method in the workshop, and the work efficiency of each workshop has been greatly improved. The musket workshops that were the first to implement this method were very successful, as they could only produce less than 300 new muskets a month, and the muskets were produced differently. By now, the craftsmen at each job have become proficient, and nearly 2,000 new muskets have been made in a month. Nearly 5,000 guns have been stored in Mawei's ammunition depot, but now only the soldiers of the firearms battalion, which was less than 2,000 in the army, have been equipped with new muskets, and it is estimated that it will take a long time for the Marine Army to hunt all the armor.

As for the artillery workshop, it was not satisfactory, using the method of casting cannons with iron molds, and Geng Jingzhong still felt that the speed of casting cannons was very slow. Before this method, five to six cannons could be made every month, but now three months have passed, and less than 100 cannons have been produced, of which only a dozen Hongyi cannons are over 12 pounds, and the others are all six-pounder and eight-pounder cannons. This amount of artillery is far from enough for the gap needed by the navy, and there is no way, so Geng Jingzhong has no choice but to let Nan Huairen and others continue to find ways to speed up production.

Just when Geng Jingzhong finished inspecting the artillery workshop at the last stop, a group of uninvited guests came from outside the mouth of the Minjiang River.

At this time, at the mouth of the Minjiang River, the Monkey Island Commercial Port was still in full swing. With the advent of cement, it became easier to build a port, and the speed of construction was greatly accelerated. The part that used to be below the sea water always needed a lot of sand and gravel to fill in, and it had to be constantly tamped. Even so, the embankment is not very tight, and when the tide is high and the tide is low, the newly built embankment will still be washed over, which is very troublesome. Now with cement, the underwater part is much easier, and the cement is mixed with sand and gravel to form a cement mortar, which is filled with large boulders and the sea water is filled with large stones, and a very strong embankment is soon obtained, so that the anchorage will be built here and there.

At this time, the visible workers noticed a black pillar of smoke rising from the eastern sky, pointed at the surrounding workers and shouted: "Hey, brothers, look over there, what is that?" ”

The surrounding workers looked in the direction of his finger, and sure enough, black smoke rose from the sea to the east, and one of the quick responders immediately shouted: "The pirates are coming!" It's a wolf smoke alarm! A few days ago, Brother Bing said that when he saw black smoke, he asked us to run to Puzhu Temple quickly. Why don't we run! ”

Many people around echoed it, and then turned their heads to look at their respective team leaders and captains. "Let's hurry up and pick up our things and go back, don't get in the way here, it is estimated that those big brothers will come in a while, and these pirates will have someone to clean them up."

"Dangdang!" Just as everyone was talking, a hurried gong sounded, and more than a dozen responsible stewards in the commercial port quickly approached the crowd: "The pirates are coming, all the workers hurry up to Puzhu Temple according to their own teams, this place is taken over by the navy, hurry up, don't rub it off!" "Coax!" Suddenly, the workers who were still busy just now quickly picked up the tools in their hands and ran to Puzhu Temple, although there were many people, but they were not too chaotic, and the work of several months had made them very familiar with their team.

At the same time, the two battalions of soldiers stationed on Monkey Island also quickly assembled and hid in the woods not far from the sea according to the pre-arranged arrangement. They don't have artillery on their side, and if they run to the beach and become a live target for pirates, it would be extremely stupid, and they wouldn't be so stupid.

"Brother Li, the pirates are here, let's just watch here? It's too embarrassing! Zhou Feng, the former commander of the Green Battalion of the Tiger Army, and now the officer of the Sixth Battalion of the Marine Army, put away the binoculars in his hand and said to Li Biao, the officer of the ninth battalion and the thousand households next to him.

"So what else? We are marines, and we can't control things on the sea! Hey, don't worry, wait, if they go ashore, Lao Tzu will have to beat them and call them dad. Li Biao was also aggrieved, but he still sat on the stone and didn't move. Where did this pirate come from, and did he really crash into the military port? ”

"I don't think so, our reputation is quite loud in the waters around Fujian, no one should dare to come to Mawei, it is estimated that pirates from other places want to go ashore and plunder. I really hope these pirates will come ashore soon, and I'll beat them up. Otherwise, the navy will come out in a while, and we won't have anything to do! ”

"I hope so!"

"Young master, I'm about to enter Mawei in front, and it's where Shimazu Hirayama-sama failed!"

"The small boat that sent the signal just now should be the Geng family, what the king of Yanping said is really right, the surname Geng is very careful, he actually let the fishermen along the coast help patrol, as soon as we appeared, they found out."

This young master is the eldest son of Shimazu Mitsuhisa, the lord of the Satsuma Domain, who is now a daimyo on the island of Kyushu in Wakoku. Some time ago, Taiwan's Zheng family was ready to start a general attack on the Dutch in Keelung, but they were still worried that Geng Jingzhong behind him would make trouble for him. So he sent an envoy to Kyushu Island to meet with Shimazu Mitsuhisa, the lord of the Satsuma domain, and told him about the ambush of Shimazu Hirayama, invited him to lead the sailors to take revenge, and promised to bribe the retainers of the Shimazu family with heavy profits to encourage him to send troops.

Shimazu Mitsuhisa, the lord of the Satsuma Domain, was still familiar with the situation in China, and he sent people to Beijing during the Shunzhi period. Fujian's Geng family is only a vassal king, and there is no naval army, even if it starts to be formed now, it should not have the strength to wipe out the entire army of Shimazu Pingshan. Although I don't like this fifth brother Shimazu Hirayama who wants to compete with him for the position of feudal lord, his strength cannot be underestimated. Their entire Satsuma Domain was originally a whole, and the pirate fleet of Shimazu Hirayama was just in the shadows. Now that something has happened to him, he really can't ignore it, otherwise the retainers who are friends with Shimazu Hirayama at home will not agree.

The Satsuma Domain was also a prince of the Wa Kingdom, and there were not many private armies of its own. The Japanese country is an island country, and the naval division has always been a very important part of the army, and now their naval division cannot be called a navy in the real sense, but can only be regarded as a prototype, but in this era, it is relatively good in the Pacific Ocean.

In the end, Shimazu Mitsuhisa agreed to the retainers' request to fight, but he was not worried about a group of people who were related to the fifth brother, so he sent a fleet led by a retainer who was close to Shimazu Hirayama, plus a part of his own descendant fleet, to form a naval division of sixty warships, commanded by his eldest son Shimazu Hisao, and went to the waters of Fujian. They also demanded that all ships not be allowed to fly the flag of the Satsuma Domain, and all of them should be changed to pirate flags, so as not to trouble them from the Qing court.

During this whole process, Zheng Jing's envoys did not tell them, and the Zheng family's fleet also suffered a big loss in Fuzhou. All the Zheng family thought about was to use the sailors of the Satsuma Domain to contain the Geng family, so that they could free up their hands to concentrate on cleaning up the remnants of the Dutch in Keelung.

"Young Master, do we still want to move on?"

"Of course, we haven't grabbed much after we've been floating at sea for so long, so we just took this opportunity to go up and loot. Don't forget, we're pirates now. Shimazu Hisao glanced at his subordinates with his triangular eyes, and said unhappily. He pointed to the looming land in the distance: "Here, the population is large and wealthy, and it is not at all comparable to the West Dog Island and East Dog Island that we occupied two days ago. There were only a handful of people on the island outside, and they were so poor that there were not even a few women, and they had to be on land to get something. Move forward quickly, don't let the Qing people over there run away!! ”

"Yes!"

Here, Shimazu Hisao ordered the fleet to speed up, and Mawei was also preparing quickly.

"Hurry up, bring up all the gunpowder, how do you usually train, hurry up!" Wang Zhenbang stood on the deck and urged quickly, this was their first official naval battle, it had to be brilliant, and after training for so long, they were waiting for this day.

"Report to the king, all the ships are ready, please depart!"

"Okay, let's go!"

The flag commander quickly waved the order flag according to the order, and sixty original Zheng family warships set off to meet the enemy. If you want to say why you didn't let the five big ships bought from the British set off, just because the guns on the big ships have been dismantled and installed on the batteries, and the rest are some small-caliber guns. In addition, the number of newly cast guns in the artillery workshop was far from enough, so the five battleships had to stay at home and watch their families.