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The role of fireships is also very important in certain situations, especially in coastal battles, where fireships alone can be victorious even if there are no large warships involved. Twenty years ago, Zheng Chenggong used a large number of fireships to besiege and burn down 20 Dutch warships. Those twenty were not miscellaneous boats, and the smallest one was also six hundred tons. Four of them were thousand-ton warships, which were destroyed in the hands of dozens of small fireships. A large warship, even if it is a fifth-class warship, will cost no less than 50,000 taels, but how much is a fireship fake? Two hundred taels is enough, and a hundred ships add up to 20,000 taels. It is extremely cost-effective to fight a dozen battleships with a hundred fireships, or even just one or two.

A considerable number of fireships have been arranged in several important areas along the coast of Fujian, and although the number of naval soldiers stationed there is not much, as long as these fireships are controlled, they can repel the invading enemy, and at worst delay until reinforcements arrive. This is also one of the important reasons why Taiwan's Zheng family did not dare to move when the Mawei Navy went out in large numbers several times. The Zheng family knew very well that even if they sent troops to Fujian, they would not be able to get any benefits. Those fireships can make them unable to test the shore at all, and they can only lose the warship in vain. Even if they had seen the right time and landed on the shore, the garrison of the Marines would have been enough to keep them from returning. After all, when the Mawei Navy went out, they didn't bring many marines.

There are two types of fireships currently under construction in the shipyard dockyard, which are designed to deal with different types of enemy ships. The smallest fireships were narrow, but they were long. Reached six meters. It was named the Fire Phoenix Ship. The pursuit is speed. And it's full of flammables. At the time of battle, these fireships were released and sailed with the wind, which was quite fast, much faster than the battleships. And once the fireship approaches the enemy ship and burns, the fire will be particularly violent. If an ordinary warship were approached by it, it would easily be ignited. At the same time, the fireship burned for a long time and was particularly destructive. Of course. This kind of fire phoenix ship is not a giant ship against the target of the government, but a small warship of less than 500 tons.

The other is the largest number of fire dragon ships along the coast of Fuzhou now, and there are 400 of them in the Dajinmen Island Water Village on the periphery of Yuegang alone, in order to guard against the Zheng family sailors on the opposite side. The size of this fire dragon ship is much larger than that of the fire phoenix ship, and the length is more than ten to twelve meters, and it is also a little 'fat'. Although the speed is slightly inferior, it is not much worse, and the overall power is much stronger. This kind of dragon ship is also very threatening to those giant ships in the coastal waters. For example, if the strongest third-class battleship in the Mawei Navy is approached by more than three fire dragon ships and nailed to the hull and burned, then a battleship will soon be finished.

Therefore. When I was conquest of the Japanese the year before last, I faced those fireships of the Japanese invaders. The Mawei fleet also sank it in advance, and some of the sporadic ones came up, but they all avoided it. That battle did not mean that the fireships were ineffective, but that the Japanese and Mawei fleets were engaged in a very hasty battle, and they hurriedly caught up with the fireships, and the wind was not very favorable, so it did not have any effect. If the Zheng family dared to attack Fujian, whether he attacked or not, so many patrols of the Mawei Navy would find the traces in advance, and the watchtowers on the coastal islands could also detect it. In that case, the fireships could be calmly arranged, and the enemy would no longer dare to approach. With this fireship and the coastal forts, it is foolproof to guard the coast and the estuary.

After taking a general look at the progress of the shipyard, Geng Jingzhong quickly left. The purpose of staying on Pingtan Island for a week this time was to supervise and strengthen military training, not to point fingers at the shipyard, and besides, the development strategy that had been formulated long ago was not easy for me to change at will. At noon, it departed from the military port of Pingtan Island and arrived at Houyu Port at half past four. If the forty or fifty kilometers of sea route were to be completed quickly on land, it would only take two hours to complete. On this boat, you can only travel 10 kilometers per hour. Although the speed of the sea ship is not fast, the sea ship is far from being able to transport goods by horse-drawn carriage, and even if the goods are transported by car in later generations, it is far from catching up with the cargo ship!

Houyu Port is getting busier and busier now, and the Kunpeng caravan is also very busy during this time. The frequency of travel to and from Luzon has also increased a lot, and basically there is not much delay on land, and there is a constant pulling and unloading of goods between the two places. What was taken away from Fujian was a lot of basic daily necessities, as well as a lot of expensive goods. Some of them were sold to Nanyang merchants, and many were sold to new towns. Newcomers now have money in their hands and are getting more and more hopeful, so they are spending more.

Ninety-nine percent of what the merchant ships brought back from Luzon was rice. The new immigrants in Luzon are exempt from tax for two years, but the rest of the harvest must be sold to the Governor's Palace, except for enough food for their own families, and 6 million stone of grain was purchased at the end of last year. Even if the rice is husked and turned into real rice, there will be nearly 5 million stones. This figure is too scary, the consumption of the people of Fujian for two months. If all of them are kept as military rations for the Mawei Army, the entire Mawei Army can be eaten for ten years.

Geng Jingzhong had seen rice husking on the edge of the Min River outside Fuzhou, and now the technology of rice hulling has been greatly improved in Fujian. This improvement is very suitable for large grain merchants like Sino-Ocean Group. The old-fashioned method of crushing or peeling the husk of the grain with a stone mill is honestly flattering. Now the new method is also based on the inspiration of the hydraulic equipment of the horsetail workshop. In the West, there are many windmills in the Netherlands, but there are no windmills in Fujian, but there is abundant water energy to use.

Geng Jingzhong once watched with his own eyes the device of removing the shell of a new instrument. Although Geng Jingzhong didn't know how the shelling machine of later generations worked, the British were very close to the working principle of this large machine. The water flow of the Minjiang River is very fast, so it can drive the water wheel to rotate quickly. Not far from the river, there are several high platforms, on which there is a funnel for rice to enter and easy to pour rice into, and two mills below. It is divided into upper grinding disc and lower grinding disc. They are all driven by waterwheels and turned. The rapid rotation of the waterwheel. When the rice enters the upper and lower milling discs from the rice inlet, that is, the funnel, it will immediately be subjected to the rolling action to separate the rice and husk.

Although this speed is many times slower than that of later generations, it is already very advanced for this era. After the separation of rice and husk, there will be workers who scrape the rice husk mixture to the edge of the high platform with a scraper board, and fall from the high platform to the bottom, and be blown by the wind in the process of falling, so that the chaff is deflected, and the rice is heavier and falls directly vertically. The chaff is deflected farther away from the rice. Although the rice underneath has to be cleaned by workers, it doesn't take much effort. Many of these devices have been built along the riverside, so that it is possible to remove the husk of rice on a large scale. If people were to be shelled in the old-fashioned way, the manual use of stone mills would have taken up most of the time, and not much rice would have been cleaned in half a day.

The cleaned up rice will not be able to rush into the Fujian market all at once, because that will collapse the grain market in Fujian and cause the grain prices in Fujian to plummet, which will not be a good thing for the people who are farming. Fortunately, there are quite a few new ships in the offshore formation. It is entirely possible to transport the newly arrived grain to the north and sell it. The price of grain in the Jiangnan area is one tael or two pieces of silver and one stone, and the grain transported here can be completely reduced to one tael of silver and one stone. After all, the price that the Governor's Mansion bought from the people was only six coins of silver and one stone, so that it could earn nearly double the profit of the seventh or eighth layer at once. The only thing that the ocean trading company pays is the freight.

A single trip to transport only takes half a month, and thirty merchant ships can bring back 400,000 stone of grain in one trip. The reason why there are thirty ships is because the others are running the routes of the Japanese country, and only the remaining thirty ships are actually enough to run the South Seas. It is also a big deal to earn 400,000 taels of silver in one trip, and few other businesses can compare to this grain business. As a matter of fact, not all of the grain brought back from Fujian has not been transported to the north for the time being, and the offshore formations have been running around in the Yangtze River and the Yellow River in recent years, but they have not done grain business, so they still need to find large grain merchants in the north and sell a large amount of grain to them at a lower price.

Geng Jingzhong's forces are also effective in Fujian, and others will not recognize them when they leave Fujian Province. In the north, all grain purchases and sales channels are controlled by a few big businessmen, such as the Hui Chamber of Commerce, which controls the grain trade in the Jiangnan region. For the entire northern region, hundreds of thousands of stone grain is just a small number, even one million stone is not a big deal, and the Hui Chamber of Commerce can take it out immediately. If all the grain of five or six million stones was sent to the north, these merchants could quickly send the grain to Beijing along the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. Therefore, no amount of grain can be digested by the northern regions.

Another problem here is that this year Fujian has begun to plant high-yield crops, and the first few hundred acres of Wangfu experimental fields at the end of last year have achieved gratifying harvests. In the field where sweet potatoes are planted, more than 3,000 catties of sweet potatoes are produced in one acre of land, which shocks everyone, including the people who planted them by themselves. Nearly 30 stone of sweet potatoes is simply ten times the yield of rice, and as soon as the news spread, the people of the entire Fuzhou went crazy. Even if the freshly harvested sweet potatoes are fresh, they still have to be sliced and dried to preserve them for a long time, and the weight will be reduced a lot after drying, but in the end there is still more than half of the weight. In this way, the yield of sweet potatoes is still more than five times that of rice, and with such a yield, the family can no longer worry about starvation!

In addition to sweet potatoes, there is also corn is the same, although the yield is not as high as sweet potatoes, but it has also reached a yield of six stones per mu, and this number is also shocked that the people who grow corn are stunned. These crops are new species, and many people are not used to eating them as a staple food, but once it comes to a famine year, as long as there is something to eat, thank God.

It is impossible for Geng Jingzhong to give the rice produced in Luzon to the people of Fujian to eat, so the promotion and planting of high-yield crops in Fujian still have to continue. Geng Jingzhong once thought about whether to temporarily stop the promotion of high-yield crops, but after thinking about it, he still asked Yao Qisheng to vigorously promote it. In the future, whether it is a war or a natural disaster, at least Fujian can save itself. (To be continued......)