However, even if the Guangdong Navy Division had such a large warship, it was not possible to dispatch it at any time if it wanted to. For a warship of this tonnage, there are hundreds of sailors and sailors on board, and the basic consumption of a day of dispatch must be hundreds of taels of silver, and if it is a drill or a battle, then it must be added to the consumption of firearms and ammunition on board and additional combat salaries. This is undoubtedly an expense that cannot be ignored for sailors who have not purchased new ships in the past one or two decades. Therefore, the only few big ships in Guangdong Navy Division are basically docked in the Shuizhai wharf for a long time as decorations, and the upper limit is to sail for ten days and eight days a year.

The Haihan people obviously had no economic scruples, and their base camp was far away at the southern tip of Qiongzhou Island, but they sent such large warships to the port of Wanshan at the mouth of the Pearl River, which was almost equivalent to the voyage between the garrison of the Guangdong naval division at the mouth of the Pearl River and Quanzhou in Fujian. And with the scale of Wanshan Port, this kind of large warship obviously does not intend to stay here for a long time, but will temporarily dock in this small port because of some kind of mission.

Regarding the behavior of the Haihan people, the two Ming alternate officials can only give evaluations such as "rich and capricious". Although this Wanshan Port is the territory of the Ming Dynasty, it seems that the right to speak in this place is not in the hands of the Ming Dynasty.

Compared with the Lijiazhuang wharf, the procedures required to land at Wanshan Port are more stringent, after all, this place is a paramilitary base, and civilian and commercial use is only a subsidiary function. However, the officials had already had an experience in Lijiazhuang, and they didn't feel particularly disgusted at this time. After they boarded the dock, they were also received by the local person in charge, Chen Yixin and Li Dou.

Because of the commercial function of Wanshan Port, Li Dou still lives here for a long time, and after Chen Yixin was promoted with the establishment of the Guangdong Military Region, he ran back and forth between Wanshan Port and Zhennan Port at the southern tip of Hong Kong Island. This time, it was only after receiving a notice from the Guangzhou Office that he hurried back from Zhennan Port in advance.

On the one hand, it is necessary to give them a certain degree of deterrence in various ways at the beginning of the contact between the two sides, and on the other hand, it is necessary to ensure the safety of these people on the way, and to make them feel that they have received the attention of Haihan, so as to lay a good foundation for the subsequent means of bribery, co-optation, and taming.

However, Chen Yixin is not personally interested in having too much contact with these alternate officials, and their destination is not Chen Yixin's jurisdiction, so Chen Yixin has no need to care about the fate of these people in the future. The reception banquet in the evening was just a formality, and after a round of wine, Chen Yixin left in the name of official business, and let Li Dou be present to accompany him.

"This Haihan junior officer is so big!" After the banquet, when he returned to the residence arranged by Haihan, Li Jin couldn't help but complain: "Brother Yan, have you noticed his eyes? It's just that there is no one in his eyes, and when he speaks, he doesn't take us court officials in his eyes at all!"

Yan Mingjun said: "People do have hard capital, Brother Li, look at the forts inside and outside this port, the warships, and the soldiers of the Haihan militia that we saw when we went ashore, in good conscience, they are indeed much more decent than my Ming officers and soldiers." People want money and money, and they want people, and with these supports, they can naturally speak hard. ”

Li Jin also knew that what Yan Mingjun said was indeed the truth, and sighed and said: "This place is still four or five hundred miles away from Qiongzhou, I don't know how rampant the Haihan people will be on Qiongzhou Island!"

The closer the two got to Qiongzhou Island, the more uneasy they became. The expectation of a new position and a new environment before departure was also erased little by little by the ruthless reality on the way. They knew that the Haihan they had come into contact with now was probably just a leopard in the tube, but just the fact that Haihan had exposed this half-claw intentionally or unintentionally had already made them feel so many of their own weaknesses and shortcomings. And Haihan, such a powerful institution, was really willing to hand over control of Qiongzhou Island to the Ming Dynasty? Yan Mingjun and Li Jin were no longer too optimistic about this.

After a night of silence, the next morning, after breakfast, they came to the dock again to board the ship. At this time, Chen Yixin appeared on the dock and announced the new escort measures to the officials: "After departing from Wanshan Port, the two "Expedition-class" armed merchant ships sent by our side will join the escort team and escort you to the capital city of Qiongzhou. Have a nice trip!"

Li Jin muttered in a low voice: "This is still a merchant ship? According to the laws of the Ming Dynasty, a merchant ship cannot exceed four hundred materials, and this ship can probably have eight hundred materials!"

Of course, he also knew very well in his heart that even if Haihan, the armed ship, violated the laws of the Ming Dynasty, no one would dare to find Haihan's bad luck. This kind of warship is an unsolvable existence in the waters near Guangdong, and with so many Ming officials present, no one really stood up to question it.

The two "Explorer-class" warships that joined in Lijiazhuang were the first to turn around and leave the port, and then the fleets carrying the alternate officials sailed out of the port in turn, and finally the two largest "Expedition-class" warships slowly turned around and sailed out in the harbor of Wanshan Harbor and crashed at the back of the entire fleet.

According to the route set by the Haihan Maritime Department, the fleet will not sail directly from Wanshan Port to Hainan Island, but will travel southwest along the coastline of Guangdong, and then turn south after reaching the waters of the Leizhou Peninsula, and go to Haikou Port through the Guò Qiongzhou Strait. This voyage is about a third longer than the direct route, and it is departed at dawn after nightfall. As a result, the time required for the entire voyage from Wanshan Port to Hainan Island has at least doubled from about four days.

However, the stops along the way after leaving Wanshan Port are not as perfect as Lijiazhuang and Wanshan Island. Most of the ports they stopped at in the next few days were fishing port towns, and there was no decent food and lodging service at all, and the officials did not stay on shore at night. At this time, there was a comparison, and everyone knew how thoughtful the accommodation service provided by Haihan was.

However, although this part of the service was not provided, the militia group escorting the convoy did not relax its guard at all, and every night a platoon of soldiers would be stationed on the shore to guard the area around the docking point. Of course, in addition to guarding the safety of the fleet, the military is also on guard against unidentified people sneaking into the fleet from these places and smuggling them to the capital of Qiongzhou.

After seven or eight days at sea, the fleet finally sailed into the Qiongzhou Strait. It happened that the weather was fine these days, and the officials knew that they were about to arrive at their destination, so they finally became a little more relaxed, and they took their families to the deck to breathe and ventilate.

Shortly after the flotilla sailed past the island of Luodousha at the southeastern tip of the Leizhou Peninsula, the officials, who thought that the rest of the journey had been lackluster, once again witnessed a scene they would never forget in their lives -- two huge sailing ships spitting gray smoke and dust at a blistering speed on the sea. After the two ships made an arc on the sea, they approached the fleet from one left and one right, and the red and blue flags at the top of the masts indicated that they were also Haihan militias.

The two warships that joined the fleet at Wanshan Port were about half the size of the two new large ships. And the larger number of gun windows on the side of these two large ships also reminds the viewer not to ignore the true identity of these two ships.

However, the two large ships had no intention of joining the fleet, but overtook the sea on both sides of the fleet at full speed, and then headed southwest. Compared to the amazing speed of these two ships, Yan Mingjun and Li Jin felt that the ship they were on was almost as slow as a turtle.

"This ...... This is also the warship of the Haihan people?" Li Jin asked as he looked at Yan Mingjun with a frightened expression.

Yan Mingjun didn't know how to answer, and there was no one from Haihan on this ship, so he couldn't find anyone who could provide a correct answer for a while. But judging from the appearance and style of the two ships and the flags hoisted on the ships, they are exactly the same as the escort ships, but I don't know what the large amount of smoke and dust coming out of the stern of the ship means, it doesn't seem like the ship is on fire, and ordinary boiling water and cooking are obviously difficult to produce so much smoke.

But this was not the focus of their attention, the terrible size and super speed of the big ship were the real reason for their shock. There have long been rumors among the people that there are 10,000-pound iron ships made by the Haihan people in Shengli Port, and the reputation of the Haihan people who are good at shipbuilding and navigation has long been widely spread, but the rumors are rumors, and there is still a gap between the feelings after seeing the reality with their own eyes. Such a huge warship, I am afraid that it will only be traced back to the time when the Three Treasure Eunuchs went to the South Seas, and now the Ming Dynasty has long since lost the existence of such a huge warship, and I can't imagine that the Haihan people who have been entrenched on Qiongzhou Island have quietly built such a huge warship.

The two looked at each other, and they both saw a deep loss on each other's faces. In their hearts, although the Ming Dynasty has stumbled a little in recent years, internal and external troubles are continuous, but after all, it is still an invincible existence, even if the wild boar skin that attacks the Ming every year outside the northern pass, the Ming people still think that they are just a group of barbarians with no force. In the vicinity of the Ming Dynasty, there has not been any civilization that surpasses the Ming Dynasty, even if the trend in the past few years is not very satisfactory, it is still the existence of the Celestial Empire.

However, after coming into contact with the sudden rise of Haihan, some of their inherent concepts have been constantly broken and refreshed. This group of overseas visitors entrenched at the southern tip of Qiongzhou Island were not only able to make the maritime trade business prosperous, so that the local government and almost all the big businessmen along the coast of Guangdong could work for a long time, but also formed the so-called militia army on their own, and their combat capability was even more powerful than that of the official army. And the Haihan warships that I have seen in the past few days have also proved that their strength at sea is equally terrifying, at least the large warships seen today are not built by the current Ming Dynasty anyway.

However, the scene of encountering two "Majestic-class" flagships in the Qiongzhou Strait was not deliberately arranged by the military, but a real coincidence. It happened that Wang Tom had led his team to practice a two-ship offensive formation in the nearby waters in the past two days, and he encountered this fleet from the south of the Leizhou Peninsula. Of course, Wang Tom would not waste his limited resources to escort the fleet to Haikou Port, so he just shook around and left after the demonstration. The cost of personnel and time is a small matter, but boiler life is a big deal for a "Majesty-class" warship, and every training session with steam-powered propulsion is strictly timed and not suitable for temporary tasks outside of this formal arrangement.

But even such a glimpse was enough to shock these Ming officials on the ship. Even people who do not know anything about surface warfare know that this naval combat ship has great advantages, not to mention that this large warship is equipped with a large number of artillery pieces and sails so fast? It is no wonder that the Haihan militia was able to do what the Daming naval division could not do, and it also took the initiative to ask the Guangdong government for the task of cruising and escorting the Qiongzhou Strait.

With very complicated feelings, the fleet finally arrived at Haikou Port more than three hours later. There was no such grand scene as they had expected before their departure, with a sea of people pouring out to welcome the new parents appointed by the imperial court, only a few carriages, a few groups of militia soldiers who surrounded the dock tightly, and a few Haihan people, and the scene was exactly the same as when the fleet docked at Lijiazhuang and Wanshan Island.

However, this time, the inspection methods of the Haihan people were obviously more meticulous than the previous two stations, and more than a dozen Haihan militiamen boarded each ship to check the identities of all the personnel on board. Although the attitude was not rude, the officials could also sense that these people did not seem to take their identities seriously.

Finally, someone couldn't stand this attitude and broke out, and on another boat docked next to Yan Mingjun's boat, a chubby official shouted: "This official is an official of the imperial court, you can't be so rude to this official!

This shout obviously attracted the attention of those Haihan people on the dock, Yan Mingjun saw someone raise his hand and signaled, and immediately someone who looked like an officer ran to board the ship.

"What's your problem?" the officer, apparently not intending to give the wronged officer any face, asked coldly as he got aboard.

"This official is the new county magistrate of Lingao County, what qualifications do you have to inspect this official's luggage?" the fat official shouted angrily.

"This is Haikou Port, not Lingao County. The officer said solemnly: "Also, you are an official of the Ming Dynasty, but I am not a soldier of the Ming Dynasty!"