Chapter 187, Nansha Chronicle (II)

Xu Xiake, the famous No. 1 donkey in the late Ming Dynasty, although he is indeed fearless of hardships and dangers, has amazing perseverance, and endures hardships and stands hard work, he is not a successful leader, but a very self-centered stingy ghost. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 info The various problems of the gentleman doctor in the late Ming Dynasty are also more or less common to Xu Xiake. In particular, he was harsh with his servants and liked to take advantage of all sorts of small advantages.

If Xu Xiake were to lead an expedition like Columbus or Pizarro, it would probably be a rebellion on the way.

For example, Xu Xiake was not an official and originally did not have the right to use the public post system. But once, he still got a horse card through a relationship, that is, a letter of proof using a post pass. So Xu Xiake took this horse card fox and fake tiger along the way, and requisitioned the villagers to carry a sedan chair for him free of charge. If you add the burden of luggage, it will take seven or eight coolies. Because of the lack of manpower, he also used "two women to replace public opinion", that is, to let women carry the sedan chair for him.

Xu Xiake sat comfortably on the sedan chair carried by the two women and traveled, and did not pay a penny. The unbearable coolies began to run away, and in the blink of an eye, there was only one person left, so Xu Xiake took out the rope and tied up the last coolie and led him away, just like treating a slave.

Next, Xu Xiake's team entered a small village, but the men in the village had already fled in fright (it can be seen that Xu Xiake is probably similar to a bandit or a devil in their eyes). Xu Xiake led the servants to search from house to house, and finally found two women and ordered them to boil water for cooking. He also whipped the lame son of the post man, and drove out the post man who had been hiding, and demanded wine, meat, and food. After eating, and getting into the bed that the old post keeper and the woman had made for him, Xu Xiake drank again and ordered them to quickly go to the coolies to carry the sedan chair and carry the luggage for him (the original coolie escaped), and then lay down to rest.

-- Although the officials and gentlemen of the late Ming Dynasty basically drove the people like cattle and horses in this way with shameless virtues, and generally regarded the people of Li as mustard, Xu Xiake, who had a very good public image as a geographer, traveler, and writer, could not avoid vulgarity, which could not help but make people feel a little regretful.

In addition to liking to take advantage of the public and lacking mercy for the people, Xu Xiake is also very stingy and selfish. In Xu Xiake's later years, he once took Monk Jingwen to the southwest, but Monk Jingwen fell ill halfway and stayed in the temple, but Xu Xiake continued to travel. Monk Jingwen understood this, but hoped that Xu Xiake would leave some money for the little monk in the temple so that he could buy some food to eat. It must be known that friends have a friendship of wealth, Xu Xiake and Monk Jingwen and his master have been friends for decades, but he shirked Monk Jingwen's request in every possible way, so angry that Monk Jingwen scolded. And by the time Xu Xiake came back from his trip and was about to take Monk Jingwen away, Monk Jingwen had already died of illness in the temple.

Of course, compared with all kinds of rotten people in the late Ming Dynasty, although Xu Xiake is stingy and selfish, he still has some discipline. Seeing that Monk Jingwen died, Xu Xiake was also very guilty, not only helped Monk Jingwen deal with the aftermath, but also fulfilled his last wish and buried his ashes in Jizu Mountain, thousands of miles away.

In short, there is no doubt about the greatness of Xu Xiake, the ancestor of the donkey, but his own character should not be overestimated.

To get back to the point, now Xu Xiake's "tolerance" for this trip, although Huameng has arranged transportation and food, the six servants Xu Xiake brought when he went out still ran away one after another because the promised reward was not fulfilled. And after seeing Xu Xiake's stingy and stingy and bad manners, the traversers suddenly realized: why Xu Xiake came to Hainan Island last time, there were only two people, himself and his brother, and he didn't even bring a servant with him - it turned out that on the one hand, it was to save money, and on the other hand, he learned a lesson from his previous trips: Xu Xiake had not left Zhejiang Province several times in the past, and the servants who accompanied him had already escaped......

――Being Xu Xiake's servant is really a very difficult thing. These ordinary people do not have Xu Xiake's hobby and in-depth understanding of tourism, nor do they have the sentiments of landscape poets, let alone take tourism as their self-proclaimed mission, and of course, they can't ride a sedan chair like Xu Xiake. As Xu Xiake's servant, he may be just to feed his family for three buckets of rice, but the price is to stay away from his relatives and may lose his life at any time.

What's even worse is that Xu Xiake not only did not understand the hard work of the servants, but also did not correctly understand the gold content of his title of "Writers' Association Member", but really regarded this as another form of "Hanlin Bachelor": Although Xu Xiake understood very well that the Ao-Song Dynasty did not pay attention to literature and light on martial arts, but was a martial noble, and he was not only a scribe, but also a "fortunate progress" generation, except for a little "holy family", he had no merits, no backer, and he couldn't take out any arrogant capital at all, so he thought that he was already very "a man with his tail between his legs." "That's it. But most of the sailors on the White Dew General Supply Ship were still tired of this old man who often called them and refused to give them a reward - who do you think you are?

In addition, because there were two servants running on the way, and there were not enough people to carry the luggage, Xu Xiake actually found Captain Rong Shiqi with a cheeky face, hoping that he could make up for two servants for himself, and Captain Rong Shiqi rolled his eyes on the spot, and almost didn't scold on the spot: What do you think of the glorious naval officers and soldiers? The poor military households of the Ming Dynasty who were like slaves and cattle and horses?

Although he was choked and rolled his eyes, Captain Rong Shiqi still pinched his nose and solved this difficulty for him: it is obviously absolutely impossible to let the glorious naval officers and soldiers call Xu Xiake as servants, but there is just a group of labor prisoners on the ship, and it is not a big deal to send two people to Xu Xiake, anyway, the criminals have no human rights...... As a result, Ah Gui and Wang Hu, who committed the "hooliganism crime" in Weizhuang, Shaoxing, and were severely beaten and arrested, were taken out of the hot and dirty Bailu bilge, changed into clean clothes, and then stuffed under Xu Xiake's hands to be cattle and horses......

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The warm breeze is gentle, the sun is shining, the verdant trees are swaying in the wind, the edges of the leaves reflect a faint golden light, and thousands of pieces are swaying and undulating, like a string of dancing gold wires. The white clouds in the sky flow slowly, and from time to time a few seabirds pass by, passing through the dappled shade and casting into the distance.

At the end of the shade of the trees, there is a snow-white sand beach and an endless blue sea, and the snow-white clouds stretch all the way to the sea, which is really refreshing to watch. Looking back from the beach, you can see a variety of buildings of varying heights, hidden in a lush tropical jungle, which looks particularly delicate and lovely, like a bonsai standing on the sea.

-- This beautiful tropical island is a gift from polyps.

The polyp, a lower coelenterate, has a body size of only a pocket with many petal-like tentacles on the sides. At high tide or at night, it transforms into vibrant colors and hunts plankton with its tentacles. Humans used to collect dendritic staghorn corals, beautiful rose corals or lotus corals. But in nature, the most abundant are the inconspicuous grey reef-building corals. They grow and breed in the warm, shallow seas and secrete calcareous substances that make up their armor. Generations of coral bones are stacked to form a giant pyramid. Over the course of thousands of years, little by little, they emerge from the water, forming reefs, and the waves break up the fragile reefs, gradually grinding them into gray-white coral sand.

The Spratly Islands are mostly made up of coral reefs, and most of them are atolls that surround the lagoon beneath the surface. The outcropping is small. Even the main island of the Nansha Islands, Taiping Island, in its natural state, is only one kilometer long and half a kilometer wide, with an area of about half a square kilometer and an altitude of just over three meters. Finding it in the vast South China Sea, where the sky and water are connected, is like "looking for a needle in the sea".

However, although Taiping Island is small, it is by no means desolate, and the whole island is densely covered with extremely lush tropical plants. Banana and coconut palms can be seen everywhere, papayas are planted along the gravel paths, and strong morning glory vines are everywhere, producing pale purple-red flowers.

Although it may look lush, there is not much real soil on the island, it is all weathered coral reefs of fine gray sand and guano soil, which is completely unsuitable for growing crops such as rice, wheat and vegetables. Fortunately, the officers and men of the Huameng Navy guarding the island in this time and space had the unscientific and excellent weapon of the [random gate], and directly transported thousands of tons of fertile soil from Guangdong to the island, carved out dozens of acres of land in the middle of the island, and planted eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, water spinach, cabbage, potatoes and other vegetables, which not only effectively improved the food of the officers and men, but also supplied the fishermen and the navy.

In addition to fruits and vegetables, fresh water is also necessary to sustain life on the island. Although there were wells on Taiping Island, the water was still salty, so the garrison built a large number of cement reservoirs to collect rainwater. In addition, a freshwater manufacturing plant was built to provide clean fresh water for drinking.

Originally, Taiping Island was surrounded by coral reefs, and to get to the island, you had to venture through the coral surface and grope your way through the deep-water waterway. And whether this channel can be found is also unknown. Even if this channel is found, larger ships will not be able to enter and will have to rely on small boats for transshipment. To this end, the garrison built a large-scale cement wharf on the island, which stretched from the height of the beach to the edge of the reef, forming an artificial deep-water port to facilitate the berthing and unloading of large ships, and even laid a light narrow-gauge railway on the pier trestle, so that human rail cars could directly load and unload goods from berthing ships. Right now, the integrated supply ship Bailu is docked at this dock, unloading all kinds of daily necessities.

Around the wharf, Huameng built a lighthouse, a meteorological station, a warehouse, a radio station, a cistern, a fortress, a dormitory, an office building, a playground, and a cement fish drying area. Protected from typhoons and storms, the buildings are made of concrete, but painted in a variety of bright colors such as yellow, green, red, blue and white, along with the sand and shell-paved paths, as well as the flower beds between the houses, create a unique color combination.

At present, the total population of Taiping Island has reached more than 500 people, forming a prosperous town. For a coral island with an area of only half a square kilometer, this number is staggering. The reason why Huameng is willing to make such a large-scale investment in a small Taiping Island is, of course, not only because of its geographical location, but more importantly, because of the only minerals on the island: struvite.

Without struvite provided by the Spratly and Paracel Islands, it would have been more difficult for Huameng to exploit Borneo's rainforest.

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-- The tropical rainforests of South Sea Borneo seem to be lush and vibrant, but in fact they are full of dangers for the local residents. Bugs, snakes, and tropical diseases aside, the sheer composition of the soil alone is enough to make any farmer scratch his head: because of the staggering rainfall brought by the tropical rainforest climate, the entire Borneo soil is constantly overwashed by rain year after year, taking away all the dissolved nutrients, so that all the components of calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium and sulphur are lost, and in some places even the silicon is almost gone, and only iron and aluminium are left. Although tropical sunlight and temperatures are suitable for plant growth, in such extremely poor tropical rainforest soils, legumes that need potassium are often not even grown, and grains that do not need much potassium are almost entirely afraid of the high aluminium content of the soil......

As a result, primitive agriculture in most of the tropics can only be done in a nomadic style of slash-and-burn farming. If you want to run a stable farm in a tropical rainforest area, you need to make a big effort to solve the problem of poor soils. In Southeast Asia, the land of Java Island has a large amount of natural volcanic ash to replenish nutrients, so it has developed agriculture since ancient times, and can be called the crown of the South Sea Islands. The main agricultural areas of Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar are alluvial plains of large rivers, which can obtain nutrients washed down from the upper reaches. However, Borneo did not have the conditions for either, so it was extremely difficult to develop.

Therefore, when establishing farms and plantations in the newly established colonial base on Borneo, Huameng had to dig more ditches and ponds to allow the precipitation to flow away quickly and avoid soaking the soil to reduce nutrient loss. On the other hand, it is necessary to apply a large amount of fertilizer to ensure the nutritional conditions of the crops.

It just so happened that on the road from China to Borneo, many coral islands scattered in the South China Sea were covered with white guano, with an average height of about half a meter, and over time, they hardened into an ore rich in phosphorus and potassium - struvite abundant in the islands of the South China Sea, which not only effectively helped the development of tropical agriculture in the colonial stronghold of Borneo, but also quickly brought amazing prosperity and prosperity to these small coral islands.

However, for RTL inmates who are forced to mine struvite on coral islands, all this simply means an increase in workload.

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At this moment, under the scorching sun of the tropical ocean, wearing straw sandals and shirtless, Ah Gui and Wang Hu, two brothers and sisters, were sweating and carrying a sliding rod to carry Xu Xiake, who was wearing a big straw hat, around Taiping Island, and finally came to the mine where the labor camp mined struvite.

Many of the prisoners were being sent in from all over the country, busy on the sun-exposed rocks. They all looked silent, tired, dull-looking, naked, wearing only trousers, like a herd of wriggling animals, chiseling struvite with simple pickaxes and hammers. After a simple selection, the ore is loaded into trolleys, dumped into the bodies of the human-powered wagons on the narrow gauge tracks, and finally pulled to warehouses near the docks.

Under the scorching tropical sun, the sweat of the prisoners condensed into salt frost on their skin. Due to the limited fresh water on the island, the prisoners could only take a freshwater bath once a week, so they were all covered in dirt and salt frost. Seeing Xu Xiake and his party, some of the labor prisoners raised their heads, as if they wanted to take the opportunity to rest for a while, but several guards with meaty faces immediately leaned over and shouted loudly, supervising them to continue working without stopping. One of the ringleaders also viciously threatened that if anyone failed to complete the required amount of work before the sun went down, the whole team of prisoners would go hungry......

Next to the sliding pole that Xu Xiake was riding, there was also a team of new labor prisoners who had just been unloaded from the Bailu and were about to be allocated to the strouncer mining site on Taiping Island, that is, the original travel companions of Ah Gui and Wang Hu. The ragged men, chained in two, staggered along the sand-paved path, flanked by vicious vigilante soldiers shouting and occasionally driving them with clubs and rifle butts.

Looking at this scene, Ah Gui and Wang Hu, who were sweating profusely carrying the sliding rod, couldn't help but feel a chill down their backs, and their legs trembled.

“…… See, if it weren't for my lord's appreciation, you two sinners would have to be like them! ”

Xu Xiake's personal servant diligently fanned the master, and flattered a bunch of cut and peeled pineapple slices soaked in salt water, and scolded Ah Gui and Wang Hu who were carrying the sliding rod arrogantly, "...... Don't be grateful! ”

“…… Yes, Master Xu's great kindness, the small nine deaths are unforgettable! Ah Gui suddenly suddenly became excited, and he hurriedly answered, and even the sliding rod on his shoulder didn't seem to feel too heavy. Wang Hu, on the other hand, looked back at the empty dock in the distance and asked hesitantly, "...... Tell you, sir, you said you were going to set off again today, but the big iron boat that carried us to the island is no longer there, so how can we cross the sea next? ”

“…… Anyway! Xu Xiake replied while eating pineapple in a good mood, "...... Let's not take a boat this time, let's go from the sky! ”

“…… Walking from the sky? For this unbelievable answer, Ah Gui and Wang Hu, two rural buns, looked at each other for a while, but they were worried that their master would be angry, so they didn't dare to ask again for a while. However, after a while, both of them understood what Xu Xiake meant:

-- At dusk, under the light of the purple and red sunset, I saw a huge hard airship in the shape of a cigar, suddenly passing through the clouds on the edge of the sky, and slowly descending from the north to the sky over Taiping Island, casting a huge shadow on the island and the sea.

Next, the stunned Ah Gui, Wang Hu and others carried Xu Xiake and his luggage, climbed the rope ladder and boarded the huge airship, and left the land of Asia and ran to an even more wonderful unknown distance...... Xu Xiake's personal servant diligently fanned the master, and flattered a bunch of cut and peeled pineapple slices soaked in salt water, and scolded Ah Gui and Wang Hu who were carrying the sliding rod arrogantly, "...... Don't be grateful! ”

“…… Yes, Master Xu's great kindness, the small nine deaths are unforgettable! Ah Gui suddenly suddenly became excited, and he hurriedly answered, and even the sliding rod on his shoulder didn't seem to feel too heavy. Wang Hu, on the other hand, looked back at the empty dock in the distance and asked hesitantly, "...... Tell you, sir, you said you were going to set off again today, but the big iron boat that carried us to the island is no longer there, so how can we cross the sea next? ”

“…… Anyway! Xu Xiake replied while eating pineapple in a good mood, "...... Let's not take a boat this time, let's go from the sky! ”

“…… Walking from the sky? For this unbelievable answer, Ah Gui and Wang Hu, two rural buns, looked at each other for a while, but they were worried that their master would be angry, so they didn't dare to ask again for a while. However, after a while, both of them understood what Xu Xiake meant:

-- At dusk, under the light of the purple and red sunset, I saw a huge hard airship in the shape of a cigar, suddenly passing through the clouds on the edge of the sky, and slowly descending from the north to the sky over Taiping Island, casting a huge shadow on the island and the sea.

Next, the stunned Ah Gui, Wang Hu and others carried Xu Xiake and his luggage, climbed the rope ladder and boarded the huge airship, and left the land of Asia and ran to an even more wonderful unknown distance......