Unbeknownst to the pirates, the commander of this army was named Ferreira, and the battalion was named after Ferreira.

However, the pirates at the mouth of the Pearl River all know Ferreira's name, he is a thief in Macau, if a pirate wants to change his errand and eat by himself, he can go to Macau to find him. If a pirate's brother or friend has an accident in Macau and needs someone to come forward to rescue someone from Franco, he can also be approached.

Even, if there is any friction between the pirates, they will ask Ferreira to mediate.

Therefore, Ferreira was very familiar with the pirates at the mouth of the Pearl River, and when Ferreira's determined progress was not hindered, Ferreira understood.

He also commanded from the mill, and when the stragglers were still a hundred and fifty paces from the pirates' fence, Ferreira blew the horn.

The military formation of the Ferreira battalion stopped as soon as they heard the sound of the horn, and suddenly there was a sharp whistle, and immediately there was a commotion on the skirmishers' line, and the mercenaries looked at each other, quite hesitantly, they signaled to each other not to speak, waited quietly, and sure enough, the whistle was heard again.

The skirmishers put down their cards, then propped themselves up with the brackets at the back, then stood behind and began to reload their heavy arquebuses.

Unlike the Camp Ferreira musketeers, who had already received cartridges, the stragglers continued to use the traditional Twelve Apostles' ammunition belts, with twelve canisters, nine containing a shot and cartridge, three with ignition powder, and a wooden box for buckshot.

In addition, some people used powder cartridges made of horns to pour gunpowder into them.

These were professional marksmen among the mercenaries, and his marksmanship was skilled, and the equipment he used was different from the arquebuses of the trading houses, but the Mushkot arquebus, which was similar to the Ming Dynasty's Lumi guns, with a large caliber, heavy projectiles, and a longer effective range.

Unlike the standing fire of a light arquebus, this heavy arquebus required a mount, which, of course, has now been replaced by a piece of stamp.

Shooting accurately in front of the line is what these elite mercenaries are good at, but even then, they will not start shooting until about a hundred paces.

Shooting the enemy's gunners at a distance of 100 paces and the enemy's infantry at 80 paces was their specialty.

Because of this, they were ordered to stop shooting at a distance of one hundred and fifty paces, which made them a little confused, so there was an initial commotion.

Unlike ordinary musketeers, mercenaries made their muskets as large or even larger than they made, and then finely polished them to minimize the clearance between the lead bullets and the barrel, and when loading, they would wrap the lead bullets in a layer of oil-soaked linen.

The ram lever used is also different, and their ram is generally made of iron, so it can be struck with a hammer to put the bullet into the barrel.

These techniques are necessary for such precision marksmanship, but at a distance of one hundred and fifty paces, any careful manipulation will inevitably not be too rewarding.

Bang bang bang.

A round of shooting broke out from the skirmishers' line, but with little success.

In the mercenary's field of vision, he only saw the sawdust on the fence and the fog on the ground, and there were few traces of the battle.

The mercenaries looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders, obviously not wanting to continue such a senseless shooting, after all, the ammunition they carried with them was also limited.

But at this moment, a gunshot like a popping bean suddenly sounded on the opposite side, and the frightened mercenaries immediately squatted behind the cards. Then came the booming sound of cannons, which was no longer safe to crouch on the ground, so the mercenary simply lay on the ground, put his backpack in front of his head, and began to dig into the ground with a short-handled hoe.

Pile up the excavated soil as much as possible into a fortification.

There was the screeching sound of bullets piercing the air in their heads, and the main force of the Ferreira battalion was still a hundred paces away from them, but they were safe. The mercenaries, who had tried to make sure they survived by some means, realized why their commander would allow themselves to open fire at such a distance, because they were opposite a group of inexperienced pirates who would return fire as soon as they were attacked.

The farther away you are, the more likely you are to survive.

"Don't fire, damn it, you idiots!" Shi Bi shouted loudly from the Great Watchtower, but his voice was completely enveloped in the sound of gunfire.

The pirates had fallen for the enemy's tricks, and it was completely pointless to fire at such a distance, not to mention the Ferreira battalion, which was more than two hundred paces away, and the row of sparse cards in front of it had not been knocked out much.

The smoke from the burning of the gunpowder shrouded the vicinity of the fence, and the pirates did not command at all, and when they heard the banging of guns around them, they continued to reload and fire until they could not attack the position, and at this time the guns of the Fran cannon were gone, the birds were hot, and the tired arms of the archers were sore.

"Get up, get ready to attack, get up." It was only at this time that the sound of the stone wall was heard by more people, and the pirates grabbed their spears and broadswords, ready to meet the onslaught of the enemy.

The smoke of gunfire gradually dissipated, but there was a blank space in front of them, no one rushed up while the smoke of gunpowder obscured the view of the pirates, and in the distance, the sparse line of skirmishers was still there, and some of them were hit by stray bullets and fell to the ground, but after the shooting stopped, they were set up again in full view, and it was obvious that the mercenaries behind them were not harmed.

The balladeers shouted to each other for care, only one guy wailed for help, and was carried down by the auxiliaries who followed behind, this fellow was really unlucky, the card and the backpack blocked the bullets for him, but did not block the hanging bow and arrow, lying on the ground and trying to dig the foxhole, he was shot in the ass by the falling arrow, and had to be carried down for treatment.

The skirmishers continued to dig foxholes, and the main force of the Ferreira battalion lined up in the back to watch the play, ready to meet at any time, but the busiest was the top of the mill.

Here, the artillery officer and Li Zhaoji's personal entourage were very busy, and the skirmish fire ordered by Ferreira triggered a chaotic return fire from the pirates, and this was also the purpose of Li Zhaoji's tentative attack with Ferreira's battalion, he wanted to test the pirates' firepower.

The key is the gun position, the fire of all kinds of Fran machines, small artillery, the fire produced by the fire is very conspicuous, after observation, it was marked on the drawings by the officers, and all the six six-pounder field guns of the artillery will come forward to attack these fire points.

"It seems that the pirates' artillery is all shotgun." Li Zhaoji said.

"Yes, I only saw the impact points of four or five solid bullets, which should have been fired by the Fran cannon, and they were far from the skirmishers." said the artillery chief.

Li Zhaoji asked: "How about the artillery bombardment from the front to the skirmish line?" ”

"It's better to have a shield car cover."

"Okay, you arrange it immediately. In the event of losses, retreat immediately, and the Freshwater Battalion and Marines will arrive at the position of the Ferreira Battalion to cover you. Li Zhaoji said.

The artillery chief was a one-eyed young man, and if he hadn't been wearing an eyepatch, he might have been able to put it in the handsome category. In fact, it was precisely because of this young man recruited by Li Zhaoji when he was in Guangzhou, and he took him with him as a clerk, and there were very few people who could write and calculate at that time.

And this young man named Zhou Shui showed his talent for mathematics at an early age, perhaps because his father was a small shopkeeper, and he grew up behind the counter since he was a child.

When a person who is good at mathematics joins the army, he must be an artilleryman. So when Zhou decided to leave Li Zhaoji's side, he refused to take charge of the local business in Tamsui, and instead chose to become a soldier, so he became an artillery officer.

Zhou participated in the whole process of establishing the field artillery of the trading company, and for most of the time, he was Li Zhaoji's spokesman in the artillery and artillery casting departments, and his result was the artillery company that was moving in the direction of Dazhai.

This artillery battery had a full range of six six-pounder field guns, some of which were involved in the Sado expedition. As the hearts and minds of Li Zhaoji and Yang Yandi, the establishment of this artillery company is complete.

It had six field guns with a total of one hundred and twenty artillerymen, one hundred and twenty-four mules and horses, twelve ammunition trucks, twenty two-wheeled trailers, a transporter and a special vehicle for blacksmiths.

This included officers, gunners, auxiliary personnel, etc., and for the sake of this artillery company, Li Zhaoji rejected Yang Yandi's proposal to establish the first cavalry unit of the trading army. The military expenses originally used to buy Yunnan horses were purchased mules and incorporated into the artillery.

It's just that this time, the thieves, limited by the transportation capacity, did not bring all the mules and horses, only equipped each cannon with four mules to pull, and the rest of the ammunition trucks and other vehicles were dragged by manpower.

Li Zhaoji did not want his artillery company to be in danger, because there were too many talents gathered here, and in this era of lack of knowledge, every artilleryman placed in other positions in the trading company could serve as bookkeepers or clerks, otherwise he would not be regarded as Li Zhaoji's heart.

There will be no shield car to cover the artillery operation, but Zhou Shu knows the value of artillery, and the credit of killing a hundred pirates with these 'hot girls' is not comparable to the loss caused by killing one artilleryman.

Each artillery was covered by two shield wagons, and the Tamsui battalion and the marines followed, and the artillery became the protagonists of the battlefield, and these guys, who were jealous and envied by the army's brother units, finally got the opportunity to perform.

"Artillery columns!" Zhou's loud command sounded on the battlefield.

Immediately, the gun carriage stopped, the gunner's door unlocked the front car, and then the muzzle of the gun was reversed, and the six guns were eight meters apart, forming a battle distance.

The field artillery company is the first group of metric units in the world in the future, this is Li Zhaoji's requirement, he is fed up with units such as zhang, infantry, and ruler, which are nothing in their field, but with the progress of technology, the length unit will reach the level of centimeters and millimeters, and the old units will not work.

And in this group, the only non-metric unit is the caliber of artillery, which is used in pounds.

The ammunition cart was parked thirty meters behind the artillery company, and the infantry of the artillery company was also dispersed, some ready to carry ammunition for the artillery, others to assist in the control of the shield cart.

Several artillery commanders surrounded Zhou Yu, communicating in language and numbers that sounded like heavenly books to the people next to them.

Their knowledge includes elementary arithmetic, Briggs logarithmic tables, plane and solid geometry, trigonometric functions, elementary algebra and fundamentals of mechanics, and calculus.

The textbook was developed by Lee Siu Kee, and of course with the support of the English and Francophone gunners, who sometimes taught them himself, but not everyone could learn it.

Knowledge is a sieve that sifts through the stupid and the impatient. Tang Mu once envied the treatment that the field artillery company received, so he wanted to master this unit, but was ultimately defeated by these heavenly books-like knowledge.

Even so, the equipment and knowledge of the field artillery company did not reach the level that Li Zhaoji wanted, and the application of artillery was still metaphysics, and experience was sometimes more important.

"Distance, one hundred and sixty meters, the gauge is zero."

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