Fernellon Albert, the captain of the "San Farno", narrowed his eyes slightly, stared at Victor Sassoon for a while, and then grinned.

"Mr. Haynes, if I'm not mistaken, did you commit a crime in the Qi country, in order to escape their pursuit, so you want to take our San Farno to hide in Europe?"

Victor Sassoon, who assumed the pseudonym Walton Haynes, showed a wry smile, then sighed, nodded and said, "Yes, Captain Albert, I have offended a very powerful nobleman in the Qi country. He coveted my wealth and took possession of most of my wealth by all means, by cunning and plunder. In the end, in order to cover up his ugly deeds, he showed a deep hostility towards me and tried to kill me. I am saddened that, as a Jew, I could not have imagined that in the self-proclaimed powerful and civilized country of Qi, we would suffer such a tragic thing as our nation had experienced. ”

"Oh! ......" Captain Fernellon Albert smiled knowingly.

Look, you blood-sucking Jewish merchants don't get seen anywhere!

"In that case, then, Mr. Haines, you and your entourage want to take our San Farno to Europe, and the price of the ticket cannot be calculated according to the normal market." Captain Fernellon Albert stared into the other man's eyes and said, "Because, we will take a great risk for this. You say yes, right? ”

"I understand." Victor Sassoon nodded and said, "We will pay twice the price of the original ticket for this trip." ”

"No!" Captain Fernellon Albert shook his head and said, "You will have to pay three times the price of the original ticket, so it is worth the risk to take you safely to Europe." ”

"Captain Albert, I have to admit that you have a very good economic talent." Victor Sassoon said sarcastically: "Well, we're willing to pay three times the price." But I would like to get a clean and comfortable cabin on board. After all, we have paid a very high price. ”

"It is my regret, Mr. Haines, to inform you that our San Farno is a merchant ship and cannot provide you with very comfortable and clean cabins." Captain Fernellon Albert sneered, "But we can make room for you in the Sailors' Rest Area in the bilge near the vents. You must know that on the sea voyage from Hanzhou to South Africa, only the Qi people are operating regular liner transportation with people, and only on those ships will they have what you call comfortable treatment. …… However, I don't think you will go on a manned merchant ship of the Qi people. ”

When Victor Sassoon heard this, his face suddenly became ugly.

From Hanzhou to the European continent, the journey is tens of thousands of kilometers, and the sailing time is more than four months. As you can imagine, crammed into the bilge with a group of filthy sailors, with no fresh food, no clean drinking water, not even regular personal hygiene, and fleas crawling everywhere on the floor and bed, it was chilling.

What is even more unbearable is that this ship is a cargo merchant ship, and it will not call at the port as frequently as manned merchant ships, so that people can get off the ship to breathe the wind and get a short rest time. This meant that they would likely only stop at a few key ports for resupply during their long journey, and for most of the time, they would have to stay in poor cabins.

Moreover, the French merchant ship was a traditional three-masted sailing ship, relying only on trade winds and ocean currents to follow the course that had been established for centuries. Instead, like those sailing ships or steamships in Qi, they crossed the Indian Ocean directly and sailed to South Africa in the shortest distance and fastest time, regardless of the influence of wind direction and ocean currents.

It is said that the fastest steamship in Qi can sail at an ultra-high speed of 13-15 knots per hour (1 knot = 1.852 km/h) from Guizhou, and can reach Cape Town, South Africa in less than 20 days.

However, the traditional sailing ship they were on would not exceed 10 knots even with the help of trade winds and ocean currents, and it needed to constantly change direction so as not to miss the wind direction and currents, which made the same voyage take more than one-third of the time.

Under this huge gap in transportation efficiency, Qi's merchant ships are very competitive, not only sailing at a speed far higher than that of traditional European sailboats, but also because they are not affected by the monsoon, they can transport more frequently every year, making their transportation costs still have a great advantage in the case of using a large amount of coal.

During this period, in the face of the deliberate technological blockade of Qi countries, in the whole of Europe, only the Netherlands and the United Kingdom had a few immature steam-sail hybrid ships, but due to the imperfection of design and technology, they did not dare to carry out ocean voyages at all, and were limited to offshore transportation. Moreover, they also dropped anchor at sea at intervals, which forced steam-powered merchant ships to rely on their sails to complete the rest of the voyage.

Captain Fernellon Albert was in a particularly happy mood after collecting a large sum of money from Victor Sassoon and his party. After leaving the dock tavern, he rented a freight wagon, took a few crew members, and headed straight for the city. He needed to buy some cheap daily necessities and prepare enough supplies for the upcoming journey.

Guizhou is the largest city in the southwest of Hanzhou and the capital of Kunzhou Province, with a population of more than 300,000, and is the most important political, economic and cultural center in the region.

It's hard to imagine that more than 70 years ago, it was a barren river beach and woods, with a meandering river of the River Kwai (today's Goose) running through the valley. The topography of the entire region alternates, on either side of the river, from steep headlands to vast shoals of the finest quality, with the fertile red loam of the headlands overgrown with huge blue eucalyptus trees, and the shallows dotted with water purple trees and the occasional narrow strip of alloy trees. From the plains to the foothills, there are excellent woodlands and meadows everywhere.

Today, it has become a bustling city, with tall buildings, heavy commercial buildings, traditional oriental cornices and buckets, huge factories and countless chimneys, the streets are full of traffic, crowds of people, large and small trading shops are full of dazzling goods, and the shopkeepers and men are enthusiastic to greet customers.

"The people of Qi are really God's favorites, not only inventing and creating countless novelties, but also having unparalleled productivity and being able to make so many goods!" It was not the first time that Captain Fernellon Albert had come to the Han continent, but every time he arrived, he seemed to feel a great change, with the increasing abundance of goods, the significant increase in population, and the continuous rise of new buildings in the city, showing a scene of prosperity everywhere.

At times, Captain Albert wondered why their great French nation could not have such great economic talent.

I still remember that during the reign of Louis XIV, France crushed the whole of Europe militarily, and economically, with the efforts of Colbert, France rebuilt its economic structure, which led to a significant increase in fiscal revenue and self-sufficiency for the country. France's industrial and trading capacity was successfully expanded through direct government control of the economic sector, the establishment of colonial trading companies and the opening of new factories.

However, the great Sun King Louis XIV, in order to fulfill the "important task given by God" and consolidate and strengthen the sacred status of Catholicism, began to fight against the Huguenots in the country and repealed the Edict of Nantes. For a long period of time, the French economy was hit hard, Caen lost all its textile machines, Lyon and Tours lost three-quarters of its textile machines, Angumwa closed down 16 of its 60 paper mills, 101 of the 129 shops in the commercial town of Mézières, only 54 of the 400 tanneries in Tours remained, and the commercial ports of Marseille and Bordeaux were also hit hard, and the entire economy fell into a severe recession.

The Huguenots, who had fled France, reopened factories in the South Netherlands, the United Provinces, Germany, and England, producing large quantities of local goods that had been imported from France. Oh, by the way, the former Spanish Canary Islands, which were occupied by the Qi people, also seem to have received a lot of Huguenots to dilute the Spaniards there.

After such a toss-up, the economic system that Colbert had built up began to collapse, the French government's industrial revenue plummeted, and the finances had to fall into the trap of usury merchants, and life became extremely difficult.

To make matters worse, in the War of the Spanish Succession, France was facing the siege of several major European powers, and France had exhausted almost all its energy, its treasury was empty, it was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the whole country was in a serious crisis.

Could it be that without the Protestants, France would have had to rely on the Jewish merchants who lent money for their livelihood?

Even if we are not as good as the Qi people and the Protestants in Europe, why are the Italians, who are also Catholics, so economically successful? Why were their merchants shrewd and capable, their craftsmen ingenious, their scholars versatile, and so far as the French?

You know, Italy is still in a state of fragmentation, and the Spaniards, Austrians, Genoese, Venetians, the Pope, and the French, tear this rich region to pieces.

This question was also asked by the Sun King, Louis XIV, but the ministers and privy councilors of the kingdom did not come to a conclusion, and could only explain it as the natural sensitivity of the Italians to business. As for the Qi people, oh God, their set of things looks simple, but many countries, including France, can't learn and can't learn, so they can only give up.

Because, the government officials of Qi State, even if they are from high-ranking and aristocratic families, once they enter politics, they must first make achievements at the grassroots level to prove themselves, and then they can stand out in the fierce competition and step by step to the pinnacle of power. Even their future imperial successor, the crown prince, seems to need to experience a long time in various government departments in order to be familiar with the specific operation process of the government, and accumulate a lot of political experience from it.

In France, on the other hand, in addition to the officials of the church system who may have experienced this similar pattern, the children of the nobility in the country were given important positions when they came of age, even if they had no experience in it.

In the more liberal United Provinces, the bombastic parliamentarians are more likely to attract attention, and they only have to beat others in theological and commercial debates to hold the most important positions, even if they have not yet proven themselves in practice.

Perhaps, it is precisely because of this innovative and pragmatic spirit of the Qi people that they have risen rapidly in just a few decades, and then extended their influence to Europe and become an important force in shaping the situation in Europe.

After the War of the Spanish Succession, the French government ran a deficit of 2.5 billion livres, which was equivalent to 18 years of national revenue. The population of the country is trapped in extreme poverty and bankruptcy, and the mortality rate is also high. According to rough estimates, the population of France has been reduced by 1 million people due to the continuous wars. When Louis XIV died, he left a bankrupt country to his young great-grandson, Louis XV.

The regent Philip, Duke of Orleans, adopted John Law's policy of fiscal reform in order to save the country from a financial crisis. The first step of the government was to carry out currency reform, following the example of Qi Guo, prohibiting the use of gold and silver, and establishing a national bank to issue paper money, so that this kind of paper money would have the same circulation as metal money in the market.

However, this kind of banknotes, which are not issued without sufficient precious metal reserves, cannot withstand the unlimited issuance of the government after all, and bury a huge "landmine" for the entire French economy.

Sure enough, four years ago (1720), with the bursting of the Mississippi bubble, the entire French economy was in a mess, and all those over-issued banknotes were reduced to pieces of waste paper, and countless people went bankrupt.

Captain Albert was also one of the victims of the Mississippi bubble, and in the great economic crisis, he lost almost all of his possessions, from a merchant with tens of thousands of miles of fortune to a poor man in debt.

And because of this, he traveled thousands of miles across the rough Indian Ocean to Hanzhou itself, ready to purchase a shipload of high-value-added Qi industrial manufactured products, steel bars, hardware, antimalarial drugs (cinchona), tea, and fine oriental porcelain, and then shipped back to Europe to sell, trying to turn over in one fell swoop.

He had calculated in private that buying goods from Hanzhou would save forty percent of the cost than buying from those second-tier dealers in the South African territory of Qi State. Then the saved money can be used to buy more goods and maximize the profits of this ocean trade.

"Hey, who are you? …… Why are you stopping our car? "Immersed in a beautiful conjecture, the rented carriage came to a halt.

Captain Albert searched for prestige and saw several men with solemn faces reaching out to stop their carriage, wearing black shirts, straight-leg trousers, and flintlock pistols in their hands, staring at them fiercely.

The military and police detectives of the Qi country! ——

(End of chapter)