Late Ming sea owl

Chapter 261: Naval Guns Landing
"It's almost out, guys, hurry up!"

In the dead of winter, several shirtless gunners were pushing hard on a gun carriage that had accidentally fallen into a mud pit. Beads of sweat the size of beans fell from their dark faces and dripped into the mud pit.

The gun carriage was carrying a 23-jin cannon that had just been lifted ashore from the gun deck of the Bowang this morning. It was a bronze-cast Kofilin long cannon with a caliber of about 2.5 and a weight of more than jin, which is about tons in later measurement.

In order to transport heavy naval guns on land, Lin Hai had specially arranged for the Construction Department to manufacture a gun carriage. This gun carriage is divided into a front car and a gun carriage, and the two parts are softly connected. When transporting, they are connected together. After entering the position, the front car is separated and only the gun carriage is used.

The reason for having a front vehicle is that it is difficult for a single gun mount to take into account the requirements of both shooting and moving conditions.

When shooting, the gun carriage is preferably two-wheeled, with a tail support on the ground at the back, which forms a stable triangular support with the two wheels, which helps to reduce the recoil. However, this structure is not well balanced when walking, so a front car is added to form a soft-connected four-wheeled vehicle.

The gun carriage is connected to the front vehicle by putting the iron ring on the tail support on the rear of the front vehicle. When moving, the muzzle faces backwards and the harness is connected to the front vehicle. At the same time, the front vehicle can also be loaded with ammunition, and people can sit on it when the road conditions are good.

This type of Western-style artillery carriage was rarely used in the late Ming Dynasty, but it was introduced in several major books on Western artillery, so He Liangtao was not unfamiliar with it.

Compared with Eastern artillery carriages, another notable feature of Western artillery carriages is that their wheels are very large, which is beneficial for their passability during travel.

The 2.5-jin cannon weighs 4 tons, and the total weight of the cannon carriage is over tons. Lin Hai asked County Magistrate Cao to requisition more than buffaloes in Tongan as draft animals, with ten buffaloes allocated to each of the cannons, and the rest as backup.

In the Ming Dynasty, there were no heavy draft horses, so the water buffalo was the strongest draft animal, and it was also very obedient, with no other problems except being slow. Fortunately, the only purpose of Huiyou Company's naval guns landing was to attack the city, so the requirements for mobility were not high.

In addition to the two five-man artillery crews, Lin Hai also assigned a team of auxiliary soldiers to assist in transportation for each 15-jin cannon, which means that there were twenty-two people for each cannon, plus ten buffaloes.

Some of the auxiliary soldiers and gunners pushed the four-foot-high wheels at the back, some pulled the ropes at the front, and some were further ahead whipping the buffaloes pulling the cart. After a lot of effort, they finally got the artillery cart out of the mud pit.

"It's a good thing it's winter. If it was spring or summer with muddy roads, who knows how much more difficult it would be to get here."

"Hey, stop talking and hurry up. The order from above is to transport the artillery before dark, and our team is already behind."

Everyone was talking at once as they walked, and unexpectedly they soon caught up with the main force because all the 19 artillery vehicles in front had stopped.

"What happened? Why did it stop?"

"The bend ahead is too sharp. They said they wanted to change the harness."

When these gun carriages were tied to the frame, the animals pulling them did not walk side by side as was traditionally done, but instead walked in multiple rows front and back, with two buffaloes in each row, for a total of five rows.

The way draft animals walk in multiple rows is quite common in Europe, but it is almost never seen in the East, and naturally there are no matching harnesses for this.

This is because the ancient European method of tying up a harness had long lagged behind that of the East. The original neck-harnessing method was used until the 8th century AD. This method of tying up a harness would compress the animal's trachea, making it difficult for it to exert force.

The European solution was to increase the number of draft animals. It was not uncommon to have 32 or even 48 horses in a harness. This forced them to adopt the multi-row walking method.

However, ancient China was very advanced in terms of tying methods. The chest-tie method was invented in the Western Zhou Dynasty and was perfected by the end of the Warring States Period, which was two thousand years earlier than Europe. At the same time that Europe began to adopt the chest-tie method, China in the Tang Dynasty began to evolve towards the final saddle-type tying method, and it was not until five hundred years later in the 13th century that Europe caught up.

The reason why Huiyou Company had to adopt the method of moving animals in multiple rows forward and backward was mainly due to the limitation of the width of the trench. This was necessary to propel a 15-jin cannon through a trench about ten feet wide.

This method also has disadvantages, that is, the length of the entire walking system becomes very long and the turning radius is relatively large. Fortunately, the traffic network of the Z-shaped trench is relatively regular, and as long as the route is designed well, you can only turn at obtuse angles.

But at this sharp turn, the buffalo-drawn carts of Wupai River could not pass no matter what, so everyone had to change the harness and go back to the traditional side-by-side walking mode.

Similar unexpected problems occurred one after another along the way. The auxiliary soldiers in charge of transporting the artillery were miserable. It was already late at night when the twenty cannons were finally transported.

It was only a short distance of seven or eight miles, but the artillery carriage took more than a whole day to travel...

Lin Hai, who had been waiting for the artillery vehicle to arrive, had already sent people to investigate the situation, so he did not punish the auxiliary soldiers. This matter could only be blamed on his underestimation of the difficulty of transporting heavy artillery on land - if he had known this, he should have started the shipment yesterday.

In fact, he should have thought that during the wars between the Ming and Qing dynasties, there was often a situation where people had to wait for the red cannon to arrive, and sometimes it even took a month or two.

After this incident, Lin Hai realized a truth more deeply: for the army's field artillery, it is nonsense to talk about performance without considering the weight. After all, only the artillery that can be pulled to the battlefield in time is a good artillery.

Another feeling is that artillery carriages also need to be continuously improved. Lin Hai knows that the artillery carriages in Europe in the 18th century also reduced a lot of weight, but he doesn't know how they reduced it. This can only rely on the wisdom of the Construction Department.

At this time, the second parallel trench had been dug halfway, and Lin Hai quickly ordered the 15-jin cannon to enter the trench. For this purpose, two gentle slopes were specially built at both ends of the first parallel trench.

It was also a hassle to get the heavy artillery downhill. It required more than a dozen people to hold it with ropes and slowly lower it down...

"Commander, we have gone to so much trouble to transport these heavy artillery here. Can they destroy the city wall on the opposite side?" Wu Guoyi had limited knowledge of the power of the navy's heavy naval guns, and could not help asking at this time.

"Let's give it a try. I think it should be fine." Lin Hai was quite confident about this.

He remembered that in the Second Battle of Guangzhou in the fourth year of the Yongli reign, Shang Kexi of the Qing army used more than 70 red-haired cannons to blow down the city walls of Guangzhou. The bombardment lasted less than two days, but the length of the collapsed city wall was thirty meters.

Lin Hai specifically read the local chronicles of Guangdong and learned that the city of Guangzhou was 28 feet high, 20 feet wide at the top and 35 feet wide at the bottom, and the city wall was thicker than that of Xiamen.

Although Shang Kexi's troops deployed more artillery pieces, the power of most of them was probably not as good as the 23-caliber 18-pounder gun.

Moreover, Shang Kexi did not know the Vauban siege method, so it was impossible for him to push these red cannons to a close distance from the city wall. After all, there were quite a few artillery pieces for the defense of Guangzhou City, and the Qing army alone captured more than 500 pieces after the war.

Since the city walls of Guangzhou could be blown down, why would Xiamen be able to survive?

(End of this chapter)