Lin Gao Qiming

Chapter 1419 Shooting Range

At dusk, the Earl walked out of the study and told the coachman to harness the car and go for a walk before dinner.He still went out in the same outfit as he had in the morning, but he added a large dark cloak with a hood.The carriage drove along the seaside boulevard into the south gate of Manila City, passed through the gate on the other side of the castle, and galloped all the way to a mixed forest of banana trees and coconut trees next to the village before stopping.Weiss stepped out of the carriage and told the carriage to wait here.He wrapped his cloak tightly around his body, hiding a dagger, binoculars, and a CZ75 pistol that he had never left for his entire mercenary career.

He walked through the grove of miscellaneous trees, and then burrowed into a dense thicket of leucaena, catalpa, and holly.From behind the shrubs, a large bamboo forest has been cut down, and only the roots of the bamboo can be seen on the ground, extending out to an open field.This must have been a wasteland once, but now many of the waist-high wild plants have been cut down and lie on a carpet of young grass and wildflowers; however, this natural carpet has obviously been damaged in many places, and many green grasses have fallen Beside the deep ruts, the crushed petals were scattered, like a rug ripped to reveal the underpinnings of the twine.Apart from the cannon, Weiss couldn't think of any heavy-duty vehicles that would deliberately come to this wasteland to repeatedly crush them.

These ruts overlapped and criss-crossed, stretching out to become a temporary sidewalk, behind which the yellow-roofed and green-walled barracks he had seen earlier on the avenue stood.Bamboo fences, topped with a thick layer of straw and banana leaves, these barracks are as simple as the farmhouses in the nearby villages, only bigger, and are incomparable with the solid stone barracks in the San Diego Fortress. It was obviously built hastily.

It was time for dinner, and the open space around the barracks was as noisy as a beehive.Little East Indian soldiers, in shirts and baggy trousers, were all barefoot—there were not enough shoes for soldiers in the colony.Soup and stews like taro are served from wooden barrels, and they are eaten sitting or standing on the grass or by the sidewalk.Weiss adjusted the focus of the telescope and slowly moved to observe. There were several spears standing against the wall outside the gate, but he did not see the cannon or other firearms he expected.Beside the path, two Spanish sergeants in flashy clothes stood drinking.A group of Tagalog children were also playing on the playground, circling around the soldiers and the barracks. They must have come from a nearby village, looking for leftovers.The Spanish sergeant, half drunk, kicked a child over in the mud, and wild laughter erupted all around him.

There are several low hills at the end of the playground. Through the telescope, they all appear in a strange shape, full of potholes; some of them have wooden poles, and the red cloth hanging on them has been broken into strips.One has half collapsed, sending clods and rubble flying far away.Weiss was very excited. The new artillery drill field opened outside Manila must have a great relationship with "Mr. Salamanca's new baby".The sky gradually darkened, and lights were lit inside and outside the barracks.Under the order of the sergeant, the soldiers lined up in small squares and began to train.Weiss still failed to see them pull out the cannon, he put away his binoculars, and sneaked back through the bushes.

Relying on the impression of the morning, Lando found the village next to the road, which is very close to the barracks and training ground.He crossed the muddy path between the farmhouses, escaped from the encirclement of Tagalog village women enthusiastically selling taro, bananas and home-brewed Tuba wine, waved to the two children who were playing in the mud in front of the house, and handed Give them each a small biscuit.The effect was unexpected. After receiving the biscuits, the two children disappeared in a blink of an eye. Five minutes later, he was surrounded by a dozen dirty children of different heights.Weiss questioned the children repeatedly in Spanish and his newly acquired Tagalog, and the answers satisfied him: One child, who seemed to be the oldest, said he saw Spanish soldiers firing cannons on the training ground every morning.The cannon was short and stubby, the child said, gesticulating with his muddy fingers, and "shone like a brand-new peso."

The former mercenary took out a string of "lead pieces": this is the local daily currency, but it is actually low-quality private coins such as Daming's sand shell wide pieces.It is called copper coin, which contains almost no copper. The main component is lead—the Spaniards and the Dutch appropriately call it “lead sheet”—not only is it thin and small, but also has a lot of impurities, and it will break when dropped on the ground. .

Even though it was such a bad currency, it was the most widely circulated small-value currency in Southeast Asia. Whether it was the Spaniards or the Dutch, they shipped a large amount of silver, and they completely relied on Chinese copper coins for the small-value currency in the colonies.It is rare to see silver pesos shipped from New Spain in the market. Including Europeans, this kind of inferior currency is basically used in daily consumption and circulation.

Therefore, Chinese maritime merchants transported a large number of such low-quality copper coins to various parts of Southeast Asia to make huge profits.With the coming of the trade wind season, the exchange rate of peso for "lead sheet" will fall all the way. , when Chinese sea-going ships start to leave one by one, the market for lead sheets will continue to rise again.In various European colonies in Southeast Asia, there were merchants who speculated on this currency exchange.

Facing greedy eyes, he announced that whoever can go to the training ground to pick up the copper and iron fragments left by the bombardment will get a string of "lead pieces". The second time he said this, the children were already shocked And scattered. Weiss thought the deal was a good deal, and there were a lot of shrapnel in exchange for a few hundred pennies. He had to buy another rattan basket in the village, and hired two villagers to put the broken copper and iron in the basket. Transported to the carriage.

The local servants were surprised that the earl was uncharacteristically ignoring a sumptuous dinner with roast duck and sherry tonight.Back at Marat's villa, he ordered Guimid to move a basket of dark things from the carriage to the study on the second floor, and ordered the kitchen to bring him coffee and some chicken pies.Finally, Mimi sent in a candlestick lit with 6 Australian candles as instructed.The study door slammed shut behind her, indicating that the Count did not wish to be disturbed.

Weiss put on cotton gauze gloves, lifted the sheet and covered it on the floor, spread the broken metal parts from the rattan basket on top and counted them one by one.Most of what the children picked up were authentic scrap iron, rusted horseshoes, fallen horseshoe nails, iron sheets that fell off the axles, and lead bullets from muskets. These wastes were all pushed aside.He was intrigued by a small fragment of a tube, made of brass, much like the trigger fuse on a mortar shell, but the rest was gone.The most valuable gains were concentrated in the large fragments at the bottom of the basket, from which he found it possible to assemble almost a complete cone of shells.Of all the fragments, the underside of the shell case was preserved in its entirety.Weiss leaned closer to the candle, checked it over and over again, and suddenly found that this circular metal piece the size of a pot lid was actually composed of a set of sandwich structures—a thick cast iron bullet attached to a circular plate of the same caliber made of copper, and the copper plate Underneath is a thin iron plate with a slightly smaller diameter. Under candlelight, the edge of the copper plate clearly shows the traces of rifling.The discovery of the inflatable belt structure on seventeenth-century shells came as a surprise to Weiss, who, as a former member of the U.S. Army, was no stranger to 4.2-inch chemical mortar shells of a similar design.

The rattan basket was turned upside down, and Weiss went over everything, hoping to find a complete fuse, but found nothing.He began to re-examine the broken shrapnel. The walls of the broken shrapnel were very thick, and there were many residues from the burning of black powder, but both the inner and outer surfaces were smooth, and they might have been cast and then machined with a lathe.Fragments vary in size, and overall the fragmentation rate of the projectile is not too high.A particularly large fragment caught his attention, about the size of a quarter shell and thinner than the rest of the blast.Both the arc and the bottom of the projectile had been blown off, and two grape-like projectiles stuck to the inner wall near the bottom, and Weiss pulled them off with tweezers.The projectile is iron, about the diameter of a 12-gauge shotgun round, and has a very rough surface.He approached the candlestick. The rough surface was a layer of black gooey dense substance, emitting a little pungent smell beside the candle flame, like a mixture of pitch and tar.This mixture stuck to the spherical iron bullet, or, by chance, the heat of the gunpowder did not melt it completely.He found more than 30 iron bullets from the pile of scrap iron and garbage. They were easily distinguished from the lead bullets fired by muskets. They were all the size of 12-gauge shotgun bullets, and the surface was more or less covered with black mixture.

Weiss pondered for a while, then suddenly jumped up and opened the door. "Mimi!" He yelled downstairs, and saw his intelligence officer and maid running up the stairs with her skirt in hand, "Go and prepare secret writing ink and cipher pad", he instructed softly.

"My lord, the monsoon season is over," Mimi reminded him. All the Chinese merchant ships in Manila port have returned, and there is only one unloaded Fujian ship stranded here. It will be at least five months before it returns. thing.

"I will deliver the letter to the San Bento." The San Bento is just a small caravel ship, but it has traveled between Macau and Manila many times.Not long ago, Weiss had a good talk with his Portuguese captain in the tavern, and learned that the ship was loaded with fresh sumac and Palawan bird's nest, and it would sail back in the next two days.

"Don't want to sleep tonight. As long as the report can be sent to the Macau intelligence station, neither Jiang nor God can find fault with our work."

(End of this chapter)