Rise of the 1630s South America

Chapter 310 Difficult Construction

Liao Meng climbed down from the deck of the "Breaking Wave" with some top-heavyness. He was a landlubber, and he became very dizzy as soon as he got on board.It hasn't changed in all these years.Therefore, during this long-distance voyage, he spent most of his time lying on the wooden bed in the captain's cabin of the "Broken Wave" for self-cultivation.Now on the wharf of Xinhua Port, when he stepped on the solid land, his legs were limp and his feet were limp—this was landsickness.Fortunately, the symptoms are mild and can persist.

Seeing the soldiers under him lined up on the pier amidst the officer's command, most of them seemed to be in good spirits, Liao Meng couldn't help but wryly smiled.With the support of loyal orderlies, he was sent to a guest house in the city to rest. As for the military affairs, he was only entrusted to the deputy company commander Bai Shui to temporarily take charge.

After several months of construction, Xinhua Castle is quite different from before.Thanks to the completion and operation of a wheel kiln with a designed annual output of more than 4000 million red bricks (currently estimated to have an annual output of more than [-] million bricks), the construction of Xinhua Castle has entered a period of rapid development after the dry season.

The first is the construction of Xinhua Castle City.From the end of February, Shi Qinjie ordered the slaves of the Eight Banners to start digging and quarrying on nearby mountains.Due to the multi-karst karst terrain here, many of the large-scale rocks were excavated by using gunpowder.This kind of large stone is very suitable for building foundations or walls, and it can be used with a little grinding.Therefore, at any cost, the slaves of the Eight Banners bit the bullet and went deep into the upstream mountainous area, quarried large blocks of stone, and then used canoes to pull them along the river to the dock of the downstream wood processing factory, and then used several temporarily built Rough wagons pull the stones to the building site.

The large-scale use of these strips of stone has greatly alleviated the dilemma of insufficient bricks here, and strongly supported the construction of the site.As of the beginning of this month (October 1641), the construction length of the city wall of Xinhua Castle has exceeded 10 meters, which has reached the perimeter length of some small local castles. However, Shi Qinjie has very high requirements for Xinhua Castle. In Zhou's planning, it reached more than 650 meters, so the current city wall is actually only about half completed.

Faced with such a construction madman, Xu Gang, the chief of the garrison here and the commander of the 101st company, once told him helplessly that precious building materials should be used on the three forts at Cape Kou instead of building useless city walls.Because in Xu Gang's view, the people on the east coast only need to build the fort at the mouth of the cape, and then block the narrow waterway, so that the enemy will not be able to attack the Xinhua Fort deep inside the bay, unless they give up landing from the mouth of the bay. Instead, go around and attack from other places.But that would be even more problematic, which meant that they had to cross at least a mountain road nearly [-] kilometers long-a mountain road covered with dense tropical rainforest, which was pure death.

Therefore, in Xu Gang's view, it is completely useless to build the city wall of Xinhua Castle.The continuous mountains and dense virgin forests around Xinhua Castle are the best barriers. No one except the natives can know the roads in these dense forests.However, Shi Qinjie still insisted on building a complete city wall in Xinhuabao. The reason was that sooner or later he would go to war with the natives in the south. I heard that these natives had already established a feudal dynasty. The only place to stand is the safest to build a city wall.

But Shi Qinjie is not a person who does not understand the truth.The forts at the mouth of the Xinhua Bay are extremely important, and it is up to them to control the bay and keep the enemy out of the gate.Therefore, he also allocated three or four hundred Eight Banners slaves to him. Later, Xu Gang returned with the 101st company from the Southern Expedition, and stuffed him with more than 400 Malay slaves.A total of [-] slaves, under the command of the supervisor, began to build the fort while cutting wood and clearing the site at the three selected fort locations.

It took more than seven months, and finally more than [-] artillery positions have been built one after another. Now as long as the artillery is installed in place and the gunners are trained, New Huaxia Bay is no longer a place where people can come in and out. landed.In the future, when manpower and supplies are sufficient, the remaining artillery positions will continue to be built. At the same time, land defense fortresses, garrison barracks and navigation lighthouses will also be built one after another. In short, this is a long-term project.

Housing construction in the city has not stopped either.In addition to the warehouses, hospitals, government, health centers, weapon depots and other facilities that have been completed before, several neat rows of residential houses have also been built. There are four residential areas.Of course, these houses are far from enough for so many free residents in the city to live in.There are more than 500 freemen in the city, most of them are Irish men, plus the Malay wives assigned to them, the population exceeds 2.The current houses only meet less than one-third of the living needs, and most people can only squeeze in damp wooden houses, waiting for the monthly building material quota to go to the "lottery".Those who win the lottery will be allocated [-] yuan in bricks, and then the person in charge of each residential area will organize the people in the entire area to use their spare time to build houses for them.

The daily work of these Irishmen is also extremely onerous.These days, they are either digging ditches, laying underground drainage pipes, processing wood in wood processing factories, or building irrigation canals.Even when they were digging ditches, their newly assigned Malay wives were also responsible for picking the soil, which showed how hard the work was.

At present, the only motivation to support them is the land that the New China colonial government announced will be allocated to them.This piece of land is located near the Coconut Creek Reservoir, about 4000 acres.According to regulations, each family can be allocated ten acres, and all the residents who are allocated land will share with the government 20-[-]% of the income in the first two years, and [-]% in the next three years. After five years of continuous farming, the land will be owned by the individual. In the future, you only need to pay [-]% of the land harvest every year.

This distribution system was uniformly formulated by the Ministry of Agriculture and implemented in the mainland and all overseas colonies. Although the first five years were equivalent to exploiting a large number of farmers who were assigned to the fields, these Irish people did not think so.They are all land-lost farmers in China, and they attach great importance to the ownership of land. When they heard that they could be allocated a piece of arable land that would belong to them forever, they were all excited, and even their working efficiency suddenly improved a lot.Moreover, the superiors also told them that as long as they worked hard and earned money, they could buy an additional land of no more than [-] mu from the government at a low price of five yuan per mu.In this way, each family can own up to [-] acres of arable land, which is absolutely unimaginable in Ireland.Therefore, their support for the government at this time is absolutely from the heart. As long as someone dares to challenge the rule of the people on the east coast and challenge the desire of these Irish farmers for land, then they dare to fight these people with their lives.

The [-] mu of land was opened up in April when the rainy season just ended.At that time, Shi Qinjie organized people to light a fire on the plotted land, and directly burned all the weeds, small trees, bushes and so on on it to ashes to fertilize the field.After the burning of wasteland, they began to level the land, remove the small stones on it, dig drainage ditches, etc. After all these were done, the farmers began to plow the land and sow seeds.

The brothers of the 101st Company of the Army were very powerful. They conquered the Bezimisaraka people in the south several times and returned with great victories. Not only did they capture more than 2000 slaves, but they also brought back a large number of hump cattle for Xinhua Castle.These hump cattle played a huge role in plowing the land, and similarly, those slaves also played a huge role in building irrigation facilities.

The fields are mainly sown with sweet potato and corn seeds. Four ridges of sweet potato tubers and one ridge of corn seeds are sown per mu, and sweet potato and corn are interplanted.These two crops are deep-rooted crops, which can better absorb the fertility of the deep soil, and are very suitable for planting in areas with strong tropical leaching.Moreover, the more important thing is that these two kinds of crops are both high-yield crops. With the barren brick red soil in the New China region, if you don't grow some high-yield crops, you really can only drink the northwest wind.

In mid-April, Xinhua Castle organized these Irish farmers to sow seeds, and by the first ten days of August, they had matured and were ready to harvest.Because it was the first year of land reclamation, and the soil was relatively poor, and no chemical fertilizers or pesticides were used, the harvest in this first season was relatively poor.

On average, only 120 catties of corn and 430 catties of sweet potatoes were harvested per mu, far from the 650-700 catties per mu originally expected.However, these grains are enough for the colony of New China, which is not particularly populous today. A total of about 4000 tons of corn and 250 tons of sweet potatoes were harvested from more than 900 mu of farmland, which is almost enough food for everyone, including slaves, to eat with their stomachs open for a year.Not to mention that both light and heat conditions and water resources are abundant here, and the growth cycle of crops is extremely fast.No, the last batch of crops had just been harvested, and a new round of planting began in mid-August.These crops are expected to be harvested when the rainy season has just started in early December, and more than 8 mu of farmland will fall fallow during the rainy season after harvesting.

In these two planting seasons, more than [-] tons of corn and sweet potatoes can be harvested. Since then, Xinhua Castle can finally stop transporting grain all the way from South Africa.More importantly, the harvested grain will also lay a solid material foundation for the proper settlement of those Ming immigrants who will arrive in a few months.

(End of this chapter)