The Dutch robbers were knocked unconscious by two musket volleys. The huge casualties caused them to enter a state of rage and began to behave irrationally. One hundred and twenty paces away, the Dutch actually set up their bows and arrows to shoot at the riflemen on the top of the mountain. This distance is far beyond the effective range of the bow and arrow, and shooting with a gun can only be random shooting.
The archers had already loaded their ammunition, set up their stands, and started shooting towards the mountain. Pieces of fire appeared at the foot of the hill, and the crackling gunshots merged into a huge explosion. More than three hundred rounds of lead bullets flew toward the top of the mountain. These lead bullets had no accuracy and spread extremely wide after traveling nearly 200 meters. Out of more than 300 bows and arrows, only about 30 hit the soldiers of the trapping regiment.
However, these red-haired bows and arrows have a large diameter and are quite powerful. The thirty soldiers of the Trapping Regiment who were shot all had their chainmails pierced and fell down screaming. But no one died. Seeing that Hong Mao had injured his comrade, the other soldiers of the trapped regiment were furious and immediately started firing a third salvo. Before the second row of Dutch bows and arrows came to the front to shoot, the third volley from the trapped regiment swept over. Dozens of red-haired sailors were suddenly stunned, with blood blooming on their bodies. They screamed and covered their wounds with their hands, but they couldn't hold back the blood that flowed out.
Some sailors who were unwilling to fall like this clung to the shoulders of their companions, roared loudly, and finally died hanging on their companions. The five powerful crossbows in the camp also opened fire on Hong Mao. Five powerful crossbows fired long arrows, which shot into the red-haired formation like raindrops. The Dutch soldiers who were hit by long arrows had no chance of survival. The blood and flesh turned into pieces and scattered in the air. The Dutchman who was still alive in the front row seemed to have been bathed in a rain of blood, sprayed red by the blood of his shot companion beside him. Some people still had bits of meat flying out from their fellow victims, which was particularly scary.
The Dutch retreated. More than 800 people were killed at once, and more than 200 were killed. The casualties were already too high to bear, and the bows and arrows here had not yet entered the effective range. There is no way to fight this kind of battle. The leading officer yelled something, and the firecracker-like drum beat stopped. The Dutch soldiers gave up the attack on the hill and fled along the way, carrying their bows and arrows.
Fang Laosan turned to look at Guanshan and heard the commander shouting: "The whole army is pursuing you!" More than three hundred soldiers carried rifles and chased the fleeing Dutch. The camp was more than ten miles away from the bay where Hongmao parked his boat. The Hongmaos ran in a panic when they saw Master Hu Ben chasing them out. The soldiers of the Trap Regiment chased behind with loaded rifles, and when they saw the lagging Hong Mao, they shot him to death. Chasing all the way to the seaside, the trap group killed more than forty red-haired men.
The Dutch suffered heavy losses this time. You must know that even in the Liaoluo Bay naval battle that shocked the southeast a few years ago, Sloppy only cut off more than a hundred red heads. Today, the Dutch abandoned more than 300 corpses under this unknown small camp. After chasing them all the way to the seaside and within the deterrent range of the crossbows on the Dutch ship, Guan Shan stopped the pursuit. There are too many crossbows on the Dutch ship, and one attack will cause very heavy casualties.
The Dutch hurriedly crowded into the small boat, rowed away from the shore, and rowed to the big ship. They did not dare to look back and fight the soldiers of the trap group. Fang Laosan hid in the pine forest on the seaside, where he observed the nine large red-haired ships in the distance. Those nine large ships are not small. They are about the same size as the Tianjing, and two of them are bigger than the Tianjing. Those boats had a wide belly and were hung with densely packed soft sails. Each ship is equipped with many powerful crossbows, some more than a dozen, some more than twenty.
There are so many red-haired crossbows! This fleet has many more powerful crossbows than all the Khitan's machine crossbows outside the Pass. These large red-haired ships are plundering everywhere and will be the number one enemy of the city lord in exploring Taiwan. Fang Laosan was observing the ship there, and he didn't know who took the lead behind him and shouted "Wan Sheng!" Four hundred soldiers shouted in unison. Fang Laosan turned his head, looked at the excited soldiers of the trap group, raised his fist, and shouted loudly: "Wan Sheng!"
In January, Wangjiawan's shipwrights delivered another ship, expanding Yang Peng's fleet to four ships. Four ships were invested in the development of Taiwan, and another 100 soldiers and 1,400 farmers arrived in Taiwan. By mid-February, there were 3,500 troops in Taiwan.
Boss Wei heard that the city lord studied the map in Tianjing New City and called the area occupied by 3,500 people Hsinchu, Taiwan. Hsinchu, Boss Wei thinks the name sounds okay, and there are indeed a lot of bamboos nearby. Boss Wei has been cutting down isolation strips in the woods during this time. It took 400 soldiers and 800 farmers more than a month to finally cut off an isolation zone around the first planned farmland and start burning the wasteland.
On the day of the burning, Mr. Wei held up a torch and lit fires everywhere in the woods. The time of burning was chosen when it hadn't rained for several days. The woods were very dry and a large fire burned a large area. Boss Wei and his two comrades worked in groups of three. They first lit a fire deep in the woods, then retreated little by little, lighting fires in other places along the way. In the end, the fire rushed forward and almost burned the three of them, Boss Wei.
Fortunately, the isolation belt was cut out before, and the three of them escaped outside the isolation zone. The fire burned for five days, causing the temperature in the surrounding area to rise a lot. After three days of burning, Boss Wei was ordered to enter the fire area to inspect, and continued to light the areas that had not been burned by the fire until the forest of more than 100,000 acres was burned to the ground.
In the end, all the forests on the east and west sides of the camp were burned away. Standing on the hill where the camp was set up and looking over, I saw only scorched earth on both sides of the river, with nothing but black plant ash. The next step was to build irrigation canals. The irrigation canal planned by Commander Zheng is four miles long and will irrigate a large area. Such irrigation canals should be six feet above the ground at the riverside, and gradually get lower from the riverside to the distance, so that the water can flow along the irrigation canal to the distance.
Boss Wei followed the squad leader and began to dig the soil with shovels, ram the soil with stone hammers, and began to build irrigation canals. On this day, Boss Wei was shoveling the soil and suddenly said with emotion: "Yuan Jin, the burned soil is so fat!" Yuan Jin, who was in the same class as Boss Wei, shoveled into the soil and said with a smile: "That's it, this is Plant ash is the best fertilizer. I heard from the platoon leader that an ordinary paddy field in Fujian can produce two stones and five buckets of rice per acre. The fields we burned are so fertile that the harvest will be even higher!"
Boss Wei also attended night school for soldiers and can now count. He stood there and calculated, and said: "The farmers who come to Hsinchu to open up wasteland are extremely rich." Yuan Jin smiled, shoveled another shovelful of soil onto the cart, and said nothing. Boss Wei thought for a while and said, "I want to write to my young friends and ask them to sign up to come to Taiwan to open up wasteland. Although I can't be an officer to recruit them into Fanjiazhuang, coming to Hsinchu to be farmers is not much worse than being a soldier. ah!"
From January to April, Yangpeng's textile factories have been expanding production. The quality of Yang Peng's fine cloth is better than the hand-woven cloth on the market, and it is very easy to sell. However, if it was dumped into the states and counties of the Song Dynasty, it would bankrupt the housewives who spun and weaved at home, causing very serious social problems and eventually turning into political problems. Therefore, Yang Peng has never launched a large-scale textile factory.
But after the ship opened the route to Hirado, Yang Peng had the Japanese market and could dump high-quality and low-price fine cloth to the Japanese country. Of course, if the fine cloth produced by mechanization was dumped to the Japanese country, it would also cause the Japanese weavers to go bankrupt. But that was a problem for the Japanese people, and Yang Peng didn't bother to think about it. During this period of time, Yang Peng's trading fleet has been running the Taiwan route, and the cotton cloth produced by the textile factory is piled in the warehouse. Yang Peng plans to let the fleet continue to sail to Taiwan until mid-May. During the period from mid-May to the end of August on the lunar calendar, there will be typhoons along the southeast coast, so the fleet will run the Tianjing New City-Hirado route to avoid typhoons.
By the end of April, Yang Peng recruited tenant farmers and began to reclaim 200,000 acres of private land on both sides of the rivers in Qing County and Xingji County. Although the paddy fields reclaimed in Taiwan have higher yields, the construction of Tianjing New City cannot be left behind. After all, Tianjing New City is the base camp, and the large amount of farmland in the local area is conducive to local stability and prosperity. After all, Taiwan’s rice has to be transported across the sea, and no one knows whether there will be problems at sea. For example, during a typhoon, the fleet cannot run back and forth between the two places.
Since Guan Shan was not in Tianjing New City, Yang Peng asked Huang Guang to organize the reclamation of new fields. Nowadays, Yang Peng's prestige in Tianjing New City is at its peak. The guards in various places are extremely fawning over Yang Peng, and the local gentry dare not stop Yang Peng from repairing irrigation canals. With the cooperation of all parties, there are basically no obstacles to reclaiming new land. Even though Huang Guang was doing this for the first time, he was able to organize 10,000 tenant farmers to open up wasteland.
During this period of time, Yang Peng's shipbuilders continued to launch new ships. Among them, in late February, five large ships built in Dengzhou and Laizhou, Shandong Province, contacted by Gao Ligong, were launched. By the ninth day of April, another large ship was built in Wangjiawan, and Yang Peng had ten large ships.
With these ten large ships, Yang Peng could transport more than 3,000 farmers to Hsinchu in one trip. Although there were ten ships, there were not that many crossbows. The new gunsmiths in the crossbow workshop are not yet skilled, and the production capacity of the crossbow workshop is still slowly increasing. From the beginning of January to the end of April, Li Zhi's crossbow makers produced only eighty heavy crossbows in four months. Eight of Yang Peng's ten ships were equipped with strong crossbows, and two ships were without strong crossbows.
But even so, the eight gunboats are still very powerfully armed. Even the Dutch pirate fleet only had nine crossbow ships. Moreover, Yang Peng's steamship can run faster than a sailboat, and can run away when encountering a large fleet that cannot be defeated. So overall, Yang Peng's fleet is very safe. In early May, Yang Peng followed the fleet and headed for Hsinchu, a stronghold in Taiwan. Now that Hsinchu has transported 10,000 people there, it consumes Yang Peng 2,000 shi of food, a lot of money and various materials every month. Yang Peng wants to see how the construction is going.
The wind was clear and the clouds were clear along the way. Ten ships cut through the waves and took eight days to reach the sea outside Zhejiang. On this day, Yang Peng was standing on the poop of the Xinxing with a cup of Longjing tea, chatting with the fleet captain Lu Hu. "City Lord, Taiwan is so barren, why didn't City Lord wait until the construction was completed before going there?"
Yang Peng smiled and said: "The wilderness is a good place. It is precisely because of the wilderness that we can cultivate and profit. If everything was as mature as the Song Dynasty, there would be a lot of resistance to whatever we did, and our career would be Extremely difficult to carry out.”
Lu Hu nodded and said: "The city lord is not afraid of miasma and went to the wild Taiwan to inspect it in person. I admire you!" Yang Peng looked at the seagulls following the stern of the boat and said: "In the future, we will open up more places and conquer more The barbaric land. Compete with the Europeans and fill the whole world with the blood of the Han people."
The two were talking there, but suddenly they heard Abban on the mast shouting: "There is a fleet to the south!" Everyone was stunned and looked towards the south. Yang Peng raised his telescope and observed the horizon for a while, and sure enough he saw a fleet gradually emerging from the horizon. After a while, the two fleets gradually moved closer, and Yang Peng could clearly see the fleet on the opposite side. The fleet was quite large, with nine ships in total. The ships in the fleet are not small either. Each ship seems to be as big as the Nova, and the two largest ships are even larger than the Nova.
Abban on the boat shouted: "The tricolor flag! It's the red-haired pirate fleet!" Hearing Abban's words, the people on the boat became a little nervous and all looked at Yang Peng. Lu Hu said: "City Lord, eight of our ships have powerful crossbows, so they may not be able to defeat the Dutch. Our ships are fast, how about we escape around them?" Yang Peng carefully observed the Dutch fleet and said nothing. Lu Hu had no choice but to look at the Dutch fleet with his telescope, but he couldn't see anything interesting.
"City Lord, can we escape?" Yang Peng put down the telescope, shook his head and said, "Our crossbows are much more powerful than theirs. If we don't escape, we will sink them all!" Lu Hu was stunned and said: " "The city lord" Li Zhi waved his hand and said: "Send the order, the fleet will form a horizontal formation to meet the red hair who rushed up to die." Lu Hu had no choice but to shout loudly to the sailor in charge of the flag: "The fleet will form a horizontal formation to meet the enemy." ! Use the side crossbow with a grenade attached to it and aim it at Hong Mao’s ship.”
"Captain of the Formosa Combined Fleet of the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the United East India Company and Captain of the Flagship Braidan" Forreston looked at the Song fleet in the distance with a monocular telescope and said nothing. Formosa is the Dutch name for Taiwan. The Formosa Combined Fleet is a fleet based in the city of Jelanzea in southern Taiwan. This fleet has been plundering near Taiwan. Sometimes it robs merchant ships, and sometimes it rushes into the Song Dynasty to plunder, becoming a local hegemon.
Except for being repelled by Guan Shan when they landed in northwest Formosa for robbery in January, this pirate fleet has never encountered a rival enemy. Even if it was Yang Peng's ship, this fleet would dare to snatch it.
After a long time, Forreston put down the telescope and said: "It's the Song fleet again that doesn't use sails and has smoke above its head. There are more ships in the fleet than last time!" After thinking about it, Forreston smiled. He said: "The Song people have set up a horizontal formation. They want to use crossbows to deal with our fleet!" The first mate Caron beside him put down his telescope and said coldly: "These Song people don't know how to fight at sea! They are learning from us. Putting strong crossbows on the ship, they thought they could rely on the strong crossbows to decide the outcome. They didn't know how strong our ship was. Even if it was blasted by hundreds of crossbows, it would only make a few holes in the ship's board. ."
Second Officer Wu Erbao came up and said: "Captain, this is the fleet of Yang Peng, the commander-in-chief of the Song Dynasty. They have been transporting farmers to the colonies in the north of Formosa. They are full of farmers and have no sailors, so they cannot engage in battle, so We can only use strong crossbows to aim at us, hoping to determine the outcome in a crossbow battle."
First mate Caron said: "Yes! There were only farmers and no sailors on their ship. We rushed to engage the ship and captured their ship! Study why their ship does not need sails!" Forreston nodded. Although more than 300 people were killed by Guanshan during the attack on Hsinchu in January, Forreston had made great achievements in plundering in western Formosa in the past few months. The headquarters of the United East India Company in Batavia attached great importance to Forreston and added manpower to Forreston in March. The headquarters supplemented him with 300 high-morale Dutch sailors and 200 strong Javanese sailors.
Today Forreston has 1,200 sailors aboard its nine ships. If he were to engage in a battle with a Song ship carrying only farmers, Forreston believed that he would be able to defeat it. As for Yang Peng's powerful crossbow, Forreston didn't take it too seriously. Although the warships of this era were equipped with a large number of powerful crossbows, the decisive role was often in gang fighting. It is believed that the enemy's artillery can at most punch a few holes in the ships of the combined fleet before his own fleet joins the gang to fight.
"Send the order! All ships rush to the enemy fleet and fight for the boarding battle!" The orderer hung colorful order flags on the mast of the flagship and passed Forreston's order to the other eight warships through the flag language. . The nine warships were fully loaded with sails and aimed at the eight gunboats listed by Yang Peng in the front row, preparing to rush forward and fight hand-to-hand.
With the south wind, the Dutch ship sailed very fast, at least seven or eight knots. A Galen ship with eighteen guns rushed at the front, rushing directly towards Yang Peng's flagship Nova. Yang Peng's eight crossbow ships loaded their ammunition and prepared to fire. The crossbowmen used long arrows to grab a handful of grenades and fired them.
Nine Dutch sailing ships rushed over in a line, with the distance between each ship being no more than a hundred meters. The Galen ship at the front was three miles, two miles, and one mile away from the Nova. Yang Peng's Nova opened fire.
The crossbow commanders adjusted their muzzles to aim at the overcoming Galen ship, pulled the lead of the grenade, and flew the opponent's ship with the grenade. The nine powerful crossbows on the port side of the Tianjing fired one after another from front to back. Black smoke immediately exploded on the port side of the ship, like black flowers. The whole ship shook once and again, pressing to the right again and again, creating a row of waves on the sea.
Not only did the Tianjing open fire, but the three ships next to the Tianjing also opened fire at the same time. The roar of artillery fire was deafening. Thirty-six long arrows carrying grenades roared towards the Dutch Galen ship. Two long arrows hit the Galen ship and smashed into the bow of the Galen ship. Two long arrows were fired into the bow of the ship. One was fired into the third deck, crashed through the two inner partitions of the ship and came to a stop. The other was fired into the second crossbow deck and hit a twenty-meter machine. The crossbow stopped.
The Dutch people are very emotionally stable. After all, these Dutch people have never seen Yang Peng's grenades. According to the power of solid bullets in this era, even if it is hit by more than a dozen cannonballs, the Galen ship will still sprint without any loss of speed. At most, a few sailors would be killed by the iron cannonballs that rushed into the ship. Or maybe the flying wood pieces brought out when the cannonball smashed through the ship's plank stabbed several sailors to death.
But the development of things shocked the Dutch people. After being blocked by obstacles, two long arrows exploded in the middle of Galen's ship. Huge shock waves burst out on the second and third decks of the ship respectively. The third deck was okay, it was the sailors' rest area, and there was no one there at this time. What fell on the second deck set off an iron-blooded storm. Countless iron pellets burst out from the shells and shot into the bodies of dozens of gunners operating the artillery on the deck, killing them in an instant.
Not only that, the shock wave caused by the explosion of the shell shattered the hull and deck. From the perspective of the Tianjing's crossbowman, the shell blew up the Galen ship's hull with wood chips flying, like two flowers blooming, and blasted two three- or four-foot-large holes in the hull. Before the Dutch could react, the remaining four ships opened fire, and a second wave of thirty-six long arrows and grenades were fired at the Galen ship.
This time three shells hit their target and penetrated the hull. A horrific explosion erupted in the hull of the ship again. Sparks and iron pellets were like a storm, sweeping across the cabin, blowing up the second and third decks and killing no one knew how many people there were. One of the last shells to explode rolled into the lower deck along the large hole in the deck exploded in front, and exploded the bottom of the ship with a bang.
The seawater gushes out from the bottom of the ship like a fountain, quickly swallowing the entire Galen ship. The sailors and sailors on Galen's ship panicked. If the bottom of the ship leaked, the ship would sink. They were all standing on the top deck preparing for a broadside battle. At this time, they dropped their weapons one by one and rushed to the bottom deck, using wooden planks to block the gushing water.
On the Dutch flagship, Captain Foreston looked at the Galen ship at the front in surprise, his mouth wide open and speechless. After a long time, he stammered: "Oh my God, will the long arrows of the Song Dynasty explode?" The first mate Caron turned pale and murmured: "My Lord, I have never seen such long arrows. ."
Second Officer Wu Erbao had lost the confidence to continue fighting and said: "Captain, the Song people's long arrows will explode, and our ship will be sunk by the shells if it rushes up like this!" Forreston said sarcastically: "Then what? I can't even shoot a crossbow with a machine gun, so they have to escape?"
"But Yang Peng's boat is faster than ours." Forreston felt a little weak, holding on to the side of the boat, his face getting paler. On the Galen ship at the front, dozens of sailors worked desperately to plug the water with wooden boards and seal the hole with nails. It took several minutes to finally seal the big hole in the bottom of the ship. But the bad luck has just begun. The Tianjing led eight gunboats and quickly turned around using paddle wheels and stern rudders, and headed north. The surging power brought by the steam engine acted on the paddle wheels, allowing the eight ships to drive faster than the Dutch with the wind. The eight ships opened some distance, turned around, and opened fire on the Dutch with their starboard crossbows.
If you want to know what happens next, let’s look at the breakdown in the next chapter.
