At dusk, the count came out of his study and asked the coachman to harness the carriage and go out for a walk before dinner. [Read full text] He went out still wearing the same outfit as in the morning, but 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 castle from the other side of the city gate, and galloped all the way to a forest of banana trees and coconut trees next to the village before stopping. Weiss walked out of the carriage and told the carriage to wait here. He wrapped his cloak tightly around himself, hiding a dagger, a telescope and the cz75 pistol that he had kept with him throughout his mercenary career.
He walked through the forest and struggled into a dense bush of leucaena, catalpa and holly. From behind the shrubs, a large bamboo forest has been cut down, and only the bamboo roots can be seen on the ground, extending out into an open wilderness. This must have been a wasteland before, but now many of the waist-high wild plants have been cut down and lie on a carpet of young grasses and wildflowers; however, this natural carpet has obviously been damaged in many places, and many green grasses have fallen down. Beside the deep ruts, crushed petals were scattered everywhere, like a carpet with its hair ripped off, revealing its hemp base. Except for artillery vehicles, Weiss couldn't think of any other heavily loaded vehicles that would deliberately come to this wasteland and crush them repeatedly.
These tracks overlapped and intertwined, stretching out to form a temporary road. The barracks with yellow roofs and green walls that he had seen on the road earlier stood behind the road. With bamboo fence walls and a thick layer of straw and banana leaves covering the tops, these barracks are as simple as the farmhouses in nearby villages, only larger. They are incomparable to the solid stone barracks in the Santiago Fortress. It was obviously built in a hurry.
It was dinner time, and the open space around the barracks was noisy like a beehive. The small East Indian soldiers wore shirts and fat-legged bloomers, and all of them were barefoot - there were not enough shoes for the soldiers in the colony. Soup and stews such as taro are served from wooden barrels and eaten sitting or standing on the grass or by the sidewalk. Weiss adjusted the focus of the telescope and moved it slowly to observe. There were several spears standing against the wall outside the gate, but no cannons or other firearms as he expected. Beside the path, two Spanish sergeants in colorful clothes stood drinking. A group of Tagalog children also played on the playground, surrounding the soldiers and the barracks. They must have come from a nearby village and were looking for scraps. The Spanish sergeant was half drunk and kicked a child over in the mud. A wild laughter broke out all around.
There are several low hills at the end of the playground. Through the telescope, they all show strange and lopsided shapes, surrounded by potholes; some have wooden poles inserted, and the red cloth hanging on them has been broken into strips. One of them had half collapsed, with clods of earth and rubble flying far away. Weiss was excited about the new artillery training range that had opened outside Manila. It must have something to do with "Mr. Salamanca's new baby." The sky gradually darkened, and lights were lit inside and outside the barracks. Under the command of the sergeant, the soldiers formed small square formations and began to train. Weiss never saw them pull out the cannon. He put away his binoculars and quietly got back through the bushes.
Rely on morning impressions. Lando found the village next to the road, which was very close to the barracks and training ground. He walked through the muddy path between the farmhouses, got rid of the Tagalog women who were enthusiastically selling taro, bananas and home-brewed Tuba wine. He waved to the two children who were playing in the mud in front of the house and handed them a hand. Give each of them a cookie. The effect was unexpected. After taking the cookies, the two children disappeared in the blink of an eye. five minutes later. He was surrounded by a dozen children of different heights and dirty bodies. Weiss repeatedly asked the children in Spanish and the newly learned Tagalog, and the answers satisfied him: one of the children who looked like the oldest said he saw Spanish soldiers firing cannons on the training ground every morning. The cannon was short and thick, the child pointed out with his muddy fingers, and "shined like a new peso."
The former mercenary took out a bunch of "lead pieces": this is the local daily currency, but it is actually low-quality privately minted money such as Ming Dynasty's Shake Broadcast Film. It's called Copper Coin. It actually contains almost no copper, and its main component is lead - the Spanish and Dutch aptly call it "lead sheet" - which is not only thin and small, but also has so many impurities that it will break if dropped on the ground.
Even though it is such a bad currency, it is the most widely circulated small currency in Southeast Asia. Whether it was the Spanish or the Dutch, they shipped a large amount of silver and relied entirely on Chinese copper coins for the small currency in the colonies. It is rare to see silver pesos shipped from New Spain on the market. Europeans, including Europeans, basically use this low-quality currency for daily consumption and circulation.
Therefore, Chinese maritime merchants transported large quantities of such low-quality copper coins to various parts of Southeast Asia to make huge profits. As the trade wind season is about to come, the price of peso exchange for "lead sheets" will fall all the way. When the first Chinese maritime merchant ship sails into the port, the market will even plummet, and when the trade wind season is about to end , when Chinese sea-going ships begin to leave one by one, the price of lead sheets will continue to rise. 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 after the bombardment will get a string of "lead pieces." After saying this for the second time, the children were already stunned. And scattered. Weiss felt that the deal was a good deal. 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 basket of broken copper and iron into pieces. Transported onto the carriage.
The locally hired servants were surprised that his lordship, uncharacteristically, ignored a sumptuous dinner of roast duck and sherry tonight. Returning to Marat's villa, he ordered Jimide to move a basket of dark things from the carriage into the study on the second floor, and then ordered the kitchen to bring him coffee and a few chicken pies. Finally, Mimi sent in a candlestick 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 up the sheet to cover the floor, and spread the broken metal pieces taken out of the rattan basket on it and counted them one by one. A lot of what the children picked up was pure scrap iron, rusty horseshoes, fallen horseshoe nails, iron sheets that fell off the axles, and lead bullets from muskets. These wastes were pushed aside. He was very interested in a small tubular fragment. It was made of brass and looked like the trigger tube on a mortar shell. Unfortunately, the rest of it was gone. The most valuable harvest was concentrated in the large fragments at the bottom of the basket. He found that he could almost use the fragments picked out to assemble a complete cone-shaped cannonball. Among all the fragments, the bottom surface of the shell shell was completely preserved. Weiss got closer to the candle, turned it over and over, and suddenly discovered that this round piece of metal the size of a pot lid was actually composed of a set of sandwich structures - thick cast iron bullets with round plates of the same caliber made of copper attached to the bottom. Below is a thin iron plate with a slightly smaller diameter. Under the candlelight, the edges of the copper plate clearly show the traces of rifling. The discovery of an expandable belt structure on 17th-century artillery shells really surprised Weiss. As a former member of the U.S. Army, he was familiar with 4.2-inch chemical mortar shells of similar design.
The rattan basket was turned over, and Weiss checked everything carefully, 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 adhered to many residues after being burned by black powder. However, both the inner and outer surfaces were smooth, and perhaps they had been cast and processed using a lathe. The fragments vary in size, and overall the fragmentation rate of the projectile is not too high. One particularly large fragment caught his attention, about the size of a quarter of a cannonball and thinner than other explosive shrapnel. The curved part and the bottom of the projectile had been blown away, and two grape-like projectiles were stuck to the inner wall near the bottom. Weiss used tweezers to pull them off. The projectile is made of iron, has a diameter similar to a No. 12 shotgun bullet, and has a very rough surface. He approached the candlestick. The rough surface was a dense layer of black glue-like material, which emitted a slightly pungent smell next to the candle flame, like a mixture of asphalt and tar. This mixture adhered the spherical iron bullet to the wall, or by accident, the heat of the gunpowder did not completely melt it. He found more than thirty iron bullets from the pile of scrap iron and garbage. They were easily distinguished from the lead bullets fired from muskets. They were all about the size of No. 12 shotgun bullets, with more or less black mixture sticking to their surfaces.
Weiss thought for a long time, then suddenly jumped up and opened the door. "Mimi!" he yelled downstairs, and saw his intelligence agent and maid running up the stairs holding up her skirt, "Go and prepare the cryptic ink and code book," he ordered softly.
"Sir, the monsoon season has passed," Mimi reminded him. All the Chinese merchant ships in Manila Port have returned, and only one Fujian ship with unloaded cargo is stranded here. It will be at least five months before it returns. thing.
"I will give the letter to the San Bento for delivery." The San Bento is just a small caravel ship, but it has traveled between Macau and Manila many times. Not long ago, Weiss was having a chat with its Portuguese captain in the tavern, and learned that the ship was loaded with fresh sappan wood and Palawan bird's nests, and would sail back within the next two days.
"Don't even think about sleeping tonight. As long as the report can be sent to the Macau Intelligence Station, neither Jiang nor God can criticize our work."
