The sky was gloomy, and the strong wind blew up the waves of the sea, and then it hit the breakwater built with construction waste.↖ On the breakwater that also serves as a trestle, dock workers wearing raincoats kept pulling trucks of sulfur, lead, tin, graphite and other mineral products with flatbed track trucks, and then pulled bags of tightly sealed wheat over, preparing to lift it onto the deck with pulley booms on the cargo ship.

Although even if the seal is well sealed in such strong winds and waves, some wheat will be damp, but since the customer doesn't care and insists on going out to sea in such bad weather, what can the East Coast people as the seller say? For the sake of many years of partners, the Director of the Port Authority of Luoqia Port has already fulfilled his responsibilities.

"It's the Dutch merchant ship." Everyone on the dock knew the background of the Meridian Ship, the Meridian Ship, which was from Recife. It was a medium- and large merchant ship with a load of about 300 tons. It had 21 crew members and 8 artillery pieces. It operated the business from Recife to Rochao Port for many years. People on the east coast were very familiar with it.

"I heard that the relationship between Britain and the Netherlands continues to deteriorate, and the mission sent by the Hague government in London broke down with the British in London. After the promulgation of the new "Navigation Law", the British were looking for Dutch merchant ships that did not follow the rules on the sea. Now some merchants with a strong sense of crisis have begun to prepare for the future. In fact, this is a gambling, hoarding goods in advance, and then waiting for a possible war, so that they can make a fortune. Although this is a national crisis, who cares?" The dock officials sat in the office. Through the glass window, they looked at the busy Dutch ships in the harbor. Various rumors circulating to the dock tavern and brothels were secretly echoed in their minds.

The "Female Deer" is not the only ship that came to Luoqia Port for trade. In fact, there were seven or eight Dutch merchant ships, most of which were affiliated with West India Company. These speculators had an extremely sensitive sense of smell - in fact, they always had some relatives in the political circle, and it was not difficult to inquire about some information - they had long discovered the tension between Britain and the Netherlands, and then made predictions in advance, and then began to purchase and hoard supplies.

In recent years, especially since the founding of the Republic of England, the relationship between Britain and the Netherlands has deteriorated too quickly, so fast that it is so fast that it is dazzling and stunned. Bourgeois merchants have entered the Republic of England, where government positions are important, and under the rule of the military strongman Cromwell, they have shown an increasingly tough attitude.

The Netherlands also showed unexpected hostility towards the new bourgeois country of the Republic of England. Because the commercial capitalists who held the power of the Netherlands were afraid that British merchants would compete with them, they continued to attack these English colleagues from all aspects.

Their initial hostility began at the beginning of the British Civil War, when the Netherlands unanimously decided to give full support to King Charles I of England. For this reason, the English Parliament had to send envoy Walter Strickland to the Netherlands in 1642, asking the Dutch to stop interfering in the British Civil War, but was ruthlessly rejected by the Dutch - the Dutch still sent four ships full of arms, gunpowder and mercenary ships to England to support the royal party's war.

Not only that, the Dutch also gave full protection to the British royalists, which annoyed the British bourgeois government. In particular, Cromwell, who had already begun to trial royalists on a large scale in China, was even more angry about this. He later sent envoys to the Netherlands again to expel the royalists, and later left the country alone because the British envoy was assassinated in the Netherlands. But this must have greatly deteriorated the relationship between the two sides.

If all this is not enough to make people believe that these two countries are on the brink of war, then the Navigation Ordinance passed by the British Parliament in the second half of last year (1651) had already explained everything: the British had begun to legally grant the navy the power to intercept Dutch merchant ships at any time.

The British Navy also strictly enforced this law from the beginning. They first restored and expanded the patrol scope of the English Navy - which used to be the English Channel, killed the North Sea coastal areas, and now expanded to the Baltic and Mediterranean Sea - to enhance Britain's influence; then set up a maritime court in the North American colonies to strictly supervise whether various colonies with frequent trade with the Netherlands violated the Navigation Ordinance, especially the West Indies colonies where the royalists were concentrated (mainly Barbados with a developed sugar industry) and Virginia. The British Navy confiscated several Dutch merchant ships here for excuse, further aggravated the diplomatic dispute between the two countries.

As things have developed to this day, any merchant with some knowledge may no longer have any fantasy about peace. It is time to deal with the arrival of war! Therefore, some well-informed Dutch merchants have traveled to the east coast to import various materials - especially crucial food - because even they are not sure whether peace can be maintained between the overseas colonies of Britain and the Netherlands after the war broke out.

Therefore, based on this idea, the senior management of the Dutch West India Company strengthened their vigilance. Their approach was to transform some merchant ships into warships to maintain the safety of routes in a vast area from the West Indies to the north, from the coast of West Africa, and from the south to the northeast of Brazil. As for the British North American colonies, they did not dare to go there for the time being, because there were already British naval warships appearing there; on the other hand, since warfare was judged to be imminent, it would be normal to acquiesce and even encourage the company's merchant ships to purchase and hoard a large amount of supplies. In particular, war preparation materials such as grain, gunpowder, arms, medicines, canvas, cables, tar, as well as important daily necessities such as liquor, cloth, farm tools, bean cakes, butter, are all priority purchase targets.

After all, the senior executives of the West India Company are now worried that if the British people draw the dispatched warships to the south and block the important ports under the West India Company, they may not have enough power to escort, because the company's limited resources must give priority to ensuring that Brazil's sucrose, salt, indigo, cocoa and other important materials can be safely transported to Amsterdam. The settlers of the colonial ports who have no time to take care of for the time being can only find a way for themselves.

The Dutch were in great trouble, but the East Coast people smiled inadvertently. Why? Because the grain that was harvested again this year finally had a buyer, and it seemed that the buyer had a big appetite, so he bought wheat worth 55,000 yuan in one breath. This made the national reserve grain warehouse, which was worried about increasing grain income, suddenly felt relieved. In order to deal with the accumulated more and more grain (in order to maintain farmers' enthusiasm for producing grain, the national reserve grain warehouse purchased various types of grains at a protective price every year), they were all preparing to launch a large semi-mechanized winemaking production line.

Of course, although the food crisis has been slightly alleviated, this winemaking production line is still up, because the European Arhangel Trading Station has already issued orders to the country, and the Duchy of Moscow still has a great demand for spirits. Zheng Yong and others plan to take advantage of the fact that Western spirits (brandy) have not yet invaded Moscow in large quantities, and in advance, the East Coast spirits (currently mainly produced in South Africa) were introduced, and to cultivate Russians' preference for the taste of spirits, so that they can better occupy this market in the future.

The profits of agricultural production have increased again, which is also extremely important for the East Coast Republic of China today. Because this means that the barren fields in the inland areas will once again attract a certain amount of private investment, and the income of rural farmers has also increased to a certain extent, which is also extremely critical to stabilizing the domestic situation in the East Coast. Grain exports have solved the three problems of increasing farmers' income, agricultural development and rural stability in one fell swoop. This has finally made agriculture, which has absorbed the largest number of employed people in the East Coast, and finally wiped out the decline in recent years. The income of farmers who have been stagnant for many years (relative to workers' income) is also expected to rise again.

As grain exports increase, the export of meat and seafood related to them is naturally not missing. However, in this regard, the Dutch asked the East Coast that they could deliver goods to their own door-to-door, after all, their ships were limited, and seafood and meat were not easy to preserve (even those that were pickled would still have a odor), especially when they heard that there was a magical refrigerated ship on the East Coast that could save goods at freezing point, they felt that it would be best for the East Coast people to deliver goods to their own door-to-door - of course they were willing to pay a freight of 50 guilds per ton for this.

Faced with this request from the Dutch, the Eastern Coast Republic's Government Council decided to agree to the Dutch's request after collective research, and then wrote a letter to the South China Sea Transportation Company, requiring them to use refrigerated ships to export frozen meat and frozen fish to the Netherlands. The Navy also needed to allocate a certain number of warships to escort this to avoid possible accidents in the middle of the journey. I heard that the range of activities of the British navy and privateers is getting bigger and bigger, so it is better to be careful in everything.

The increasingly tense situation between Britain and the Netherlands actually made a fortune on the east coast of the New World, which is a wonderful thing. Of course, this is also thanks to the deformed economic structure under the rule of the Dutch West India Company, that is, the tropical colonies dominated by plantations mainly use sugarcane cultivation and sugar-pressing to make sugar. As for the daily life needs of the locals, it was trafficked by the West India Company from the outside world (the advantage of doing this is to make money twice) - for example, they transport cloth and wine from the local area, food from British North America, from Curacao to salt, etc.

However, no matter what, the demand of the Dutch West India Company has begun to gradually affect the industrial and agricultural production of the East Coast Republic of China. The South China Sea Transportation Company, a large trust shipping company, has simply placed new orders for six refrigerated ships to the three major state shipyards, intending to expand the number of refrigerated ships to ten; at the same time, the Northern Arsenal and the Northern Gunpowder Factory have also begun to gradually increase their power and prepare to produce various types of arms; the Dayuhe Arsenal Comprehensive Workshop has also begun to produce a large number of labor tools and steel bars. In short, everything seems to be thriving under the stimulation of external demand. (To be continued, please search for astronomy, novels are better, updated and faster!
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