Chapter 8: The Treasure Ship

While Lin Qian was wondering where he could get a clock, the sound of hoofbeats came from afar, interrupting his thoughts.

Lin Qian followed the sound and saw three riders entering through the city gate.

The one in the middle was the Governor-General's daughter he had seen that morning, Miss Catalina.

The Spaniards around all retreated to the roadside, doffing their hats in salute.

Having suffered a loss that morning, Lin Qian followed the Spaniards' example, stepping to the roadside and bowing his head in greeting.

The hoofbeats drew near and stopped.

"Raise your head." Catalina said coldly.

"Miss Catalina asks you to raise your head," the mounted guard beside her translated in Chinese.

Lin Qian raised his head as instructed, meeting Catalina's gaze directly.

Unlike the golden-haired, blue-eyed Europeans, Catalina had the typical Spanish look—wheat-colored skin, voluminous black wavy hair, deep and captivating eyes—bearing a striking resemblance to Catherine Zeta-Jones in Latin American films.

"Yellow monkey, I think I saw you during the day. What are you doing in the walled city?" Catalina demanded, the guard translating loudly.

"I've come to embrace the bosom of the Lord." Lin Qian showed the cross on his chest, doing his best to avoid trouble.

After hearing the guard's translation, a sneer curled at the corner of Catalina's lips: "Stolen off some poor priest, I suppose? You yellow monkeys are all shameless thieves. Guard, arrest him."

The guard looked troubled and said quietly in Spanish: "Miss Catalina, we have no jurisdiction over captains of the Great Ming. The Governor-General, he…"

"'And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.'"

This was a passage from the opening of the Bible, and one of the few lines Lin Qian remembered. Reciting it now in Spanish served to prove he had indeed converted.

Catalina looked at him for a moment, then said with feigned surprise: "Ha, a yellow monkey who believes in God."

With that, she spurred her horse toward the Governor-General's residence: "Next time I see you, you won't be so lucky."

Lin Qian maintained a friendly smile throughout, watching Catalina's figure disappear at the end of the street.

On the way back to the docks, Lin Qian asked: "Bailangzai, what do you make of that woman?"

"That Miss Kai from the official's household? She seems reasonably reasonable…"

In this era, officials bullying commoners was commonplace. Someone like Catalina, who would let a person off after hearing their explanation, was already rare in Bailangzai's eyes.

Lin Qian: "That's not what I'm asking. I mean, since she's the daughter of the Spanish Governor-General, why does she only have two guards? It might be fine in the walled city, but wouldn't it be too dangerous going to the Parian market?"

"Spanish?"

"The people you call Franks." Lin Qian explained.

From the court to the common folk, the Great Ming's understanding of Western European countries was extremely limited. They couldn't distinguish Spain from Portugal at all, calling them all Franks.

Bailangzai thought for a moment, then shook his head: "Just some foreign woman, why bother so much about her?"

"If we were to snatch this woman, would it be easy to pull off?" Lin Qian asked casually.

Bailangzai's expression shifted slightly as he analyzed: "Snatching her on the road—I could handle the guards with three more good men. But the sea is the problem. The Fran… the Spaniards' ships are fast. Even if we could get out of port, we couldn't escape."

"Not asking why I want to snatch her?"

"Sixth Brother's mind is meticulous. He wouldn't do something that's a suicide mission for no reason, so there's no need to ask." Bailangzai replied.

Lin Qian glanced at him.

Bailangzai's face was calm. He was only sixteen, wearing an icy expression all day, speaking very little, yet extremely skilled—during the ship seizure, he had killed three guards in a row.

Now it seemed his mind was no simple thing either.

"Don't worry, it was just a joke." Lin Qian tossed out a line.

The two walked back in silence, returning to the cabin before the port closed at nightfall.

Lodging in Manila wasn't cheap, so the boatmen all stayed on the ship.

Seeing Lin Qian and the other board, the boatmen all crowded around, looking at him with eager eyes.

Lei Sanxiang asked on everyone's behalf: "Brother Lin, have you found a buyer for the ship's cargo?"

"Mm, someone's coming to unload tomorrow. Then at three quarters past the hour of You, I'll pay everyone their silver."

At these words, the boatmen erupted in cheers.

Lin Qian responded with a smile, walking back to the cabin amid the boatmen's cheers. He set the things he'd bought during the day on the table, lit a candle, spread linen paper on the table, and began writing his navigation log with a quill pen.

Starting from the day he seized the ship, he recorded in detail each day's voyage, route, wind direction, weather, hydrology, and so on.

This wasn't the formalism of keeping a journal. A navigation log allowed one to estimate approximate position by recording each day's voyage, so as not to get lost at sea.

After reaching port, the entries in the navigation log could also serve as a route chart.

It could be said that every additional sentence written in the navigation log was one more measure of security for future voyages.

Lin Qian wrote in the navigation log using a mix of simplified Chinese, English, and Spanish. For certain sensitive words, he combined Latin roots with English suffixes, so that even if the log fell into someone else's hands, it would be very difficult to understand.

But the quill pen was far harder to use than a modern fountain pen, and the linen paper was rough and coarse.

Writing Latin letters was manageable, but writing Chinese characters was extremely inconvenient.

He burned through three white beeswax candles in a row, writing until the small hours of the night, before he finished filling in the log for the past half month.

Lin Qian yawned and stretched, habitually reaching for his coffee cup. His hand grasped empty air, and he couldn't help but smile bitterly.

In his previous life, he had been a fanatical coffee lover. He had coffee machines installed at home, at the office, and on the ship, with his daily caffeine intake hovering around dangerous levels.

Who would have thought that coming to the Great Ming would force him into coffee withdrawal.

Today he had wanted to buy some coffee, but upon asking around, he discovered that coffee hadn't yet been introduced to Spain. The Spaniards' favorite beverage was still hot cocoa from the Americas.

Lin Qian sighed helplessly, paced to the cabin window, opened it, and gazed out at the view of Manila.

There was no moon tonight. The harbor lay in pitch darkness, with only a few moving torches visible here and there.

The closer to the Manila galleon, the denser the torches around it.

During the hundred-plus years of Spain's dominance over the world's oceans, the Manila galleon might not have been a famous name.

But under a different name, it was absolutely thunderous—the Spanish treasure ship.

It could be said that the Manila galleon was the Spanish treasure ship cruising the Pacific.

These ships had enormous cargo capacity—of the goods carried on each voyage, silver alone came to around thirty tons, close to a million taels, nearly 10% of the Great Ming's entire tax revenue.

Every ship carried the fruits of plunder that the Spanish had wrested with all their might; if anything went wrong on the voyage, it would have a huge impact on the Spanish crown's finances, so they could hardly afford not to guard them carefully.

Lin Qian stared at the Manila galleon, lost in thought—this ship was not only of immense economic value, its firepower and protection were also pushed to the absolute limit.

In the age of sail, the larger a ship's tonnage, the more sailors it meant, the thicker the hull, the higher the bulwarks, the greater the number of cannons, and the larger their caliber.

Whether in long-range gunnery duels or boarding actions, it held an absolute advantage.

In today's world, the mainstream Western warship was the galleon—the same hull type as the Black Pearl from the Caribbean pirate stories.

And the Manila galleon's tonnage was even greater than a galleon's; by tonnage it could be called the greatest of its age, holding an advantage over any galleon warship it faced.

Against the Great Ming's antiquated antique-grade naval warships, it was an outright crushing superiority.

And this was even with the Manila galleon having sacrificed some cannon space for cargo capacity.

Lin Qian's main profession was architectural structural design—he wasn't deeply familiar with ship design, but the fundamentals of external load resistance analysis, material stress analysis, and spatial utilization analysis were all interconnected.

If Lin Qian were to refit it, with the design philosophy of pursuing ultimate firepower, he could add at least ten more cannons to the ship.

At the same time, lowering the height of the sterncastle, increasing the number of lateen sails, and enlarging the area of the aft main sail would greatly improve speed and seaworthiness.

If he invested even further, sheathing the hull bottom with copper and lead, applying a cruiser's stern design, optimizing the hull lines to reduce sailing resistance—these too could greatly increase speed.

Meanwhile, adding wrought-iron armor belts at critical points along the waterline, and employing watertight compartment design in the compartments below the waterline, would also drastically reduce the risk of being sunk.

With a no-expense-spared refit, perhaps a single ship alone could roam and dominate the Great Ming's southeastern coast...

For Lin Qian, studying different types of design schemes was both his old trade and his way of relaxing his mind.

Given that it was now roughly three in the morning, he allowed himself to relax this way for ten minutes.

Ten minutes later.

Lin Qian took several deep breaths of the fresh sea breeze to dispel his drowsiness, closed the window, sat back down at the desk, and resumed working.

He took out the sea charts and navigation logs he'd picked up during the day and studied them.

These materials were extremely crude—the positional relationships between Dongfan Island, Luzon Island, and Yuegang in Zhangzhou on the charts were completely wrong.

But they weren't entirely without value.

After all, the Southern Ocean region had numerous islands, and Lin Qian could use these charts and logs to learn about the conditions of the surrounding islands.

He kept reading straight through until dawn.

Yahei

Pink Round

Pen