Chapter 235: All the Talented Arrive (8)

The pirates were confined in the camp for three days, after which all personnel not considered "immediate combat power" were singled out.

The selection process was simple: first, a naked-eye assessment — any graying-haired, middle-aged or elderly underworld types whose facial wrinkles could trip a fly were pulled out first. The remaining then underwent individual interviews. Those who could clearly state their own age, including some who slipped through the cracks but whose teeth betrayed their years, were also all picked out.

These old men and the half-grown youths who passed the interviews were eventually returned their personal belongings. Each also received ten taels of severance silver from Du Dewei before being packed onto ships and sent off to Dayuan.

... Standing on the ship that had once been his flagship, Du Dewei watched all these old brothers being herded into a brand-new fortune ship and couldn't help but let out a long sigh.

"What, can't bear to part with them?" Beside him, arms folded across his chest, the giant-like Sha Zhengming had originally come to inspect the pirate vessels. Seeing his new subordinate sighing there, he let out a scoff.

"I wouldn't dare, sir." After observing the situation over these past few days, Du Dewei was no longer completely in the dark. He now had a rather profound impression of the so-called Dayuan Gang: boilers, propellers, heavy machine guns, Type 38 rifles...

These Dayuan "superiors," who had surrendered to the court and thrown in their lot with Governor Xiong before him, not only possessed many inconceivable weapons but were also a group of immense wealth and power, with elite troops under their command — not the sort of ordinary, silver-starved government soldiers. Thus, Du Dewei, a mere piddling official awaiting appointment, now grew increasingly deferential. He had already begun to vaguely sense that his new superiors, with their formidable strength, were figures destined for some great undertaking.

"Heh, I'm afraid you don't know the benefits of going to Dayuan." At this, Sha Zhengming pointed at the two trusted confidants standing behind Du Dewei. "These two will accompany the ship; consider it a publicly funded wind-observation tour. When they return in a few days, they can preach and explain to everyone, so the new brothers will know what kind of paradise on earth Dayuan truly is."

And so Du Dewei had no choice but to awkwardly dispatch two of his men to board the ship for their publicly funded excursion. Truth be told, however, he himself was now equally full of curiosity about Dayuan. So despite the unpleasant look on his face, Du complied swiftly and without fuss.

After sending off the old men, the apprentices, and the handful of pirates with trade skills, the total strength of Du Dewei's gang, originally over 1,100, plummeted to 700.

Life in the barracks was grueling every day, especially during this current recruit phase: bathing on schedule, eating on schedule, reciting military law, listening to instructors' lectures... In short, it was all indoor coursework, the hardest thing for these habitually undisciplined pirates to endure. Going outside to practice goose-stepping wasn't even an option. So these past few days, the camp barracks were filled everywhere with the agonized cries of men being beaten by military disciplinarians with whips and clubs.

In fact, once they truly endured this phase, they would very quickly discover the benefits of Mawei Barracks.

The three meals here were decent, and the portions were large and filling. Every month, each man received three taels of silver in pay, on time. The environment was clean and hygienic. All the men's major wounds, parasites, and skin diseases were cured by doctors using miraculous suturing methods and certain pills.

Furthermore, while the instructors beat and cursed men, they never insulted them, nor did they employ the corporal punishments common in medieval armies, like the arrow-through-the-ear parade. Even the beatings and scoldings were strictly about the matter at hand — at most, a few whacks on the backside or a stint in solitary confinement. On the contrary, they showed considerable concern for the newcomers' daily lives.

The pirates were human too, and most came from impoverished backgrounds, driven to desperation. So after a few days in the barracks, combining their daily experiences with the instructors' lectures, many could still feel the goodwill here.

Of course, regardless of their state of mind, this "eagle-taming" phase was one they absolutely had to pass through. These men were different from the mud-legged recruits in Dayuan; they did not lack combat ability. What they lacked was discipline, confidence, and a mindset of respecting rules.

After all the men Du Dewei had brought were locked into the barracks, the next step was clearing out the ships. The eighteen pirate ships contained some rice and salt, along with some stolen goods and silver.

All the stolen goods, after being registered, were transported to the Haedong Trading Company. Du Dewei then received a sum of silver paid to him based on the market price of the stolen goods.

This silver, together with the wealth he had accumulated over the years, became the severance pay for the old hands. Naturally, after dismissing his men, Du Dewei still had a fair amount left. But he had no expectation that this wealth would remain in his own hands: an official surrendering to the court who didn't hand over all his savings to his superiors and still hoped to gain a foothold in officialdom? Wouldn't that be the fighter jet of fools?

Du Dewei possessed this awareness.

However, when he carried the silver to his superiors, he was met with immediate ridicule. Sha Zhengming's attitude was one of extremely harsh derision; Zhang Dongdong's attitude was slightly better, but he still laughed at him for a while.

Fortunately, after Zhang Dongdong finished laughing, he pointed out a clear path for Du Dewei: invest and buy property. And so Du Dewei saw several exquisite pictures on an iPad.

The pictures on the iPad were day and night views of Chikan Avenue. Zhang Dongdong told this pirate leader, the first to come and surrender to the court: You are very fortunate; the policy is open to you. So hurry up and use those meager savings of yours to buy two shop fronts on Chikan Avenue, then bring your old mother and younger siblings over. In the future, being a landlord will be enough for you to live off for the rest of your life lying down. Do you know how much a single shop front on Nanjing Road... no, I mean Chikan Avenue, will be worth in the future?

Dizzy and disoriented, Du Dewei carried the silver back to his private room.

Shopkeeper Du, his life philosophy utterly overturned, ultimately decided to find an opportunity to visit Dayuan himself. This was also the fundamental reason he now smoothly sent his trusted men to tour Dayuan, going with the flow.

Although he couldn't fathom his new superiors' thinking, he was clear on one point: they bore him no ill will. After all, with his retainers already absorbed by others, he now possessed nothing except this silver. What else could anyone covet from him?

"Comrade, sailing around in ships like these — it truly must have been rough on you." After inspecting all eighteen pirate ships, Sha Zhengming sighed to Du Dewei with heartfelt sincerity.

A mere eighteen Chinese-style ships, yet there were six or seven different models: great fortune ships, second fortune ships, bird ships, Guangdong ships, patrol ships, fishing ships...

The condition of all the ships was poor; a few of the smallest fishing boats could only be described as wrecks. When Sha Zhengming boarded the main fortune ships, the chaos and filth above deck were truly an eye-opening sight: ship gear tossed carelessly on the deck, tangled with the ropes and cables underfoot, forming natural tripwires.

Crudely made, privately cast iron cannons were lashed to the bows with hemp rope and wooden chocks, gunpowder kegs left exposed to the side, as if ready at any moment to ignite and blast apart the baskets of gravel and iron shards nearby.

As for the dark, damp ship cabins reeking of stench and mildew on the pirate ships, Sha Zhengming didn't even have the desire to step down for a single glance: the rats and cockroaches roaming the deck in broad daylight had already completely killed his appetite.

"Get these ships out of here, clean them up spotless, and then come back."... Sha Zhengming, seemingly so fierce and unstoppable, was in the end utterly routed by these pirate ships. And so, Comrade Du Dewei, the newly minted Outer Garrison Commander, under these latest orders, sailed his own ships to the shipyard outside Fuzhou City.

It was only when he arrived outside Jinglou Gate that he learned the Qingshi Great Pier, its seams caulked with cement that he had seen that day, was also a property of the Transmigrator Group. And beside the pier was a shipyard the transmigrators had acquired by scattering silver.

The shipyard was formed by merging three shipyards along the river, situated right next to the government-run Minjiang Chuanchang. The original private owners and shipwrights had now become foremen and employees of the Transmigrator Group. These local Fuzhou shipwrights, under the direction of a batch of core personnel transferred from Taijiang Shipyard, were currently building transport ships of the transmigrators' latest design.

A not-too-tall transmigrator, wearing a false hairpiece, received Du Dewei.

This man was called Zhao Ning, one of the chief engineers from Taijiang Shipyard, now transferred to Fuzhou to oversee the shipyard's operations.

After directing Du Dewei to dock the largest and best fortune ship of the pirate fleet at the pier, Zhao Ning first went aboard for an inspection, then shook his head and said to a foreman beside him, "No value. Cure it, then load cargo."

What Zhao Ning meant by "no value" here was not that this 700-liao great fortune ship had no use value, but that it had no combat value.

In the Crossing Faction's planning, the future main armed transport ships for the faction's operations in the chaotic wind belts along the mainland coast — apart from those soft-sailed, streamlined main battleships — were to be dual-purpose passenger-cargo vessels built to a uniform standard, similar to the "old junk ships" of the late Qing Dynasty.

"Old junk ships" had actually appeared as early as the 16th century, after the Portuguese came to East Asia.

At that time, after adapting to the chaotic wind conditions here, the Portuguese quickly combined Chinese-style hard sails with the slender Western hull form, inventing this new hybrid ship type.

This ship type initially went unnoticed, but was later gradually developed and popularized during the Qing Dynasty, eventually spawning the similarly bloodlined "red single ships" in the south. The Chinese widely used these ships for coastal trade. Due to their superior seaworthiness, this ship type had already supplanted traditional Guangdong ships and fortune ships, becoming the main transport vessel.

By the late Qing Dynasty, this hybrid ship type had unified all under heaven. It was the mainstay in the great battles between the Qing government and the Taiping army. Moreover, the Arrow, the ship that triggered the Second Opium War, was an old junk ship.

In the transmigrators' planning, the future standard armed transport ship of their faction would be a new ship type based on this hybrid vessel as a prototype, with its lines readjusted by a ship designer from later generations.

Thus, the great fortune ship Du Dewei had sailed here, since neither its hull type nor tonnage could be modified, could henceforth only be used as a short-haul transport on low-risk routes.

And even so, this ship's service life would not be too long: for a certain faction that demanded standardization in everything, all these miscellaneous ships that did not meet assembly-line standards would eventually be sold off to Ming Dynasty buyers.

And so, the great fortune ship that had accompanied Du Dewei for many a year was very quickly "cured" by the shipyard workers.

... The so-called curing meant sealing the entire ship completely with large quantities of calcium oxide, not missing a single corner. After a period of time, once the rats, cockroaches, and all manner of bacteria were dead and gone, the ship would be unsealed, then loaded full of cargo to run short-haul routes between Dayuan and Fuzhou.