Chapter 267: Alonso

In theory, the estuary of any great river is bound to be a resource-rich fishing ground — the Zhoushan Archipelago is an obvious example.

But that rule doesn't apply in the 17th century. For a motor sailboat equipped with sonar fish finders, the entire strait is a fishing ground.

You just need to follow the "Black Tide" — the Japan-Philippines Warm Current — in a loop around Taiwan Island. In truth, you don't have to go far at all before the 85-ton cold storage hold is stuffed full of fat fish.

After drilling the trawl net operation, the two boats hurried back to port. As for the more complex and dangerous two-boat trawling mode, that was still beyond them for now — the shareholders would have to figure it out on their own later.

The return voyage was relatively relaxed. After finishing up on deck, Yu Chengde hurried down to the cabin to cram another round of instrument operation. The results were poor, however: getting an illiterate old fisherman to understand all kinds of electronic instruments takes time and patience.

Facing the evening sunset, and communicating via the internal speakers, the helmsman and the engineer worked in tacit understanding and easily docked the Fathead Fish at Chikan's fish wharf.

The next moment, a scene brimming with rich capitalist flavor unfolded: the captain, engineer, crane operator, and other technical personnel — like those badass American workers who drop their work and walk off the moment their shift ends — came off the boat laughing and headed straight for Chikan Avenue without looking back, discussing which restaurant to hit for a good meal.

Meanwhile, the theoretical owners / bosses / capitalists — Yu Chengde and his group — began their grueling labor.

They put on thick linen work clothes, led their sons and nephews to open the cold hold, and with hands clad in woolen gloves, began lifting 85 tons of chilled fresh fish into the hoist basket, bit by bit. After that, the crane would transfer the fish onto the iron-rail carts on the wharf, and then the bosses still had to push the carts into the large cold storage warehouse, wait for the inspector to weigh, accept, and sign off on the goods, and only then head to the finance office to collect their currency against the paperwork.

While the employees were finishing a venison feast, drunkenly hitting the sauna, and heading home to sleep with their wives, the bosses were still burning the midnight oil: 85 tons of iced fresh fish isn't something you can clear away so easily.

The above procedure, for twenty-some able-bodied laborers, usually required working under the wharf's bright lights all the way until midnight to finish.

They had no choice but to work themselves to the bone: every second they dragged their feet, the boat's coal-gas refrigeration system ran one second longer, and fuel and various consumable costs increased. Being a capitalist wasn't so easy after all.

Poor Yu Chengde — he only now realized that when the age-old dream of "inexhaustible fish catches" actually came true, it wasn't as wonderful as he had imagined.

After toiling for half the night, the exhausted people hurriedly took the night bus home to sleep. It wasn't until the next afternoon that the shareholders returned to the boat and began settling accounts.

They didn't know until they calculated, and once they did, it gave them a shock: after deducting all personnel expenses, fuel and consumables, vessel depreciation, taxes and fees, maintenance costs, and wharf fees, the net profit from this trip was only 180 taels of silver.

Eighty-five tons of high-quality fish — even the cold storage inspector would admit that — and in the end, it only earned this much silver. Keep in mind, in later generations, a single train car's load capacity was only 60 tons.

Where did the problem lie? Personnel expenses.

Over 200 taels of silver had been siphoned off by the Port Authority for nothing: the "Technical Extraction Fee."

This fee was bundled with the technical personnel like the engineer. For every extra month Yu Chengde and the others hired an engineer, they had to pay the authorities an extra sum of silver: the so-called Fuel Surcharge Wharf Construction Tax, which was the Technician Surcharge.

After settling the accounts, the simple, honest fishermen were ready to rise up and overthrow the villainous Port Authority.

But rebellion, too, had to follow basic law. This fee item had existed in the contract from the very beginning. The Port Authority's intent was very clear: to force the boat owners to master the skills quickly so they could return the personnel to them.

So in the end, the dejected men could only curse bitterly — "Let those bastards gloat a few days longer" — and accept the loss.

In fact, all of the boat owners' reactions were within the Port Authority's expectations: can a borrower ever outplay the bank?

In the mastermind's planning, based on a baseline net profit of 400 taels of silver per voyage, Yu Chengde and his group could repay roughly 1,000 taels of their loan each month — each fishing trip plus rest and reorganization took about ten days.

This way, if they could operate the boat independently, they'd pay off the loan in just one year; a bit slower, and it'd be done in about a year and a half.

By that point, the shareholders could save up silver and split off on their own: after another year or so, half of them would have scraped together enough capital to buy a new boat.

So, if everything went smoothly, Yu Chengde would spend three or four years in total to gain full ownership of the Fathead Fish — that was the path the designer had laid out. The newborn infant capitalists still needed to stumble along for a stretch before they could gradually grow strong.

After venting their grievances, the shareholders got to work: today, the boat had to be taken to the shipyard for inspection and to replenish consumables.

While the boat was docked at the shipyard, the honest man Yu Chengde led the crew to haul fuel. What fuel? The Green Fish.

Aside from a bit of emergency coal, the motor sailboat's daily fuel was all wood. So, people do change: the wreck of the Green Fish, theoretically already purchased by the Port Authority, had recently become a source of sentimental attachment that an old fisherman couldn't stop thinking about. Anyway, the scrapyard had plenty of derelict boats, and no one cared if you took a little advantage of public property.

Under the banner of visiting his old partner, a certain Yu openly hauled his old partner's remains onto the new boat, then proceeded to chop the old partner into kindling, making it more convenient to use on the next voyage — after so many days, the old partner had been thoroughly dried by the sun and was just right for use.

From this one point, you could see that even an infant-form capitalist was still a capitalist, and blood still dripped from his every pore.

A poor, honest fisherman who had traveled a thousand miles to Dayuan to join the short-haired rebels had so rapidly degenerated into a deadbeat. Truly, every first pot of gold comes with original sin.

Moonlight washed over everything like scattered silver, spilling across the sea outside Dayuan Port. As gusts of sea wind blew past, the silver-scale-like waves rose and fell restlessly, and at the same time, the sailing ships floating on the sea drifted with the current.

"Oh, God, is that the legendary 'Light City'? This is truly astonishing." Alonso de Rojas Vargas stood at the bow, peering through a monocular telescope at the brilliantly lit castle in the distance, exclaiming in surprise.

Alonso was a big-bearded Portuguese nobleman. His ancestor was the famous Knight Alonso de Rojas, who had followed the King of Aragon in the 13th century to attack the heretics entrenched in Valencia. Thus, in Alonso's long string of hidden given names, "Rojas" — that glorious noble surname — was the most important part.

As a senior Councilor of the Macau City Council, Alonso had been formally entrusted by the Council to come to Dayuan and establish diplomatic relations with its master.

And at this moment, Alonso was standing on the armed sailing ship Cascaes at midnight, gazing at the Imperial City on Dayuan Island.

The Cascaes had departed from Macau a week ago. Following the guide's plan, the ship first rode the south wind north to Xiamen, then crossed the strait from Xiamen Port, trailing behind several junks.

Thanks to the lighthouses along the way, the fleet encountered little trouble, and the Cascaes arrived smoothly at Dayuan on a midnight at the end of September.

Under normal circumstances, when a ship approaches coastal waters in the dark, it cannot move easily: no one knows whether reefs or hidden shoals lie ahead.

But because of that castle emitting bright flames, the several junks leading the way quickly calculated their position by referencing the castle and the lighthouse at the mouth of the Dayuan Channel. And so, those junks charged headlong into the Dayuan Channel in the darkness and sailed off without a trace.

They left the large, cumbersome Cascaes, unfamiliar with the route, blowing in the wind outside the channel mouth.

Fortunately, even in the dark of night, it wasn't lonely here. A traffic command boat, painted entirely bright red and emitting a brilliant beam of light, soon approached.

The light beam began sweeping wildly over the Cascaes from a great distance, the intense glare making the sailors whose eyes were stabbed cry out in alarm. The ironic part was this: no one shouted words like "heretic" or "devil." After all, white light appearing in the boundless dark of night matched the descriptions of various holy scenes in the Bible.

The next moment, a loud human voice boomed from the command boat.

Since the Portuguese had set out from Macau, the ship naturally wasn't lacking a Chinese translator. After the translator shouted back a reply, instructions quickly came from the command boat: wait in place, and enter the port tomorrow morning.

The Cascaes, with a displacement of 300 tons, was quite clumsy in this situation. Rather than risk entering the port under light guidance, it was better to wait until the next morning — one night's delay made little difference anyway.

Early the next morning, a short-haired pilot boarded the Cascaes' gangway. Councilor Alonso, despite having already gathered a great deal of information from merchants beforehand, was still dazzled during the entry into port.

What followed was a complex docking procedure. The Cascaes first moored at the Beixianwei Island wharf, right next to the channel exit.

All short-term foreign visitors would stay on Beixianwei Island, which greatly reduced the health department's epidemic prevention burden. Most of the Cascaes' crew disembarked here, and they would quickly grow fond of the place — the Pirate Bar's rum, sound-system stage, and pole dancers were already famous far and wide among East Asian sailors.

After this, the Cascaes was towed by the command boat to the Chikan Wharf area on the other side of the Taijiang to unload cargo.

Since trade between Macau and Dayuan wasn't complementary, the Portuguese had gone to considerable trouble to assemble a cargo for this diplomatic mission.

Fortunately, Macau sat right at the throat of the Pearl River Delta. As long as you had silver coins, it wasn't hard to temporarily procure some "bulk goods." So when Special Envoy Alonso set out, the Cascaes had been loaded, on the merchants' advice, with rice, buffalo hides, crude iron stock, and coal — goods said to be relatively popular in Dayuan.

Of course, the Cascaes also carried no small amount of silver coins, the kind used by merchant ships of all nations to cover their trade deficits when dealing with Dayuan.