Chapter 1379: Party A, Party B (Please Subscribe)

Major General Blake was truly at a loss for words!

He was a staunch republican! To cut off the English king's head, he had taken up a musket and gone to the battlefield with his father while still in his teens... After so many years of struggle, he had finally turned the kingdom of the Stuart dynasty into the republic of the Cromwell family. And now here he was, running off to the East to conquer a realm for the son of another absolute monarch.

And what was more, he had to shoulder all the dirty work and hard labor, and in the end let a prince of the Great Ming Empire step in as a ready-made monarch!

This really had the flavor of going out to find oneself a master!

If Major General Blake wanted a monarch that badly, he had already had one more than twenty years ago — so why had he bothered with a republican revolution?

"If we can complete a preliminary exploration of the southern continent and establish colonial footholds, then why should we accept a Chinese as its monarch?" Major General Blake spoke his mind. "Why can we not turn it into a colony of the English Republic?"

No sooner had he finished speaking than he saw the two supercargoes of the East India Company begin shaking their heads at the same time.

"What? Am I wrong?" Blake asked.

"General," said Beckett, "according to what we currently know, the southern continent lies east of the Strait of Malacca and south of the East Indies, within the sphere of influence of the Great Ming Empire."

Blake shook his head and said, "We can take the westerlies route, sailing due east from the Indian Ocean — perhaps even easier than passing through the equatorial doldrums."

He was right: taking the Indian Ocean westerlies to the southern continent was indeed more advantageous than going through the equatorial doldrums. For the doldrums route would bring one to the northern part of the southern continent, but that region was mostly tropical savanna and wasteland of little development value, with only a small amount of wetland.

The Indian Ocean westerlies route, by contrast, could reach the comparatively wetter southwest and south of the southern continent, which held greater value for colonial development.

But the problem was that in this era England did not have many people to send out as colonists!

Worcester looked at this rather eccentric general, shook his head, and said, "General, even if we could find a sea route from the Indian Ocean to the southern continent, we would have no way to transport enough labor there... According to the Dutch explorations of several decades ago, no civilized people exist there.

As for England itself, it has only a few million people at present, and the number is shrinking year by year! Moreover, we have recently opened colonies in Hudson Bay and the Caribbean, and sending settlers there is far simpler than sending them to the southern continent."

The English colony at Hudson Bay had arisen from the fur trade, and the younger Cromwell was planning to establish a chartered trading company devoted to the lands around Hudson Bay.

England's Caribbean colonies included the island of Jamaica, the island of Barbados, and the Bahama Islands. On the map these little islands all looked unremarkable, but because their special climate was perfectly suited to growing sugarcane with black slaves, those few small islands had become England's most profitable colonies.

In addition, the small colonies the English had established in the Gambia, on the Gold Coast, and along the coast of India were all profitable as well.

But what truly drew the inhabitants of the British Isles was still the Kingdom of New England — every year tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand, English Catholics, Scots, Irish, and some members of the Church of England, persecuted by the English Republic, left their homes, crossed the ocean, and went to seek refuge in the Kingdom of New England, which occupied the territory of the historical Thirteen Colonies of North America.

In a sense, even as the British Isles moved toward complete unification, their inhabitants were splitting in two... Most people, willingly or under compulsion, converted to the Puritan form of Christianity and became part of the English Republic; a minority went to the New World and became subjects of the Kingdom of New England, devout believers in the Roman Catholic faith.

And throughout this process, the population of the British Isles had been steadily declining, so it had lost the capacity to export large numbers of people.

Without people, what ability did the English East India Company have to develop the southern continent?

"Perhaps we could attract other Europeans to the southern continent." The moment Major General Blake said this, the two East India Company supercargoes could not help but smile bitterly.

Who would willingly emigrate to a colony ruled by Puritans? Unless there was gold to be dug, how was it any different from penal transportation?

Blake knew well enough that Puritan rules were not exactly endearing, so he could only sigh: "It seems this land is one God has reserved for the Ming Emperor... But even so, we cannot go and build a kingdom for the Ming Emperor just for a bit of money!"

The two supercargoes of the East India Company both nodded vigorously.

Of course one would not do such a thing for just a bit of money... It would have to be a great, great deal of money!

Blake still had some ideals. His gaze firm, he said, "For the interests of the English Republic, we have no choice but to serve the Great Ming Emperor. But we must insist that any colony discovered by the East India Company be fully self-governing..."

He looked at the two East India Company supercargoes and said earnestly, "And furthermore, we should spread the Puritan faith and republican ideas in the colony on the southern continent!"

Spread republican ideas? What are you trying to do?

Worcester and Beckett, the two East India Company supercargoes, were both dumbfounded. They were not true Puritans, nor were they republicans — when the revolution broke out in England, the two of them had been doing business in India. Mingling day in and day out with corrupt Indian princes, they had long since forgotten all of Jesus' teachings. And to this day they still did not understand what difference there was between a Lord Protector hereditarily held by the Cromwell family and a king hereditarily held by the Stuart family.

Just as the Dutch were planning to use the great enterprise of exploring and developing the southern continent to maintain their position in the Eastern trade, and the English were preparing to use the same opportunity to spread dangerous republican ideas, the Governor-General of the Australia-New Zealand Company, Anthony Robb, and its Chief Supercargo, Afonso Lopes — a firm run by Portuguese merchants — were already seated in the parlor of the Left Garden, cups of Mancini milk tea in hand.

The Left Garden was the new residence Zhu Cilang had built for Marie Mancini, within the walls of the Old Mountain Palace, with a gate opening to the outside of the palace as well.

The reason for building this Western-style garden villa was so that Mancini would not appear to be too far outdone by Princess Nisha — Princess Nisha also had a magnificent Red Fort within the Old Mountain Palace, and if Mancini had no new house, she would have seemed somewhat diminished. And the reason Mancini's new residence was called the "Left Garden" was that the surname Mancini carried the meaning of "left-handed," so Marie Mancini's Chinese name was Zuo Mali — Left Mary — and the Left Garden was Left Mary's garden.

Like Marie Mancini, Anthony Robb and Afonso Lopes both had Chinese names as well: the former was called Luo Dongni, and the latter Luo Afang.

Zuo Mali, Luo Dongni, and Luo Afang were not casual Chinese names, but formal names officially recorded in their patents of nobility.

These three were, of course, all nobles of the Great Ming holding imperial patents!

Zuo Mali had received the patent of a First-Rank Imperial Mandate Lady after bearing Zhu Cilang a son, Zhu Hengli. Luo Dongni had originally been the Governor of the Portuguese in Macau, and after submitting to the Great Ming had been enfeoffed as the Count of Hao'ao. Luo Afang's credentials were even older: he was a Macau Portuguese merchant who had come to open an arsenal when Shanghai first opened its port, and for his meritorious service in supplying arms he had been enfeoffed as the Baron of Kenanchuan.

The Australia-New Zealand Company, in which the three of them held large shares, was also a shipping firm engaged in East-West trade. Operating under the name of a "Ming-Portuguese joint venture," it was in reality a chartered trading house of the Great Ming homeland, essentially no different from the Royal Chamber of Commerce, the Yiguan Party Trading House, the Sand Ship Guild Trading House, or the Jiale Market House. But bearing a Portuguese name and employing large numbers of Portuguese sailors stranded in the East, it found it relatively easy to enter and leave the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, and could also manage the occasional run on the European routes.