Chapter 744: Ships and Cannons

The moment Company Commander Lu Keyong of the Jala saw the three ships stranded on the sandbar in the river, his heart sank with a premonition of disaster.

A veteran officer's instinct made him snatch up a spyglass and peer at the enemy vessels in the river, gauging their height, then shift his gaze to the crimson corner flags exposed above the riverbank levee. He spun around and bellowed.

"Pass the word! Marines on deck! Load all cannon and matchlocks! Deploy starboard leeboards! Hard to starboard!"

The ship's signal flags shifted and unfurled; soldiers on the forecastle and sterncastle roared the orders at the top of their lungs.

"Marines on deck!"

"Load all cannon and matchlocks!"

"Deploy starboard leeboards!"

"Hard to starboard!"

The relay of commands surged from Lu Keyong's flagship, passed forward from sterncastle to forecastle and on to the next ship's sterncastle, proceeding vessel by vessel until it reached the lead ship, and then came echoing back again.

Only at that moment did the lead ship, still under full sail, begin winching the lines, lowering the starboard leeboard — a massive oar-like blade stowed on deck — into the river.

The ships behind followed suit, one after another.

As each warship deployed its starboard leeboard, the water resistance on the starboard side shifted; combined with the forward thrust of the sails, this generated a force driving to the right front, causing the entire fleet, from van to rear, to execute a starboard turn in sequence right there on the river.

Lu Keyong was extremely decisive. The moment he recognized the river ahead was a deadly ambush pocket and knew there was no room to turn the fleet around, he resolved to swing all twenty-four warships' bow guns toward the south bank, preparing to force a landing with the full strength of his Jala and tangle with the enemy troops ashore for a time.

Though he called it a forced landing, Lu Keyong did not actually believe the operation was particularly dangerous.

He assessed that the Marshal's Office cavalry using the river levee to conceal their movements, for all their bustling back and forth, were not present in great numbers.

Everything he had seen and heard, from the Anshan Post boundary stretching northeast, was a land blanketed in black smoke.

Coupled with the offensive against Liaoyang, no matter how many troops the Marshal's army had sent on this expedition, they could not withstand being scattered in all directions like flung sand.

Horse and foot troops were not like the navy; men and horses had to rest eventually. They had accomplished a tremendous amount between dusk and dawn — today was the moment the Marshal's army was at its most vulnerable.

As the fleet braked hard and turned, marines swarmed out onto the decks. Archers and matchlockmen stood watch at the prows, while cavalry soldiers extended long planks as gangways and led their warhorses down from the ships, wading ashore through the shallows.

Suddenly, shrill whistles rose from the willow-lined levee — several signal rockets shot into the daylight sky.

Atop Liaoyang's city wall, on the corner tower in the northwest named the Tower of Subduing the Barbarians, Liu Chengzong leaned on the railing, spyglass in hand, gazing far toward the riverbank.

The signal rockets were the ambush trigger for the First Brigade's Thousand-Catty Cannon Battery.

From his elevated vantage point, the battlefield along the southern bank of the river, seven miles away, lay spread before him with perfect clarity.

Through the spyglass, Zuo Guangxian's cavalry was massing and maneuvering in the fields south of the long levee. As rocket after rocket climbed into the sky, the First Brigade's Divine Armament Corps artillerymen, hidden along the willow-lined levee, opened fire with a thunderous roar.

Along a levee section nearly a third of a mile long, one Thousand-Catty Cannon after another fired in succession, the concussive blasts throwing up a vast curtain of gunpowder smoke that shrouded the entire bank.

Only when the smoke in the spyglass gradually dispersed did the sound of the cannonade, like distant thunder rolling across the sky, slowly reach Liu Chengzong's ears.

Liu the Lion silently counted in his mind: twelve silver bars.

Lu Keyong's assessment had not been wrong — today truly was the moment the Marshal's army was at its weakest.

Between dusk and dawn, they had scattered to raid the countryside, storm and breach cities, search and haul away valuables, process prisoners, suppress the city, and seize the Eastern Capital.

With this entire sequence of operations compressed into a short span, the only force Liu Chengzong still had at hand that could move was Zuo Guangxian's two thousand men in the Mobile Corps.

In truth, even the Mobile Corps had gone without rest for that same full day and night; they were only holding together because their horses gave the soldiers a barely adequate level of spirit.

As for the First Brigade's Divine Armament Corps artillerymen, they had hauled ammunition all night and moved cannons all day. Out of an authorized strength of six hundred and forty, fewer than three hundred could still be fielded for combat — they too were a spent force.

Yet, listening to the sound of those cannons, Liu Chengzong knew his artillerymen's morale and fighting fervor were at an unprecedented high.

Because he had dispatched battlefield inspectors.

Twenty-four Plumed Forest Cavalrymen, led by the Plumed Forest orphan Liu Yiren, had been inserted into the twelve gun crews to oversee the battle at the front line.

Inspector squads are normally a hated thing, but today, on the banks of the Taizi River, the Plumed Forest Cavalry inspectors were the exception.

They had come under Liu Chengzong's direct orders for one specific purpose: to tally battle results. The order was simple — any fourteen-man Thousand-Catty Cannon crew that scored a hit would be rewarded with two newly cast silver bars.

Zuo Guangxian's Mobile Cavalry Battalion had been seeded with the exact same type of inspector squad.

Liu Chengzong knew his troops were exhausted, and this was indeed the moment the Marshal's army was at its most worn down, men and horses alike.

But he was rich!

Five years ruling Qinghai could not compare to a single day of scraping the earth in Liaodong. With this much silver in hand, of course he was going to throw it around!

One salvo from the twelve cannons on the river levee — four hundred taels of silver, hurled away.

Down below the city walls, the army's accompanying craftsmen had four furnaces blazing at full capacity, and had already cast another two hundred silver bars.

Picking up money had never been so simple.

If the Marshal's army artillerymen on the willow levee looked at the inspectors, their gazes would surely carry the devout reverence reserved for the wealth-delivering acolytes attending the God of Wealth himself.

But in fact, they had no time whatsoever to look at the inspectors.

With the immense roar of heavy cannons firing in succession, smoke and dust erupted from the levee. Seven-catty, eight-ounce cannonballs shot forth with tremendous force, crossing a hundred paces in an instant and slamming heavily into the sand-ships at the rear of the river fleet.

Nine cannonballs hammered squarely into a prow, punching through the five-inch hull planks like paper and blasting into the cabin within the forecastle. But it was the other three cannonballs that inflicted the real carnage.

One, its trajectory angled slightly high, skimmed the forecastle and smashed into the troop shelter on deck, drawing a chorus of agonized screams from within. It plowed a bloody path, bounced onto the deck, and, spattered with gore and minced flesh, embedded itself in the base of the mainmast — a single piece of fir timber.

The other two, angled slightly low, both struck below the waterline at the bow, punching two fist-sized holes in quick succession through the underwater hull planks and plunging into the bottom hold.

"Hit!"

Before the cheers on shore could even rise, the bow guns and matchlock-wielding marines on all twenty-four sand-ships in the river opened return fire, aiming for the dense clouds of gunpowder smoke on the bank.

The warships of the Haizhou Naval Force did not look like much; their hull planks were not even as thick as the Later Jin's shield carts, and each ship carried only a single cannon mounted at the bow.

Even that single bow gun came at considerable risk.

Sand-ships were not designed to be gun-armed vessels. Mounting a heavy cannon on the bow required placing a great deal of ballast stone in the bottom hold to maintain the ship's trim, and the "peace basket" at the stern — normally used to add drag in emergencies — had to be pre-loaded with stones.

This modification of sand-ships to carry heavy cannons was, in fact, an innovation born of the naval battle at Pi Island in the fourth year of the Chongzhen reign.

Before that, the Great Ming had simply had no enemies in the northern seas, much less enemies who used cannons at sea. Thus, the hulls were thin, and no one cared about shipboard firepower.

This was plainly evident from the battle now unfolding on the Taizi River.

Twenty-four ships, carrying eight two-thousand-catty Red Barbarian Cannons and sixteen two-thousand-catty Great General Cannons — on paper, their firepower looked even more formidable than the field artillery of an entire Marshal's army brigade.

But in reality... their Great General Cannons were better than their Red Barbarian Cannons.

Although both were two-thousand-catty pieces, the Grand General Cannons were cast by Shang Kexi himself after he reached Haizhou. He had no competent cannon-founders at hand, so the Invincible Grand General Cannons he copied had small calibers and short barrel lengths, and could only fire six-catty balls.

But the cannons Shang Kexi cast were actually more serviceable than the Red Barbarian Cannons in his possession.

Those eight two-thousand-catty Red Barbarian Cannons of his were cast from pig iron with superb workmanship — impossible to burst, and with an exceedingly long range.

They had just one drawback: small caliber.

This model of Red Barbarian Cannon had a bore of barely two inches and one tenth, firing four-catty round shot and chain shot, and the barrel walls were extremely thick.

This Red Barbarian Cannon model was cast in the first year of the Chongzhen reign by Wang Zunde, who was transferred from Vice Minister of Justice to Vice Minister of War and Governor-General of Liangguang.

That year, upon taking up his post in Liangguang, it happened that the court was purchasing Red Barbarian Cannons, so he borrowed one from the Portuguese for a look, went back, and shut himself away to copy it.

Wang Zunde did not use the iron-core bronze-jacket technique; he simply cast pig-iron cannons. The barrels were therefore thick and heavy, but the advantage was cheapness and volume — a single cannon cost less than eighty taels of silver.

At the time, the court was caught up in the Jisi Incident, and the capital, hearing the alarm, urgently needed cannons. Marshal Wang had his practice pieces escorted to the capital under guard.

By the fourth year of Chongzhen, Wang Zunde had shipped from Guangdong to the capital, in successive convoys, a total of one hundred and seventy-five self-cast pig-iron Red Barbarian Cannons.

When Li Jiucheng and his lot rebelled and the various Regional Commanders encircled and suppressed them, both sides used firearms cast under Wang Zunde's supervision.

The cannons were certainly well cast; their only flaw was that their design was ill-suited to field battles.

Wang Zunde had cast city-defense cannons for the Chongzhen Emperor: the two-thousand-catty ones fired four-catty balls, the twenty-seven-hundred-catty ones fired six-catty balls. The design did not pursue caliber or power; it sought volume, sufficiency, durability, and the ability to defend the capital.

After all, when sending cannons to the capital, his first consideration had to be that the cannons must not burst and must not cause trouble at a critical moment.

Precisely for this reason, Shang Kexi's Haizhou naval forces relied more heavily on their self-cast Invincible Grand General Cannons in terms of firepower.

With a thunderous roar, the twenty-four heavy cannons opened fire one after another toward the gunpowder smoke on the river embankment. The Red Barbarian Cannons fired round shot that pierced trees and shattered stone; the Invincible Grand Generals fired canister, dense iron pellets riddling the smoke.

One salvo sent the artillerymen on the embankment sprawling in swathes; they were nearly suppressed.

Seeing this, Lu Keyong felt relieved.

He was familiar with the performance of all firearms. Although the field guns of the Marshal's army had shocked him with their power — one salvo had crippled one of his boats —

as long as his shipboard cannons could suppress the enemy guns by sheer numbers, the coming landing operation would be trouble-free.

Because the company he led consisted entirely of the most seasoned gunners. The Invincible Grand General was a breech-loading cannon of the Frankish type, inherently fast-firing. If they could suppress the enemy artillery just once, they could keep them pinned down continuously until they withdrew or were completely destroyed.

Judging the situation, Lu Keyong immediately ordered his subordinates to wave the flags. Amid drumbeats, the sailors aboard the ships scrambled over the sides and waded ashore through the shallows.

Once ashore, the sailors split into five… not five companies, but five niru, with horsemen advancing as a screen to shoot arrows from below the river embankment in covering fire; the main body acted as a reserve, hauling timber and stone along the bank to protect the follow-up troops landing.

The left and right wings, under cavalry cover, circled around the embankment, one east, one west.

The rear guard remained at the water's edge to watch over the landing boats.

To make such a maneuver in the face of artillery fire was extremely bold.

It was founded on Lu Keyong's absolute confidence in the Haizhou gunners.

However, the twenty-four heavy cannons had not truly suppressed the Marshal's army artillerymen on the shore.

The Frankish-style breech-loading Grand General Cannons had just completed their second shot. At the bows, several gunners were laboriously lifting the one-hundred-fifty-catty removable chambers to reload, about to begin the third shot.

Suddenly, the Marshal's army field guns on the long embankment boomed out again.

This shocking turn of events horrified Lu Keyong.

Because the Grand General Cannon was breech-loaded. Although its excessive weight made reloading slower than lighter Frankish guns, even so, a breech-loader's rate of fire was not something any muzzle-loader could hope to match.

Even the firing rate of small guns like the Bead-Spitter or the Crouching Tiger was a little inferior to the Grand General Cannon.

The bow of Lu Keyong's flagship mounted a Red Barbarian Cannon. His gun had fired a little later than the cannons on shore — a matter of a few breaths. Just now, the sailors had swabbed the bore clean with the sponge and raised the muzzle, and were pouring in powder, not yet having had time to tamp it.

How had the cannons on shore already fired?

And from those very same positions, too — the continuous thunder of cannon fire.

Twelve reports!

Still twelve reports!

Lu Keyong said to those beside him, "This is bad. The enemy also has twenty-four heavy cannons, firing in alternating volleys!"

No matter how skilled the gunnery or how great the courage, the steps of sponging the bore, wiping the inner walls, pouring in powder, ramming it firm, seating the wooden sabot, and loading the ball could not be skipped.

What's more, while under suppressing fire from twenty-four cannons — even firing from low ground to high, the shot lashing the long embankment like grapeshot, wouldn't that still scare the enemy soldiers into hugging the ground? How could they possibly finish reloading so fast?

The Marshal's army, of course, did not have twenty-four heavy cannons.

They had only twelve. The heavy city-defense guns captured in Liaoyang City had no suitable gun carriages, and the Grand General Cannon was a relatively unfamiliar piece to them. Besides, this was a sudden raid to intercept the fleet; they had not had the idea of bringing two types of cannon and two types of ammunition.

The cannons fired fast for just two reasons, nothing else.

First, the Marshal's headquarters possessed more advanced cannon technology.

They had purpose-built two-wheeled gun carriages with balanced centers of gravity, paired with a screw mechanism to adjust elevation. Although the screw was often damaged by the cannon's recoil shock, even if it broke and jammed on the carriage, the better-balanced carriage allowed the crew to adjust the barrel by hand and temporarily wedge it with wooden blocks to make do.

And what had an even greater impact on loading was the silk powder bags that Liu Chengzong had wrapped into cylinders.

The six steps — loading powder, tamping, seating the sabot, tamping, loading the ball, tamping — were simplified by the powder bag into a single step.

This item's effect on the battlefield was greater than the cannon's design. Even if a Hongwu-era cannon used it, its rate of fire would still increase.

Second, it was thanks to the silver bars.

The Marshal's army artillerymen had been badly mauled by the ship cannons.

Over a dozen Grand General Cannons had fired canister, blanketing the positions of the twelve thousand-catty guns.

Although the gun carriages, the willow trees, and the tall shields the artillerymen had placed on either side provided some cover, several dozen men were still wounded. One field gun crew was poorly positioned, exposed to the view of several ships, and took the brunt of canister blasts from six Invincible Grand Generals. One Yulin Army overseer and ten artillerymen were killed outright.

The remaining one overseer and three artillerymen were all wounded.

That cannon had lost its fighting capability.

Yet, the wounded Yulin Army overseer who survived shouted to the neighboring gun crew: "Send a few men over, and I'll split the reward silver with you half and half!"

The two adjacent crews, which had men to spare, each immediately detached three men. For the reward silver, they formed a new improvised crew on the spot, manned the cannon, and opened fire again.

And the other gun crews, still more or less intact, loaded even faster, bringing out every skill they had ever learned in training.

Amid the roar, their own cannons were still firing, greatly heartening the mounted patrols formed up behind the long embankment. As long as their own artillery kept fighting and pinned down the ship cannons, they could engage the enemy landing force.

Otherwise, the shore would have to be yielded to the enemy, allowing them to land unopposed.

Amid the impassioned sound of waist drums, the mounted rangers likewise filed out at a gallop, charging toward the Haizhou cavalry bursting forth from both sides of the long embankment.

?? Good evening!

? (End of chapter)