prosperous age

Two months passed quickly after Li Chengliang arrived on the Eastern Continent.

A new pier has been built, still with a wooden boardwalk extending into the sea, purely for convenience.

Although the Eastern Continent is rich in resources and the surrounding mineral deposits have been thoroughly explored, they have not been developed due to time and manpower constraints.

Among them, wood is the easiest to collect.

According to the customs of the Ming people, they naturally cut down a large number of trees to build houses and other necessary structures.

More than twenty boardwalks were laid in just a few days, and most of the Fujian ships already had berths.

One detachment of the double-decker gunboats remained in the harbor, while the other began to patrol daily.

Meanwhile, on Tokyo Island, Li Chengliang dispatched two battalions of troops to establish barracks at the east and west ends of the island, respectively.

Now that the government troops have arrived, they are no longer afraid of the Western barbarians discovering their whereabouts.

During this period, Li Chengliang had thoroughly familiarized himself with the surrounding terrain.

The city of Tokyo is surrounded by a complex network of waterways, with several river bends flowing into the sea nearby, creating a terrain that resembles an isolated island.

Previously, the Ming army had already deployed sentries along the land routes and along the surrounding rivers, so the defenses were relatively tight.

However, the northern exit of the bay has a narrow shipping channel.

Li Donglin had already noticed it when he arrived.

There are at least three straits where gun emplacements can be set up, and the narrow waterways can be used to block the entire northern waterway.

The southern route, however, has a wide outlet to the sea, but only one narrow section leading in, where fortifications can be set up on both banks to block the southern entrance.

So, from the very beginning, Li Donglin sent more than two thousand people to build simple gun emplacements on both sides.

Four were built on the north side and two on the south side, with a centurion stationed at each.

Meanwhile, two observation posts were set up along the coast by two hundred households on the island, which could transmit news from the sea at any time.

They deployed a force of a thousand people directly on Tokyo Island.

The remaining thousand or so people, along with the Ming soldiers who had stayed behind and the sailors who had been brought in, built wooden walls and fences to first construct the city walls of Tokyo, making the entire camp look quite presentable.

After two months, the island's defenses and the outline of Tokyo's city defenses were finally completed.

What remained was for each unit to gradually improve its city defenses, while also transferring two battalions of troops back from the island to prepare for expanding the exploration area.

To this day, they only know that the Western Barbarians are to the south, but they still don't know how far away they are.

After all, there were only a few people left on the island, so naturally they wouldn't dare to show themselves or make contact with the Westerners.

Upon seeing Western barbarian warships patrolling nearby, everyone would be instructed to hide.

Fortunately, the ships of the Western barbarians never entered this bay area; they would just circle around it and then leave.

However, if Western barbarian warships appear in the near future, they will definitely encounter Ming warships.

Li Chengliang had no habit of hiding, and besides, his mission wasn't to hide from rats on the Eastern Continent.

At this time, in the Governor-General's Mansion in Tokyo, although conditions were harsh, Li Chengliang still built the Governor-General's Mansion in the center of the city, which was only a little simpler than in the country.

"Li Dong, now tell me in detail about the local people you found in the north and south."

Several wooden chairs were placed in the room. Li Chengliang sat in the head seat, with five chairs on each side below him.

Two deputy generals, five guerrillas, and Li Dong, the guerrilla who stayed behind, were all seated below.

During this period, although the focus was on improving the defensive fortifications, Li Chengliang also inquired about the surrounding situation.

Li Dong highlighted the key points, but not in much detail.

Although he had sent someone to investigate, he hadn't paid much attention because he found that the other party didn't seem to have much fighting ability.

"General, there is a tribe about seven or eight hundred people north of Tokyo. They live by fishing and hunting, but their tools are simple. They only have very crude bows and arrows and spears as weapons."

Several dozen miles to the south, there are similar tribes, with a slightly larger population, but probably less than a thousand.

The Ming army's exploration was limited to the area within a few dozen miles around the city of Tokyo, and had not yet expanded.

In fact, at that time, the eastern coast of the Americas, especially the Great Lakes region, was still home to a relatively large number of Native American tribes, which were also quite numerous.

In the west, most Native American tribes are concentrated near Mexico and the United States, and the further north you go, the fewer tribes there are.

This is also why two tribes were found within a few dozen miles of their landing point, and they were more than a hundred miles apart.

Although they are all called Indians, they actually live separately according to their tribes and rarely interact with each other.

"Have your people act as guides, and we'll make contact with both sides first."

They live by fishing and hunting, just like the Jurchens.

Li Chengliang thought about it and felt that the risk factor was not high.

With rudimentary weapons and living according to tribal customs, they were not unlike the Jurchen tribes he was familiar with.

Since the Ming Dynasty could assimilate the Jurchens, there was no reason why these locals couldn't be allowed to submit to the Ming Dynasty.

Besides, although they brought a lot of supplies, it was still limited.

If they could win over the locals and get them to cultivate the land and produce food for the Ming army, then they could truly establish a foothold in the Eastern Continent.

After a moment's thought, Li Chengliang summoned two mild-mannered squad members from his personal guard and sent them with the guide to contact the two indigenous tribes.

When Li Chengliang called them "locals," he didn't mean to look down on them; rather, he considered them to be natives of the area.

So the next day, the two Ming army teams left Tokyo City under the guidance of their guides, heading south and north respectively to make contact with two indigenous tribes.

On one hand, Li Chengliang ordered the navy to patrol the sea, and on the other hand, he ordered Fujian ships to go out to sea to fish and provide meat for the government troops. He also had soldiers take turns participating in the construction of the city.

A wooden fence certainly doesn't qualify as a city.

At least in Li Chengliang's view, they should use local soil to build the earthen wall first.

We'll make bricks when we have the resources.
Enclose it with earthen walls, and that's a city wall.

Soldiers were rotated to build the city, so there was no rush to speed things up; we could take our time.

He left these matters to his two sons to look after.

Meanwhile, in the waters off Tokyo Bay, the Ming Dynasty's patrol fleet finally encountered Spanish warships on the open sea.

During this period, the patrols of the Ming navy were quite random. They would either set sail from the northern waterway, sail north for a while and then turn back to return to the bay via the southern waterway, or set off in the opposite direction.

However, apart from occasionally seeing small boats in the distance, they never encountered any decent ships.

The naval officers and soldiers knew that those were fishing boats belonging to a nearby indigenous tribe, so they did not approach them.

The Ming army has made contact with them, but it is still in the early stages.

Because of the language barrier, the interactions between the two sides were very simple, and most of the time it was just a matter of testing each other.

Li Chengliang's personal guard specially selected a few clever soldiers to deliberately approach them and try to learn their language.

The language spoken by these natives was different from the languages ​​of the surrounding foreign lands that Li Chengliang knew.

Although he was unfamiliar with the area, he was accompanied by naval officers and soldiers who were well-informed and experienced.

They couldn't even strike up a conversation with each other, which shows that Native American languages ​​and Chinese or other Asian languages ​​really don't have much in common.

Many people in later generations believed that Native Americans might have been Chinese who migrated eastward, but that's probably overthinking it.

Making such a judgment based on the similarity of individual languages, the physical appearance of Native Americans, and the resemblance of their ornaments to those of the Shang and Zhou dynasties in China, is biased.

After all, those things were all made of natural materials. Perhaps the two sides just had similar aesthetic tastes, so they made similar choices. Li Chengliang was quite restrained and patiently arranged for people to learn their language, tried to make contact, and accepted them into the Ming Dynasty to serve as manpower for the Ming Dynasty to develop the Eastern Continent.

The Western barbarians, who had already landed, did not operate in this way. Instead, they directly resolved the issue by force, conquering these tribes, especially the larger ones, to serve as their labor force for developing the continent.

This is perhaps the biggest difference between people from the East and the West.

Westerners are poor, so they are stingy in their work.

The Ming Dynasty, on the other hand, considered itself to be a vast and resource-rich land and looked down on everything around it.

Although they despise them in their hearts, they do not show it, but instead use tolerance to demonstrate their politeness.

This is why the fishing boats of both tribes, upon discovering the Ming Dynasty's warships, did not panic or flee.

A few encounters were enough to make them lower their guard.

In fact, the tribes in the north were completely unaware that the southern Indian tribes had been enslaved by the Spanish.

Because there is too little contact between them.

It wasn't until European raiders entered the area on a large scale and expanded their territory that the Native American tribes began to communicate with each other and learn about the situation.

Only after being severely suppressed did the tribes begin to unite and take concerted action to fight against these foreign invaders.

On the open sea, two Spanish galleons sailed from south to north at a slow speed.

The five upper-class gunboats of the Ming Dynasty had just left Tokyo Bay and were sailing south. In another hour, they would turn back and return to the bay via the northern route to complete their patrol mission for the day.

On the vast sea, several ships met unexpectedly, and their alarms immediately went off.

"This should be the Ming Navy that General De Pero mentioned in his report. Tell the Nick to hold steady and not to fire. We'll try to make contact first and find out where their naval base is."

The commander of the Spanish patrol fleet immediately issued orders.

Normally, one warship would be enough for such a patrol.

Faced with the Native Americans' wooden boats, their force could wipe them out dozens of times without inflicting any casualties on themselves.

However, behind this group of people is a powerful empire.

The Ming Dynasty is not a country they can enslave at will.

Therefore, in addition to reinforcing the patrol fleets by adding a warship, the Spanish governor also strictly demanded that each fleet avoid engaging in battle with the Ming army as much as possible.

In fact, De Pero has already recounted in detail his previous experience in Manila.

Based on the Ming Dynasty's massive navy and the report from the Spanish envoy who attended Emperor Wanli's wedding, Pedrode concluded that the Ming Dynasty was not to be trifled with for the time being.

The navy brought by Li Chengliang was not particularly strong among the various navies of the Ming Dynasty, but at this time the Spanish military strength in the Americas was also not strong.

Currently, a large number of capital ships have been redeployed to the mainland, while the remaining dozens of warships are to be deployed simultaneously on the east and west coasts.

The east coast, in particular, was heavily fortified to guard against privateer fleets from countries such as England and France.

Therefore, the Spanish navy was actually the weakest on the west coast of the Americas.

This is also why Drake was able to easily plunder the coastal towns on the west coast of America after crossing the Strait of Magellan, capture Spanish ships, and finally escape successfully.

In reality, Spain's military strength on the west coast is not even as great as Li Chengliang's.

Their focus remained on guarding against Europeans, not on the Ming Dynasty.

The USS Nick was pulled to the back as an emergency messenger ship, ready to flee at any moment, while the flagship moved closer to the Ming warships.

This time, the communication between the two sides went smoothly.

After all, there were sailors on board who could speak Spanish.

Alternatively, the Ming Dynasty would assign multiple translators to each fleet to ensure that they could communicate simply with ships from foreign vassal states.

Soon, the ships separated.

The Spanish warships turned back, while the Ming warships continued their previous voyage.

"You board the small boat and return to Tokyo on ship number C to report what happened here."

The naval guerrilla commander gave instructions to one of his personal guards.

Through previous contacts with the Spanish, both sides had roughly figured out each other's location.

The Spanish naval base is about seven or eight thousand miles away from here, a judgment made based on the time it took for their fleet to patrol once.

A single round trip takes more than a month, so it's no wonder they only appear in the vicinity about once every three months.

It was simply too far, so the Spanish were naturally unwilling to sail frequently.

It was clear that they had tacitly accepted that the Ming Dynasty occupied the nearby waters, and after the meeting, the other party's general agreed to return to port and not continue sailing north.

Furthermore, there has been a preliminary agreement that officials will accompany them on their next visit to discuss related matters.

Although it was just a verbal agreement, in the eyes of the Ming generals, the two sides were so far apart that it would be a losing proposition to wage war over such a barren place in between.

The Spanish fleet led the way, followed by the Ming fleet, which slowly sailed south.

When it was time to return, the Ming guerrillas did not choose to turn back, but continued to follow.

"Sir, why don't we turn back?"

The thief asked hesitantly.

"We'll continue south for two more days before turning back."

The guerrilla replied, "Also, tell the last ship of the '戊' series to send back the message that we are expanding our southern patrol and need to follow the foreign ships south for two days, so that the lord will not worry."

The guerrillas used a clever tactic here: to expand the Ming army's territorial waters as much as possible.

Traveling south for two days was tantamount to telling the Spanish that this sea area was now land and that the Ming Dynasty considered it its own.

As for continuing south, the guerrillas had no intention of doing so.

At least not at this stage. He has taken it upon himself to make decisions, turning what should have been a one-day journey into five or six days.

They expanded the patrol area several times over, but it's unclear whether they will face penalties in the future.

Li Chengliang already knew the news at the Governor's Mansion in Tokyo.

But when the second warship returned, bringing news that the naval warships had sailed south for two days before turning back, a smile appeared on his aged face.

“Give Deng Youji a commendation.”

He naturally guessed his plan, which was to expand the sea area controlled by the Ming Dynasty to the south.

When the Spanish arrived later, they could then draw a border southward.

The fleet could travel much faster south than north.

In just these two days of sailing, the Ming Dynasty's territory in the Eastern Continent may have been pushed nearly a thousand miles south.

It is essential to commend him for his achievements.

"Father, the Western barbarians are quite easy to talk to."

Li Ruzhen suddenly said.

"That's because they're afraid of my Great Ming Dynasty."

Li Chengliang said calmly. (End of Chapter)