Lin Gao Qiming

Chapter 142 The Great Ming Pirate Ship

This is the first time the traversers have fought at sea, and the captured pirate ship gave them a chance to see the specific equipment of the Chinese pirates who once roamed the southeast coast in the late Ming Dynasty and spread their reputation far and wide in Southeast Asia.Not long after the ship was towed into the port, a survey team composed of military, intelligence, industry, agriculture and other ministries came to Bopu by car to conduct a field inspection of the entire ship.

The intelligence team reconfirmed that the ship was indeed a type of "Guangzhou Ship", which indicated that the pirates should have come from Guangdong, not Fujian, where Yiguan's main activities were, so Liu Xiang's gang was very suspicious.

The hull has inherited the consistent advantages of Guangzhou Shipyard, and it is made of very hard wood. At first, no one could recognize what kind of wood it was. Later, Fa Shilu of the agricultural team recognized that it was lychee wood. The hardness of this wood is very high. In 1927, the Red Army of Hainan Island used lychee wood to build a front-loading artillery with an all-wood structure.If it weren't for the combination of SKS+M43 bullets that transcend time and space, it would be difficult to penetrate the small artillery and muskets that are common at sea in this era.

There are a total of 16 guns on board, and it is difficult to identify the specific types of these guns.According to European standards, it can be regarded as a 4-8 pound gun.The artillery casting is rough, most of which are made of various pig irons and miscellaneous irons, and one door is even simply made of iron chamber wood.It can be seen that the people who cast the cannon basically don't understand the technology of the cannon: the casting of the cannon is rough, the structure is simple, not to mention the technology of boring the barrel, just the countless air holes on the cannon body make the mechanical team stunned—— This thing has a much higher chance of blowing itself up than killing the enemy.

The cannon was simply installed on a wooden frame, with a muzzle on the bulwark and tied with a rope.There is no device for moving and adjusting the position of the artillery, and there is no aiming equipment. The only way to make the artillery aim at the target is to constantly move the hull and get the ship close enough.This is why there are as many as 8 or more sculls on the ship - in addition to being used as extra power, it also plays a role in quickly adjusting the ship's position.

After field testing and firing, the largest 8-pound cannon can shoot iron bullets 500 meters away under the condition of using the fine-grain gunpowder modified by the traverser. If the elevation angle is increased, it should be able to go further, but this The poor structure of this kind of gun prevents it from being loaded with too much gunpowder, and none of the shots in the battle exceeded 200 meters, which shows that the pirates are very clear about the quality of their guns.Inferior ammunition makes the effective range further reduced: in addition to a small amount of lead bullets for muskets, the main shells on the ship turned out to be stones, and there were also some small iron bullets. When the Qing Army Fort bombarded British warships at the Pearl River Estuary from 1840 to 1842 , although "bullets fell like rain", no amount of stone shells could cause much damage to the oak hull of the British warship.

The quality of the gunpowder on the ship was even worse, it was completely powdered gunpowder with high sulfur content, when this kind of gunpowder was used for test firing, a lot of thick smoke was emitted, and the explosive power was very weak.In comparison, the quality of the gunpowder seized in the first anti-encirclement and suppression battle was the best, obviously because it came out of the official treasury, while the quality of the gunpowder seized from the Gou family was a little lower.It seems that the gunpowder of these pirates is privately made by the underground workshop, and the lack of saltpeter may explain this.

In addition to the cannon, there are more than a dozen different matchlock guns, some obviously obtained from the Portuguese or the Dutch, and some are local counterfeit goods, as well as bird guns and fire guns ranging from one-eyed to three-eyed— —Probably got it from the Ming army.These guns are seldom maintained, and they don't seem to be very easy to use. Weapon enthusiasts in the mechanical group, which has always been known for its fearlessness, dare not try it out.According to its estimates, the best quality Portuguese or Dutch-made original matchlock guns, with good ammunition, have an effective range of no more than 50 meters.

The cold weapons recovered from the ship are very rich and varied, and some of them have never been seen before. The intelligence and information department organized various historians to come and identify them.

The most common is the bamboo spear, with a blade-shaped spear tip installed on the top of the bamboo pole, and the length is between 5 and 6 meters. There are many such spears, which greatly exceed the number of corpses found on the ship. In addition to being used for fighting, it is also used as a javelin.

Another kind of spear is wooden, with tips at both ends, and is used for close combat.One of the most commonly used cold weapons by pirates is a short waist knife that looks like a hatchet, with a total length of no more than 50cm and a very strong blade.

There are also a large number of pear-headed darts and small darts for throwing on the ship, hooks, sickles and hooks for fixing enemy ships... There are all kinds of them.In the end, a large number of fishing nets and rawhide were found—they were used to install on the bulwark, which can withstand the blows of the enemy's light projectile weapons, and can also defend against the opponent's gang battle. This time, they were dismantled in order to disguise themselves as fishing boats. down.

As a common water weapon, incendiary weapons have been found in two types: a torch for throwing a bamboo tube, with a piece of greased wood inserted at the top of the bamboo tube, which is thrown like a grenade with a wooden handle after being ignited; They are earthen pots of different sizes, filled with pyrotechnic materials such as gunpowder and sulfur. The top of the pot is sunken, used to hold charcoal fire. When using it, use a rope on the mast to swing it on the deck of an enemy ship and hit it. broken.

"It's really rich." Yu Eshui ignored the fact that the blood stained on the weapon was congealing and stinking, and kept looking around excitedly, "I can write three or four papers on these things alone. It's a piece of cake."

"That's right, you can also interrogate real Chinese pirates in the 17th century. Who can compare to you in this advantage!"

"Yes, yes." Yu Eshui didn't hear the meaning of ridicule in it, and kept taking pictures and taking notes of those messy scrap copper and iron.

Wu De sent a group of members from the commune to clean up the corpses, and washed the deck with sea water and fine sand. By the evening, the ship had been washed clean, except for the dense bullet holes and The deck shed that had been beaten to pieces showed no signs of battle.

Wu De looked at the ship and felt strange. He was also a navy soldier, and now he is the secretary of the commune!I don't know how many times I have done this kind of task of driving a fishing boat to protect the fish in the army, but I was snatched by Chen Haiyang, who was born in a frigate.Jealousy, jealousy!

Jealousy is jealousy, what should be done or what should be done, he looked at the things unloaded on the ship, the top has been emptied, and even the sails have been taken off - completely smashed.The members of the commune were still squatting on the deck concentrating on picking out the lead bullets embedded in the wood with iron picks.

"We are really poor." He couldn't help but sigh, lead is not so precious anyway.As long as you look at the composition of the low-quality Ming money that is everywhere, you will know that lead is a standard base metal.The stinginess of the industrial sector is also forced out.The ancient mining and metallurgy industry is too small compared to the huge appetite of the traversers.Once the new army under planning is formed, lead bullets will be used for hundreds of muskets...

"Boss Wu, the navy has handed over eighteen captives, how should I deal with them?" Fu Youdi reported to him respectfully.

Fu Youdi became a cadre again, and Wu De took a fancy to him, who likes to be domineering and has a strict style of control. Once the law and order crackdown at the Dongmen City Police Station ended, he was always anxious to get up because he didn't get into a leadership position. Huo's Fu Youdi was activated by Wu De and was appointed as the captain of the reform through labor.

"All of them will be assigned to the reform-through-labour team. They must be strictly monitored!" Wu De ordered, "The chiefs of the security team will be interrogated at any time, so don't send them too far away when assigning jobs."

"Yes."

After the joint investigation team conducted a thorough inspection of the ship's structure, it was believed that the ship was quite well-made, and it would be best if it could be repaired for my own use. Whether it is used as a fishing boat or a transport ship, it can exert great benefits.

The damage to the ship was not great, and the basic structure was intact, but there were too many bullet holes in the plank of the ship, and the water poured into it when the waves bumped.After the on-the-spot inspection, the ship still has the value of utilization, and it can be repaired and continued to be used.

To repair the ship, it involves the upper pier of the ship.This is a rather complicated matter, but it is inevitable for ship repairing and shipbuilding.According to the Navy's idea, it is best to build a dry dock directly. The Admiralty proposed a plan to excavate a simple dock in a sheltered harbor at Lingaojiao, digging a 40-meter-long, 12-meter-wide, 2.4-meter-deep The canal is built with stone walls on all sides, and then the water is drained, and the ship is repaired in this dry dock. After repairing, the water is put in, and the ship can sail away.Ship locks will be manufactured and installed later, so that new ships can be built for use.

This plan was rejected by the Planning Commission, which estimated that the investment was too large.The construction engineering team came up with another simple alternative to the huge and expensive dry docks - simple slides.

The simple slideway is to use a wooden slideway and a lot of grease to complete the upper pier and launch of the boat from the water surface to the slipway.The advantage is that the equipment is simple and the operation is convenient.The requirements for the pressure resistance of the shore and beach foundation soil are not high. For ships under 500 tons, when they go up and down the pier, they only need to level the original ground, add gravel and ballast appropriately, and roll it to make it smooth. .And because of the simple structure, it is very convenient to disassemble and assemble.If you need to relocate, you can move easily.In the past, many small and medium-sized civil shipyards in China adopted this kind of equipment.

(End of this chapter)