The waves slapped on the beach, stirring up waves and retreated lazily. The kelp thrown from the sea water covered the entire coast and formed a brown band. The kelp emitted a sweet but not odorous smell of rotten algae. For the southern waters of Chile, this smell is more typical, just like a seal that appears on the coast all the time.

This is the outer port of Corral in Valdivia, a city that was once captured by the East-shore people during the East-West War. Now, this city at the mouth of the Valdivia River has turned into a super-large construction site. About 3,000 eastern coastal people from counties in southern Chile came here to renovate forts, build embankments, clear waterways, and plant windbreakers. They even built a large-scale construction on a piece of wasteland with severe salinization outside the city, building many facilities including warehouses, residential buildings, office buildings and prisons, which made the few Spanish residents in Corral town stunned.

It can be seen that the people of the East Coast really plan to manage the Port of Coral well, and do not hesitate to invest in its infrastructure and improve transportation conditions for this. This sounds a bit inconsistent, because the Port of Coral is the land of the real Spanish Kingdom, but the people of the East Coast occupy it and manage it as their own land. If this is not inconsistent, what else would be more inconsistent?

There are not many suitable agricultural land near the Port of Coral. Apart from mountains and seas, local residents have only developed a very small amount of flat land for farmland. However, with the gradual expansion of the city's scale in recent years, these farmlands have also faced the misfortune of being squeezed and encroached by cities, but no one seems to really care. After all, the area upstream of the river has huge high-quality plains, which can be all developed into farmland.

It is noon now, and the harbor is quiet. The Spanish dock officials hid in customs houses, drinking coffee helplessly, and seemed to have nothing to do. In fact, they have been deprived of their power to work and can only stay in the house all day long, drinking and praying for time. Fortunately, they can still receive a salary similar to that of the original one, which was paid by the East Coast people, after all, this place is still nominally the territory of the Kingdom of Spain.

In fact, the East Coast government has been discussing the status of some parts of southern Chile with the Kingdom of Spain. Their demands are mainly two points. One is that the land originally leased to the East Coast south of the Boundary River (Bueno River) was bought out in one go, making it an undisputed East Coast territory; the second condition proposed by the East Coast people was to lease land south of the Cayekaye River system and north of the Boundary River. For this reason, they could promise to increase the import of goods from Western colonial areas, and at the same time pay a relatively high rental fee, no less than 50,000 pesos per year, and can be paid in one go for ten years.

To be honest, Trinidad, the governor of Peru in the Kingdom of Spain, laughed when he first heard the news. He smiled not because he was happy, but because the people on the east coast were too thick-skinned, which made him a little confused about how to respond. The governor of Trinidad looked through the historical information in the archives and learned that the people on the east coast had not rented south of the border river for a long time, and began to openly move north many years ago, penetrated into the vast central valley north of the border river, settled and pioneered, mined and transported, fished and logged, and even opened workshops, and did not take the Spanish seriously.

Even their inland transport company openly monopolized the cargo transportation business of the Cayekaye River system of Valdivia, completely expelling all Spanish shipping forces, so that the task of transporting mercury and silver now has to be entrusted to their company, and there is no one else.

The Governor of Trinidad knew that there were already a lot of people on the east coast near Valdivia. Conservatively estimated that there were 10,000 people, and it might even be as many as 20,000 to 30,000, because this cannot be accurately counted. But whether it is 10,000 or 30,000 people, it is not less than the local Spanish citizens. They control money and force, and at the same time, they penetrate into the economic system step by step, making the Spaniards wake up and find that their neighbors have changed, and ships and outposts with the flag of the East Coast are everywhere.

The Governor himself did not think he had the ability to expel local East Coast people from the country. In fact, this might lead to war and was an option that could not be used. However, renting the area south of the Valdivia River is also a difficult proposal to accept, because there are still numerous silver mines (although the output is not large, and some of them are almost exhausted). At the same time, there is a large mercury mine near the city of Villarica, which is more critical to the production of the Potosi silver mine in Upper Peru, so it cannot be given up easily.

The East Coast people later revised their proposal, saying that they had no interest in silver mines and mercury mines, and that they could still hand over these mines and some of the surrounding land to the Spanish to control, and that the rivers they dredged and the roads they repaired could also be provided to the Spanish to transport these minerals. In fact, they were willing to provide some more advanced machinery to help the Spanish improve mining efficiency and increase silver production in disguise in exchange for the right to lease the land.

To be honest, this proposal is actually very sincere. In fact, the people of the East Coast are not very interested in those silver mines, and they always value land. Especially the fertile land that can be cultivated, they are of the greatest value in their eyes. It seems that they are born to be a group of farmers, and they only have these in their eyes.

Faced with the conditions offered by the East Coast people, the Governor of Trinidad was unable to make the decision, so he could only report the information to Madrid and hand it over to King Carlos's Holy Tribunal. But he heard that King Carlos's health has been getting worse in recent years, and his mental state is also very unstable, and he feels moody. Therefore, he is not sure what kind of ruling His Majesty the King will make in the end. He only hopes that the interests of the Kingdom of Spain will not be harmed for no reason anymore, and there is no benefit.

In addition, the "savvy" Governor of Trinidad also solemnly suggested in his report that more gold and silver would be transported from the La Plata River to the sea and sent to Spain. This part of the transportation task can be entrusted to the East Coast people. Their ships are large, fast speed blocks, and high reliability. They can also avoid the Caribbean Sea, which is as numerous as pirates, so that gold and silver in the Americas can arrive in Spain safer and enrich the country's finances.

The Governor of Trinidad believes that the distance between Potosi's silver mines is long, the mountain roads are rugged, and the cost is too high. If you pass through Jujuy, Tucuman, Salta and other places, and arrive at San Fe or Port Rosario via the Chaco Plain, it will not only be closer, but the traffic conditions will also be much better, and the loss on the way will drop to an extremely satisfactory level.

They can sign an agreement with the insurance companies of the East Coast people in Buenos Aires to insure that these precious metals can be successfully arrived in Cadiz via the Atlantic Ocean. The East Coast Republic wants to see the stability of the Kingdom of Spain, so it is absolutely possible to transport these gold and silver to the Old Continent smoothly. This is undoubtedly a matter of no doubt.

The Governor of Trinidad was not sure whether his proposal would be accepted by the Madrid court, but he hoped it would be possible. Because all the signs showed that the people of the East Coast seemed to be unable to wait to embezzle the area south of the Valdivian River, and they had invested a lot of resources here and moved a large number of residents, so it was impossible to leave. It was fine if they had not made any requests before, but the Governor of Trinidad was happy to pretend to be confused, but now that the question of negotiating his status has been formally raised, it was doomed that the land could no longer be owned by the Kingdom of Spain.

Instead of this, it is better to sell for a good price! The Chilean region is not the focus of the expansion of the East Coast people. They invested as much energy here as the Pampa Plain or the Chaco area, so the expansion speed was not as fast as imagined. Valdivia is still far from Santiago. The central valley is a narrow and long north-south vertical plain. If the East Coast people eat one bite at a time, it will take at least many years to reach the Santiago area. The Kingdom of Spain can completely use this precious window of time to seize more technology, money and other benefits from the East Coast people, enrich the country and strengthen the army, develop the economy, improve the level of industry and agriculture, and then carefully consider the East Coast people. This is actually the only model they may rise.

No matter how the East Coast diplomats argue with the Spaniards, the East Coast pioneers who have crossed the border to Valdivia have already started to live step by step. This year is their first year of large-scale land reclamation in nearby areas. Standing on the top floor of the Cathedral of San Sebastian, the tallest building in Valdivia, you can see large areas of golden wheat fields in the wild that have begun to be harvested.

People on the east coast dispatched a large number of machinery to assist in harvesting. Among them, there were even several full steam harvesters in trial operation. Thanks to the rapid advancement of domestic material technology, the weight of the steam engine was greatly reduced, and some practical small steam harvesters gradually began to become popular and became the target of limited rental or procurement by many agricultural cooperatives. There is a state-owned farm on the east coast outside Valdivia. Because it is a little far from the river, the soil is not so soft, so this kind of steam harvester can be used. The wheat harvesting speed in the field is much faster than that of a horse-drawn harvester.

Of course, there are not only these agricultural machinery for the East Coast people. In fact, they have various machinery such as steam trenches, fertilizers, seeders, rolling presses, steam rakes, etc. The prices are not very expensive. If the villages that have established agricultural cooperatives grit their teeth, they can buy a lot of them, which is very critical to improving the efficiency of agricultural production.

In addition, they also pay great attention to the use of fertilizers. In addition to the waste residue of steelmaking, Peruvian bird droppings, horse island seal dung, whale bone meal, Djibouti potassium salt, superphosphate (produced in the northern chemical plants, the main raw materials are the rich cattle and sheep bones on the east coast) and other fertilizers are also widely used in agricultural production, which actually improves the efficiency of agricultural production in disguise.
Chapter completed!