On June 15, 1704, an old sailboat docked at Cape Town Harbor.

Although the ship is old, its name is very domineering. It is called the "Oriental Giant" and is affiliated to the Hei Water Shipping Company. The ship left the Damo Port of the home port in the second half of last year, and then passed through North Korea's Wonsan, Jeju Island, Ningbo Dinghai, Fujian Mawei, Lianwuqinzhou, Brunei, Malacca, Leba Island, and Xinhua Port. It finally arrived in Cape Town, South Africa. The entire voyage lasted for more than nine months, which is an epic voyage.

Of course, this is only for the small local airline of Blackwater Shipping. After all, this is the first time it has opened such a long route and has been completed in Africa. It is indeed not easy. But for shipping giants like South China Sea Transportation Company and East African Transportation Company, this route that has not yet spanned half of the earth is really nothing. Especially for the Nanhai Company, which is firmly in the top throne, they are equipped with a large number of fully steam-powered ships. With the support of the port supply along the way that the East Coast government has spent decades and huge costs, they can already achieve a fixed global navigation route, which is something that other companies cannot match and cannot be replicated in the short term.

Blackwater Shipping Company signed an agreement with the South China Sea Transport Company the year before yesterday. With the approval of the Ministry of Transportation, it opened a route between Cape Town and Dabo Port. This route is mainly freight, that is, transporting the rich medicinal materials, gold, high-end fur, silk fabrics, tea and other specialty products from East Asia to Cape Town, and then purchasing complete sets of equipment, books, weapons, medical supplies, hardware products, etc. here, and then transporting them to East Asia for profit.

There is no doubt that this is a trade route with gold flowing, and Blackwater Shipping Company can definitely make a big profit from it. Although according to the agreement, they want to share part of the profit with the South China Sea Transport Company (which is considered to be the sharing of the route between the two parties), they are also very profitable, which is the first step for the company to move from the near-shore to the ocean, and it is of great significance.

The "Oriental Giant" is a large 1,100-ton ship. After the berth of the commercial dock in Cape Town, the Port Authority immediately sent some people to organize the unloading and collect fees. As the only free port on the African continent, although Cape Town does not have tariffs, it will also appropriately charge other fees. The rate is not high. However, considering that there are many ships docked here, the Cape Town Port Authority is still a very profitable company. Otherwise, the South African River District Administration would not use its income as collateral and borrow from the Volkswagen Savings Bank to build railways. The bank is not stupid!

When they first came from the relatively backward Blackwater area to Cape Town in the Flower World, the sailors of the "Oriental Giant" were immediately fascinated. The first lieutenant who led the team to disembark on the ship looked at these people vigilantly, especially the young men, for fear that they would disappear without saying a word. That would be too ugly. This is not an unfair worry. There was a Russian merchant ship sailing from Arkhangelsk to Amsterdam. After docking for several days, all the sailors refused to return to Russia, which made a big joke.

Fortunately, the sailors of the "Oriental Giant" are not that bad. Perhaps because the income in cities such as Dabo and Hei Shui is quite good, they just went to shops to make big purchases and did nothing else. Because Cape Town is a free port, the goods here are not expensive, and the quantity is very large, just like local big cities. Therefore, you can see a large number of crew members lingering in various stores almost every day. The most important thing is to purchase various goods that are difficult to see elsewhere, and the price is cheap.

In this era, the risks of ocean sailing were unpredictable, and it took one or two years to go. If the income was not satisfactory, to be honest, few people would be willing to be sailors. The East Coast Republic had experienced this stage, and once had a shortage of sailors. It was difficult to recruit those who ran far away from the ocean, or they could not be retained for a long time if they were recruited. At that time, they were even forced to use a large number of foreign sailors to fill the vacancies, which shows how serious the lack of people was.

Later, the Ministry of Transportation of the East Coast had to introduce a series of measures to increase sailors' income. The most important one was to legalize the duty-free quota of sailors' privately purchased goods, that is, to allow sailors to purchase certain amounts of tariff-free goods, which greatly increased their income. The popularity of the sailor profession gradually increased, which reversed the dilemma of insufficient manpower.

Nowadays, sailors of the "Oriental Giant" are purchasing goods in large quantities. There is a unified space on the ship to store them. As long as it does not exceed the specified amount, everything is fine. In addition, according to the old tradition left by the sailing era, each sailor's personal belonging box can also store some goods. In theory, this is illegal, but tradition is tradition. For hundreds of years, sailors from all over the world have been like this. The East Coast officials naturally turned a blind eye. Anyway, the box is not big, and they have to place daily necessities, so it doesn't matter if they carry some things. That's it.

Merchants or sailors from Europe can be seen everywhere on the streets of the Cape Town commercial district. In fact, this is a large trading center. Merchants from many countries choose to ship the goods here for sale, and then buy the things they need to transport them back to their destination. For example, the Dutch in India purchases weapons and ammunition and goods from their homelands of Europe here, and then sells Indian goods including Ceylon gems, coconuts, Punjabi silk and other Indian goods. This saves their voyage and procurement costs, and reduces risks and has many benefits. The only dissatisfaction is probably that many goods are controlled by Cape Town merchants, whether they are East Coast or foreigners, and they suck an extra layer of blood by them. This seems to be why the Dutch East India Company insists that the company's merchant ships transport spices throughout the entire journey. They really don't want to be controlled by Cape Town merchants. Therefore, they would rather take some risks and increase costs than do it yourself.

Such a prosperous business naturally brought huge fiscal revenue to the Cape Town government, and also provided local people with many high-income and high-quality jobs. After all, the shops, crowded banks and many hotels and restaurants on the street are not fake. In addition, many foreign businessmen invest in real estate here, if the city is not prosperous and the people's wages are not high, it will be unreasonable.

After the sailors of the "Oriental Giant" got off the ship, a group of special "guests" on the ship also went to an open area under the guidance of the dock management department. This was a group of immigrants from mainland China, with a number of more than 200. According to the plan, they will stay in this place that also serves as an isolation and quarantine area for a while, waiting for an old-fashioned sailboat from the South China Sea Transportation Company to pick them up and head to Gibraltar Bay in Europe.

Yes, yes, they will be a new group of residents of Jinghai County under the name of the Straits Management Committee. With the continued operation of the East Coast Army in southern Spain, the area of ​​Jinghai County will be ten times the present in the future, which undoubtedly requires more people to fill the gap. All the local Spanish people are not trustworthy and will be shipped to other places for resettlement in the future. In fact, in the second half of the year, a merchant ship will arrive at the Port of Cape Town with a full load of Spanish residents from Gibraltar, and then wait for another ship to transport them to Australia to settle. Before them, a merchant ship had already carried hundreds of Poles from Danze County. According to the agreement, the "Oriental Giant" will take some of them back to Northeast Asia and be scattered in Vladivostok, Hokkien and even Kamchatka to enrich the local population.

The area of ​​the isolation and quarantine area is not very large, and it can accommodate about four or five thousand people, which is temporarily enough. However, I heard that Cape County is building a larger temporary resettlement area for immigration adjacent to the Freeport related areas, which can accommodate about 50,000 people to cope with the increasing pressure on short-term resettlement.

This was mainly used to build a large number of Indians and Mestiso people who were transported from the local area. There was no way. After so many years of cleaning up, the capacity and resettlement capacity were still insufficient. More and more relevant personnel were stranded in various temporary resettlement sites. Not only Cape Town, but Dayuan Port and other places had already resettled at least 20,000 people, relying on working in local state-owned farms. Now the Yellow-and-Black Dividing Line has finally had a further capacity to receive personnel, so the local area decided to increase the intensity of sending personnel to this side, striving to clear out more Indian ancestry people from the local area as soon as possible. The Cape County Government has money, so naturally it has to share the worries of the country and build the largest temporary immigration resettlement site in southern Africa. Anyway, this account can be recorded first, and then repay the countries on the dividing Line later. There is no rush.

In addition, according to a rumor, the Cape County Government will also "lent" a considerable amount of funds to Yicheng County to build infrastructure in the marching railway area, including but not limited to rural roads, farmland water conservancy facilities, agricultural product distribution markets, agricultural product deep processing enterprises and even farmers' residences, in order to achieve a higher level of development in those areas, so that the colonial support for several columns of the Yellow-and-Black Dividing Line will be stronger. Those grass-headed kings have to rely on the marching railway to transport all supplies. The longer the marching railway is built, the better their lives will be. Otherwise, it is not impossible to fail the colonial situation. Anyway, there are more than one column that has been destroyed in the past few years.
Chapter completed!