Wind Rises in North America 1625

Chapter 104 Assumption
The "Breaking Waves" and "Conquest" brought back 618 immigrants from the Ming Dynasty, including 489 young men, 97 young women, and 32 children under the age of fourteen.

This brought the population controlled by the Qiming Island travelers to over one thousand, reaching 1628 people (517 of whom were Native Americans), slightly alleviating the extreme shortage of manpower.

In view of this, after the autumn harvest, the decision-making committee opened up five settlements between Shixing Fort and Guangfeng Fort, thus closely connecting the two places.

The weather in November gets colder day by day after the autumn dew falls.

However, in order to allow the new immigrants to settle down as soon as possible and survive the harsh winter, hundreds of strong men were organized and worked day and night to improve the infrastructure of their homes.

In the wilderness, rows of brick and wooden houses continued to rise.

The processed wooden boards were laid in the brand new wooden house.

Fences extended continuously along the perimeter of the settlement, eventually forming a circle to keep the wild animals in the woods out.

Pieces of wood, chopped by axes, were turned into piles of firewood, neatly stacked on one side of the row houses, providing enough firewood for the immigrants to keep warm in winter.

A group of children carried bundles of straw from the farmland back to the settlement on their tender shoulders to use as kindling for the stove.

The women sewed brand new cloth into suits of clothes and made soft furs into winter clothes to keep out the cold.

The only cotton-spinner, assisted by several apprentices, made the best use of his time to roll balls of soft Susong cotton into thick quilts.

Everyone is working hard for a better new life.

"What are you looking at?"

On November 11th, after noon, Li Xianqing accompanied Luo Zhenhui to several colonization sites under construction to inspect their progress. As they reached a row of immigrant dormitories, they noticed the other person pause, approaching the doors and windows of a wooden cabin and carefully observing something.

"I think we should get the glass out." Luo Zhenhui pointed at the paper covering the windows, shook his head, and sighed. "To keep out the wind and cold, the windows are already small, so the light intake is relatively poor. Now that the weather is cold, and the windows are covered with paper again, I guess there won't be much light in the house during the day. Living in it will inevitably feel a bit depressing. If you don't turn on the lights, you can't do anything."

"I'm afraid we won't be able to make glass anytime soon. No one understands it," Li Xianqing said with a wry smile. "Although we all know that glass is made from melted sand, no one understands the specific ratio of raw materials and the production process."

"We can't make it, but we can get some craftsmen to help us build it."

"During this period, it seems that the craftsmen of the Ming Dynasty were unable to produce transparent glass?"

The world's first glass mirror was produced in Venice, the glass capital. In 1317, Venetian glassmakers accidentally invented transparent glass while trying to make colored glass.

The glass made in ancient China was generally not transparent. It had many beautiful colors added to it and was used as a decoration. It was called colored glaze.

As for those small lenses, and even the early primitive flower glasses, they were all made by grinding them at a cost of considerable manpower and material resources. They were considered luxury goods and could not be mass-produced at all.

During this period, Venice had the most advanced and largest glass manufacturing industry.

However, with the huge sums of money being spent by European countries and the continuous plagiarism of technology, sporadic glass manufacturing industries have emerged in countries and regions such as France, England, and Germany, posing a serious threat to Venice's monopoly on the glass industry.

"It doesn't matter. As long as we can make glass, even if it's opaque," Luo Zhenhui pondered for a moment and said, "We don't know the specific production process, but we do have a basic understanding of the chemical reactions. It's just a matter of doing more experiments."

"Well, we can work with that Spanish merchant Pedro to find a way to get us one or two glass craftsmen from the Spanish American colonies or Europe. At worst, we can just spend a little more money and consider it buying people. If we can make products like glass or mirrors and bring them to the Ming Dynasty, they will also be high-value-added commodities and can be exchanged for a lot of people and materials." "You probably don't know. Meng Shengxin sold a dressing mirror from the 'Breaking Waves' in Guangzhou for a whopping 1,600 taels of silver! I heard that after changing hands a few times, the price of that clearly visible mirror has soared to 2,500 taels of silver."

"Really?" Li Xianqing was extremely surprised when he heard this. "Then we still have more than a dozen dismantled dressing mirrors in Shixing Fort. If we take them to the Ming Dynasty to exchange for silver, wouldn't that mean we can immediately earn 30,000 or 40,000 taels of silver?"

"Haha..." Luo Zhenhui laughed, then shook his head. "Selling those dozen or so glass mirrors is a one-time deal. It won't sustain us for long. ...I just mentioned glass manufacturing casually. Right now, aside from furs, we have almost nothing worthwhile to ship to the Ming Dynasty to exchange for money to support our continued large-scale immigration activities."

"So, we must now plan carefully. Besides striving to improve and develop our industrial system, we must also see if we can develop some specialty products or high-value-added goods. This way, our ships bound for Ming Dynasty won't be too empty, and we can create a large trade surplus to feed back our immigration activities and support further production expansion."

"Actually, if we have enough manpower, we can further process the fur." ​​Li Xianqing nodded and said, "For example, we can make sea otter fur into finished products such as coats, hats, scarves, gloves, shawls, mats, mattresses, etc., thereby earning higher added value. In addition, seal skin and deerskin can also be made into shoes, hats, vests, gloves, and decorations."

"Oh, by the way, there are also specialties like seal oil and deer antlers that can be brought to the Ming Dynasty for sale. Besides that, you could also bring a few of the tall and sturdy firs, spruces, and tall pines (also known as Douglas firs) on the island to see if you can sell them for some money. It's said that during this period, the Ming Dynasty was still very short of wood. Whether it was for building magnificent mansions, large ships, or even making furniture, there wasn't much good wood available."

After more than a thousand years of logging, by the Ming Dynasty, high-quality timber had become extremely scarce in the Chinese mainland, especially for construction and furniture manufacturing.

Buildings such as royal palaces, mansions of dignitaries, and temples and pavilions of monks and Taoists require a large amount of wood, especially large-sized and high-quality wood.

Royal buildings tend to use nanmu, a wood that can only be found in the primeval forests of the southwest, but is extremely inconvenient to transport.

In addition, the shortage of high-quality timber also affected the Ming Dynasty's maritime trade.

In the past, Zheng He's voyages to the West were stopped. In addition to the unanimous opposition of officials and gentry, another important reason was the shortage of timber for building large ships.

Although, it is indeed a waste of transportation capacity to transport several giant trees across the vast Pacific Ocean to Ming Dynasty for sale.

It can even be said that this kind of cargo that takes up a lot of space is extremely uneconomical in terms of trade value.

However, Qiming Island currently has no valuable commodities to offer. Apart from furs, it only has hundreds of thousands of looted Spanish pesos. The trip to Ming Dynasty is purely to give money.

Of course, after "hooking up" with the Spanish smuggler Pedro, the Ming Dynasty's specialties can be exchanged for some silver through his smuggling channels, which can also slightly subsidize the cost of round-trip transportation.

However, this is not a long-term solution.

Because, if trade is handled properly, it can accumulate a huge amount of wealth in a short period of time, and it may also allow the people of Qiming Island to live a prosperous life.

However, this does not have a positive effect on the growth of Qiming Island's hard power. Once the trade chain is broken, it will become penniless and immediately fall into difficulties.

For example, the Spanish cracked down on trade smuggling.

For example, when the Ming Dynasty was in a state of collapse.

Therefore, time travelers must plan ahead, develop industry honestly, and lay a solid foundation.

Therefore, driven by market demand, it is necessary to develop some specialty products and produce some high value-added goods.

This will not only have a positive effect on the advancement of industrial technology and the expansion of industrial scale.
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(End of this chapter)