Alva is gone.

The old duke didn't know until he left that the meal that Chen Mu gave him was not sumptuous but extremely delicate was the food of the Ming army.

Because the guards who ate in the guest room downstairs of the Yamen of the Military Mansion ate the same thing as him, except that the Daojie County sheep enema with green onion roasted mutton was missing, and the soldiers of the Military Government who ate with the guards ate the same.

Even in the conversation between the Spanish guards and the Ming soldiers, they knew that all the Ming soldiers in the New World ate these, they ate better at the station, and when they went out to fight, they ate other easy-to-carry military rations.

Compared with the dialogue between the commander and the commander, the small talk between the guards and the soldiers is much easier, the Ming army soldiers generally know Spanish, and the Spanish guards also generally speak Chinese, although it is not standard to communicate more laboriously, but the general meaning can be understood.

It's just that the mentality is complicated, and there are both thoughts that want to be close to each other, and thoughts that compare with each other.

In the comparison between the guards and the pro-soldiers, it was found that the garrison food of the Ming army was much better than that of the Spanish army, but the level of combat food of the two sides was about the same, and the biggest difference may be that the cooking skills of the Ming army's back pot team were better.

The rations of the Western Army are not bad, and they may be the countries with the closest taste to the Ming Dynasty in the whole of Europe.

The staple food of the Western Army's rations was rice, which was mainly accompanied by smoked pork, cheese, soybeans, and peas, and the ingredients were salt and vinegar, as well as wine, which was ten times more than the fresh water they carried.

Not to mention, although Chen Mu did not say anything nutritious about the relationship between the two countries at the banquet, this meal made Duke Alva, who was about to leave the New World, feel very good.

Even on the day of the large-scale reorganization of the Western Army and the departure of the transportation of armaments in the following half month, in the deafening greeting of the newly built artillery temple in Shelter Bay, Li Dan escorted Alva with his flagship Rokko and 12 large shark ships.

To a certain extent, the seven-year victory contest of Wanli and Chen Mu's military ration banquet opened a new chapter in the diplomatic history of the Ming Dynasty and Spain, and the two countries quickly entered the honeymoon period after the end of the years-long war.

The situation is both strange and not strange.

For the Spaniards, Da Ming is a giant beast that walks in the dense forest, when the Philippine Viceroyalty was the first small beast to cross into the dense forest and was eaten, the Spaniards felt the threat from the forest, and sent a stronger beast into the dense forest, but only half of the body was slapped to death.

When the giant beast really came out of the woods and stepped on the bones of the New Spanish garrison to say hello to Spain, Spain could only say hello with trepidation.

If there is not much difference in strength, even if there is a good trade relationship, there will still be a huge sense of threat, but once the difference in strength is too large, good trade is really just good trade.

This is amazing, obviously nothing has changed except strength, but it can change people's mentality.

The Spanish fleet still had absolute dominance in the Atlantic.

Since the first war of the Ming Dynasty and the total annihilation of the western army of Linlai Island, King Philip has made great efforts to build warships along the coast and form his fleet to transport the elite Iberian legions across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The plan could not catch up with the changes, and before Fei Lao Er was ready for a disgrace, three legions in New Spain were beaten by the Beiyang Banner Army and even the formation was canceled.

This was the tragedy of Spain, a powerful kingdom that had to fight with its king's ambition to unify Europe with religion, and faced the threat of the Ottoman Empire, both to suppress a rebellion in the tax-paying province of the Netherlands and to face a backstab from the Pope, which had to disperse its once-large military forces across the Netherlands, the Mediterranean, and Italy.

If you don't guard these places, Spain's fundamentals will be gone.

can guard these places, and Fei Laoer's ambition will have nowhere to put it.

When Li Dan and Chen Jiujing joined this large-scale expedition, they had a premonition in their hearts that what they saw was not Spain.

It was not the New Spain, which was unable to compete and grovel after a military defeat in the New World, nor was it the Alva fleet of more than 300 warships and merchant ships in the Caribbean.

Alva knew that the two young Ming captains were the sons of Chen Mu, and it seemed inevitable that in times of crisis, people would inevitably have this kind of relationship outside of blood to add mutual trust, and this tradition was also common in Iberia, which was ruled by Rome for 500 years.

Li Dan, who boarded Alva's flagship, did not hesitate to praise the huge fleet of Spain, even if he was not clear about the formation of the Spanish fleet, but just by looking at it, he knew that this fleet meant a huge threat to everyone at sea.

Spain's main warships have always been large, so they were called pot-bellied ships by the Ming Dynasty.

This was especially true of the Spanish fleet in the Atlantic, where among the more than 300 warships and merchant ships that transported troops and baggage, there were nearly 100 Galen ships with a size of more than 400 large shark ships, and 46 large Galen ships with a tonnage of 500 to 1,400, all of which were equipped with heavy guns of huge caliber in the bow.

"These warships were built by order of the king to deal with you."

In the six-story stern of the flagship, Duke Alva's old, loose-skinned hands covered the glass of the windows, and he looked at the huge fleet sailing on the undulating sea behind the ship, and it was hard not to show a proud look on his face when his eyes fell on the Galen ships with their huge railings and spinnakers.

It's just that this pride was quickly overshadowed by greater rejoicing, he said: "Even in the face of the Ming fleet...... Fortunately, they were not put to use. ”

Li Dan agrees with this sentence, but the things that the speaker and the listener think are different.

The reason why Alva said that it was fortunate that the Great Galen fleet was not put to use was because a fleet of this size could be deployed to a more useful place, rather than a pointless naval fight with the Ming army.

The land ceded to the Ming Dynasty by the treaty was less valuable in the eyes of Spain than the defeat of the army.

Their invasion policy had no assimilation power against the aborigines, not to mention the use of aboriginal power for their own purposes like the Ming Dynasty, and the endless resistance of the Indians made every inch of land extremely expensive to maintain.

In fact, with the exception of the Viceroyalty of Peru, which was rich in gold and silver, Spain ceded a large amount of land to the Ming Dynasty either without substantial occupation, or as if it were a loss of baggage, after the signing of the New Spanish Border Treaty, Spain's income in the New World not only decreased, but also increased considerably.

Li Dan had another idea, he was thinking about the fact that this fleet and the main force of the Oriental Fleet would start a big battle at sea, and who would be beneficial to the result?

He didn't know.

It's not that his confidence in the Rokko battleship formation is weak, but when more than forty big Galen with heavy guns on the bow roar like a huge wave on the sea, and under the bombardment of forty pounds of boulders, how many ships in this world can stop it?

But he knew that it must be Da Ming who won in the end.

This confidence did not stem from the fact that the Liujia battleship was better than the Galen ship, in fact, it was difficult for Li Dan to evaluate in his heart which of these two warships with similar sizes and different tactics was superior or inferior.

But the Ming Dynasty has a shipbuilding industry that is not weaker than that of Spain, the Ming Dynasty has a larger and huge production capacity, the Ming Dynasty has more soldiers, and the Liujia warships are loaded with fewer troops.

Therefore, this sea battle that happened in Li Dan's heart, although the process may be more tragic than the second war in Mingxi, the final winner must be Daming.