"The temperature must be several degrees below zero, right?" Liu Jianguo, a senior technician of the engineering department of the Southern Railway Company, looked at the fine snowflakes floating in the sky and muttered to himself.

It's already a cold winter in the southern hemisphere, and the climate is dropping rapidly at a latitude like Chiloe Island. Often, a cold gust of westerly wind drifting from the Pacific Ocean can cause the air to drop by many degrees, but fortunately it is not common because if cold and dry air blows over the ocean, it prevents the water vapor from rising on the surface of the sea to form rain - but local rainfall is very abundant, which is rare in temperate regions around the world.

Frequent rainfall, combined with relatively cold weather, has resulted in areas such as Hokkaido in Japan, parts of the United Kingdom, and the Falklands Baleen Whale Harbor area: dense swampy depressions and peaty soil in some areas. Furthermore, in some areas, the deposition of peat has been over time and has gradually formed lignite, but this coal reserve is not large and has little value, so no one has developed it.

"Let's go." Wang, who is over forty years old, put the whale skin rain boots on his feet tightly, leans on a wooden cane, and looks at the confused road ahead and says. There is a path that clears out of the dense forest and leads to a lumberyard deep in the forest. More than 300 prisoners of war from Poland were working in the lumberyards, all of whom had been transferred to the expedition period after performing well along the Southern Cone Interoceanic Railway. If they do not make any major mistakes after the expiration of the three-year probationary period, then they can apply for citizenship of the East Coast Republic of China. Generally speaking, it can be done within a year, which means that it only takes 5-6 years for them to obtain free status. Although it is not as fast as ordinary indentured slaves who can obtain free status in only 3-5 years, considering their initial status as prisoners of war slaves. This is already some kind of benevolent government.

Accompanying Wang Dali and others was Xu Gang, the former commander of the 101st Company of the Army (now abolished) and the current squadron leader of the road protection team of the Southern Railway Company. Xu Gang took dozens of heavily armed road escort soldiers, escorted more than 100 pack beasts hired in Araukan Port (with more than 100 Araucan Indian riders), and more than 300 people from Zhili Hejian Mansion in the north of the Ming Dynasty, ready to set off together.

The destination of these supplies is the logging fields deep in the dense forest, as is the destination of the migrants. Together, they were to be enriched to help the Polish prisoners of war who had arrived there in advance to establish a relatively stable settlement. To facilitate future colonization activities into the interior of Chiloe Island. Obviously, the Southern Rail Company will not limit its pace to such a small coastal port as Guanhai Port, and their ultimate goal is to occupy this large island in the south of Chile - and it is not that no one has pointed out the danger of the Southern Railway Company emigration to the areas once colonized by the Spaniards. But the Southern Railway Company is a rogue enterprise from top to bottom, and their president Mo Ming is also a rogue leader with a strong personality, and it is impossible to expect them not to cross the line and step on the line.

Of course, Mo Ming's move is not without support. Some powerful departments, such as the General Directorate of National Intelligence, the Gendarmerie, the War Department, and even the Admiralty, expressed limited support for the Southern Railway's sneaky territorial expansion to test the Spaniards' bottom line, i.e., they did want to know whether the Spaniards would do anything against the East Coasters who had crossed the border to colonize.

Although according to some limited information, the Kingdom of Spain did not have any strong resentment against the countries of England, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, etc., which had seized their colonies, and they continued to do business and state dealings, as if nothing had happened. It's just that the overseas colonies themselves will fight back and forth. For example, the Spaniards have organized fleets and soldiers many times to recover colonies occupied by other countries, and then they are fought back again by other countries, and then they are fought back again. The process dragged on for decades, but the relationship between the two countries remained largely unaffected during this period. Perhaps in their minds, the competition between overseas colonies was not enough to make the whole country fight for it.

Even so, the people of the East wanted to know for sure that the Kingdom of Spain could not do anything to France, Portugal, England, and the Netherlands, which were also Christians and whites. But will the Easterners, as pagans and yellow people, make the Spaniards even more angry? Thus they made up their minds to break with the east coast and even go to war. This kind of thing can't be guessed, you can only use practical actions to test their bottom line, fortunately, the Southern Railway is nominally a colonial trading company, if it really wants to make trouble, the East Coast government can also put the matter on the businessmen (although they seem to be the largest shareholder of the Southern Railway), and it is not difficult to put it away.

In other words, the market of the Southern Railway Company is continuously bullish in China, especially after it single-handedly opened up the smuggling trade in Peru, even though the company has made it clear that it will lose money for the third consecutive year, but it is still favored by investors in the Qingdao financial market. The company's seven-year and 10-year bonds are selling well, and expected yields are hitting record lows; Share sales have also begun to gradually accelerate, among which Genoa's Doria family exercised the right to acquire a while ago, invested heavily to increase their equity ratio to 5%, and some other investors are also very active, at present, the 40% of the shares sold by the Southern Railway Company have been sold a total of 19.85%, which has injected a large amount of valuable funds into the company's development, so that the president of Mo Ming Mo can also perform some extraordinary tasks.

Perhaps the only concern of investors is the strong army background of the Southern Railway Company. The company not only accepted several army companies that had been dismissed from the Ministry of War, but also clearly stated in the company's articles of establishment that each president of the Southern Railway Company must be an active military attache appointed by the War Department. The War Office seems unmoved by the fact that the War Department seems unmoved by the fact that its strong background in the Army will inevitably be influenced by the fact that it is a large Concierge enterprise in the white shirts of civilians and naval officers as a "concentration camp for the remnants of horse manure."

However, regardless of the background of the Southern Railway Company, as the first company to carry out overseas colonization and trade, its influence and exemplary nature are undoubtedly extremely huge, and the company has also brought a broad market and a large number of cheap agricultural and mineral products to the domestic industrial and commercial circles, which has great positive significance in promoting the development of domestic industry and commerce and reducing the price of daily consumer goods. This alone, no matter how sour civil servants crooked their mouths, could not stop the Executive Committee's full support for the company - including the exploration and colonization of Chiloe Island by the Southern Railway, of course.

Okay, let's get down to business. At this time, the expedition led by Liu Jianguo (representative of the Southern Railway Company), Wang Dali (representative of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Geology and Mineral Resources), and Xu Gang (the principal of the army forces) set out from Guanhai Port, a settlement in the grass stage, and advanced to the logging site in the inland area. Today, August 3, 1651, they were expected to spend two or three days crossing a makeshift forest path between the hills to reach the coast on the other side of the north.

The lumber yard is located on the other side of the hill, as experts from the Ministry of Agriculture agree that the soil is more fertile and the agricultural conditions are better. Therefore, the Southern Railway Company decided to set up a lumber yard there, and sent many prisoners of war and slaves (including overseers) to cut down and clear the land here, laying the foundation for subsequent colonial settlement.

Upon arrival at the map, known on the map as the "Mishan Lumberyard," the expedition will distribute supplies to the local loggers and take a day off before continuing on their way, depending on weather conditions. If the weather conditions are not good, which is common in winter, they will return to Guanhai Harbour and then take a 72-ton steam steamer (an old paddle steamer that has been obsolete in China, bought by the Southern Railway Company at a low price to use the residual heat) and explore, observe and map the eastern coastline of the island, providing detailed information for future full-scale colonization.

Of course, if the weather is good, they will follow the trails between the hills and valleys and explore the inland areas. They will do their best to find a suitable path for people and animals to walk among the hills with dense forests, swamps, rivers, depressions, and lakes, and at the same time record in detail the soil, forest, animal and plant resources of the areas they pass through, and mark each suitable place for human settlement as the official basis for future colonization.

On August 5, 1651, Wang Dali and his entourage finally arrived at the Mishan Lumber Yard after a difficult trek. The local Polish loggers cheered, they were fed up with this cold, damp place. Due to the shallow, silted water and reefs on the sea, the port was not suitable for the local waterfront, so their supplies were transported by ships from the port of Guanhai and brought by a difficult forest path to Guò. The condition of the trail was so bad (in many places it was made of thick logs that were laid down on the ground) that it was impossible to pass through the vehicles, and the resupply was naturally slow with the difficulty of transporting it by horse teams.

On the other hand, poor road conditions mean that it is difficult to transport timber resources here. This will require a lot of effort to build roads, such as the Southern Railway Company, which has seriously considered building a railway from Guanhai Port to the north through the mountain valley to the Mishan Logging Yard (which can be extended to other areas in the future). The area through which the railway passes is full of swampy depressions, except for forests and hills (no more than 200 meters, which are not very undulating and have a gentle slope). It can be said that the technical difficulty of the construction of the railway is not great, but the amount of work is very large, and this requires the Southern Railway Company to invest a lot of manpower and material resources in cutting down trees, draining swamps, and building reservoirs in this area, and then it can build the railway section by section -- this is destined to be a beautiful dream before the official opening of the Liangyang Railway.

On August 7, 1651, the weather on the island of Chiloe, which had been gloomy for a week, finally cleared. Wang Dali and the others packed up their things, and then continued their exploration and exploration journey along the mountain path. (To be continued)