The sky was overcast, and the wind whipped up the waves in the open sea, and then smashed hard against the breakwater made of construction waste reclamation. On the breakwater that doubles as a trestle, dock workers in raincoats go back and forth, constantly pulling away truckloads of sulfur, lead, tin, graphite and other minerals with flatbed railcars, and then pulling bags of tightly sealed wheat over to be hoisted onto the deck of the ship with the pulley boom on the cargo ship.

Although some of the wheat will be damp even if it is sealed well in such stormy weather, since the customer himself does not care and insists on going to sea in such bad weather, what can the East Coast people as the seller say? For the sake of many years of partners, the director of the port authority of Luoqia Port has already fulfilled his responsibilities by giving away some moisture-proof quicklime for free.

"It's a Dutch merchant ship." Everyone on the docks knew the details of the Hind, a medium-sized merchant ship with a deadweight tonnage of about 300 tons, with a crew of 21 people and 8 guns.

"I heard that relations between Britain and the Netherlands were deteriorating, and that the mission sent by the Dutch government in The Hague had collapsed in London to negotiate with the British. After the promulgation of the new "Navigation Law", the British were staring at the sea for unruly Dutch merchant ships, and now some merchants with a strong sense of crisis have begun to prepare for a rainy day. In fact, this is a gamble, hoarding goods in advance, and then waiting for a possible war to break out, so that they can make a fortune, although it is a national disaster, but who cares. "The dock officer was sitting in his office. Look through the glass windows at the busy Dutch ships in the harbor. All kinds of gossip that circulated in the dock taverns and brothels echoed in my mind.

The Hind was not the only ship to come to Rocha for trade. In fact, there were seven or eight Dutch merchant ships, most of which belonged to the West India Company. These speculators, who had an unusually keen sense of smell - in fact they always had some relatives in political circles, and it was not difficult to inquire about some information - had already noticed the tension between Britain and the Netherlands, and then made predictions in advance, and began to buy and hoard supplies frantically.

In recent years, especially in the years since the establishment of the Republic of England, relations between Britain and the Netherlands have deteriorated so rapidly that it is dizzying and stunned. Bourgeois businessmen entered the Republic of England, where they held important positions in government, and under the rule of the military strongman Cromwell, they showed an increasingly hard-line attitude.

The Netherlands was also surprisingly hostile to the new bourgeois state, the Republic of England. Because the commercial capitalists who held power in the Netherlands feared that the English merchants would compete with them, they constantly attacked their English counterparts from all sides.

Their initial hostilities began at the beginning of the English Civil War, when the Dutch unanimously decided to support King Charles I of England on all fronts. For this reason, the Parliament of England had to send an emissary in 1642 to Walter . Strickland went to Holland to ask the Dutch to stop interfering in the English Civil War, but the Dutch ruthlessly refused - the Dutch continued to send four ships laden with ordnance, gunpowder, and mercenaries to England in support of the royal army.

Not only that, but the Dutch also gave full shelter to the British royal party, much to the annoyance of the British bourgeois government. In particular, Cromwell, who had already begun a large-scale trial of the royal party elements in the country, was even more angry about this, and he later sent an envoy to Holland again. He demanded that the Dutch expel the royal elements, but was later averted by the assassination of the British envoy in the Netherlands. But this has certainly greatly deteriorated relations between the two sides.

If this was not enough to convince people that the two countries were on the brink of war, the Navigation Regulations issued by the English Parliament in the second half of last year (1651) made it clear that the English had begun to legally empower the navy to intercept Dutch merchant ships at any time.

The British Navy enforced this law from the outset, first reinstating and expanding the patrol area of the English Navy, which had previously been the English Channel, which had survived the North Sea coast, and now extended to the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean, in order to increase British influence; Maritime courts were then set up in the North American colonies to strictly monitor violations of the Navigation Regulations in the colonies with which the Dutch traded frequently, especially in the colonies of the West Indies (mainly Barbados, where the sugar industry was developed) and Virginia, where the British navy confiscated a number of Dutch merchant ships, further aggravating the diplomatic dispute between the two countries.

Today, any businessman with a little insight will probably no longer have any illusions about peace, and it is time to deal with the coming of war! Thus, a number of well-informed Dutch merchants came to the east coast to import all sorts of goods, especially vital foodstuffs, because even they were unsure that peace would remain between the Anglo-Dutch overseas colonies after the outbreak of war, which seemed unlikely.

Therefore, based on this line of thinking, the top management of the Dutch West India Company strengthened its vigilance on the one hand - their practice was to convert some merchant ships into warships to maintain the safety of the route to the vast area from the West Indies in the north, to the coast of West Africa in the east, and to the northeastern part of Brazil in the south. On the other hand, since it has been judged that war is imminent, it is normal to acquiesce in or even encourage the company's merchant ships to purchase and hoard large quantities of supplies. In particular, such as grain, gunpowder, ordnance, medicines, canvas, cables, tar, and other materials for war readiness, as well as important daily production materials such as spirits, cloth, agricultural tools, bean cakes, and butter, are all priority purchases.

After all, the West India Company's top brass was now worried that if the British sent warships south to blockade the important ports under the West India Company, they might not have enough strength to escort them, because the company's limited resources had to prioritize the safe delivery of important supplies such as sugar, salt, indigo, and cocoa from Brazil, and the settlers in the colonial ports, who had no time to take care of it, would have to figure out their own ways.

The Dutch were unlucky, but the people on the east coast inadvertently smiled crookedly. Why? Because this year's bumper grain harvest finally has a buyer, and it seems that this buyer's appetite is not small, he bought wheat worth 55,000 yuan in one go. This made the people of the National Grain Reserve Warehouse, who were worried about increasing their grain income, breathe a sigh of relief, and in order to deal with the increasing amount of grain (in order to maintain the enthusiasm of farmers in producing grain, the National Reserve Grain Depot would purchase all kinds of grain at a protective price every year), they were ready to launch a large-scale semi-mechanized wine-making production line.

Of course, although the food crisis has eased slightly, this brewing production line still has to be used, because the European Arkhangel trading station has already sent orders to the country, and the demand for spirits in Moscow is still very large, Zheng Yong and others plan to take advantage of the fact that Western spirits (brandy) have not yet invaded Moscow in a big way, and early to enter the East Bank spirits (currently mainly produced in South Africa), and cultivate the Russians' preference for the taste of spirits, so that they can better occupy this market in the future.

The profit of agricultural production has increased again, which is also extremely important for the East Coast Republic of China today. Because this means that the barren fields in the inland areas will once again attract a certain amount of private investment, and at the same time, the income of the vast number of rural farmers will also be increased to a certain extent, which is also extremely crucial for stabilizing the domestic situation on the east coast of the country -- grain exports have solved the three problems of increasing farmers' income, agricultural development, and rural stability in one fell swoop, and this has made it possible for agriculture, which has absorbed the largest number of employed people in the country on the east coast, to finally sweep away the decline in recent years. Peasant incomes (relative to workers' incomes), which had been stagnant for many years, are also expected to rise again.

As the export of cereals increases, the export of meat and seafood related to it will naturally not be less. However, in this regard, the Dutch asked the East Coast to be able to deliver their goods to their own doors, since their ships were limited, and it was not easy to preserve seafood and meat (even if they were pickled, they would have a peculiar smell), especially when they heard that there was a miraculous refrigerated ship on the East Coast that could store goods at freezing point, and they thought it would be better for the East Coasters to deliver their goods themselves - of course they were willing to pay a freight of 50 guilders per tonne for this.

In the face of this request of the Dutch, the Council of the Republic of the East Coast, after a collective study, decided to accede to the request of the Dutch, and then sent a letter to the South China Sea Transport Company, asking them to use refrigerated ships to export frozen meat and frozen fish to the Netherlands, and the navy also needed to allocate a certain number of warships to escort the goods to avoid accidents that might arise on the way.

The growing tension between Britain and the Netherlands has made a fortune on the eastern coast of the New World, which cannot but be said to be a wonderful thing. Of course, this was also due to the deformed economic structure of the Dutch West India Company, that is, the tropical colonies dominated by plantations, which were mainly based on sugar cane cultivation and sugar extraction, and the daily necessities of the natives were trafficked in by the West India Company from outside the world (which had the advantage of making two times the money) - for example, they brought cloth and wine from the mainland, grain from British North America, salt from Curacao, and so on.

In any case, the demand of the Dutch West India Company had begun to gradually affect the industrial and agricultural production of the East Coast Republic of China, and the South China Sea Transport Company, a large trust shipping company, simply placed a new order for six refrigerated ships from the shipyards of the three major countries, intending to expand the number of refrigerated ships to ten; At the same time, the Northern Arsenal and the Northern Gunpowder Factory also began to gradually increase their horsepower to prepare for the production of various types of munitions; The comprehensive workshop of the Dayuhe Arsenal also began to produce a large number of labor tools and steel bars, and all of them seemed to be thriving under the stimulus of external demand. (To be continued......) R1292