The expansion of ambition is a very normal opinion thing for a person who is in a high position and is used to giving orders all year round, otherwise no one would say that power is a drug addiction that men can't quit!

It's just that Li Tianyang still has a strong rational existence, even if his heart has changed his goal from protecting his family and friends through the troubled times before, to now wanting to gain a foothold on Dayuan Island to resist the attacks of the Qing Dynasty in the future, and then become a prince, he has never exaggerated the strength of his team and tried to ascend to the sky in one step.

The biggest problem that plagues Li Tianyang now is population, which is a big hurdle that Li Tianyang can't overcome!

There are indeed a lot of people in the inland of the Ming Dynasty, and in these years, Li Tianyang has never given up except for the action of migrating people from the inland when they have stopped moving people from the inland in extremely difficult times!

Qi San, a human trafficker who specially recruited people for Li Tianyang and them, has gone from being the leader of a group of no more than 100 coolies on the Yuegang Wharf to now having thousands of people under his command and most of the coastal areas south of the Yellow River, from which we can see the price and determination that Li Tianyang has paid in relocating the population over the years!

However, unless the Ming people are forced to do so, who is willing to leave their hometown to work hard in other places, let alone an overseas wild place that no one has ever heard of!

Unless there is a natural and man-made disaster that is rare in a century, ordinary people will definitely not be moved by Qi San's manpower and accept Li Tianyang and they have to recruit, so Li Tianyang has consumed a lot of silver this year, but the number of people recruited is only tens of thousands of people, which is considered good!

Until now, the population of Bengang, Jilonggang and their affiliated villages together has been less than 100,000 people who moved from the coast and absorbed the pirates!

100,000 may seem like a lot, but excluding children, the elderly, and women, there are no more than 30,000 strong laborers in a real family.

And the people recruited by Hongtang and Qixintang over the years, whether they are still alive or have been sacrificed, account for almost one-third of them. These recruited manpower is basically a professional soldier, who rarely works in the field in normal times, and in the end, work like farming falls on the shoulders of about 20,000 strong laborers.

Of course, ordinary farm women are also capable, and they can barely help these men in their families to share some farming tasks, but in the absence of enough livestock on Dayuan Island as a means of cultivating the land, these men still have to cultivate hundreds of thousands of acres of land developed on Dayuan Island, you can imagine how hard their work is!

However, if you want to support Li Tianyang's inflated ambitions, then Hongtang, the armed force in Li Tianyang's hands, must urgently need to develop and grow, otherwise what kind of hegemony will there be, the princes of the territory!

It is obviously impossible to recruit the last labor force on the island, and the recruitment from the inland is now very ineffective, as for the most effective co-optation pirates in the early stage, with the rapid expansion of Hongtang, the pirate gangs in their sphere of influence are gradually decreasing!

Even if there were some pirate gangs who did not want to belong to Hongtang, most of them went to the two pirate free zones planned by Li Tianyang, and they were still panting there. And this, you can't let Li Tianyang slap himself in the face, and lead his troops to encircle and suppress those pirate gangs that abide by Li Tianyang's rules very much, who will dare to believe Li Tianyang's words in the future!

Therefore, Li Tianyang thought about it, and finally shifted his attention to the original natives on the island again!

Don't look at the general size of the indigenous tribes, most of them are only small clans with a size of hundreds of people, but after all, the people have been breeding on Dayuan Island for hundreds of years, and just Li Tianyang and them quietly counted the population of the Bengang Alliance tribes, which has already exceeded the total population of Bengang and Jilong Harbor!

Moreover, due to the harsh environment, sanitary conditions and other factors, there are very few elderly people among the indigenous people, and at least two-fifths of the population of the tribe are men in the prime of life, which is much more than the men in the Bengang team.

These indigenous men were born to be qualified warriors, except for not knowing tactics and strategies, the conditions in all other aspects completely left Qi San and the former farmers, fishermen, and coolies recruited from the inland by a large margin, as long as a little training could become a powerful force in the hands of Li Tianyang.

Dayuan Island has not been developed, so naturally there is no benefit to development, that is, there are countless big trees on the island that are decades or hundreds of years, as long as Li Tianyang and them are willing to walk ten miles into the jungle, they can cut down a lot of qualified materials for building warships.

Therefore, the only factor restricting the rapid expansion of Hongtang in the future is population, whether it is the construction of a "Yang Fan-style" warship, or the sailors carried by the ship, as long as there are enough manpower, Li Tianyang believes that in no more than five years, he can expand the strength of Hongtang today, no, three times!

After this arduous journey to Beijing, Li Tianyang believes that it is much easier to move these patriarchs than before.

This is also when Li Tianyang chose these patriarchs before, almost all of them were large and medium-sized clan leaders, these tribes almost accounted for at least one-third of the population of the entire alliance, and they were also the weather vane and backbone of their respective small circles.

"What was Bengang like, I believe I don't need to say more, many of you know it in your hearts, before you were worried that we Bengang people would annex your clans that have been passed down from generation to generation, and now after this trip, I hope you can change your point of view!" Anyway, in order to satisfy the appetite of the family before, Li Tianyang had already made his words very clear, and at this moment, seeing that everyone appeared in front of him, he quietly smiled.

"A general in the Ming Dynasty can control the life and death of tens of thousands of people, and a governor can control the lives of millions of people. Are you willing to live like this for the rest of your life? ”

People will have desires, will yearn for a better life, if you don't know it's okay, but when the comparison appears, everyone will have a different view of the current life!

"God, you make it clear, don't go around the bush with all of us, what changes do you want us to make? What kind of benefits can it bring to us in the new year? "The one who can talk to Li Tianyang so unceremoniously is naturally the patriarch Ma Yao of the Jura Mountain Society, as a die-hard supporter of Li Tianyang, the horizons he opened up when he entered Beijing make him still have endless aftertastes.

(End of chapter)