On board ship 101.

"Why do I need your head? I want the oriental beauty." Zhao Hao laughed and said, "Promise me that you must bring it to me!"

Qiaoqiao came to serve the soup just in time. When she heard this, her hands went limp and she almost dropped the soup bowl on the ground.

She felt extremely sad, so she quickly put the soup bowl on the table and left the restaurant in a hurry. Then she sat in front of the brick stove in the small kitchen, feeling sad.

"What's wrong?" Secretary Ma, who was helping her look after the stove, looked at Qiaoqiao in surprise. The dim firelight made her face red and shiny.

"No, nothing." Qiaoqiao forced a laugh, then broke it and whispered, "The young master is going to take me by force."

"Ah?" Secretary Ma opened his mouth slightly in surprise. He thought that the young master had grown up and had made great achievements. "How could that be?"

"Yeah, this guy is really something. Does he need to fight for a beauty?" Qiaoqiao blurted out with a hint of resentment: "He wants to take over the food in the pot before he even eats the food in the bowl..."

"Pooh, pooh, what nonsense am I talking about!" After saying this, she blushed with shame, covered her face and dared not look up.

"Is the beauty you are talking about called... Oriental Beauty?" Secretary Ma is Secretary Ma after all, and he knows every detail of Zhao Hao.

"Yes, you knew it long ago!" Qiaoqiao looked up in surprise, somewhat complaining to Sister Ma that she had kept it from her: "Didn't you say that we should tighten the fence and prevent dogs from getting in?"

"Hehe. Wait, let me laugh for a while..." Secretary Ma waved her hands and laughed until tears came out of her eyes, "We can't compare to this oriental beauty, not even Miss Jiang or the young county lady can compare to her."

"Really? Such a powerful person? Could she be a Japanese princess?" Qiaoqiao asked in surprise, thinking that the county lady would be fine, but Miss Jiang would be in danger.

“You’ll know when the time comes…” Secretary Ma laughed so hard that his stomach hurt, and he kept the secret, refusing to tell anyone even if he was beaten to death.

~~

The wind had been blowing all day, the night sky was cloudless, and the moon and stars were sparse.

Futian Bay was pitch black, and the warships on both sides turned off their lights to avoid becoming targets for the other side in the dark.

At two o'clock in the morning, the wind changed direction. The flag that was originally waving towards the harbor suddenly spread outward.

"God bless you!" Colonel Pinto, who was about to despair, suddenly became energetic. He decided not to save money after returning to Macau. He would hire a decent monk from the church to be the ship's chaplain instead of letting the drunken ship's doctor take over. The bastard's uniform smelled of alcohol, it would be a miracle if it could work!

The European crew members on the Governor of Goa had received orders long ago. As soon as they saw the wind change, they immediately kicked and woke up the South Asian sailors who were sleeping like dead pigs, and went to the deck to set the sails.

There are more than a dozen sails of different sizes on the four masts, some of which are square sails that provide power, and some are triangular sails that help with lateral movement. If it were all raised and lowered by manpower, it would be unimaginable. Fortunately, this is a fully rigged sailing ship with a large number of movable rigging installed, which can save sailors time and effort, and they can freely operate the sails with a small number of hands.

Under the bright moonlight, more than a hundred well-trained South Asian sailors worked in groups, pulling on the ropes, raising and lowering the sails through pulleys and tackles, keeping the sails taut with rigging and halyards, and using guy ropes to move the cross mast to obtain maximum wind force.

After a while, all the sails were set and were blown by the northeast wind.

In the belly of the ship, a dozen sailors worked together to turn the main deck capstan to reel in the long anchor cable. Unlike what most people imagine, a sailboat anchored at sea mainly relies on the long anchor cable, not the anchor... The seabed is mostly silt, so even a thousand-pound iron anchor can provide much grip to hold a thousand-ton sailboat?

Therefore, anchoring is not about holding the ship with an iron anchor, but about spreading the anchor cable on the seabed better. Then the ship is held by the two or three hundred meters of anchor cable entangled in the mud on the seabed. In the core part of the caravel, there is a special compartment for stacking anchor cable trays. The anchor cable, which is thicker than an arm, can reach thousands of meters when fully deployed.

~~

As soon as the anchor left the mud on the seabed, the huge 1,500-ton wooden ship was finally freed from its restraints and slowly sailed westward under the propulsion of countless sails.

The Oriental Beauty nearby also followed. In fact, the galleon was small and flexible, and it was only waiting to set out in order to protect the flagship.

"Hurry, hurry, hurry!" Colonel Pinto stood on the stern, anxiously urging the sailors to adjust the guy ropes and move the crossmast to obtain the maximum wind force.

He was anxious, very worried! Because at this time, both the Governor of Goa and the Oriental Belle were facing the enemy ship with their bows.

How many guns are there on the bow? The Goa Governor has two full snake guns and six half snake guns. The Oriental Beauty is even smaller, with only two full snake guns and two half snake guns...

The total number of guns was less than the number of guns on the side of the Viceroy of Goa! But there was no other way. The Portuguese naval thinking decided that they would place all the heavy guns on the side, instead of being like the conservative Spanish who still insisted on installing the largest gun on the bow.

Therefore, the tactic of the Duke of Goa this time was to withstand a barrage of artillery fire and charge into the enemy camp! Using the huge ship that was several times larger than the enemy's, it crushed the enemy ship and fought its way out.

The unusually tall hull meant that Pinto did not have to worry about encountering a boarding battle, so in his opinion, the most this battle would do was cause the Duke of Goa to suffer some damage and a few monkeys to die, which was something he could afford.

In order to be discovered as late as possible, even at this time, there was still no light on the Duke of Goa. Relying entirely on Colonel Pinto's familiarity with the terrain of Futianura and the help of the compass, they sailed towards the bay mouth in the dark!

The sails were blown up, and the heavy sailing ship was getting faster and faster, finally picking up speed!

Colonel Pinto breathed a sigh of relief. As long as the Duke of Goa could speed up, no ship could stop it! To use a phrase that people in the Ming Dynasty loved to say, it was like "a mantis trying to stop a chariot."

"Send a signal and have the Oriental Beauty follow me." The colonel's tense face finally showed a confident smile. "After we sail into the open sea and regain our freedom, we will turn back and teach these arrogant Ming Dynasty a lesson..."

Before he finished speaking, there were flashes of fire on the dark sea in front of Colonel Pinto. Before he could react, the earth-shattering sound of artillery exploded in his ears!

One shell after another whizzed in, hitting the Duke of Goa with a bang!

"How can they have so many full snake cannons?!" Pinto looked at the other side in shock. The flames flashing one after another must be more than a hundred, right? This is just one side of the ship. The entire ship and the entire fleet combined, could there be three hundred guns? What the hell is there to fight!

The full snake cannon can be simply understood as a long-barreled cannon, while the half snake cannon is an ordinary cannon. On the Duke of Goa, there are only fourteen full snake cannons, twenty-six half snake cannons, and forty smaller falcon cannons... the so-called red cannons.

Although the Oriental Beauty was small, its firepower was similar to that of the Goa Governor. In total, it had less than 30 heavy guns! How could the Ming Dynasty fleet have firepower ten times greater than their own? !

Now there was no one to answer his questions, and there was no time to think about it. Colonel Pinto made up his mind that once he broke out of the encirclement, he would immediately flee with the wind. He would never provoke a madman with 300 heavy artillery pieces!

"Give the order to the bow, don't fight back!" Pinto immediately held the railing and yelled outside.

There are only a few pitiful bow guns, and firing them will not cause much damage, and the recoil will also affect the speed.

The messenger ran to the bow and stopped the gunners who had finished reloading. The gunners shrugged indifferently. It was dark anyway, so they would be firing blindly.

~~

The Ming Dynasty fleet on the opposite side didn't open their Sharingan, so how did they detect the movements of enemy ships from afar?

In addition to Wang Rulong foreseeing that the enemy was going to break out and arranging small boats to monitor in advance, it was also because the sails of the large sailboat were white.

More than twenty white sails were raised, and under the bright moon, they could be seen clearly from two miles away.

So the commanders of each ship took a look and said, "Okay, since we can't see anything else, let's just hit the sails!"

It happened that the Punishment Fleet was in the leeward position at this time, and the side of the ship facing the enemy was tilted upwards, so that the muzzles of the guns were also facing upwards, just right to fire at a high altitude!

Another advantage of hitting the sails is that the shells don't need to be too powerful, so you can aim for a longer range. Of course, the premise is that you can hit the target.

So as soon as the caravel entered within a thousand meters, the captains could not wait to order the cannons to be fired. If it was daytime, anyone who dared to fire at this distance would probably be shot by General Wang.

Soon, Xuande Cannon could no longer bear the loneliness and joined the firing. The twenty-one warships in a fan-shaped formation no longer cared about saving ammunition and improving their hit rate. Anyway, it was just a random attack, so there was nothing to be particular about. According to the pre-arrangement, the priority was to make the two Western sailing ships lose power, but try not to damage the hull of the galleon.

Actually, the latter sentence is nonsense. Before the 20th century, the total number of galleons sunk by cannons did not exceed 20. Often, in a naval battle, thousands of cannons would fire at the same time, and the battleships of both sides would be riddled with holes, but they would still not sink.

So there is a reason why expensive things are expensive, this is irrefutable.

The Yongle Cannon and its grandsons fired two to three rounds a minute, and fired two thousand projectiles in eight minutes... one fifth of which hit the hull, mast and sail of the enemy ship. There were hundreds of holes of various sizes on the hull of the caravel.

But it was just a hole and did not cause serious damage to the hull.

But the speed of the two large sailing ships dropped significantly. This was because more than a hundred shells hit the power systems of the two ships - masts and sails, and even blew off the foremast of the Governor of Goa. When the mast fell, it also killed more than a dozen sailors who were caught off guard...

Although the rest of the masts were intact, most of the sails had holes in them. This was the problem with Western soft sails. Once a hole was broken, the wind would leak out and they would be useless. They were not as durable as Chinese hard sails, which could still hold the wind even with a lot of holes in them...

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