Marin boarding the ship in person is naturally a big deal for East Frisian. For the king of a country, travel is also a big thing.
Fortunately, Marin at home can be safely handed over to very reliable people such as the old Hoffman and Schwartz, and he is not worried about making trouble when he is not at home.
This time, Marin's plan was to go to the Canary Islands first and wait for Columbus. After Columbus's fleet, Marin planned to let three ships go back first, leaving only one, and loaded some spices to Cadiz as evidence to lure the Spaniards into the game.
If four ships full of spices appear in the port of Spain, such a priceless thing, Marin is not sure whether the Spaniards will be malicious and come to "black and black"... So, he planned to let the three ships first The boat went back, leaving only one. After all, it was a property worth more than a million gold coins. Even the king of a big country like Spain will be jealous when he sees it. You must know that before the discovery of gold and silver in America, Spain's fiscal revenue was not high, and it did not reach one million gold coins a year. Therefore, in the face of so much wealth, Marin did not dare to guarantee whether the Spaniards would be jealous. Therefore, he intended to leave behind a small boat of spices to take to the Kings of Spain.
In order to ensure the safety of Marin, Schwartz and others selected dozens of elite soldiers familiar with water to protect Marin with the boat. In addition, in order to train gunners, the 32 heavy guns on the two ships were also equipped with half-skilled gunners. As for the other half, they are trainee gunners, who can be regarded as training newcomers.
In fact, if there is a naval battle, at most half of the artillery on the ship will be put into battle, and the artillery on the other side will have no chance to be put into use. Unless the ship is trapped on both sides, there will be a chance to use the artillery on both sides.
Therefore, although each ship has 16 guns, only 8 guns are used in half of the actual naval battles. For a 12-pound gun, the required gunners are around 8 to 10 people. Therefore, there are only 80 gunners on board at most.
In order to save manpower, half of the gunners still have to work part-time as sailors. For these two 250-ton armed merchant ships (not yet warships), the number of professional sailors set for each ship is 10, and the number of sailors and gunners is 64. Therefore, the number of his crew has reached 74 people per ship. In order to protect Marin, Schwartz and others sent another 50 guards to accompany the ship. Therefore, the number of the entire fleet has reached as many as 200 people.
However, these two ships are big enough, and with the three-story poop at the stern, there is enough space to accommodate them. Although the ship building is not conducive to navigation, it is very conducive to loading and loading people. After all, a building has a lot of space. Unlike the British Galen ship, the space is compressed into the hull, making it particularly compact.
Marin is very interested in this voyage. In order to practice naval warfare and train the sailors' naval combat capabilities, Marin also specially drew a lot of barrels of gunpowder from the small gunpowder depot, and extracted enough iron ball shells, and practiced artillery battles during the voyage, playing time .
People in this era are still at the stage of boarding battles in their understanding of naval battles. Although artillery was also used, it was not dominated by artillery.
Many of the designs on the ships are not reasonable. For example, the Spanish and Portuguese like to place artillery on the bow and stern of the ship. When a naval battle breaks out, Spanish or Portuguese warships are used to facing the enemy head-on, with their bows facing the enemy ship. Even, they will seek to use the ram angle of the bow to ram the enemy ship.
Under such tactics, the side artillery is basically useless. Once the war broke out, only the artillery on the bow could come in handy. Of course, this is a case of confronting the enemy head-on. Another situation is to use the artillery on the poop at the stern of the ship to shoot at the pursuing enemy ship while fleeing when there is a huge disparity between the enemy and the enemy.
However, in both of these methods, a few artillery pieces cannot be used. Because, the width of the bow and stern is there. Before Marin, he asked Portuguese designers to put all the artillery on the side. In the end, although the Portuguese designer did not let Marin get what he wanted, he also left a few gun positions on the side.
When it was time to install the artillery, Marin simply removed the artillery directly in front and behind the warship, and placed it on the sideboard reserved by the Portuguese designer. Of course, this will affect the boarding and disembarking of the people in the middle of the sideboard.
Because, the design concept of these two ships is actually a merchant ship concept. One of the rules of merchant shipping is that the sides should be convenient for unloading cargo. Therefore, ordinary merchant ships are tall at both ends and low in the middle. When the merchant ship is on the side of the long bridge wharf, the side deck is usually not much higher than the wharf, so it is suitable to take a ladder up and down.
However, for warships, such a design is very dangerous. Because the side deck is too low, it is easy for the sailors of the approaching enemy ship to climb up and have hand-to-hand combat with the sailors of the own ship.
Marin hadn't noticed this before. The Portuguese designer, who was originally a merchant ship designer, had never designed a warship, so he did it.
Before departure, Marin ordered the craftsmen to install the artillery removed from both ends on the low decks in the middle of both sides. In addition, both sides of the deck were nailed up with thick planks to prevent the enemy from climbing up from here. Of course, the artillery placed on both sides has special windows for shooting. This is somewhat similar to the design of the lower artillery deck of the British, but on the top of the deck.
In this way, the "bulky salvo" requested by Marin can be barely realized. It's just that there is only a salvo of 8 guns, which is really not deterrent.
In order to strengthen security, Kohler also transferred 50 matchlock guns and enough ammunition from the East Frisian arsenal, and loaded them into the ship Marin was on.
Before leaving, Captain Kidd, the commander of the two ships, asked Marin to name the two ships himself. But Marin is not very satisfied with these two ships, and they still have a displacement of 250 tons. Therefore, Marin simply named the two ships "2501" and "2502". And the ship that Marin took was 2501...
And the sad Captain Kidd was appointed as the commander of the "250 Formation"... If a Chinese person is here, if he hears that Kidd is the 250 Commander, he will probably laugh out loud...
But Kidd doesn't know the other meaning of 250. He is still complacent about being the commander of these two "advanced" warships.
In this way, after everything was ready, under the command of Kidd, the two ships passed the English Channel smoothly and arrived at the Atlantic Ocean. Then, it went south along the Canary cold current...
When he came out this time, Malinte brought the sheepskin document that Ferdinand II and his wife had awarded him as the "Spanish Wild Earl" in gratitude for saving Prince John. Although the Earl of the Wilderness does not have an inch of territory in Spain, but the Earl is an Earl, and he still has many privileges on the land of Spain. Marin's two ships will stay in the Canary Islands for a long time, waiting for Columbus' fleet. Therefore, it is still somewhat useful to use the title of the Spanish count.
The previous voyage was smooth, but when the ship left the Portuguese waters and arrived in the Moroccan waters, a little accident happened...
From the direction of the mainland of Morocco, 4 Moorish pirate ships came...