King of German Mercenaries

Marin personally boarded the ship, which was naturally a big deal for East Friesland. For the king of a country, traveling is also a big thing.

Fortunately, Marin can safely hand over to very reliable people such as old Hoffman and Schwartz at home, 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 and wait for Columbus. After waiting for Columbus's fleet, Marin planned to let three ships go back first, leaving only one, to load some spices to Cadiz as evidence, to lure the Spaniards into the game.

If four ships full of spices appeared in the Spanish port, such a valuable thing, Marin was not sure whether the Spaniards would be malicious and come to "black eat black"... Therefore, he planned to let the three The ship went back, leaving only one. After all, it was more than a million gold coins. Even the king of a big country like Spain would be jealous when he saw it. You must know that before the discovery of gold and silver in America, Spain's financial revenue was not high, and it did not reach one million gold coins a year. Therefore, in the face of so much wealth, Marin can't guarantee that the Spaniards will be jealous. Therefore, he planned to leave a small boat of spices to take to meet the two kings of Spain.

In order to ensure Marin's safety, Schwartz and others selected dozens of elite soldiers familiar with water to protect Marin on board. In addition, in order to train gunners, the 32 heavy guns on the two ships are also equipped with half-skilled gunners. As for the other half, they are apprentice gunners, and they can be considered 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 used. Unless the ship is caught in the dilemma of being surrounded on both sides, there will be a chance to use the artillery on both sides.

Therefore, although each ship has 16 guns, in actual naval battles, only 8 guns are used in half. For a 12-pounder gun, the required gunners are about 8 to 10 people. So, at most 80 gunners are on board.

In order to save manpower, half of the gunners still have a lot of part-time sailor jobs. For these two 250-ton armed merchant ships (not even 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, each ship reached 74 people. In order to protect Marin, Schwartz and others sent another 50 guards with them. Therefore, the number of the entire fleet has reached as many as 200 people.

However, the two ships are large enough, and there is a three-story poop at the stern, and there is enough space to fit them. Although the ship building is not conducive to navigation, it is very conducive to loading goods and people. After all, buildings have a lot of space. Unlike the British Galen, the space is compressed into the hull, which is particularly compact.

Marin is very interested in this voyage. In order to practice naval combat and train the sailors' naval combat ability, Marin also specially prepared a lot of barrels of gunpowder from the small gunpowder storehouse, and extracted enough iron balls. .

In this era, the cognition of naval battles is still at the stage of receiving side battles. Although artillery is also used, it has not been dominated by artillery.

Many of the designs on the ships are not very reasonable. For example, the Spanish and Portuguese like to place their artillery on the bow and stern of the ship. When a naval battle broke out, Spanish or Portuguese warships were accustomed to face the enemy head-on, with the bow facing the enemy ship. Even, it will seek to use the ramming angle of the bow to ram the enemy ship.

Under such tactics, broadside artillery is basically useless. At the start of the war, only the artillery in the bow can come in handy. Of course, this is a situation of facing the enemy head-on. In the other case, in the case of a great disparity between the enemy and the enemy, while fleeing, the artillery on the stern of the stern is used to shoot the chasing enemy ship.

However, neither of these two methods can use a few artillery pieces. Because, the width of the bow and stern is there. Before Marin, the Portuguese designers were asked to put the artillery on the broadside.

In the end, although the Portuguese designer did not let Marin do as he wished, he also left a few gun positions on the broadside.

When the artillery was installed, Marin simply removed the artillery in front of and behind the warship and placed it on the broadside reserved by Portuguese designers. Of course, in this way, it will affect the disembarkation and disembarkation of the crew in the middle of the broadside.

Because the design concept of these two ships is actually the concept of merchant ships. A rule of thumb for merchant ships is that both sides are easy to unload. Therefore, the general merchant ships are high at both ends and low in the middle. When the merchant ship leans on the side of the Long Bridge pier, the side deck is often not much higher than the pier, and it is suitable for ladders to go up and down.

However, for warships, such a design is dangerous. Because the side deck is too low, it is easy for the sailors of the approaching enemy ship to climb up and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the sailors of the own ship.

This was something that Marin had not noticed before. The Portuguese designer, who originally designed merchant ships, had never designed warships, so he did so.

Before departure, Marin ordered the craftsmen to install the cannons removed from both ends on the low deck in the middle of both sides. In addition, both sides of the deck were nailed with thick planks to increase the height to prevent the enemy from climbing up from here. Of course, the guns placed on both sides have special windows for firing. This is somewhat similar to the British lower artillery deck design, but on the top deck.

In this way, the "wideside salvo" required by Marin could barely be achieved. It's just that the salvo of only 8 guns is really no deterrent.

In order to enhance security, Kohler also drew 50 arquebuses and enough ammunition from the East Frisian arsenal and loaded them into the ship that Marin was on.

Before leaving, Captain Kidd, the commander of the two ships, asked Marin to name the two ships himself. But Marin was not very satisfied with the two ships, and, moreover, still had a displacement of 250 tons. So, Marin simply randomly named the two ships "2501" and "2502". And the one that Marin was on was the 2501...

And the tragic Captain Kidd was appointed as the commander of the "250 Formation"... If a Chinese was here, I would have laughed out loud when I heard that Kidd was the 250 commander...

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 reached the Atlantic Ocean. Then, following the cold Canary current to the south...

This time, Malint brought the sheepskin document that Ferdinand II and his wife had given him as the "Country of the Wilderness of Spain" in order to thank him for saving Prince John. Although the wild earl does not have an inch of territory in mainland Spain, the earl is the earl, and he still has many privileges on the land of Spain. Two of Marin's ships were to stay in the Canary Islands for a long time, waiting for Columbus's fleet. Therefore, it is somewhat useful to take out the name 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 mainland of Morocco, four Moorish pirate ships came...