New Shun 1730

After deciding who was going to London, China and France quickly organized a group of transport ships.

The captured British soldiers were required to pickle the bodies of the dead British soldiers with salt and lime to prevent them from rotting during the sea transportation.

The Dashun side was more humane. Since deterrence was meaningless here, after all, this was not the British mainland and could not scare the people who should be scared.

Therefore, they did not choose to build a Jingguan, but piled the bodies in lime and salt and sent them away.

China and France dispatched a battleship and two cruisers for escort.

Or it can be said to be escorting.

Or it can be said to be deterring - even if it was a diplomatic mission and might be surrounded by British warships throughout the journey, in the wartime state, the Chinese and French warships that won a great victory in Gibraltar docked in the Thames would eventually cause great chaos in the financial market.

Interestingly, the two battleships sent by China and France to escort were sister ships in the true sense, and they were really born from the same mother.

The Dashun side sent out a 74-gun battleship named "Wuyanghou".

The French side sent out a 74-gun battleship named "Reckless" after the literal translation.

In terms of name, they are similar.

In terms of blood relationship... Both ships are the pinnacle designs of designer Francois Coulon Jr. Both ships have the same drawings and were born around 1945. It's just that one was born in France and the other was born in China.

The captain, layout, deck, configuration, and gun positions are all the same. They were really built with the same drawings.

What's even more annoying is that shortly after leaving Gibraltar, they encountered the British squadron that was monitoring the movements of the Sino-French fleet.

In the British squadron, Wuyanghou and Reckless also saw the eldest sister of the 74-gun family, the Fear, which was captured by the British army before.

Because of the shipbuilding technology, material properties, and material properties of the wood itself at that time, the 74-gun battleship was close to the possible limit.

Long hulls made of wood tend to bend and sag over time. Although increased maintenance can solve this problem to a certain extent, maintenance costs money.

Therefore, this design has achieved almost perfect specifications for a sailing warship in terms of speed, protection, firepower, maintenance, and cost-effectiveness.

It can also be said that the 74-gun battleship family derived from the eldest sister of the family, the "Fear", has bred a huge family from Russia to Spain in the entire mid-18th century to the early 19th century, which is basically the absolute main force of the sailing decisive battle in this century-except for the Netherlands and Denmark.

Denmark has no need to build warships with such a deep draft because of the strait problem; and the Netherlands is really... the former maritime hegemon, in the era when 74-gun ships are popular, the port has been in disrepair for many years and has been silted up, and it is impossible to build such a large warship.

Of course, this is determined by science. The materials are there. No matter who designs it, it will end up in the same way and look similar.

But after all, it was designed by the French first.

At this time, it was hard to say whether the French should cry or laugh at the meeting of the "sister ships" on the sea.

In terms of laughter, China, France and Britain, the three powerful countries at that time, all chose to use 74-gun battleships as the main force for the ocean decisive battle, and they were all working hard to build such ships, which seemed to be worthy of pride.

In terms of crying, the eldest sister ship on the opposite side was captured by the British, and the British flag was planted, erasing the traces of France.

Fortunately, this awkward meeting lasted only a short while, and the British battleships chose to retreat, leaving a faster medium-sized battleship to monitor.

After the fleet escorting the prisoners raised the flag, it continued to move forward, and was finally surrounded by the main fleet of the British at noon the next day.

Admiral Edward Hawke, commander of the British Channel Combined Fleet, greeted the officers of the Dashun Navy headed by Chen Qinghai on the proud three-deck 108-gun Royal George battleship.

The two sides are now in a state of war, so there is no salute.

The officers on the Dashun side did not show much interest or shock in this tall warship with 108 guns.

Because they are supporters of Liu Yu's military building ideas, and like Liu Yu, they think that Dashun's construction of this three-deck warship is purely for the sake of grandiosity and a waste of money.

Dashun has no chance of a decisive battle in its own coastal waters, and building such a super-large battleship with a displacement of more than 2,000 tons is useless except for slowly decaying in the Bohai Bay.

Dashun built a three-deck warship with nearly 100 guns. The only function was to serve as the emperor's "imperial ship" when the emperor reviewed the Songsu Grand Review. After all, it was taller. In addition to being an imperial ship, the rest of the time was spent resting in the military port. The speed was too slow, the supply was too wasteful, the morale was too great once it sank, and Japan, Korea, and Vietnam had no chance to let Dashun use such a large ship. For these reasons, the naval officers on the Dashun side did not think that big is good.

Even now, with its tall hull, the ship looked like it was looking down at the Chinese and French warships that had lowered their flags.

On the deck of the Wangjia George, the officers from the Dashun side and the British officers looked at each other with hostility, but the atmosphere was not yet tense.

Chen Qinghai and Edward Hawke are of the same age, and their backgrounds and experiences are different. However, their neutral personalities in the army, or the external images they show, are very similar.

On origin.

Chen Qinghai caught up with the boom period of Dashun shipbuilding. As one of the first batch of naval officer graduates, he has been promoted to a senior officer of the navy and commander of the squadron.

Edward Hawke is also a representative of "zero ability" in the British Navy - of course, it is the British characteristic of "zero ability", because his uncle's family is the butler and family lawyer of the Duke of Leeds, one of the British "Immortal Seven". By the way, he was also the second-in-command when Newton was the director of the Mint, a member of the British Trade and Plantation Committee, and a representative of colonial issues in the negotiations of the Treaty of Utrecht.

"Immortal Seven" refers to the seven nobles who abolished James II and wrote to invite the King of the Netherlands to rule Britain. The real "dethronement and enthronement are up to me" family.

In terms of origin, the gap between the two is quite large. After all, Chen Qinghai does not have an uncle who is at the level of the hereditary household government or the government of rites of Dashun, or the level of the clan leader of the clan.

However, in terms of personality, the two are very similar, and can be said to be very similar.

The so-called personality is the external image set by oneself.

Among the first batch of officers of the Dashun Navy, the top three have their own different labels.

Mi Ziming is needless to say, everyone knows that he is Liu Yu's direct descendant, even if he wants to be different, it is impossible.

Du Feng, Liu Yu once joked that if this happened in the context of the sinking of Shenzhou a hundred years ago, he would probably have shaved his head and fought for fame and fortune. He is a very sophisticated, gambler-like egoist.

The image that Chen Qinghai has been operating can be simply described as "soldiers are very simple, and they are all born to be loyal to the motherland", a pure soldier.

So he is not in Nanyang, but as the second in command of the main fleet of Bohai Dashun.

Edward Hawke also has this external image: Soldiers are all pure and born to be loyal to their motherland.

However, whether it is Chen Qinghai or Hawke, they can become fleet commanders, and they are one of the few people with power on the sea surface of the earth at this time. It is obviously impossible to say that they are really pure people.

He was the first officer in the navy to instill patriotism and naval pride in soldiers, and became a good story, thus opening up his image of a "pure soldier".

In the John Bean shooting incident, Hawke, who has always been a pure soldier, provided a seemingly simple testimony, which indirectly contributed to John Bean's execution.

In the subsequent Brest Blockade, he showed the image of a "pure, reckless, politically ignorant, simple" soldier: the Admiralty disagreed with him, and he drove his flagship back to the port without saying a word, and went ashore to ask for an explanation - who the hell thinks can do it better than me, who can do it, don't be poor and talk, forcing the Admiralty to have no choice but to let George Anson come back to serve as the acting commander of the Channel Fleet for half a year - it became a good story for a while.

In William Pitt's strategy of attacking the French coast, he was dissatisfied with William Pitt's plan, so he wrote a long letter of opposition - a private letter, but because of some "unexpected circumstances", it was "accidentally" made public, causing anti-Pitt politicians to launch a wave of offensives against Pitt.

But after the letter was made public, Hawke took the initiative to apologize: the reason was that he had crossed the line between politicians and soldiers. Although the letter was accidentally made public, it was still wrong. As a simple soldier, he should not put forward his own ideas at the national strategic and political level.

This is basically the kind of person. If it were the storybooks, novels, and dramas of the Dashun, he would probably be the image of a loyal and brave general with a black face.

But to say that a person who can get to this position, to the position of fleet commander, really doesn't understand politics, is really so simple and pure... I'm afraid this is not the real world, but the storybook drama world.

In general, before the Dashun joined the war, Hawke supported William Pitt's strategic policy: that is, to continuously harass the French coast, forcing France to pile up a large number of troops on the coast, thereby relieving the pressure from Hanover and Prussia, and forcing France to disperse the fleet.

But Hawke believed that Pitt was a "strategist who was roughly correct, but poor in tactical choice."

That is: he thought the strategy of harassing the French coast was correct.

However, he felt that the people in the cabinet and the Navy Department had problems with their brains as to where to harass, where to attack, and where to attack specifically. They were just blindly commanding based on the map.

Of course, with the participation of the Dashun and Spain in the war, the naval power balance in the Atlantic Ocean changed greatly.

Britain has mobilized all the available naval forces, 70,000 sailors, 250 warships and armed merchant ships of various types, which seems to be a lot.

But in fact, the regular warship force that can fight in the ocean is less than the Sino-French joint fleet. It is impossible to expect to requisition the company's merchant ships to fight in the ocean, and it is okay to guard the strait.

In this case, Hawke also disagrees with any radical and adventurous decisive battle, because in this situation, at most the Caribbean will be lost. The population base of 2 million in North America is there, all of them are Protestants, not Catholics, and France cannot conquer North America.

However, if the decisive battle is lost, it may not only be the Caribbean that is lost, but the whole of Britain may fall into chaos.

Now, Dashun has explained its intention to return the prisoners in Gibraltar and proposed to go to Dunkirk.

In this regard, Hawke believes that this is an opportunity for peace talks and will not show his arrogance too much.

As for Dashun's proposal to go to Dunkirk, Hawke also understands the political significance of Dashun. In order to prevent the cabinet from arguing about it again, he cleverly proposed a compromise plan.

Allowing Dashun's fleet to go to Dunkirk, because he is the commander-in-chief responsible for the blockade of Cape Brest from Dunkirk, although this matter involves political issues, it can also be regarded as a simple military blockade.

As for whether to go to London and whether to drive the warships to the Thames, he said that he had no right to decide - this requires the order of the cabinet and the Admiralty, otherwise he, the commander of the Channel Fleet, will allow the enemy to drive the warships to the Thames, and he will be shot.