Chapter 2911: Mai Ruibao in Guangzhou (4)

Happily, by this hour the whole ship's company knew him for Mai the shipwright's younger brother, schooled in the Chiefs' own academy and now fed from the Chiefs' imperial granary. The watch let him wander the ship at will; Mai Ruibao even caught, faint but unmistakable, a thread of admiration in the way they looked at him. Those four characters — "higher-primary graduate" — alone drew a clear line of rank between him and sailors who held, at the very most, a "C-grade equivalency."

True, his "higher-primary diploma" had come by way of the art-prodigy track — but higher primary was higher primary, and the diploma itself brooked no dispute. Even had he never gone into photography, that certificate alone would have let him leap like a fish in the broad sea, soar like a bird in the high sky, anywhere within the Senate's system.

He paced to and fro to fend off the early cold, sizing the ship up with a professional eye. To Mai Ruibao, who had run about the Hong Kong shipyard doing odd jobs since boyhood, ships were the most familiar of all man's works. When the Hong Kong shipyard's flagship product, the H800, first saw the light, it electrified the Two Guangs; whether a boatwright's workshop had filled Kun parts orders or never, a good many across the Pearl River delta conceived the fancy that "we too can build the Australians' great ships." Leaving aside the piles of finished and half-finished freaks and failures that came of it, a few products did succeed in grafting Kun-ship features onto the traditional guang form — such as the one beneath his feet: the deck sheer eased off, the hull drawn out and given more closely spaced frames, a sharp bow adopted for speed.

The upshot of all this "Australianization" was that expenses kept being forced upward through the building until the original owner could not carry them at all; in the end the Guangzhou station bought her out, and she became the Jieyun of the Dabo shipping fleet. And precisely because she outsailed most Chinese merchant craft, Mai Ruibao reckoned that on reaching Hong Kong he might even linger at home two days before taking ship for Lingao — faster, that, than a week of empty waiting in Guangzhou. He had spent the whole Spring Festival holiday in the photography unit's training camp; it was going on a year since he had been home. And should the Chiefs approve his application — heaven only knew how many years might pass before he got home again to see his mother and his sister.

At the thought of that application — of going out to cover the frontier garrisons' officers and men — Mai Ruibao's spirits rose of themselves. He must get familiar with every manner of armament and gun, and quickly; so he made a circuit of the Jieyun, inspecting her equipment. On either beam stood a 12-pounder carronade, of the newest trunnion-mount recoil type, firing through gunports cut in the bulwarks. On the poop deck — the "duck's rump," as the hands called it — was mounted a breech-loading defense gun firing fixed cartridges; he remembered watching just such a little piece on a training range spitting solid lead balls and canister at astonishing speed, blowing a stack of man-shaped board targets a hundred-odd meters off into flinders. For a guang ship of four hundred tons, her self-defense battery was already formidable. He walked right up to the bow: a 12-pounder field gun sat upon a pivot carriage near the deck's centerline, mounted high enough to fire on either beam — beyond question the most powerful, longest-reaching weapon aboard. Mai Ruibao studied closely the Bopu Arsenal insignia and the production number graven on barrel and trunnions: as Shi Pandao had said, the number was only in the low hundreds — Army castoffs, without a doubt. The Army still carried the piece in quantity. As for the Fubo Army's opinion of it — he remembered an artillery second lieutenant at the Zhaoqing grand exercises damning it as "a six-horse good-for-nothing." "Now look at our new steel gun," the lieutenant had said proudly, indicating a freshly assembled Type 1635 mountain gun. "Four big mules carry it off, and it throws three times as far as that good-for-nothing."

Only, the Type 1635 mountain gun was seldom seen; at the exercises most of the batteries were still equipped with the 12-pounder. The reason at the bottom of it Mai Ruibao understood perfectly well: the Senate would not spend the money. That thought, naturally, stayed strictly inside his skull — nothing of the sort dared pass his lips.

"But what if Ah-ko's ship too should meet an enemy with steel guns and longer reach?" Mai Ruibao fretted, without quite knowing why. The worry was largely groundless. Their carronades and their 12-pounder field gun were, in Southeast Asia, already "divine weapons and marvelous arms" — a single such piece would fetch several hundred taels without the least question.

The Jieyun carried the wind on her beam; once past Ma Wan she bore away gradually into the strait running southeast toward Tsing Yi, while the lighthouse on Tang Lung Chau still winked and flashed, marking for seamen the forks and joins of the channels. The eastern horizon lay gilded by the sun still under the water, a lacquer-thick crimson. Then in an instant — at the very heartbeat when the morning sun leapt clear of the sea — a squadron of little steam launches came charging straight in, backs to the solar disc. Mai Ruibao heard the lookout in the crosstrees cry out in alarm, warning the helmsman off a collision. But it proved a false alarm: in a trice the launches heeled over and curved away, wheeling in unison, precise and unfaltering. For agility, seen at a distance, they were the very image of a row of sharks cruising with their backs above the water, the squat funnels and conning towers on their decks for dorsal fins. Their engine hearts must be vigorous ones, for the gray-black smoke gushing from their funnels kept cadence with their machinery's clamor, spurting forth in emphatic, measured bursts. "Senate new warships, beyond question!" Mai Ruibao concluded, reading the signal flags streaming aft of the deckhouse. Sadly, they left him no time for close study: around the bend the launch squadron dashed straight for Kap Shui Mun (the channel west of Ma Wan, between it and Lantau) and vanished, one hull after another, behind Tang Lung Chau.

"Right five degrees. Maintain interval, one cable."

"Five degrees right — interval one cable, aye —" Helmsman Guan Zongbao drew out the words in his habitual chant. He knew this liturgy of orders by heart; in the old training days, had he answered wrong — had he lagged but one beat in the echo — the officer standing behind him would bestow upon the spot a knee driven into his spine. Still, any day of it beat the recruit camp, where the instructors strolled about from dawn to dark with cudgels the thickness of a forearm, ready at any hour and any place to "instill the naval spirit" into the recruits.

Naturally, Guan Zongbao had borne it all with clenched teeth. The whole reason he had shaved years off his age to enlist was so that when his wretched old man bullied his mother, the lout might feel a flicker of dread. Taking the spirit-instilling cudgel in the recruit camp proved the officers had more spirit than his old man ever had! And serving on the little boats was better yet — some Chief Wang had said so: in the Great Song navy, the smaller the vessel, the more chances to win battle honors and medals. That pack of rotten kinsmen and clan elders — just wait till Guan Zongbao had won his honors and decorations, had risen by stacked merit — then see whether they dared let so much as half a fart against him and his mother!

As for handling a boat, to Guan Zongbao, raised from childhood on the banks of the West River, it was as natural as splashing in the shallows, nothing to think twice about; only after enlisting in the Senate's navy did he learn how much learning there was in it. A helmsman had to be handy at every station aboard — well and good to behold the engine howling fiendishly at its work — but then they racked their brains all day long supposing fires aboard, or the hull punched through by cannon shot, or the bottom blown open by a "river-churning dragon" mine, and set the whole crew dashing this way and that in damage-control and rescue drills. Why did the Chiefs think up nothing but these unlucky enterprises? Chafing past endurance, Guan Zongbao could only pour his whole enthusiasm into the weapons training he loved — saber combat, boarding actions, rifle marksmanship — and best of all, live fire with the machine cannon. One was mounted atop the conning tower: give the crank a turn and the five barrels swung whatever way you pleased, hammering away — talk of shaking the earth and stirring the mountains. Besides that brute, three 30 mm single-barrel guns stood ranged along the deck; one explosive shell would gouge a saucer-sized hole in a wooden hull, and two or three hits were quite enough to blast a sampan to the bottom.

The machine-cannon launch Guan Zongbao served on was by no means some new invention; its lineage ran back to the steam spar-torpedo boat that Wen Desi had personally anointed as the treasured instrument of coastal defense. Who could have foreseen that once the thing entered service, the Navy's verdict would sour? The first trouble was the feeble power of its Suichao steam engine: even with wind and water both favoring, its over-slow speed could barely overhaul a junk; set against a strong head current there had even been the embarrassment of full throttle making sternway. The starved power also left the spar-torpedo boats all but unmanageable in any sea; after a string of capsizings and sinkings, the Navy hauled them ashore and laid them up in preservation. During the Two Guangs Campaign, the Navy, straitened for riverine vessels, remembered this chicken-rib of a class: off came the spar-torpedo gear, on went "typewriters" and small cannon, and up the rivers they went as gunboats to support the Army. Even so, their showing in action inspired small respect — the weak power plants made them lumbering on the rushing West River — and the Army judged them hardly better than armed daihatsu barges, which were, whatever else might be said, cheaper and of more uses. Had matters gone on so, these steamers that neither father nor mother loved could look forward only to being broken up into heaps of scrap iron and rotten planking. Their salvation came when they met the benefactor fate held in store — the Navy's immortal staff officer, blessed with an eye that discovered beauty wherever it lighted.

All through the Two Guangs Campaign, the immortal Staff Officer Wang had ridden his three-engine launch into the firing line to observe or to command, heedless of danger, till the Senators of both services called him, half in admiration and half in jest, the "god of war of small boats." At one operations conference this "god of war" observed that to overcome the obstacles the Ming habitually strewn through the river channels — timber rafts and iron chains, palisades, sluice gates — demolition teams should be sent in without delay to blast the barriers and open the water roads: "The inland rivers are the true field of battle for the spar-torpedo boats." The Navy took the counsel: the soundest hulls were picked out, and each was fitted with two of the new spar-torpedo mounts — fixed not merely on telescoping spars, but fired by electric detonator, far the easier to control. The power plants were rebuilt from the keel up to cure the launches' "heart trouble": thanks to the progress of petroleum science, the 80-horsepower Qin Huali Type IV twin-cylinder hot-bulb engine displaced the old Suichao steam engine and boiler. Clumsy thing as the hot-bulb engine was, within the family of internal-combustion engines, beside a steam plant — coal smoke blowing everywhichway, forever begging for water and coal — it was progress of the first order. The industrial Senators of the machinery line were heartily pleased with the trial, and schemed upon it to breed the whole Qin Huali engine family and set the Senate's internal-combustion revolution going.

(End of Chapter)