Chapter 3: Galle Fort

Among the many East India Companies established by Western colonists, there was a Danish East India Company that most people would overlook. It was established in 1616, quite early, even a dozen years earlier than the Portuguese East India Company. As early as 1620, it had established a small colony in Tharangambadi on the east coast of the Indian subcontinent. At that time, the Portuguese and British strongholds in India were still on the west coast of the subcontinent.

However, in the following hundred years, the achievements of the Danish East India Company were limited to this. Due to its disastrous defeats in the Thirty Years’ War shortly before and after, and then being continuously beaten by the rising Sweden for nearly half a century, losing all its Scandinavian territories, its national strength gradually declined.

However, at this moment, the Viking genes in the Danish blood still often flared up. The two participations in the Thirty Years’ War and the feud with the Swedes were the consequences of this irrational behavior. Now, the Viking disease was afflicting the captain of a chartered merchant ship, the Griffin, Trelleborg Visby. Yesterday, he was considering whether he should fly the Swedish flag, which was at war with the Holy Roman Empire, but he felt that it would be bad for his reputation if it got out. So he simply followed until he could no longer see land before launching an attack. The subtext of this consideration was that he had complete confidence in not leaving any survivors.

In any case, Visby knew that his ship was much larger than his opponent’s, and the slender hull of the ships from northwestern Europe had faster speed and more deck guns. Even though there was a strange epidemic on the way, and dozens of bodies were thrown to the sharks, he now had far more sailors who could board and fight than his opponent. However, he did not know that his opponent was a woman, much younger than him, and had more confidence in victory. And that woman had a group of employers that Visby had never dreamed of.

After many years of trade, this woman had obtained some weapons from those business partners that should not have appeared in this time and space. The Hangzhou had 8 12-pounder long-barreled cannons: 2 on the forecastle gun deck, 2 in the rear of the hold deck, and 4 on the quarterdeck gun deck. These cannons were all wrought iron cannons that Lingao had phased out and sold at a high price to friendly and neutral business partners.

If it weren’t for the fact that Li Huamei had a group of fans in the navy, and that she had transported a large amount of urgently needed goods for Lingao, and after the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Bureau, she had also provided a large amount of economic and political intelligence on European colonists and local chieftains in Goa and other places, and was listed as a very useful collaborator, she would not have obtained the approval of the Planning Institute.

The sea wind howled, and the sails flapped. Captain Visby’s Griffin was advancing at full speed. Li Huamei could already clearly see the griffin statue on the bow. With her years of experience as a pirate, the entire dynamic combat situation map had already clearly appeared in her mind.

“Brothers, light the fuses!” she drew her sword. “Raise the red flag!”

The battle was short and fierce, but it was not beyond Li Huamei’s expectations. Under her firepower advantage, the Griffin’s speed advantage did not bring Captain Trelleborg Visby much benefit. One after another, cannonballs destroyed the Griffin’s artillery and rigging systems, and killed most of the sailors on deck.

When Li Huamei led her men to charge onto the deck of the Griffin, like an autumn wind sweeping away fallen leaves, slaughtering the Danes like cutting melons and vegetables, Captain Visby realized what an inappropriate target he had chosen. The moment the gleaming Patton sword approached, Captain Visby immediately made the most appropriate choice:

He threw his sword onto the deck and raised his hands. “I surrender!” he shouted in German—at that time, German was a semi-universal language at sea.

The tip of the Patton sword stopped in time—it was 0.001 centimeters away from Captain Visby’s throat.

“Alright. I accept your surrender,” the woman said arrogantly. “Now you, your ship, and your cargo are all mine…”

“At your service…” Visby said dejectedly, with a bit of “black humor.” In those days, the fate of a failed robbery at sea was tragic: the sailors could still change their allegiance, but he himself was very likely to be swinging from the mast soon.

According to Li Huamei’s past temper, a character like Visby who dared to actively rob her ship would either walk the plank or swing from the mast after being caught. At the very least, he would be keel-hauled. In short, he would not have a good end. But for some reason, her heart began to soften.

As a small pirate group with only two ships and less than three hundred people, the Li sisters had survived in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean for so long, which fully demonstrated their strength. What’s more, now Li Huamei personally had a little bit of goodwill from the transmigrator group behind her.

Don’t underestimate this little bit of goodwill. In the past few years, Li Huamei had increasingly discovered the powerful strength that this goodwill represented—she was becoming more and more inseparable from the Senate.

“If it weren’t for my sister and me, I might as well have joined the Australians,” Li Huamei thought to herself. Thinking that she was actually going to be an undercover agent, she couldn’t help but feel very discouraged.

She carried her scimitar, kicked open the door of the captain’s cabin, and began to search for spoils. The most valuable things on any ship were always in the captain’s cabin, unless it was a Spanish treasure ship loaded with tons of gold and silver.

The search was quickly completed. A bag of gold coins and some gold jewelry were found in the captain’s cabin, which was not much. Two small barrels were locked in the ammunition depot. After prying them open, they were found to be filled with silver coins, about three or four thousand silver thalers—in this time and space, European ships went to the East empty and returned full, so they generally had to carry a large amount of cash. In addition, a lot of scattered gold and silver coins were also found on the prisoners.

The cargo on the ship included some furs and weapons. Furs had no market in India and were mainly for re-export. The weapons were probably for the use of the Tharangambadi colony or sold to the local natives. In addition, the largest batch of spoils was actually—people.

First, a European man and several blond women were brought out from the hold. He introduced himself as Frederick Wellesley Carlson, a Lutheran pastor. One of the women was his wife, and the others were war widows and orphans taken in by his church, as well as some Catholic nuns who had been “liberated” during the war in Germany. There were originally more than a dozen, but half of them died on the way, and now there were only 6 left. Since Protestantism did not have the profession of a nun, and these Catholic nuns and widows and orphans had no other means of livelihood and would sooner or later become prostitutes, the Copenhagen church where Pastor Carlson belonged decided to let him go to the colony to preach and take these women to the colony to make a living—the so-called making a living was to marry the single European colonists there.

According to the confessions of other prisoners on the ship, Captain Trelleborg Visby was willing to take these women because he wanted to sell them in the colony for a large profit. As for whether they would become servants to the governor or concubines to some prince, that was not his business. Anyway, a pastor had no place to reason in India. Since they were commodities, these women were locked in the hold all the way and were not violated in any way.

Next to be brought up were a group of slaves that Visby had plundered from an Arab ship he had robbed in Oman. They were also locked in the hold, men and women, black and white, a full twenty or so. The women were basically so abused that they could barely crawl, and the men were not much better. Li Huamei knew that the Australians had a special interest in white women, and they could probably be sold for a good price. About three or four of the Arab slaves could probably be brought back to Lingao alive. The rest could only be sold in Ceylon. In addition, her own ship and the captured ship also needed repairs.

After being completely disarmed and briefly dealt with, the two ships slowly sailed towards the port of Galle in the south of Ceylon.

The injured Griffin was much slower, and it was not until dawn the next day that it reached the vicinity of Galle. The sea was dotted with fishing boats, and seagulls chirped as they flew between the fishing sails. A large flock of fruit bats returning to their nests flew silently over the Hangzhou and the Griffin.

Galle was a trading colony controlled by the Portuguese in the southwest of Ceylon, about 100 kilometers south of Colombo in the old time and space, right on the coast of the Indian Ocean. The old city of Galle and its fortress were built on a rocky peninsula, which was a natural harbor. Due to the presence of a large number of coral reefs, the entrance to the harbor was extremely complex.

In the 14th century, Galle was already one of the most active ports on the island of Ceylon. In 1505, the Portuguese began to settle on the island. In 1507, they established a trading post in Galle and built the small fort of Santa Cruz.

Li Huamei and Li Siya had both been there countless times, but because of some disputes with the locals last year, they had originally wanted to avoid it this time. Now it seemed impossible to avoid it.

No one was killed in the last incident, so it was nothing more than spending some money to settle it. Repairing the ship also cost money. In addition to the gold and silver she had plundered, some of the prisoners she had captured had status and could be sold to the governor of Galle—His Excellency the Governor would be very happy to extort a ransom from his Danish counterparts in Tharangambadi. It would just take some time.

This governor did almost nothing in this small colony: the Portuguese were good at enclosing colonies, but not good at managing them. The hot weather was certainly a problem, but the seemingly innate laziness of the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula was also a reason. The conquest and development of the entire island of Ceylon was completed by the Dutch and the British, but the Portuguese left little trace. The Galle Fort, which later became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was built by the Dutch after they captured Ceylon, with a building area of 350,000 square meters. The current Galle Fort was just a wall built on the north side of the peninsula near the isthmus and three forts added in 1625 after being threatened by the Dutch.

However, these three forts could only deal with sea attacks at the technological level of the time. Even in the face of the firepower of the Hangzhou, they would not last long. It was really hard to see that the Portuguese had been operating here for more than 120 years.