Chapter 290: The Manila Arsenal

At first, the ordinary white citizens and merchants of Manila disliked the new arsenal that had sprung up on the outskirts of the city. Besides the fact that the governor had poured all the money scraped together through monopoly laws and special taxes into this project, which brought them no benefit, there were its own reasons. The factory was a frightening novelty to the residents of a colony far from Europe. No other place in the entire Philippines had such a concentration of machinery and furnaces. The constant clang of metal, the incessant drilling, planing, and chiseling of various tools, and the continuous noise made even the Spaniards in Manila, nearly ten kilometers away, complain, as they could no longer enjoy the sleepy tranquility of their former days. And the large number of recruited heathen Chinese and local natives gathered around the factory created all sorts of illusory anxieties among the Spaniards, with some frequently mentioning the “threat of several thousand savage workers.”

Recently, another terrifying rumor had been circulating among the European community in the colony: that fanatical priest, Paul, was manufacturing a terrible new type of explosive in the factory, so powerful that a small bag of it could level the entire city. This was not entirely a rumor. Dull explosions could often be heard from the direction of the arsenal, like thunder on the horizon. Some even claimed to have seen ox-carts loaded with severed limbs and flesh coming out of the factory at night, to be secretly buried in the wilderness.

Aisaburo leaned lazily against the simple guardhouse made of scrap wood and straw, facing the main road leading to the factory workshops, completely oblivious to the fate of being blown to smithereens at any moment. This former ashigaru-gumi had come to Luzon half out of faith and half with the delusion of making a fortune overseas. Unfortunately, both Lord Ukon and Lord Naito had fallen ill and died one after another, and the southern barbarian governor’s regard for the Japanese expatriates had gradually waned.

After years of hardship, eating one meal and starving the next, Aisaburo’s dream of getting rich had long since vanished. However, being a soldier and standing guard for the southern barbarian governor was much more comfortable than bending over to work in the fields. He calculated that he could eat his fill at every meal. Although the southern barbarians were not very generous, only giving some rice and dried fish as a salary, combined with the taro and vegetables his Tagalog wife grew around their house, it was enough to support a family of four. If he could get a more lucrative post like guarding a tax checkpoint next time, he might even be able to earn a few extra coins, go to a small tavern run by the Chinese in the Parian, drink a few cups of tuba wine made from coconut sap, and enjoy a plate of roasted pork. The rich, fragrant taste of the pork seemed to linger on his tongue. Aisaburo leaned against the wooden post of the guardhouse, lost in a happy reverie, a smile on his face, his mouth half-open, drool trickling down the corner of his mouth, forming a small river on his sun-darkened face.

“Hey,” Aisaburo was startled back to his senses by a loud call. He saw his captain, Kuroshima Jubei, standing before him. This ronin from Owari was said to have fled to Manila after killing someone in the port of Hoi An in Quang Nam. “Aisaburo-kun, be more presentable. Daydreaming on guard duty again?” Jubei pointed ahead. “A carriage is coming.”

In Madrid or Seville, people would not have given this plain, even crude, two-wheeled carriage a second glance. It was pulled by a listless, underdeveloped Chinese pony, its unpainted wooden body bare except for an oiled canvas awning. But in the Philippines, where horses were more valuable than men, the factory area was frequented by ox-carts transporting wood and iron. A carriage, even the most rudimentary one, was a symbol of nobility.

Aisaburo walked towards the carriage, his musket held across his chest, but the hammer was not cocked. Best not to frighten the nobleman in the carriage, he thought. The new muskets made by the southern barbarians were very efficient, eliminating the troublesome and dangerous matchlock. You just had to bite open the paper cartridge, pour it down the barrel, place a small copper cap on the nipple, pull back the hammer, and a pull of the trigger would send the bullet flying.

Aisaburo, accustomed to Japanese-style muskets, was quite unused to this new contraption at first. He had accidentally discharged it several times on the training ground, enraging the southern barbarian officer and earning him no small number of “three-pinta-de-gato” (a type of punishment) from his captain.

Although this new invention performed exceptionally well, few people used it. The reason was that the arsenal could produce very few of the small copper caps, and production was intermittent and could not provide a stable supply. Only a few newly formed Japanese companies were equipped with them. For the local Spanish garrison, the cumbersome matchlock remained their primary weapon.

Unexpectedly, it was not some southern barbarian master who emerged from the carriage, but an “Indio.” Although he was dressed like a native gentleman in a long, silk-embroidered “barong” that reached his hips, and carried a short cane in his hand to show off his status, anyone could recognize him as an old hand at sea from the wind-whipped, white-edged wrinkles on his face, the dark brown sunspots on his exposed skin, and the nimble way he jumped down from the carriage. What is this old sea dog barking about? Aisaburo wondered. In his years of living in the Philippines, he had learned Tagalog and Pampangan, could get by in Spanish, and could even understand some Hokkien and Cantonese. The words this Filipino sailor spoke were similar to the languages he knew, but he couldn’t fully understand them.

The sailor seemed to have grown impatient with the chicken-and-duck conversation. He reached out and shook a piece of paper at the Japanese soldier. Although Aisaburo couldn’t recognize many Latin letters, the Manila city crest printed on the paper and the bright red governor’s seal stamped with sealing wax, which had been waving in front of his eyes for a long time, finally made him understand. He looked at Captain Kuroshima, who had already walked away, then at the carriage that only a nobleman could ride in, and finally lowered his musket and waved his hand. The carriage swayed and drove into the factory area.

Aisaburo returned to the guardhouse and soon fell back into his daydream about roasted pork.

Fernando Marcos leaned back in his seat under the carriage awning. After all the effort of talking to those Japanese, he felt too tired to say another word. There was nothing more tiring than trying to explain to the people of this world who he was and what he could do.

In another time and space, Marcos’s career as a sailor on various illegal vessels had lasted for more than 20 years. He once considered himself a born lucky man. Whether his smuggling boat was seized by the Korean coast guard and he was detained, or his smuggling ship encountered a Russian border guard patrol boat and was hit by machine-gun fire, almost sending him to meet the Sea Dragon King, he had at least managed to save his own life in the end. But he could never have dreamed that fate would play such a novel joke on him, throwing him and everyone on the Saba into a strange world that he still hadn’t fully figured out. When their lifeboat was overturned by the waves, Marcos almost thought his life was over. Fortunately, he and the Saba’s engineer, Aquino, had been soaking in the sea for half a day and were about to lose consciousness when they were finally rescued by an Anhai ship heading for Zhongzuosuo. Zheng Zhilong and his men initially regarded these two strangely dressed Filipinos, who couldn’t even explain their own origins, as Dutch spies, and later as accomplices of the kūnzéi (kūn zéi - “shaved-head bandits,” a derogatory term for the transmigrators). The two unlucky men were thrown into a water prison and subjected to all kinds of torture. In the end, everyone concluded that they were just two half-mad men spouting nonsense, who posed no threat and were of little use.

If Fernando Marcos had ever heard of the so-called “dragon-slaying skill,” he would have understood it deeply. This Chinese idiom was a vivid portrayal of his situation. There were no GPS or LORAN navigation stations for him to use in Zheng’s territory, nor were there any diesel engines or other power equipment that needed Aquino’s care and maintenance. They were completely ignorant of the workings of a 17th-century Chinese junk, not even qualified as sailors. These two unlucky men, of no use to the Zheng family, were forced to become the lowest and most humble slave laborers, doing hard labor under the whips of the overseers, and occasionally having their anuses used by others to experience “exotic customs.” This inhuman torture continued for years. Aquino grew weaker and weaker and finally died of malaria. If it weren’t for being discovered by Hale and redeemed to Manila while building the cannon foundry in Zhongzuosuo, Marcos would surely have followed in his footsteps soon after, dying for one reason or another, his body tied to a stone and thrown into the sea, to be slowly gnawed to the bone by fish and shrimp.

The creaking of the waterwheel and the noise of metal clashing with various blunt instruments grew closer, pulling Marcos out of his terrifying fantasies about his future. The factory’s large wooden doors were open, and next to them, near the gate wall, were displayed the factory’s products and semi-finished products. Marcos peeked out from under the carriage awning. A row of gleaming cannon barrels lay there. These were all bronze cannons recently removed from various forts and galleons in Manila. After being polished, their bores were re-milled with a water-powered milling machine and then rifled with a rifling machine.

Not far away, there was another row of bronze cannons, not yet dismantled, mounted on two-wheeled carriages. These were the field guns of the Spanish garrison, which would also undergo similar modifications.

Although the level of national education in the 20th-century Philippines was limited, and Marcos had never handled guns in his illegal career, he still understood the concept that rifled weapons shot more accurately and farther than smoothbore weapons.

Under a bamboo shed a little further away, there were some brand-new cannons. The black, thick ones, like soda water bottles, were heavy cast-iron cannons to be mounted in the forts. The smaller, grayish-green ones were bronze field guns, few in number and looking rather sparse. A few workers were busy polishing the cannon barrels.