Chapter 292: The Marquis

A group of people fled from the casting and forging workshop. Perhaps on Hale’s orders, or perhaps he had prepared in advance, several native workers were already waiting outside with tea barrels. A little sugar had been added to the black tea imported from Lingao, and it was iced with well water. Drinking it felt refreshing. As soon as the Spaniards had caught their breath, Hale, without pausing, dragged them on. The next target was the machining workshop, built adjacent to the river and the giant waterwheel. Compared to the suffocating casting and forging workshop, this one was filled with the pleasant smell of freshly cut wood. The Philippines had no shortage of wood. The quality was excellent. Striped hardwood that would have been priced in the tens of thousands in a certain East Asian country in a later era was sawn here to make machine tool stands, bases, or transmission shafts, and even tracks for freight on the ground. The ears were filled with the squeaking and clashing of transmission shafts and gears, and the screeching of cutting tools and drills gnawing at metal, all mixed together. Although it was a bit noisy and harsh, it was by no means as deafening as the noise in the hellish casting and forging workshop. The Spanish gentlemen seemed to have recovered some of their spirits, circling the huge boring machine built for cannon making, clicking their tongues in amazement.

From time to time, some native workers walked around the drilling and boring machines, holding wooden shovels to scoop the falling iron filings into baskets, ready to be sent back for remelting. Marcos knew that more than seventy percent of the iron and nearly ninety percent of the copper imported by the Spanish Philippines colony were consumed by this factory. Of course, what the citizens of Manila were most concerned about was the large amount of silver pesos it devoured. But Governor Salamanca was the exact opposite: whether it was iron, copper, or silver, he intended to double the input into the mouth of this gold-swallowing beast of an arsenal, as long as the golden eggs it laid could bring glory and promotion to himself and his allies in the officialdom. Commodore Don Juanco de Bazán, Marquis, had come for this very reason.

The Marquis grabbed a handful of iron filings from the ground and rubbed them in his hands. The white satin gloves immediately showed a large black stain. It was covered with soapy water used as a lubricant and coolant, greasy and foamy, disgusting, and it soaked through the gloves.

The iron filings pricked the skin of his palm, hard and rough, as if reminding him that they had been cut and peeled from the parent body by even harder and sharper steel drills. As a senior naval officer, the Marquis was no stranger to the naval cannon foundries of Seville and Liérganes. He had also traveled in France, Germany, and Venice, and had visited the weapon manufacturing workshops there. These machines seemed to have prototypes in European workshops. But in terms of scale, precision, and efficiency, those European products were barely children’s toys compared to the miracle designed by this Japanese priest. Even the most famous cannon-founding expert in Europe, who would believe that a cannon bore could be “hollowed out” from a solid iron blank with a drill rod?

The Marquis de Bazán threw down the dirty, damp gloves and picked up a new pair of white silk gloves from the wooden tray that his attendant had been carrying all along. However, his inner excitement caused his hands to tremble so much that he couldn’t put them on. The Marquis threw the new gloves back onto the wooden tray. “What is that?” he asked, pointing with his arms crossed at a machine with a spiral cutter in front.

“It’s a machine for making rifling.”

“Rifling,” the Marquis de Bazán repeated the unfamiliar word. It was clear that he was very interested, but he tried his best to maintain a solemn expression, not letting his ignorant confusion show on his face.

The Japanese priest suddenly opened up, talking endlessly about various scientific theories, from Archimedes’ spiral principle to the rotation of the planets. The Commodore listened as if in a fog. He vaguely seemed to understand a little: the rifling, designed according to the principles of the spiral and rotation, would increase the hit rate of the cannonballs by more than ten times. If the gunners were equipped with telescopes, rifled cannons could even accurately destroy a warship sailing a league away.

Equipping gunners with telescopes was too extravagant. Telescopes were not cheap in Europe at this time. But a cannon with a range of over a league that could accurately hit a ship was truly terrifying in this era.

“The problem is with the shells,” said an artillery officer. “The rifled cannon has already proven its power in the Pangasinan campaign. It is a truly terrible weapon of genius invention. It has only one drawback: only shells of very precise dimensions and properties can match the rifling. Such shells are undoubtedly very difficult to manufacture. We can also use the old round shot in the new cannons, but then it would be impossible to achieve the effect that Mr. Paul claims.”

“You are absolutely right,” Hale immediately picked up the conversation. “I have already thought of a way. Using precise machines to manufacture precise objects is far more efficient than relying on manual labor to make crude ones. Gentlemen, please follow me to see how shells are made by machine. Marcos, lead us to the front.”

In a corner of the machining workshop were two small lathes driven by animal power. The rough shell castings brought from the foundry were polished and shaped here, and the screw threads for installing the fuzes were turned. A few selected Chinese workers carefully inspected the finished products with special calipers. Hale took one from the batch that had passed inspection and showed it to the guests, asking them to imagine the terrible scene when the hollow warhead was filled with gunpowder or shrapnel and detonated by a fuze connected to the top screw.

“A rifled cannon must be closely matched with its ammunition. All its superiority comes from this. The most basic principle is that there must be no gap between the shell and the bore. The entire thrust generated by the gunpowder explosion is used to push the shell, not wasted by leaking through the gap like in a smoothbore cannon. And only when the shell body completely fits the bore can it get friction from the rifling to form a stable spin motion perpendicular to the flight line. As for a smoothbore cannon, because of the gap, from the moment of ignition, it rolls along an irregular path in the bore. This completely irregular rolling will continue from the bore into the air. The final result is that it is impossible to predict where the shell will land.”

Hale grew more excited as he spoke. Since coming to this time and space, he had rarely had the opportunity to display his technical authority and advancement in front of a crowd. “A muzzle-loading rifled cannon has two contradictory principles. To load the shell into the bore quickly and without effort means that the friction between the two cannot be too great, but this violates the first principle that there must be no gap between the shell and the bore. If it were a breech-loading cannon, this contradiction would not exist. It would be enough to make the shell slightly larger than the bore diameter. But we are not yet able to manufacture reliable large-caliber breech-loading cannons. To solve this contradiction, the first method I thought of was a chemical mortar-style shell. Oh, you don’t know what a chemical mortar is? Well, it’s a… in short, a rather terrible mortar. The shell is the long conical shape you saw at the Cavite naval fortress, with a steel plate at the bottom, connected to the shell by a ring of purple copper. When the explosive force of the gunpowder pushes the steel plate, it will press forward on the copper ring, and as a result, the softer copper ring will expand outward to fit the bore.”

“Truly marvelous,” the Marquis de Bazán listened intently and couldn’t help but exclaim.

“But this is still too complicated and not conducive to production. So, initially, our shell production could not keep up with the number of new cannons cast. I have been constantly trying to improve. What you see here is the result of my recent ideas. Does this shell look a bit like an elongated teardrop? You see, we have cut away a layer of the shell body below the centering band. This part of the shell body will be entirely wrapped in a material that can expand under thrust, and it is much cheaper than copper.”

“What material is it?”

“Concrete paper.”

“Paper?” the commodore asked doubtfully, and the faces of several officers showed expressions of disbelief.

“Yes, strictly speaking, it’s paper pulp.”

The prepared concrete paper pulp was poured into special molds, wrapping the lower half of the shell body. After demolding, it still needed to be dried and pressed.

Finally, the workers would use a scraper to trim the surface of the concrete paper shell and use calipers to calibrate the outer diameter of the warhead one by one. After all this was done, the shell would be sent to the charging workshop.

“So, Mr. Paul, may I venture to congratulate you on having solved the production problem of the new shells?” asked the Marquis de Bazán, standing by the stove in the drying room, looking at the densely packed shell casings on the drying racks.

“There are still some defects in the factory’s operation. First, there is a lack of labor, especially workers who can skillfully operate the machines. So, at present, we can only produce about 10 explosive shells and canister shot per day.” Marcos drew a sharp breath. Hale’s production figures included a large number of duds that could not be fired. The actual daily output was less than a third.

The operational efficiency of the arsenal was very poor. Both Hale and Marcos were well aware of this.

Hale, however, continued to boast with composure, “As long as we can supply enough manpower and materials, we can increase the production of shells by 3 to 4 times. It would be best to have more Chinese. The time and effort it takes to train a Chinese to operate a machine is 5 times less than training a native, and their work efficiency is 5 times higher. If His Majesty is gracious enough to grant us European craftsmen skilled in instrument making, that would be even better. We have now recruited some German craftsmen to undertake important technical work, but unfortunately, there are still too few. There is only one instrument maker from Augsburg in the factory. All the precision aiming instruments and shell fuzes rely on his skills. He can also repair clocks. His craftsmanship is truly impeccable, but the problem is that he is simply too busy.”