open sea

Chapter 1457 Confrontation
On the evening of the fourth day after Qibai arrived on the banks of the Kama River, nomads fishing on the shore found traces of Cossack fishing boats on the river.

When they saw the enemy, the enemy also saw them, so they knew each other that there was an enemy stationed on the other side.

But relatively speaking, Xibai and Karacha knew more. As the headquarters of the Stroganov family, the existence of Solikam in the Ural region was no secret to the Cossack Sechi who spread all over the wilderness.

It was no secret to them, and it was no secret to the nomads on the front lines of the Ming army.

In essence, there is no difference between the nomads and Cossacks under the command of Karacha and Baibai.

If the Cossacks had to be singled out, then Qibai and Karacha also gathered a lot of Cossacks in the process of marching westward.

Several Cossacks who were driving a small fishing boat on the river looked towards the river. From their perspective, there were some traces of Tatars on the other side of the river.

In the bushes in the swamp by the bank, there was a Tatar who seemed to be riding a horse, raising his whip towards his fishing boat, and asked something to the Cossack who was half his body taller in the bushes under his horse.

Beside the Cossack, several Tatars on foot were pulling strings out of their pockets and struggling to string their bows.

It is easy to tell whether a person is a Tatar or a Cossack through the style of clothing and hairstyle, but the Cossacks on the river are limited to this. They cannot distinguish whether it is a Tatar or a Khitan.

Even the nobles of the Raksha Kingdom can only accurately and incorrectly distinguish between Tatars and Khitans.

They call the Chinese the Khitans, and the Khitans and many nomads the Tatars.

In fact, the rider on the horse by the river bank is a rider from the Mongolian steppe, the walker on the ground is the herdsman near the Altai Mountains, and the Cossack in the middle is the herdsman who recently surrendered to them.

When they met for the first time, neither the Mongolian riders on the shore nor the Cossack fishermen in the river were impulsive. They all chose to turn around and go back to contact the reinforcements, even thinking the same in their hearts.

'They're definitely going to rally, I'm going back to find someone! '

The difference is that the Cossacks wanted to go ashore and rob them, while the Mongol riders wanted to ambush them on the bank.

This is seeking benevolence and benevolence, but in half an hour, the garrison on the other side of the Kama River and a few Cossack Secchi mobilized manpower, and quickly assembled forty or fifty warships, large and small, and sailed to the other side of the river in a mighty manner.

When they were not halfway across the Kama River, the people who were investigating along the lower reaches had not yet received the news, so they all commanded Karacha to lead thousands of troops to help here, and more herdsmen were still gathering.

Karacha only scattered hundreds of people on the shore, and more people arranged a second line of defense in the forest behind.

He fought against the Cossacks many times, and what impressed him the most, and also made him fear the most, was the Cossack's ship.

The Cossacks are neither a country nor a nation. The ships they use are often very different due to their rampant regions. Generally speaking, they have a lot to do with the styles of warships in neighboring countries. Generally speaking, they mainly absorb Novgorod sailing ships. It evolved from the galley warship of the Ottoman line.

A single-deck, manned, single-masted or double-masted, small-sized light ship that is good at plundering.

Seeing the surging Cossack fleet, Karacha ordered the troops to withdraw without hesitation. All the troops withdrew to the second line of defense away from the shore, and started to use felled tree trunks to build a wall.

In the words of Bingyong of the Zhejiang Army who followed Karacha, the best way to deal with these people without a boat is actually not to fight them.

Because these people look so familiar, their ships look like Japanese pirate ships, their people look like Japanese pirates, and even their weapons and fighting methods are similar to Japanese pirates.

So...they are Japanese pirates.

In fact, the way the Ming army called Cossacks was Rakshasa.

Soon, as night fell, this encounter between Ming and Tsarist Russia across half the world began with the first armed conflict breaking out on the Kama River.

Neither side is a regular army, and both have the willingness and purpose to plunder, so this encounter with little plunder started quickly and ended even faster.

When the battle report was delivered to Xiaobai that night, he had already started building a boat in the lower reaches of the Kama River...of course not the kind used to sit on it, but to build a pontoon bridge.

There were three battles. The first battle was on the river bank. There were not many herdsmen left behind. When the Luocha bandits landed, they killed and wounded seven people with muskets. The remaining nearly a hundred people fled to the second line of defense.

They may or may not have shot single-digit enemies.

Then hundreds of Cossacks got off the boat and chased the defeated army to Karacha's second line of defense. A large number of nomadic infantry and archers stood behind the thick wooden fortifications, throwing arrows at them.

Knowing that they were being lured, the Cossacks tried their best to avoid fighting and wanted to retreat. After dropping more than a dozen rounds of corpses, Karacha's infantry and archers pulled out of the fortifications and started chasing them. However, the Cossacks' armor was better than theirs, and the hand-to-hand combat could not be delayed until the flanking cavalry came to support them. .

The two sides fought all the way back to the river bank. The cavalry came late and intercepted dozens of people. The remaining Cossacks fled by boat.

They captured more than 20 captives, and at the cost of nearly 200 casualties, they left 47 corpses of Cossacks, dozens of pairs of soldiers with damaged armor and intact ones, and six matchlock guns. Killed, but the body was taken away.

However, those corpses that were taken away must have nothing to do with the Tang Bao written by Xiaobai at this time. Only corpses can be called harvesting, and no corpses can be called rewarding the court.

The immediate boss of this army is Qi Jiguang, who is known for his strict military law.

The battle process of the first confrontation was very simple, and it also allowed Xiaobai to get a feel for the strength of the enemy on the other side of the Kama River-it was no different from that on the other side of the mountain.

This was the enemy they saw on the other side of the mountain, part herders, part Cossacks.

Cossack armor and muskets are impressive, but they can't change the nature of stragglers and rogue-like habits in combat, so they are easy to deal with.

The Cossacks, Ming's northern captives, and Japanese pirates are the same type of enemy in the eyes of Bai Bai. They are rogues who are good at sneak attacks. They are extremely harmful to settled cities and surrounding villages. They also have advantages in organizational flexibility and mobility against regular troops.

But these advantages are not worth mentioning to the people he led and the troops he led at this time. They did not have cities to settle down, and those certain flag forts built by him were just small strongholds left by dozens of people. influences.

Hunger, on the other hand, is a greater threat than the Cossacks.

That night, more than 500 rafts were used in the lower reaches of the Baikama River under the cover of night to send the Baihu tribe and some scouts of the three formed light and heavy cavalry away from the river bank.

In the next few days, while he continued to make sailboats in the lower reaches of the Kama River, he continued to send people to the south to investigate the situation. According to his information, there was a Perm in the south that used to belong to the Khanate. A thousand-year-old male, now conquered by the Raksha Kingdom, is a force that cannot be underestimated in the region.

Xiaobai intends to try to see if he can take advantage of his identity as a descendant of Mongolia to recruit this large tribe and let them serve as the vanguard of the Ming army's westward expedition.

As for the Cossacks in the north, they were actually not in the eyes of Bai Bai.

But before Xibai could contact the fishermen, hunters and herdsmen in Perm, the Cossacks in the north successfully provoked Xibai's anger.

His shipyard was set on fire by the Cossacks coming downriver.

The most exaggerated thing is that some of those Cossacks still took off their pants on the boat and danced to the worshipers on the shore facing the soaring flames.

(End of this chapter)