King of Mercenaries - Chapter 67: Producing Fine Salt A Thousand Quarts Daily

Bringing along the 500 families of serfs back to Texel, Marin immediately led everyone as they started construction. Firstly, they started building adobe houses for the 500 families, as their residence.

Then, amongst the 500 families of serfs, 700 male labor were gathered up to help with paving the roads. As for the salt-boiling center at the coast, Marin had specifically hired several professional bricklayers from Cologne and made them help building the fuel-efficient stove. Also, Marin had sent out the ship towards the continent to bring lots of bricks back.

It wasn’t actually a hard undertaking in building the fuel-efficient stove, the only troublesome thing was laying the chimney stack. The commonfolk would have no trouble laying the walls of a stove, but nobody besides professional bricklayers could properly build a chimney stack. If there was a mistake, it would be easy for the chimney stack to fall. That’s why Marin had taken the time to hire bricklayers to build the fuel-efficient stoves for salt-boiling.

The professionals were true to their name, the several bricklayers completed their tasks wonderfully, and finished laying the 20 chimney stacks for the fuel-efficient stoves. While at Kohler had also picked up the 20 huge metal pans they had ordered from Amsterdam.

Because there were many places that needed infrastructure on the island, Marin decided to just keep the 8 bricklayers he had borrowed from Rheydt. Also, he sent someone to inform Rheydt, and took in the families of these 8 men. As they had formed a beneficial pact of profit, Rheydt did not hesitate, and immediately agreed to Marin’s request.

After spending one month’s time, the coastal salt-boiling center was finally done constructing. The road from ‘t Horntje to the salt-boiling center had also been smoothly paved by the 700 strong men. Also, during their spare time, they had also dug out a trench in the beach where the salt-boiling center was at, so that the sea-water would flow in, which makes it easier for everyone to obtain seawater. On the other hand, Marin ordered them to dig another trench for pouring out brinewater…

After the road was done paving, the briquettes that were unloaded at ‘t Horntje were transported towards the salt-boiling center without stop. As for the salt-boiling center, it was named Salttown by Marin…

When all 20 pots were running at full capacity, and after many repetitions, everyone had finally determined, the daily production of seasalt to be 1000 quarts…

Besides, the salt-boiling method was utilizing a new technology that Marin had suggested, so the product they obtained was fine salt with extremely good taste…

Actually, it wasn’t even considered advanced technology. The main thing was, as the salt-boiling process reaches the final stage, there would be a small portion of seawater remaining, not allowing the seawater to evaporate completely, instead, they should dump the seawater out.

In that portion of the seawater, it actually contained other salts such as magnesium chloride and potassium chloride which were much more soluble than edible salt. The difference between magnesium chloride and edible salt was, it was extremely bitter, while potassium salt has an astringent taste. If they had completely evaporated the seawater, the salt left behind would be coarse salt, and among that, would contain impurities such as magnesium salt and potassium salt, which would cause the coarse salt to have a slightly bitter and astringent taste.

While the saltwater that was poured away, was commonly referred to as “bitterns”. By pouring out the bitterns, the salt that they obtained barely passed the threshold to be called as refined salt. In refined salt, though it still contains magnesium salt and what not, but the impurities were at a very low amount. While the bitterness of the refined salt would also be really bland, becoming difficult to identify. Compared with the refined salt which had been chemically processed in the modern world, the differences in taste was already quite small.

In the middle ages, the Britons know how to boil salt, but they do not know how to get ride of the bitterns. That’s why, their salt could only be considered as coarse salt. As for the mineral salts from the salt mines of Lüneburg, they were much more bitter, and it was rare to find high-quality refined salt without any bitterness.

In reality, the secret behind removing the bittern was found during the process when people were basking the salt under the sun. They unintentionally scooped some of the salt from under the bittern and tasting it, realizing that there was no bitterness, they started keeping the bittern and only extracted the refined salt which had a good taste. In this age of salt-boiling, people were more used to boiling the saltwater completely, and obtain the coarse salt remaining at the bottom of their pots. Normally, nobody would pour out the bittern as it was boiling, nor did they know they should remove the bittern…

The refined salt produced under Marin’s guidance, it had a taste that overshadowed the overwhelming majority of the salt that was currently circulating in Europe. After Rheydt tasted it, he immediately judged it as a upper-tier refined salt, and he believed that only the nobility was worthy of consuming these fine salt…

Rheydt wasn’t certain of the reason why, he just assumed it was the good quality of seawater around Texel. What he didn’t know, was that Marin just added a procedure to pour out the bittern. And it was with that simple step which had caused the taste of the salt to improve by leaps and bounds.

After the refined salt being produced by Salttown had their bitterns removed, Marin ordered them to add some freshwater, to dilute the magnesium ions and other impurities, then pour it away… This way, the bittern remains would become less…

Then, he heated the remaining salt, to completely evaporate water from it. Next, he made someone grab a copper hammer, and smash the salt grains. This way, the refined salt that was produced by Salttown quite resembled the powdered white salt that could be seen in modern day refined salts…

These white powdered-form salt, across the entirety Europe in the Middle Ages, was absolutely one with superior quality, no wonder Rheydt gave it an extremely high rating.

To the point that because of its high quality, Rheydt asserted to raise their buying price to 4 shillings, of course, his 3 pennies of profit would not be affected…

After calculating the cost, each day, these 20 salt-boiling pots which used the fuel-efficient stoves, only consumed 15 chaldrons of briquettes. Which also means, the daily supply of 50 chaldron of briquettes they receive from Hoffman’s manor wasn’t even used up, and they only managed to use less than one third of it.

In reality, Marin could expand the production of the salts. However, Marin believed that since everything was just starting, they needed to test the market’s reaction, so there was no need to make too much at once.

Otherwise, if they had too much of a surplus, it would be troublesome if they couldn’t sell it away.

As for the 20 salt-boiling pots, including the labor used for transporting the coal, the total manpower needed was less than 100 people. As such, there were still untapped potential from 600 abled-bodied men…

The 500 families of serfs which Marin had brought onto the island, their total population reached 3100 men. Just the abled-bodied men alone reached a number of 700.

From the looks of it, salt-boiling only required 100 men, so Marin decided to just bring the remaining 600, to start cultivating the barren land around Den Burg…

Currently, it was already early March of the early Spring period. With perfect timing, the Spring plowing was just about to start. Meanwhile, Marin owned a 1000 horses, which could be used for developing the land.

However, these draught horses lacked plows.

As such, Marin sent Kohler to the nearby city, to hire a bunch of skilled blacksmiths to reside in Den Burg. At the same time, he had also purchased a good amount of iron ingots, wood, as well as other forging equipment…

Once this batch of blacksmiths arrived on the island, Marin immediately arranged for them to work together with the carpenters, to build a batch of bend plows, as well as other iron-made labor tools.

Then, these farming tools were distributed amongst the serfs. As for the serfs from the three native farms were arranged to take care of the originally 800 morgens of cultivable land.

Under Marin’s orders, all the human feces and horse manure on the entire island were poured into the fields. This brought about a wide protest from the serfs, they felt that by doing this, Marin was basically dirtying the fields, and would make the food that grow out of it “really disgusting”.

But Marin did not have the time to spare listening to their protests, so under the suppression of 400 soldiers, the serfs could only do as bidded. Otherwise, the enraged serfs would definitely had given Marin a heavy beating. However, Marin owned a castle, and with 400 soldiers who had seen war, these serfs who were honest to a fault could only do as they told, even if they find it disgusting.

While arranging the serfs to tend the fields, Marin also made Kohler and Scholl to bring their men, and based on the addresses their soldiers had given them, visiting each household to pick up the men’s family.

The reason why Kohler was sent, was because Kohler was Marin’s most diplomatic underling, and really knew how to do things. For example, the families who were being chained down by the local lord and disinclined to release them, Kohler had the persuasion skills to negotiate with them. To the point that he could negotiate prices, and buy their freedom with money.

Because of that, this was something only Kohler was suitable for, Scholl was barely qualified, but Schwartz and the others were unsuitable. Marin would also have no problem going himself, but he was a Lord now, and there were many matters in his land that needed his attention, and he was too busy. Besides, if he had to deal with this himself, to receive the family of a soldier, that would be too demeaning of his stature. If it was the family of a general under his command, then it wouldn’t have been a problem if he went to receive them in person. But his number one General, Schwartz’s family had settled down in Hoffman’s manor some time ago. That’s why, he didn’t need to go personally to win the hearts of his men. And those airheaded soldiers have yet to shown enough value for him to act personally…

Once Kohler left, Marin started calculating the cost by himself. He discovered, the 1000 quarts of refined salt Salttown produces daily, had an actual market value of 3 shillings 9 pennies per quart. Deducting the price of briquettes and the cost of transportation, as well as the labour costs, which adds up to 9 pennies.

On average, for every quartz of refined salt, his profits reached a high price of 3 shillings. 1000 quarts, that meant 3000 shillings of pure profit. And 3000 shillings was 150 pound sterlings (or 225 markkas), which can be convered into 600 ducats…

That was only a day’s profits! Marin was fainting, 600 gold coins a day, there were 365 days a year, even after deducting the holidays such as Christmas or New Years, there would still be 350 workdays (there weren’t any weekend breaks here, the most that happened were workbreaks due to major holidays.) In that case, wouldn’t he be able to earn 210 thousand gold coins in a year? Marin was so excited that he started shaking, like the neighbouring old guy who just had a stroke…