Chapter 412: Buying and Building Together
After discussing the navy school's name, the construction of the Ferdinand Naval Academy was set in stone. Like Hechingen Military Academy, Ernst would serve as honorary principal.
Constantinoo Prince remarked, "Ernst, are you perhaps addicted to serving as principal?"
Ernst replied, "Father, you've misunderstood me. Though my own military capability isn't that strong, my greatest skill lies in building up the ideological environment at an academy."
Though Ernst rarely involved himself in direct teaching, he believed he excelled in what might be called "political education," having received that sort of training from an early age.
Ernst: "Strengthening the navy is a key move for the East African Kingdom right now. Our navy is a major weakness that leaves us vulnerable at sea. By contrast, the East African Army's national defense pressure is much smaller, because we've grown to be Africa's top land force in sheer scale. Frankly, unless a country committed its entire national power, nobody in Africa's interior could defeat us on land.
But at sea, our shortcomings are obvious. We lack both manpower and warships; it'd only take one foreign fleet to sink our entire navy. Hence building a force sufficient to protect our coastal waters is our foremost objective."
The East African Navy's development was indeed urgent, but that didn't mean Ernst planned a massive expansion. As Archduke Ferdinand had noted, East Africa lacked a comprehensive system. Even if they purchased countless modern warships, without a framework to maintain them, they'd be just heaps of scrap iron.
Constantino observed, "Overhauling the navy is a long process. Not something that can be done overnight. Even Germany can't build up its navy in just a few years. It'll take decades. So we in East Africa ought to proceed methodically. Working steadily across Africa is enough."
Germany's overall scale dwarfed East Africa, given the difference in land area and overall development. But now, at least, they could be compared—even if the Hechingen Principality in the past wouldn't have been worthy of any mention. That said, the East African Kingdom still wasn't secure. One reason: East Africa had effectively become the world's biggest exporter of enslaved people, which went against the increasingly powerful abolitionist movement worldwide.
Ernst considered abolitionism a hypocritical gesture from colonizers—useful for swaying Europe's moralists. In reality, it happened because Britain's industrial expansion no longer required the slave trade, and so forth. Eventually, once global markets slowed, the major powers would revert to outward aggression. North and South America were drifting away from their old rulers, so Africa would become the next prime target. Within those undercurrents, if East Africa wanted to stand firm, it had to build up its navy and repel threats at sea.
Ernst: "About buying ships: Father-in-law, I'll rely on you to handle that. Meanwhile, smaller vessels can wait."
Archduke Ferdinand asked, "Certainly, that's my job. But small vessels are also essential. How do you plan on dealing with that?"
Ernst explained, "I intend for Hechingen's four major shipyards to design and build those smaller ships, letting East Africa develop its own shipbuilding talent and technology."
For small or mid-sized warships, Hechingen's own yards were perfectly capable. In fact, with enough funding, they could handle some large-scale builds, too. But as the archduke had pointed out, many advanced technologies were lacking. In Europe, private yards commonly built navy ships. Britain, for example, combined both government and private resources.
Yet Hechingen's yards had no history building advanced warships. Some knowledge came from the Venice Shipyard, which once built sail-driven battleships for the Venetian navy. The kingdom's other three yards copied Venice's model. With steam power and iron armor trending, Venice's yard had already declined—only after Ernst poured in money did it begin to research steam power anew.
Ernst added, "So the Bagamoyo Shipyard will handle most of it. We can import technology from Europe. Above all, it's the labor force that needs training."
The Bagamoyo yard's workforce mostly came from Germanic and Italian immigrants, with only a few from the Far East. That was typical for East Africa. Any factory needing some technical skill recruited German immigrants, who had the advantage of basic education. Many Far Eastern immigrants struggled even with left and right, or counting beyond five, so putting them in a factory was challenging. Still, the situation was changing. The first class of East African elementary students graduated last year. That in turn let East Africa send more exchange students to Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Indeed, East Africa was somewhat better off than the Far East in that regard—no language barriers hindered them from schooling in German. The Far East's first official batch of overseas students only sailed this year—fifty in total, thirty recommended by East Africa's embassy. Meanwhile, East Africa's first class of five hundred foreign-bound students came from the old colonial era families. The Hechingen Principality in Germany hosted many of them in its schools, which now boasted over twenty thousand enrollees (including orphans from Europe and the German region).
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