January 3, 1868.
Great Lakes Region, Mwanza.
The Great Lake—Lake Victoria—covered nearly seventy thousand square kilometers, with an average depth of around forty meters and excellent navigability.
To develop the Great Lake, advanced vessels were indispensable. They did not need to be especially sophisticated, but they at least had to be better than the dugout canoes used by the natives.
Moreover, the Great Lake alone contained over a thousand islands, many of them suitable for human habitation and naturally inhabited by natives.
These natives lived by fishing and might spend their entire lives on the islands. Naturally, this was unacceptable to the East African Colonial Government, whose ultimate goal was "clearing to zero."
Thus, whether for developing and utilizing the Great Lake or clearing out the natives on its islands, establishing East Africa's own Inland Lake Force was necessary.
And whether fishermen were catching fish or an Inland Lake Force was being established, ships were indispensable.
Even in his previous life, ferries remained the main means of transportation on Lake Victoria. Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania had all built ports along its shores, relying on the Great Lake's vast waters to establish many sizable port cities. These lake ports were in no way inferior even to some of Africa's seaports.
The Great Lake also possessed abundant freshwater fishery resources. As the East African colony developed and restricted the consumption of wild animals, seeking new substitutes for meat became inevitable.
At present, Ernst had two ideas. One was to develop ranches and livestock husbandry. The other was to develop the fishery resources of the East African colony's freshwater lakes.
Livestock development took time, while the fishery resources in East Africa's lakes were ready for the taking. The Great Lake, Lake Tanganyika, Lake Malawi, and even Lake Turkana—any one of them was enough