Jade vanished along the water's edge, and white eagles soared over sea and sky. Eight hundred li north from the Black Snake Tribe lay the kingdom's largest stronghold on the West Coast: West Mountain Port in Golden Mountain Bay. After three years of development, this natural harbor, blessed with excellent waters, had grown from its first two or three hundred people into a great bay town of thirty-two hundred tribesmen!
Last summer, the kingdom's second fleet heading north arrived at Golden Bay. This fleet of longships not only brought a new group of priests, warriors, and commoners, but also important craftsmen skilled in pottery and brickmaking, metal smelting, and shipbuilding, making the entire town flourish all the more.
Looking out, a newly built small Main God Temple stood on the western mountain by the mouth of the sea, overlooking the long Golden Bay that stretched five hundred li. And the expanded reach of West Mountain Port, following the vast newly reclaimed fields and the temples bearing the Main God Banner, had extended from the winding eastern shore of Golden Bay to the narrow western shore at the foot of the western mountain.
West Mountain Port occupied both shores of Golden Bay, so it was naturally divided into an east town and a west town. In the Golden Bay Shipyard of the east town, eight longships had already had their most important single-piece keels laid, and their extended cabin decks were being built. More than ten kingdom shipwrights, over two hundred Miwok artisan apprentices, and dozens of tribal carpenters and headman's sons from the North Bay Tribe were all busily working around the skeletons of the longships, building the largest "great ships" ever constructed on the West Coast.
In truth, these West Coast-built longships were clearly a size smaller than the