First, this could easily stimulate a region's economy.
Since it was tax-free, merchants would instinctively follow the merchant ship's route, striving to maximize their profits while minimizing costs.
Such legal tax avoidance methods were rare elsewhere.
More importantly, a ship like this would undoubtedly offer countless opportunities—whether it was business serving the wealthy or business done with the wealthy, it all meant connections and channels.
The food, clothing, housing, travel, and consumption of the people living aboard would all require vast quantities of goods and trade to sustain.
They would need to resupply directly on the spot.
In other words, it only needed to dock beside any particularly primitive island, and merchants, workers hired by merchants, and people seeking work aboard the ship would naturally strip the island of everything it had, absorb its people onto the ship, and turn it into a deeply developed industrial island.
Some of the island's people might find work locally, while others might grow tired of life aboard the ship and disembark to settle there. A large portion of the locals, meanwhile, might be taken aboard the ship.
After all, people's yearning for a better life was only natural. Otherwise, South Americans would not have crossed countless hardships, endured pursuit and blockades, physical walls, and invisible discrimination, yet still insisted on going to North America in search of work and opportunity.
Even back in the days of New Oriental, hadn't a huge number of people abandoned the homeland that had given birth to and raised them, with its low educational costs, because of material living conditions, and thrown themselves into the embrace of North America, with its high material standards and high costs?
That was a common trait of humanity, but it was precisely because of that that things like love for one's homeland,