I stared down at a small pale coffer, it was half filled with silver bullion coins.

"This is all I have to work with!?" I was incredulous

"This is what remains from keeping our people alive!" Nadine countered.

I opened my mouth to respond but no words came out. Nadine was right here, feeding the people certainly came first.

After a moment more, "How bad is the food situation really?" I asked. "From what I can see there is a shocking amount of fruit ready for the taking."

"You aren't grasping the real scale of the problem. There are close to thirty thousand people on this island, practically every family grows vegetables in a private garden. Every family forages for fruit, every family fishes for meat. There. Is. Not. Enough. Most of the fruit you have seen here isn't even ripe, we've eaten lobster to near extinction!"

Damn. Calculations started running through my head, thirty thousand people split into an average family size of five still meant six thousand family units. Six thousand families acting primarily as laborers, with only one to three able-bodied people able to assist in gathering daily sustenance. Unlike the aristocratic meals I was used to they would require much less variety but much more staple products. That's eighteen thousand meals a day, there really wasn't enough food to go around.

"Are the other ships I saw from delivered food?" A grave look had lit my face.

"Yes."

"Hmmm. How many more shipments can we afford with what's left?" I had been trained at the academy to deal with problems similar to this. Purchasing, shipping, costs of goods sold. Even so I felt blind with so little detail, so little structure.

"Three, maybe four depending on how much salted meat and grain we get in each shipment." Nadine replied.

Still not enough. Buying food with our limited funds and no cashflow was going to be suicide in the long run, not buying food might be suicide in the short run too.

The balance of the nation hung in the next question, a part of me didn't want to know the answer.

"How long can our people survive with no new food, at our current rate of consumption?"

Nadine's heretofore confident expression started to slip. "Maybe eight months... it's the end of the wet season, dry season is going to be hell."

I'm doomed, is all I could think, and I'm going to bring down thirty thousand innocents with me.

Nadine continued, "We also don't have sufficient housing, already we are dealing with flooding issues, inadequate cover from the rain is going to become inadequate cover from the heat. People are going to die before they can starve, maybe not everyone but some will." she was properly frowning now.

"I need... I need to know more." I called Sebastian in.

"Sebastian, clarify for me exactly how much manpower we brought with us to the island. Nadine, please summarize how much manpower you can mobilize after his report."

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Reporting Sir, two doctors, thirty honor guards, mostly made up of retired soldiers, fifty or so chefs, maids, and other support staff, almost a dozen tradesmen." Sebastian promptly answered.

Nadine took a minute to tabulate in her head, "Two hundred or so laborers and staff loyal to my family? We can't afford to pay them any more but might do what we ask anyway."

"Just under three hundred then, that we can directly manage. I don't intend on starving to death. I fear we are going to need drastic measures." I paused again.

"How open to barter and negotiation are the traders? Sebastian, how likely are those traders to be interfered with by my old family? What are the fastest growing crops on the island? What do we have available to build with? Is there any illicit trade on the island? How long does it take the most profitable crops to grow? Do we have any maps of the island, and if not how long would it take to tour the island?" A rapid series of questions left my lips, they would decide my plan of action.

And so our conversation continued, much was revealed to me, much left me hopeless. The traders we had encountered so far had only been open to transactions in bullion, probably due to political pressure. We might be able to sell other products to them but it would be a losing deal until the politics were out of the question. Many crops were fast growing but still outside our survival range. Bananas and plantains took ten months to a year to start fruiting, a year for a harvest. Starfruits, passion fruit, and papaya took similar timelines. Dragon fruit could produce in a little more than a year if taken from cuttings, several years from seed. Almost every other fruiting tree or bush would take several years to the better part of a decade to produce sufficiently.

Cash crops had much more forgiving cycles, but wouldn't feed our people and are still vulnerable to political pressure. Sugar cane grew well and could be harvested in as little as nine months with luck, closer to a year with bad luck. Indigo grew in a matter of months, same as saffron. Coffee and cocoa both took a handful of years to reliably produce. Nutmeg took as long as five years to grow. Luckily Nutmeg was one of the most popular cash crops and had been replanted after the storm to great effect, only a couple more years until those plants could be harvested, but still at smaller scales.

There were a couple of maps of the island in Nadine's hands, but they weren't necessarily accurate, and wouldn't tell us exactly where was best to grow. It quickly became obvious, however, that the windward side of the island was much steeper and cut with deep valleys. The heart of the island and the leeward side of the island had more mild slopes that would be more conducive to agriculture. I would need to see for myself to be sure on the specifics, and touring the island would take several weeks. Too much time would be lost doing so without action, we needed to start now or risk total collapse.

I was correct in my earlier assumption that the fallen trees were snapped up to make the existing houses, there was an issue with how well such timber could be made into planks, and a huge lack of nails or proper tools to make lasting structures. Adobe was a viable building method but not a quick process or particularly stable with only mud bricks and no stone. The saving grace was bamboo. The island was flush with it, it grew fast, and could be assembled without nails. Processing it was still a bit of an issue, it wasn't easy to cut down without a sharp axe or saw, and it would need cutting to size as well. Lack of sufficient quantity and quality of tools plagued all ventures.

There was and illicit trade on the island, namely in the production and smuggling of rum. Sugarcane could be crushed into a sugary syrup and boiled down to a strong rum with relative ease. Mostly done on small scales and for private consumption, it was nevertheless an option on the table. If we could sell rum to traders or pirates, it would greatly change our cashflow situation.

I would need to decide in the next few days how best to spend our remaining bullion, how best to allocate space to food, cash crops, and balance the growing times of each. Furthermore I needed to decide how dramatic the changes made could be; what will the people accept, and what will be too slow to stop our collective starvation. Lastly and most importantly, I would need to make manpower decisions to implement everything. The more buy-in from the people the more willing they would be to take orders, the less so the more I would need to rely on my three hundred loyalists.

Best of all, I had to do this before I got married in a few days. No pressure.