Even if I were to make wetsuits for the haenyeo out of rubber, it wouldn’t happen overnight.
Though a bit expensive, rubber fabric itself can be obtained as long as you have the money.
Cutting it is also possible.
The problem is that there is no adhesive to join the pieces together.
So, although it was a bit inconvenient and primitive, I decided to use another method. I would make one-piece rubber wetsuits that didn’t require any adhesive.
1. Create a mold of the women’s upper and lower bodies using clay, plaster, or something similar.
At this time, their body measurements must be taken.
This can be done among the women themselves, or I can do it.
Since I am still young and the women here don’t even treat me like a man, it is possible for me to take the measurements.
2. Afterward, take the molded plaster cast or clay statue to Fridolf Gek, who is skilled at wood carving, and ask him to carve an identical wooden version.
3. On the carved upper and lower body statues, thickly apply a mixture of Brazilian rubber and sulfur in specific proportions.
4. Once it seems to be at an appropriate thickness, steam it thoroughly in the boiler attached to the steam engine I purchased last year.
5. Peel the rubber wetsuit off the statue.
Isn’t it easy?
However, since sleeves couldn’t be made and attached using this method, I made the sleeves separately.
I experimented with several adhesives bought from Kunst and Albers along with pine resin mixed with charcoal, and then bonded them using the one that seemed best.
As for the size, because Fridolf Gek couldn’t handle making individual molds for everyone, I only made three types: large, medium, and small.
I also made fins in a similar way.
I created a wooden frame for these, and since making the frame was simple, it was relatively easy.
I know that the durability isn’t great and the convenience is poor compared to modern wetsuits.
Still, they are good enough to wear into the sea during winter.
It was something I only realized much later, but thanks to making the wetsuits by thickly layering the rubber, a sort of air layer was created within the rubber, which had the advantage of increasing the insulation effect.
However, there was a problem: all the women living here didn’t know how to swim.
In the end, I had to teach them how to swim.
There were no swimsuits, but I made tops and bottoms out of black cotton for them to wear while I taught them.
Thanks to the Sewing Machine, making clothes was really convenient.
I also couldn’t forget the lead-weighted belts.
Humans naturally tend to float in the water due to buoyancy, and to overcome this, it is best to wear a belt filled with lead around the waist.
I had bought plenty of lead blocks, so I just had to make the belts to hold them, which was also easily solved with the Sewing Machine.
As I mentioned before, the women here, especially Seon-hui and Jeong-sun who had seen me since I was a child, did not treat me as a man, so it wasn’t difficult to go into the water with them and teach them to swim.
Furthermore, although they were crudely made, I even fashioned goggles for them to wear, so everyone reached a level where they could harvest sea cucumbers from the ocean.
It wasn’t just the Joseon women, including Seon-hui and Jeong-sun; even Olga, the wife of Mikhail Yankovsky, begged me to teach her, so I did.
Olga is a mixed-race woman of a Russian man and a Buryat woman, and having grown up in a Buryat village, her identity is closer to the Buryat than Russian.
She is only 16 years old, but she has a strong sense of survival, and even though her husband, Mikhail Yankovsky, brings home a decent amount of money, she didn’t want to miss the opportunity to earn money herself.
After teaching them for a month or two, everyone became proficient at harvesting sea cucumbers.
Thanks to the help of the wetsuits, goggles, fins, and lead belts, everyone’s working speed was significantly faster than the natives here, and their harvest was also much larger.
However, because I already knew to some extent the dangers of being a haenyeo, I strictly forbade them from going into deep areas and warned them several times about the risks.
Professional haenyeo from Jeju Island or the southern regions are okay because they are well-aware of special breathing techniques like the Sumbisori and the risks of decompression sickness, but these people are novice haenyeo, so it is truly dangerous.
In China, sea cucumbers are more expensive than one might think.
Even if they aren’t as expensive as abalone, they are almost comparable.
Why didn’t I think of abalone if it’s so expensive?
Abalone is a warm-current species, so it doesn’t grow here.
If there were abalone here, I would have caught them first.
No, considering the Chinese love for abalone, they would have been wiped out before I even arrived.
The reason I went to the trouble of making rubber wetsuits myself and distributing them to the women of Sidimi wasn’t simply to catch sea cucumbers.
One hidden purpose was to show Joseon immigrants that the Sidimi area was overflowing with ways to make money, thereby attracting more Joseon immigrants to the region.
The second purpose was to learn rubber processing techniques.
Charles Goodyear patented vulcanized rubber in 1844, but the rubber industry has still not properly developed.
Seeing Brazilian rubber being commercialized and sold, it seems it isn’t entirely without use, but it isn’t very noticeable in the surroundings.
In other words, it is the early stages of rubber use, meaning people don’t know where to use it and aren’t familiar with processing methods.
Rubber wasn’t even used for wheels; the few high-wheel bicycles and rickshaw wheels I saw did not use rubber.
Therefore, it makes no sense to go somewhere to learn rubber processing or applications right now; if I develop applications, that immediately opens up a new market.
This means I could potentially take over everything that would belong to a future Michelin or Goodyear (for reference, that company has nothing to do with Charles Goodyear).
Even just making and selling rubber shoes in Joseon after the opening of the ports could create a market worth ten million dollars.
Beyond that, if I move into tires, I could sufficiently dominate the global market and become the Rubber King of the world even before the development of automobiles.
Setting aside becoming the Rubber King, attracting Joseon immigrants to Sidimi is currently quite successful.
Well, this is more thanks to our amazing land reclamation technology than the sea cucumber harvesting, but in any case, inquiries were constantly coming in asking if they too could move into Sidimi.
The people who had come with me welcomed more Joseon people entering Sidimi, but many of the people who had been in Sidimi from the start opposed their migration.
Perhaps if it had been last year, the Sidimi Joseon people would have welcomed their move as well.
This was because it was advantageous for Joseon people to band together in large numbers to survive in Russian land, but now that I had reclaimed a large amount of farmland and created an agricultural cooperative, letting them have a stake in it made the original residents worry that their vested interests might be encroached upon.
I persuaded them by mentioning the threat of the Honghuzi Ma-jeok.
“The rumors that we have improved a lot of farmland and increased our horses, making us wealthy, have spread throughout the entire Primorsky Krai. So this winter, those Ma-jeok bastards will surely attack, and this time they will come in much larger numbers than last winter. Do you think we alone can block over a hundred Ma-jeok?”
When I threatened that over a hundred Honghuzi Ma-jeok might attack, only then did their opposing opinions vanish.
The Koryo-saram in Yeonchu have a Russian Army garrison right below them, so they don’t have such threats, but this land of Sidimi is a place that can be threatened by them at any time.
Last winter, the Honghuzi underestimated us and came in small numbers, so we were able to repel them without any damage, but this time it will definitely not be easy.
The news that the people of Sidimi had become wealthy has spread widely across Primorsky Krai, and just looking at the fields, hay is lush on over 500 Dessiatine of land.
Selling just the hay would yield at least over 30,000 Rubles, and there are many horses and agricultural machines.
Also, there were piles of saltpeter from India that I brought to use as fertilizer and grain I bought from Japan.
Besides that, just how many horses were there?
There were already over 40 Western Horses alone, and with over twenty horses brought from Joseon and Manchuria, the Sidimi Joseon people were famous for always riding horses instead of walking.
(I and the Russians mainly ride Western Horses, but the Joseon people mainly ride Joseon or Manchurian Horses.)
All of this is like precious treasure to the Honghuzi Ma-jeok. If we appeared even slightly weak, there was no way they would leave us alone.
No matter how good marksmen Mikhail Yankovsky and I were, if there was such a gap in numbers, it wouldn’t mean much.
Moreover, if I were to lose my life, this world itself might perish, so if it got truly dangerous, I would have to abandon everyone and run.
In the end, I emphasized once again that Joseon people have no choice but to live together with other Joseon people, and only then did the people understand and accept the migration of the Joseon people.
At first, only about 10 families migrated, but once the rumor spread that we were accepting migrants, they rushed in like a tide, and by the time of the fall harvest, there were almost 100 households.
If this happened, the area where the existing Joseon people lived would become too cramped.
So, we decided to build a new village to the north.
In the middle of Sidimi, there is a lagoon formed by seawater, which divides the village into north and south.
Strangely, the north side is a plain where our reclaimed farmland is located, while the south side of the lagoon is mountainous, where Yankovsky’s ranch is.
Even though it’s called a lagoon, it isn’t completely cut off from the sea; a passage where seawater flows in and out, like a shallow stream, still remains.
To get from the village where we lived to the northern farmland, we had to cross this stream-like seawater.
However, since there was a natural bridge-like formation in the middle, we could cross without getting our feet wet by placing just one short bridge, so we built a bridge.
We decided to build the new village above this lagoon.
I had brought quite a few bricks from India, but these had to be used for building defensive walls.
Therefore, the newly migrated people decided to live in the traditional dugouts of Primorsky Krai immigrants for just this one year.
As the Joseon people who had lived in Sidimi previously came into money, they started by building new houses and were now living in quite decent homes.
In the meantime, the season for harvesting hay approached, and we cut all the hay planted on the 500 Dessiatine of reclaimed land using harvesters.
Hay shouldn’t just be cut; it must be dried.
The autumn in this region is dry without rain, so you can just leave it cut to dry and flip it every few days, and there is also an agricultural machine for flipping it.
About fifteen days after laying it out and drying it, the hay is harvested with a hay collector.
A hay collector is a machine attached to the back of a cart that lifts the hay spread on the ground onto the cart, but a person must be attached to organize the hay coming up onto the cart.
This required a significant amount of labor, and the arrival of the Joseon immigrants was a huge help.
The hay harvested this way consisted of Timothy, what they call Lucerne in this region—Alfalfa—and oat hay, totaling 250,000 Poods, excluding the hay we would use.
I had already met with the Colonel in August and signed a contract for this hay.
Of course, the Colonel tried to cut the price somehow this time as well.
“So, this time it’s not just oat hay, but Timothy and Lucerne as well. You know the difference, right, Colonel?”
“I’ve been supplying hay for how many years; do you think I wouldn’t know? Even so, do you think it makes sense for the price to be the same when supplying 250,000 Poods as it was for 15,000 Poods?”
“What’s the difference? If anything, shouldn’t the price go up? Does the Russian mainland raise the price just because you supply a small amount of hay?”
“Think about it carefully. If we sign a supply contract like this, the need to ship hay from Russia this year disappears.
And that becomes your achievement, doesn’t it, Colonel?”
The Colonel nodded.
Solving the hay supply problem for the military horses in the Russian Far East would be a tremendous achievement.
“If you cut the price, we will lose the motivation to produce hay. Honestly, planting soybeans, wheat, or rice on the reclaimed land would bring in much more money. If that happens, won’t the dream of hay self-sufficiency in the Russian Far East disappear?”
“As you say, if that side is more profitable, you could just plant something else instead of hay. Why did you plant hay?”
“At that time, we lacked manpower. Since it was land we just reclaimed, we also needed to test the soil fertility before planting other grains. But now, Sidimi is overflowing with labor, and we have sufficiently tested the soil fertility. We have plenty of reasons to plant something else.”
Ultimately, the Colonel succumbed to the threat that we might grow something other than hay and contracted to pay 25 Kopeyka per Pood for Timothy and oat hay, and 35 Kopeyka per Pood for Lucerne (Alfalfa).
That way, I supplied 200,000 Poods of Timothy and oat hay and 50,000 Poods of Lucerne, receiving 67,500 Rubles in payment.
250,000 Poods is an amount that can feed the military horses in the Russian Far East for about 180 days.
This winter, the need to bring in hay from the outside disappeared, and word went around that the Colonel’s merit was fully recognized, making his promotion to General quite likely.
Upon hearing the news that the Colonel had been promoted to General, I presented him with a small gold trophy as a gift.
Of course, it was a bribe.
—