Marines and Airmen (1)
Mountain Spirit let out a hideous laugh.
[If it were a fishing boat, I might save it on the incoming tide, given all the devotion you have shown me thus far. But this time, there is no chance.]
That’s just because a warship is bigger than a fishing boat, so the tide can’t lift it, right?
I thought I was beginning to understand how gods “worked.” What they meant by something being “natural,” too.
So he really can’t be a convenient tool after all.
Either way, what I had to do here hadn’t changed.
The British ship had run aground, but Joseon’s navy would be arriving soon, so we had to get moving. And now that the British were effectively neutralized, the Joseon forces no longer needed to fight them, which meant things had actually become more urgent in a different way.
[But where will you go? If you want to unload all these dried yellow croakers... are you planning to return to Wonsando and speak to Im In-son again?]
No.
Before winter ends, I have to finish cleaning up the entire country and return to Kaesong. There’s no time to retreat to Wonsando and waste it away.
I looked at Un-hong beside me.
“Is there anywhere in the south worth going?”
* * *
As always, when Taesu asked her a question, Cha Un-hong felt a measure of relief.
He was a man who needed a traveling companion too.
Cha Un-hong answered with confidence.
“I thought you’d say that. There’s no way you’d go back to Wonsando or Ganghwado. In that case, the place is Gangjin.”
Gangjin was a stronghold of the Song merchants. The Song merchants monopolized trade between Jeju and the mainland, and they brought their goods in through Gangjin.
But Un-hong wasn’t speaking only as a member of the Song merchants.
The merchant group whose scale rivaled the Song merchants so closely that people called them “the Song merchants of the north, the army merchants of the south.”
The headquarters of the military merchants was Gangjin Jeolla Military Garrison, the army headquarters of Honam.
Together with the Three Provinces Naval Command in Gyeongsang Province, it was one of the two richest military bases in the country, if you measured wealth rather than combat strength.
“Gangjin, then. We’ll be going by boat, so I suppose that makes sense. It’s a shame we can’t stop at the big markets in Jeonju or Namwon, though...”
“No need to be disappointed. If you’d wanted to stop in Jeonju, you only needed to go a little southeast from Samnye Station.”
“Oh? Now that you mention it, you’re right. So you never intended to go there in the first place?”
“That’s right. The reason we came to Geokpo in the first place was because of Gangjin. In Honam, you can’t conduct a proper business discussion without going through Gangjin.”
To begin with, Taesu’s instinct in naming Jeonju and Namwon was not wrong.
Twenty-five percent of the country’s five-day markets were in Honam. Jeonju and Namwon were especially large among them, and both were even recorded in Joseon’s official state compendium, Mangiryoam.
But a merchant, not a government official, had to look at where the distribution economy truly began.
“I suppose I should stop calling you a bobusang like that. The bobusang of Jeolla all come out of Gangjin, and they all return to Gangjin.”
In any case, given his position, Taesu had to unify the entire bobusang world by himself, in effect leading a small elite force of one. He couldn’t possibly tour all two hundred markets in Jeolla Province.
He would go straight for the head. Just as he had targeted Yongin in Gyeonggi and Hongju in Chungcheong when he subdued those provinces in one sweep.
Taesu had thought along those lines too. He simply hadn’t realized that the “head” of the Jeolla bobusang was not Jeonju or Namwon, but Gangjin’s native merchant group, the military merchants.
“The military merchants were a bobusang guild? When you were electing the Dobansu, Im In-son made it sound like they weren’t bobusang at all. More like the Naesang or the Kang merchants.”
“What Hosan’s words say isn’t wrong either. They have nothing to do with the Songdo Chakwimbang. What I mean is that the military merchants mostly began as peddlers who went around selling goods from the army. Once they accumulated enough wealth, they’d begin making big deals with the military itself.”
“The military, huh... Got it.”
Taesu ended the conversation there.
The first reason was that he judged he had heard everything he needed. There was no need to say anything yet about the new business idea that had already begun forming in his head after listening to Un-hong’s explanation.
And the second reason was that, apparently, a traditional villain was about to show up and interfere with their departure.
* * *
The age of tribute and offerings was long past, and Joseon’s tax payments had undergone considerable monetization.
At present, the country had gone beyond even the Daedong Law, and cash payment systems like dokeol had become the norm.
But such laws did not mean the state no longer needed the goods; they merely meant the state would buy those goods back with tax revenue.
In other words, those goods were no longer something to be “offered” to the court, but something that could be “sold.”
They had become part of commerce.
People who said Joseon’s commerce was underdeveloped were mistaken. Local military officials, clerks, and power brokers threw themselves into trade with utter shamelessness and without the least prejudice.
And then they plundered seafood on such a scale that you’d have thought they were plotting to assassinate the king with an overdose of iodine and mercury.
They simply hauled it away and sold it. No oil could compare. This was the “development of commerce in late Joseon” and the “germ of modernization.”
So it was only natural that the sight of Taesu sweeping up dried croakers, seaweed, shellfish, and crabs sent the locals into a frenzy.
This wasn’t quite as formidable as the strongest of the Seven Martial Seas, Jeolla Left Naval Headquarters, but Buan was still a great route where even Injo’s temporary palace had stood. The clerks and constables along the shore burned with zeal and rushed forward.
“Who’s this bastard running around babbling those hideous foreign words about western ships and buying up everything all at once!”
They didn’t need to search very hard. The culprit stepped forward at once.
“It’s me.”
Since Un-hong had stayed behind as well, Taesu was genuinely alone.
The constables were dumbfounded.
“How dare some rootless peddler think he can come here and act like this!”
The magistrate at the front dragged his cudgel back and swung it hard.
There was no need to defend himself. With the power of the Snatch-It-All Fruit, a commoner could never hit the chosen one.
Unless the opponent possessed a certain kind of fighting spirit in more ways than one.
Thunk! A single jab wrapped in divine power caved in the magistrate’s nose, bone and all. It was unbelievable.
“You bastard!”
Taesu dodged the short dagger thrust by the man beside him and seized the wrist that held it.
Several among the onlookers who knew how to fight were deeply shocked.
He can dodge a knife?
No matter how superior your build, facing a knife barehanded is harder than facing a gun with a knife. That’s why a knife is a weapon.
[The stronger your axe becomes, the stronger you become too. And so do I. A little more, and you might even be able to dodge bullets.]
‘You can tempt me all you want, but this time I’m not killing anybody. If I leave, these people will be the ones who suffer.’
Taesu simply smashed the constable’s collarbone with the edge of his hand. It was the consideration of a modern man, someone who didn’t instinctively grasp that in Joseon a broken bone was an injury close to fatal.
The constable, panicking at the realization that he could no longer lift his right arm, took a kick to the stomach and vomited up stomach acid.
One of the petty tyrants stumbling backward shouted, “Hey! If we let some outsider look down on us here, it’s all over! Surround him! You—go get more men!”
Then he deployed a tactic that would have been fairly effective under ordinary circumstances.
The petty tyrant jutted out his chin toward the fishermen.
“You fools got suckered by the merchant’s sweet talk, thinking he’d buy your fish so you wouldn’t have to surrender it to the state, but this bastard’s just a drifter anyway. Do you think you’ll be safe once he’s gone? If you want to cleanse even a little of your guilt, then you’d better seize this criminal now!”
The fishermen flinched.
He wasn’t wrong. Taesu, after all, was an outsider who would eventually leave, just like the western ship itself.
Just as the thought began to take shape — The croakers are all sold, so doesn’t Park Axe have no more business here? — someone else shattered it.
It was Cha Un-hong.
“Don’t let those words sway you. If Dobansu Park Axe had wanted profit, he could have simply bribed those men with a little pocket money or cloth. Then this would have ended without incident.”
And with an expression that plainly said they should be ashamed of themselves, she swept her gaze over the fishermen.
“But Park Axe fought petty tyrants who deceived and humiliated the state above and oppressed the people below in order to rob them. He has done more for you than you have done for yourselves.”
The petty tyrants blustered that they had never deceived the court or carried out illegal plundering, only that His Majesty happened to eat a basketful of seaweed at every meal.
Of course, unless seaweed was an aphrodisiac, there was no way that could be true. Nobody listened to their claims.
“The girl is right. Is this really the kind of thing that can be done for profit? Isn’t it obvious who is lacking in righteousness?”
“We already live our lives risking death every day out on the boats. If we’re going to hand over a righteous man to the unjust just because we’re scared of some red gate, then how can we expect to escape ridicule from outsiders?”
The petty tyrants were horrified by the thing that had never mattered in Joseon before: public opinion.
“Have you all gone mad?”
“Yes, we’re mad, you bastard! Wouldn’t you be mad too if foreign warships were invading while you were only red-eyed over seafood?”
After that, Taesu didn’t even need to step in.
They were thoroughly beaten and strung up one after another on the very racks and poles where the croakers had been drying. Since the market had just been emptied of fish and looked forlorn, it was a fortunate bit of housekeeping.
Taesu then declared the words everyone had been waiting to hear.
“I’m taking these croakers and these people with me. Until I return after disposing of the croakers, I’ll feed everyone myself. When I come back, this mess will all be over anyway. Is there anyone who can tow the boats we’ve bought? I’ll pay well.”
The response erupted in a frenzy.
“We don’t need money. I’ll take the lead and man the oar and the sail lines.”
“We’ll follow only the general’s orders, so please take us all with you!”
Even the people who hadn’t sold their boats to Taesu stepped forward, saying they would simply tow their own vessels along and follow. The number of ships in the flotilla swelled in an instant.
It was almost like the birth of a religious leader. If Choe Je-u had been here, he would have wept.
But like most religious leaders, Taesu led them somewhere no one could have expected.
* * *
The Samarang could not fire a single one of its proud twenty-two guns.
If the grounding had been a gentle, horizontal one, that would have been a blessing from God. But with the ship heeled hard to starboard, the port-side guns had become almost like anti-aircraft pieces, while the starboard guns were at risk of exploding with the powder the moment they were fired.
Nevertheless, Colonel Belcher did not despair. Bringing the Royalists along had been the right call after all.
“Lower every boat we have! Transfer the ship’s equipment and valuables onto the Royalists. Make sure especially that the opium doesn’t get wet!”
Opium was the crucial resource the Royalists would need to go to China and bring back a rescue ship.
But the thing to be rescued was not the crew. The Royal Navy could handle that, or, if necessary, the crew could simply be repatriated to China through the Joseon government.
What Captain Ogle needed to spend his “fees” on without sparing a cent was the British East India Company.
The good thing about private companies was that money could solve everything. It wasn’t impossible to dispatch the East India Company’s so-called goddess of vengeance, HEIC Nemesis, which was supposedly somewhere off Borneo by now, and have her tow the frigate free.
Nemesis was the East India Company’s vessel — not the Royal Navy’s — and it was Britain’s first iron ocean-going steamship.
Built solely on the conviction that it would avenge China for banning the sale of narcotics, this latest warship showed exactly what kind of motivations drive human technological progress.
During the First Opium War, Nemesis had earned decisive distinction by towing large sailing ships armed with heavy cannons into waterways where sailing ships couldn’t even enter. A twenty-two-gun frigate would be child’s play.
For that reason, the most urgent cargo to rescue in this situation was opium.
The sailors of the Samarang all wore the same expression as enlisted men in the Korean army who’d been told that the military dog outranked them.
“Captain. What about us? If we load all that onto a little boat like the Royalists, when are we supposed to get aboard?”
“What nonsense are you talking? The crew stays here to repair the ship and keep watch in all directions!”
“B-but if the natives swarm us and start hurling spears... They say the Joseon people are cannibals!”
Back in the day, even Captain Cecil, the diarrhea general of Erigon, had been quite the hardass, but if you wanted the original source of marine intensity, it was the Royal Navy.
A slack-witted weakling was a shame to the Marines. The colonel barked furiously.
“You goddamn idiot. By God, I’ll eat you before those Joseon bastards do. What’s so precious about a life worth only a single silver coin?”
The colonel whipped them and flung around threats of hanging as he drove the men hard.
But England was also the origin of democracy, along with the Marines.
Such tyranny could not be tolerated. The sailors were preparing, in true Royal Navy fashion, to impeach the captain.
The intensity of Marine democracy was on another level entirely. Once the motion passed, it was dismissal from this world.
Just as the colonel was wavering over whether to signal the Royalists to shell the Samarang, the situation thankfully changed.
Since time immemorial, one of the best ways to suppress internal conflict has been an external threat.
“Boats from the Joseon side are approaching by the dozen!”
Colonel Belcher and the sailors silently agreed to a temporary truce.
“Signal the Royalists! Escort the Samarang along its side!”
But a sailing ship is not a car.
The tide had been ebbing for a long while already. The water beside the Samarang was now dangerous even for a brig.
Besides, to be honest, a six-gun brig wasn’t all that large compared with Joseon’s boats.
He could already see the future: after firing a couple of cannon shots, the ship would be swarmed and devoured by Joseon men crawling aboard like an ant mass.
Captain Ogle really did deserve to call himself one of Belcher’s close men.
He made the rational choice. Someone had to survive to report back to China, after all.
The Royalist immediately turned its bow and peeled away.
If the ship-of-the-line symbolizes “battle” and the clipper “cruising” among the wooden sailing ships that met a splendid end in the nineteenth century, then the brig symbolizes “maneuver.”
A favorite even among pirates, the brig is ideal for swift coastal sailing. Unlike the Samarang, the Royalist achieved a marine-democratic consensus and cut through the wind with perfect unity.
It was a reverse charge with the momentum to circle the globe and come back around.
“You bastard!”
Amid Colonel Belcher’s scream, fishing boats slid in one after another.
The fishermen were not afraid of anything. They had just heard that Ganghwado’s golden fleet had defeated a Western vessel exactly like this.
While Colonel Belcher cursed Captain Ogle by the names of all the devils in hell, something shaped like a hook latched onto the starboard side of the Samarang, which was already listing upward.
And the colonel and sailors clustered awkwardly on the starboard side got to witness a remarkable sight.
The giant who appeared to rise from the port side ran across the tilted mast as if it were flat ground.
Then he hacked down the Union Jack that had been hanging limp from the mast, slicing it apart bit by bit with an axe.
Why he was trying to start the Second Opium War right here soon became clear.
The man took the British flag in both hands, spread it open like an umbrella, and jumped.
“!!”
Colonel Belcher thought of Lenormand, who had leapt from the observatory in Montpellier sixty years ago with a parachute in hand, and Cha Un-hong thought of Emperor Shun, who had jumped with two bamboo hats to escape his parents’ abuse.
Like Lenormand and Emperor Shun, the man did not die. Thud! Landing on the slanted deck, he swept the Union Jack out behind him like a cloak.
Within the hearts of the British Marines, who had proclaimed themselves invincible throughout the nineteenth century, an instinctive terror began to bloom.
It wasn’t that they weren’t prepared for battle, or even that his body strength was absurd enough to jump from such a height onto such an unstable surface and come away unscathed.
From their position, Taesu looked as if he had simply fallen from the sky.
And the Marine’s eternal nemesis was always the Air Force.
Author’s Note
1. Military dogs, of course, have no rank. Claims like “military dogs are sergeants” are just the sort of rumor that tends to circulate in the army.
2. Nemesis is a well-known vessel. According to The Times at the time, it was developed “to deal with China’s complicated coastlines and waterway geography and to smuggle opium.”
3. The Arrow Incident, which triggered the Second Opium War, was the event in which a Qing official forcibly removed the British flag from a ship, or so the British claimed.
4. Louis-Sébastien Lenormand, a student of Lavoisier, is regarded as the first person to experiment with a parachute. He did not die from the fall.