Chapter 254: Primordial Salvage

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Yu Sibao was the youngest person on the ship, only 17 years old, a full 6 years younger than his cousin Yu Chushui.

Yu Sibao, who had followed his father out to sea fishing since he was 15, was exceptionally gifted, unmatched by anyone in diving; he could hold a single breath and dive to the seabed to scoop up crabs.

Today everyone had set sail just like any other day. The fishing village where the Yu Family lived was right along the Putian coast, about 20 kilometers by sea from Luci. The Green Fish had been casting nets and fishing all the way, and before they knew it, they were near Luci. Seeing that it was getting late, Yu Chengde gave the order to head for the usual spot to moor and shelter from the wind, planning to set sail back early the next morning.

After the ship stopped in a bay where everyone often sheltered from the wind, the fishermen continued their hard labor: once fresh fish were hauled aboard, the fishermen had to process the catch at once. Otherwise, in the south's average high temperature of over 20 degrees, the raw fish would quickly spoil.

This was the crux of the problem: fishermen at sea had no refrigerated trucks or express delivery; they had no capability to deliver fresh fish onto the tables of the wealthy. The fish had to undergo primary processing before they could be preserved, such as air-drying and salting.

Different environments create different peoples.

In the same time period, fishermen from Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany were working in the bone-chilling North Sea, Norwegian Sea, and around Iceland. The cold seas produced fatty Atlantic salmon and Atlantic herring, and the North Sea region, which saw no sunlight for half a year, was essentially a giant refrigerator — this is why Northern Europeans could sit at home and eat fresh chilled salmon.

This natural chilling method was impossible in temperate regions. So the Han people living in East Asia, even the wealthy gentry class in coastal cities, were ultimately forced to develop the habit of eating freshwater fish. People's order of preference was: they would rather eat bony fresh freshwater fish than eat salted fish.

This awkward situation persisted all the way into later generations. Even after humans invented the refrigerator, the contradiction still existed, it merely shifted — the reason for not eating sea fish became price.

Apart from the rich who could enjoy the dietary changes brought by technological progress, the vast masses of commoners could still only eat chopped-pepper fish heads and freshwater fish stewed with all kinds of heavy seasonings... a plate of salmon sashimi costing over a hundred yuan was not something the poor could afford.

After mooring the ship, the fishermen on the Green Fish began the work of salting fish by the lingering glow of the sunset. Every fish caught had to be slit open, gutted, and then rubbed all over with salt grains.

The Min region lacked salt; what Yu Chengde and the others were using now was a bit of private salt secretly boiled in iron pots in the village. Even so, the amount of salt was still insufficient, so one part of the fish had to be hung on the rigging to be made into wind-dried fish.

Whenever this time came, Yu Sibao would strip down completely naked and dive headfirst into the seabed to play.

The seawater near Luci's reef coast was exceptionally clear. Now, when Yu Sibao plunged into the seabed, he faintly saw a dark shadow underwater. After holding his breath and diving diagonally down for another ten-plus meters, Yu Sibao saw a Great Fortune Ship toppled over on the seabed.

A little over two months was not enough time for the ship to be covered by sea sand, so Sibao recognized at a glance that this was a large Great Fortune Ship.

After turning around and surfacing, Sibao took several deep breaths, then dove headfirst back into the sea. This time he descended vertically from directly above the ship, so he had ample time; before long, he had slipped into the sterncastle of the Great Fortune Ship.

There were not many corpses in the sterncastle, only one human corpse, already excessively decomposed, revealing many white bones and fish-bite marks, floating against the cabin ceiling.

... When the battle happened, almost everyone on the Great Fortune Ship was on the deck, so when the ship sank, the living had all swum away, and the dead had long since been swept off by the currents. As for this one in the sterncastle, he had been shot through by a heavy machine gun bullet long before.

Yu Sibao, a 17th-century fisherman, was naturally unafraid of corpses. In this era, everyone from the lowliest commoners to the wealthy gentry, as long as they survived to adulthood, had countless times more experience with all kinds of dead people than people of later generations.

So after Yu Sibao entered the cabin, he quickly focused his attention on an object in the corner of the toppled cabin... something that gave off a faint metallic sheen.

The young man's reasoning was simple: anything metal was useful. So after scooping up that object, without having time to examine it closely, he turned around and swam out of the cabin, which was quickly clouded by stirred-up silt, and hurriedly swam all the way toward the sea surface.

From this point on, things spiraled beyond control, because the first thing Yu Sibao tossed onto the bow was a copper Buddha.

After the seawater washed the surface silt away, this 6-inch Xuande-style red copper Shakyamuni lotus seated statue immediately gleamed with a golden-yellow luster under the setting sun, and at the same time ignited the atmosphere among the bunch of commoner fishermen on the bow — everyone knew that their luck was about to turn; it was impossible for a sunken ship to hold only this much wealth.

And so, under everyone's expectant gazes, Sibao soon dove back into the sea.

After surfacing the second time, Sibao brought up an inkstone, a chopping knife, and a waist token from the corpse. Although everyone on the ship was illiterate and no one recognized the Zheng family's token, the chopping knife and inkstone were certainly worth a few taels of silver, so everyone's spirits soared even higher.

On Sibao's final exploration before dark, what he brought back were that silver ingot and the military spike.

Originally, when he was blindly groping inside the silt-clouded cabin where darkness made it impossible to see, he had only gotten that silver ingot. However, when he swam out of the cabin and prepared to surface, he discovered a dagger wedged in a crevice of the reef outside the ship, so he conveniently grabbed it and brought the military spike up.

After receiving that blackened silver ingot, Yu Chengde hurriedly called for his son to dry off and put on clothes, then personally brought over the already boiled ginger tea.

The tea was the coarsest bitter tea, the ginger was wild ginger from the field beside the village. After Yu Sibao drank a few mouthfuls of tea, another piece of news that greatly excited everyone came from his mouth: inside the sterncastle of the Great Fortune Ship, there was a large toppled cabinet, and he had already groped his way to the location of the lock.

Early the next morning, the Green Fish stopped fishing and instead slowly moved the ship to directly above the sunken ship, dropping anchor to moor. Not long after, Yu Sibao, wearing a loincloth and with a thick cloth belt tied around his waist, began to enter the water.

Today, Yu Sibao was well-prepared. This time, not only could he descend rapidly along the anchor chain, but tied to the cloth belt at his waist was also a wrought iron awl for prying locks.

However, the road to happiness is paved with setbacks; a little over two months was not enough to turn a Great Fortune Ship built of fine wood into rotten timber. So when Yu Sibao groped his way into the cabin and used the wrought iron awl to pry the lock, the lock made of fine copper naturally did not budge at all.

Under the simultaneous effects of buoyancy and limited time, Yu Sibao laboriously spent an entire morning prying at the lock six times, and ultimately achieved nothing... not only did he fail to pry open the cabinet door, but the wrought iron awl was even bent in the process.

After lunch, Yu Chengde, based on his son's description, decisively changed his approach. He first had Yu Sibao enter the water lightly, then carefully feel along the edge seams of the toppled cabinet.

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