Bogdan rode a Mongolian horse and had just returned from the mountains north of the port of Heishui, along with several Oroqen and Feiyaka tribesmen. They took a fancy to the relatively superior living environment of Heishui Port, and after weighing whether fishing and hunting could fill their stomachs or farming could fill their stomachs, they decisively abandoned the ancient traditional fishing and hunting life, and moved to the vicinity of Heishui Port to rely on the people on the east coast to make a living.

Of course, only a minority of people are willing to come to the East Coast, and many more of Sakhalin's natives are still clinging to their traditional way of life. However, as they become more and more closely associated with the people of the East Coast, sooner or later they will abandon their backward and traditional lives and live around the Blackwater Port and become a member of the East Coast system. On the east coast, there are advanced agricultural crops and techniques, exquisite goods, and strong military force, which makes them attract a large number of Shandan people to come to take refuge without a single shot. The children of Shandan were gathered to go to school, the women went to work in and around the port of Heishui to do some handicrafts to earn their families, and the men went to the mainland to fight as military households of the East Coast people, so that the Heishui area became a stable rear area for the East Coast people.

After the arrival of this group of more than 200 Oroqen and Feiyaka people, the total number of Shandan people who have been included in the household register on the east coast has reached more than 800. This number is frightening, and it can be said that tribes or villages of a few hundred miles in the vicinity have basically moved over. Together with the Ming and Korean people who settled in the local area, a small number of technicians, soldiers and sailors from Europe, more than 200 black soldiers and their Korean wives, the population of Heishui Port has reached more than 2,700 people, and it is also a first-class city in North Asia.

The newcomers quickly found acquaintances among the early settlers of the Shandan people. The two sides call for friendship and are not lively. Bogdan is a headache for these undisciplined savages. After handing them over to the officials in charge of civil affairs. He returned to the city with a group of colleagues from the police station.

In fact, the city is just talking, and Blackwater Harbor doesn't even have a serious permanent wall, but some poplar fences have been built around important facilities. The new brick and tile kiln factories, small cement kilns, and lime kilns that have been built in the local area have limited output, and they have been responsible for transporting materials to Yantai Fort and providing support for the construction of the winter base on Rishiri Island and the port of Heishui, which have always been in short supply. Therefore, although the walls of Blackwater Harbor have been built for three years, not even an inch has been built. This broke Bogdan's heart, who is in charge of local policing.

But the good news is not without it. At present, the construction of the urban area of Heishui Port can finally be completed after three years of continuous construction and surprise construction last winter. The city covers a very large area of 0.5 square kilometers, and if you include the dock area, the coastal defense fort area, and some of the Shandan military household residential areas attached to the city, the urban area is more than one square kilometer. With such an area, if the walls were built according to normal standards, it would probably become a big city of the scale of the local capital, Dongfang County.

To build a city wall comparable to that of a majestic city in Dongfang County, the difficulties for Blackwater Port are enormous, both in terms of building materials and human resources. However, Mo Ming didn't plan to complete it in the short term, no, the plan could be put forward in the long run. I can afford to wait for three or five years.

In the future, we will use it in the winter, so many captured prisoners. What if they are not allowed to work well to redeem themselves? In this era, Europeans had to work in winter, even in the colder eastern parts of Poland and Russia, and those serfs who had nothing had to work in temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius in winter. Dressed in meager winter clothes, they went outdoors in cold climates to get hay (in the autumn when they missed the time to help the lord), dug ditches in the frozen land (heavy rains in the summer and autumn made it impossible to start work), and cut down trees in the forests—one of the few means they had to get cash, otherwise they might not be able to pay the taxes they had in the spring.

Their "industrious" life continued until the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and the Poles and Russians could work outdoors in the winter of minus 30 degrees Celsius. Therefore, starting from the winter of last year (1644), more than 600 Qing prisoners who had been captured in previous battles were driven out of the coal mining area of their Maodong and began to build houses in the bitter cold of minus 30 or 40 degrees Celsius, resulting in more than 100 deaths in one winter.

But it doesn't matter, there are a lot of prisoners. In the middle of this month (May 1645), Mo Dashuai's fleet returned again, sending more than 800 Qing prisoners to the port of Heishui. The composition of the Qing army prisoners this time is a bit interesting, among the more than 800 people, there are about nearly 200 Qing soldiers captured in Shandong; More than 600 people were captured in the strongholds of the Qing army in Leting County, Jinzhouwei, Lushunkou (Jinzhou Zhongzuo), Zhenjiangbao, Phidao, and Tieshan (North Korea's Iron Mountain) on the coast of Hebei and Liaodong. Among them, there are more than 200 people in the Eight Banners, more than 100 Mongolians, and nearly 500 Han people. These captives were men, women, and children, and most of them were those who had not escaped from the breached strongholds. Compared with the surrender of the Han army in the green camp that they caught before, these people are undoubtedly the basic plate of the Qing army.

It is said that in the whole month of April and even the beginning of May, the East Coast Fleet carried more than 6,000 people to land and fight back and forth on the Bohai Sea and the North Yellow Sea in succession. Especially along the coast of Liaodong, the Qing army generally only left a small number of Dingkou garrisons, and most of them seem to have been transferred to Liaoxi or Guannei, and the entire Liaodong at least the coastal area is extremely empty. The East Coasters often took two or three days to land, but the attack was often over in one day. Those weak earthen walls were completely unable to withstand the close bombardment of field cannons, and the attack of nearly 4,000 well-armed soldiers, which basically changed hands in a day.

Perhaps the only of these towns that has delayed the lives of the East Coasters is the Golden State Acropolis. Since Mo Ming wanted to test the deployment of Manchu troops in the vicinity, he lingered under the city for several days until a horse team of about 1,000 Manchurian Eight Banners and Mongols arrived. Dealing with a horse team of no more than 1,000 people on the east coast is naturally handy, the spear array plus long-range artillery blocked this may be the only mobile force that the nearby Qing army can piece together, and then the east bank artillery very neatly collapsed the Jinzhou city wall, thousands of standing up soldiers and artillery with the artillery to clear the few resistance points in the city one by one, the infantry of the east bank people drove into Jinzhou City, and the Qing army horse team had nothing to do about it.

After sacking the entire city, the people on the east coast returned to the sea in a large formation, and the Qing army horse team once tried to storm the east coast army on the march. However, in the face of the well-organized car formation and sharp firepower from far and near on the east coast, the Qing army horse team had nothing but more than 100 casualties. After attacking so many cities, even a pig has been trained, and even these officers and soldiers of the Standing Force, whose combat effectiveness is much weaker than that of the Black Eight Banners, have greatly increased their morale and self-confidence after repeated victories with the people on the east coast. When facing the Qing army's horse team, they were also quite stable, because they knew that the opponent could not break through at all, whether it was a car formation or a foot formation.

In addition to attacking the land strongholds, the people on the east coast also sank more than 20 ships of the Qing army in three places: Lushunkou, Zhenjiang Fort and Phi Dao, which were basically weak junk ships. These ships, together with the Qing ships that were sunk at the mouth of Dagu, caused heavy losses in the strength of the only naval division of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, and it can even be said that most of the losses were made. After going ashore and plundering a handful of North Korea's Tiesan County, the army on the east coast swaggered back to the sea, and then returned directly to Heishui Port through Yantai Port by boat, which had been thawed for more than half a month.

The arrival of a large number of prisoners of the old and new Qing troops expanded the establishment of the Heishui Coal Mine and the construction team again. Most of these 1,300 Qing prisoners were young and middle-aged, and in order to divide and attack them to prevent them from making trouble, Johnson, who was in charge of the construction of Heishui Port, divided these people into several parts according to their different work contents, namely the logging team, the quarrying team, the coal digging team, the coal washing team, the construction team, the Qingtang team, and so on. He also deliberately promoted some Han people with low status in the past, or the green battalion, to be the foremen, and provoked contradictions and hatred between them through differential treatment, so as to achieve the purpose of dividing management.

If nothing else, these people will be "reformed through labor" here all the time. If they do well enough, they may have the opportunity to be pardoned for their past sins, become local freemen, and be given land and shelter. After all, if you don't give these people a little bit of motivation, it's hard to ensure that they won't be passive or run away when they work. Desperate people are always difficult to manage, and if they can really be transformed, then it must be a very happy thing to see the soldiers of the Eight Banners on the battlefield in the future.

These people are currently under the management of Bogdan, the head of the Blackwater Police Station. This fierce-looking Albanian has officially settled here, and he has dozens of patrol officers and about 100 North Korean doglegs under his command, and is known for his "tough style" and "iron-fisted management", and many veteran Qing prisoners will involuntarily tremble their legs when they see him. However, under his "efficient management", these people braved the cold to build more than 100 houses in the winter, and the results were remarkable. Of course, they also paid the price, more than 100 people died from heavy work, cold weather or disease, and the rest also had frostbite of varying degrees. (To be continued......)