remains of a doomed 13th century Mongol fleet
It was the stuff of legends: a Mongol ruler determined to expand his empire, an invasion of epic proportions, and a divine wind twice sent by the gods to repel the attack. The ethereal threads of folklore and artwork often intertwine the historical reality of Kublai Khan -- grandson of Mongol ruler Genghis Khan -- and his failed 13th century invasions of Japan.
Archaeologists sifting through the muck of a small fishing harbor on a tiny island have now reclaimed a principal historical thread by anchoring Khan's devastating military defeat of 1281 to a monumental find: a shipwreck from the doomed Mongol fleet.
The story begins in 1274, when Kublai Khan conscripted the newly conquered Korean vassal state of Koryo into abetting his first ill-fated military invasion of Japan. The fleet, purported to consist of 900 warships, encountered initial success before abruptly retreating, perhaps wary of Japanese reinforcements or the region's notoriously stormy seas.
Whatever the cause, some Japanese accounts invoke strong winds that shifted course on Oct. 20 and forced the Mongols into full retreat. So began the first stirrings of the mythic "divine wind” sent by the gods to protect Japan, an otherworldly force the Japanese would eventually call the "kamikaze.”
The invaders returned in 1281, this time with a fleet that some Chinese sources have numbered as high as 4,400 vessels, the majority procured from the conquered Sung Dynasty of southern China. Historians say strengthened Japanese defenses and a failed military rendezvous forced the bulk of the fleet to set anchor off the southwestern Japanese coast, where the invaders lingered for six weeks. It was there, near the tiny island of Takashima, that disaster struck on July 30 when a typhoon devastated the bulk of the fleet. The boats had been chained together to form a flotilla, pooling the fleet's military resources but effectively bottling up any escape route to deeper water.
"It would have been an unparalleled disaster for the Khan,” says James Delgado, executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum.
The legend of the kamikaze, sent in response to the emperor's prayers, would grow to become a staple of Japanese folklore, fading away only at the conclusion of a war nearly 700 years later. And the Mongols would never again attempt to invade Japan, aborting a third attempt in 1286 over mounting fiscal worries exacerbated by their military debacle.
Delgado first learned about an underwater archaeological site tied to the mythic Mongol defeat while working on the British Museum Encyclopedia of Underwater and Maritime Archaeology, the first of its kind for the young discipline. Through his research, he spoke with Torao Mozai, a Tokyo University engineering professor whose excavations made headlines in 1981 when his sonar-aided digs in Japan's Imari Bay yielded tantalizing Mongol artifacts, including spearheads, war helmets, a cavalry officer's iron sword and stone anchor stocks.
Fishermen on Takashima added to the haul, showing researchers the ceramic pots and other curios pulled from their fishing nets over the years. Relegated to its finder's toolbox, one item in particular caught the eye of researchers: the personal bronze seal of a 13th century Mongol commander.
"Like all great history stories, people are looking to find the physical evidence after the fact,” Delgado says. "That seal was literally the smoking gun, the finger that the material coming up from Imari Bay was from the Mongol invasion.”
If the smoking gun had been found, the doomed ships of the triggermen would remain elusive for another two decades, until a group of determined Japanese archaeologists discovered the shipwreck and, as Delgado puts it, helped to "rewrite history.”
Catalyzed by Torao Mozai's early explorations, the Kyushu Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology began annual excavations in Takashima's Kozaki Harbor in 1991, with archaeologist Kenzo Hiyashida at the helm. In 1994, their digs in the harbor's viscous muck yielded three large wood and stone anchors. The largest, buried under 70 feet of water, still retained a thick rope cable reaching toward the shore, some 500 feet away. Had the anchor merely been dropped from a long- departed ship, or was it provocative evidence of a shipwreck still confined to the harbor's depths?
Researchers traced both the red oak and granite used to construct the massive anchor -- now broken but an impressive 23 feet long when intact -- to China's Fujian Province, where the Mongol fleet originated.
Delgado says the anchor's position suggests it dragged behind a shore-bound ship, a scenario that envisions a raging typhoon as the potential agent of doom.
Perhaps with this image in mind, the Japanese archaeologists began their methodical excavations at the beach, sifting through the 500-foot expanse toward the anchor. By the end of the 2001 field season, the archaeologists had uncovered an assortment of artifacts that finally pointed to an exciting conclusion: They had found a ship from Kublai Khan's lost Mongol fleet of 1281.
Delgado, a co-host of the television documentary series "The Sea Hunters,” joined the Japanese archaeologists for a portion of their final excavations this past summer. With a film crew in tow, he helped to document the chunks of wood, clusters of iron arrows, bits of red leather armor, partial skull, and other artifacts spread out over an area roughly the size of two regulation basketball courts and buried in up to 5 feet of muck. As a Western spokesman of sorts for the Japanese team, his observations and historical analysis appear in the January/February issue of Archaeology magazine.
"They're proud of their history, they're proud of the work they do,” he says of Hiyashida and his team. "What they've done is world-class archaeology.”
Among the most significant finds, the anchor and other remaining bits of the ship's keel and mast step (a piece of timber into which the mast is slotted and fitted) provided important clues as to the warship's original dimensions. Based on their measurements, the Japanese archaeologists and Delgado agreed that the ship would have measured about 230feet long, more than twice the length of contemporary European warships.
Not only was the ship much larger than its European counterparts, it was technologically superior. It possessed watertight bulkheads, a rudder and three layers of overlapping planks to strengthen the hull. "So what you have is a very large, strong but flexible ship,” Delgado says. "This is the most technologically advanced warship of its day, anywhere in the world.”
Delgado bases part of his glowing assessment on another major surprise. Scattered among the relics of the shattered ship, researchers found two intact and four partial bombs, each constructed with a dense ceramic shell. The Chinese called the cantaloupe- sized projectiles chien-t'ienlie, or "heaven-shaking devices,” while the Japanese knew them as tetsuhau. X-rays revealed that one of the intact tetsuhau contained gunpowder, while another contained both gunpowder and more than a dozen chips of iron -- shrapnel designed to cut down the enemy's warriors and horses alike.
"It argues for a diverse arsenal of explosives that were not fired by cannon but by catapult,” Delgado says. "This is the earliest evidence we have of ordnance, and particularly of bombs going to sea.”
Such military might is suggested by some historical documents and a famous set of late 13th century scrolls, one of which depicts a Japanese warrior falling from his bucking, wounded horse. Three Mongol archers approach him from the right and a bomb explodes overhead. Although the scroll supports the idea that Mongols deployed the tetsuhau during the 1281 invasion, historians such as Thomas Conlan of Bowdoin College have argued that artists retouched the scroll at a later date, adding depictions of the Mongols and the bomb.
The scroll's murky history notwithstanding, the discovery of the ship and the tetsuhau have made a big impression on scholars.
"It's a significant find, I mean there's no question about that,” Conlan says. "I think what's important about this is that we can assign a very specific date to this. I think it's a really neat find that we know in 1281, these things really existed.” The discovery, he says, will likely spur a reinvestigation of the shells and their origins before the Mongols incorporated them into their naval warfare scheme.
The find, however, probably won't settle ongoing debates over the size of the invading Mongol fleet or the precise reasons for its extraordinary demise. Experts favor a range of different estimates for the fleet, with Conlan suggesting that historical Chinese claims of 4,400 ships and 100,000 warriors may have been exaggerated by as much as tenfold.
Nonetheless, an invading Mongol force of even 10,000 troops would have been a sight to behold, he says, and the invasion attempt remains a "phenomenal feat” for the 13th century.
"I still think it is an amazing thing that the Mongol fleet was able to go this far,” he says.
Morris Rossabi, a specialist of Mongol history at City University of New York and Columbia University, says the important discovery of the ceramic bombs at least settles the question of whether the Mongols had access to them in the 13th century.
As natives of a land-choked country, he says, the Mongols had relied on a cavalry in their previous military campaigns. "Naval warfare was entirely new to them,” he says. "It's remarkable that they were able, in a very short period of time, to master this or adapt to the new technology.”
As a recent Mongol conquest, the Sung Dynasty of China provided much of this technology and shouldered the biggest burden for invading Japan.
"These people had a very high level of sophistication in all things, including the art of war,” Delgado says. "And I think what this shows is that when the Mongols conquered China, they gained access to the most technologically advanced civilization in the world.”
The defeat of such a force could become, well, legendary.
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