Adventures of a Sea Hunter (17 page)

Knowing that the Mongols would be back, the bakufu ordered the construction of defenses at Hakata Bay. In a six-month period in 1276, laborers erected a 12½-mile, 5- to g-foot high defensive stone wall set back from the beach. The samurai also organized their vassals into a compulsory defense force and requisitioned small fishing and trading vessels for a coastal navy.

Kublai Khan renewed his demand for Japan’s surrender in June 1279, just as the last remnants of the Sung dynasty in China crumbled before the Mongol onslaught. The bakufu cut off the heads of the Mongol envoys as they landed. Furious, Kublai Khan ordered Koryo to build a new fleet of nine hundred ships to carry ten thousand troops and seventeen thousand sailors; and in China, he ordered a fleet of nearly thirty-five hundred ships and an invasion force of a hundred thousand Chinese warriors to prepare for battle.

An artist’s rendition of a thirteenth-century Mongol ship wrecked at Takashima Island. Courtesy of Kyushu Okinawa Society for Underwater Archeology

Kublai Khan directed the two fleets—the Koryo Eastern Route Division and the Chinese Chiang-nan Division—to rendezvous at Iki Island to co-ordinate their attack. The Eastern Route Division sailed first on May 3, 1281, retaking Iki on June 10. Without waiting for the arrival of the Chiang-nan Division, the impatient commanders of the Eastern Route Division sailed to Hakata Bay. Takezaki Suenaga’s second scroll depicts the second invasion, showing him riding off to war, passing in front of the newly built stone wall at Hakata Bay as other samurai sit atop the wall and wait for the enemy. The stone walls thwarted the Mongols, who pulled
back to occupy an island in the middle of the bay. The Japanese used their small navy to cut into the Mongol fleet, with armed samurai springing onto the enemy ships and killing the crews and soldiers. The second scroll also shows Suenaga in a small boat, running up alongside larger Mongol ships and fighting his way forward to cut the throats of the crew in deadly hand-to-hand combat. The brushstrokes of the artist convey the ferocity of the fighting, with blood spurting as sharp blades and arrows cut down men. The paintings are a graphic testimony as to why the badly mauled Eastern Route Division retreated to Iki Island with the Japanese in pursuit.

The Chiang-nan Division finally sailed in June and met up with the Eastern Route Division at the small island of Takashima, 30 miles south of Hakata. The Japanese fought the combined Chinese and Mongol forces in a running two-week battle throughout the rugged countryside. The crews of the invading ships chained their vessels together and constructed a plank walkway, forming a massive floating fortress in preparation for the inevitable waterborne assault by the small defense craft of the Japanese.

The Japanese ships, some of them filled with straw and set on fire, attacked the Mongol fleet but were unable to do much harm. As the story was later told, the Japanese beseeched the Goddess of the Ise Shrine for another storm to help them, and their prayers were answered. The legend states that “A green dragon had raised its head from the waves” and “sulfurous flames filled the firmament.” Driving rain, high winds and storm-lashed waves smashed into the Mongol fleet. Thousands of ships sank, drowning nearly a hundred thousand men. Mongol troops stranded on the beach, demoralized and cut off from escape, were rounded up and executed. The shores were strewn with debris and bodies; according to a modern Japanese history, “a person could walk across from one point of land to another on a mass of wreckage” at the entrance to Imari Bay. Kublai Khan abandoned his dreams of a Japanese conquest in 1286 when he abruptly cancelled the preparations for a third invasion.

Interestingly, Suenaga’s scrolls and the handful of Japanese documents from the 1281 invasion do not depict or mention a storm. Critics
of the scrolls deride them as the work of a “self-aggrandizer,” while others point to persistent myth-building by Japan’s military and political leaders that glorified the emperor as a god and celebrated Japan’s divine protection and status. (Eventually, this led to a series of wars of conquest that greatly expanded the Japanese empire from the 1870s through the early 1940s.) But the Venetian adventurer Marco Polo, who allegedly spent several years in Kublai Khan’s court, wrote an account of the Mongol invasion in which he mentioned the storm that destroyed it:

And it came to pass that there arose a north wind, which blew with great fury, and caused great damage along the coasts of that Island, for its harbors were few. It blew so hard that the Great Kaan’s fleet could not stand against it. And when the chiefs saw that, they came to the conclusion that if the ships remained where they were, the whole navy would perish. So they all got on board and made sail to leave the country. But when they had gone about four miles they came to a small Island, on which they were driven ashore in spite of all they could do, and a great part of the fleet was wrecked and a great multitude of the force perished.

Given the prominent place of the story of the kamikaze in Japanese history, who knows where the truth lies? For a handful of young archeologists, the truth lies in the remains of the events, which now lie beneath the waters of Japan’s coast.

The beautiful views of Hakata and Imari bays and their gentle waves belie the violence of the storms that are said to have twice destroyed the Mongol fleet, as well as the tremendous battles waged on their shores in 1274 and 1281. Apart from memorials and monuments, few physical traces of the invasion remain on the land other than a handful of reconstructed sections of the stone wall in the heart of modern Fukuoka. Some scholars do not believe that the stone anchor weight at Hakozaki Shrine comes
from the Mongol invasion; they think that it is one of many similar anchors lost on the bay bottom during the centuries Hakata Bay was an active port, because no other evidence—such as weapons or broken hulls—has ever emerged. But the waters off Takashima Island in Imari Bay have yielded traces of the Mongol fleet and its destruction.

Fishermen are usually the first to discover shipwrecks, and for years, Japanese trawlers operating in the waters of Imari Bay had been dredging up pottery and other artifacts from the lost Mongol fleet of 1281. Then, in 1980, Torao Mozai, a professor of engineering at Tokyo University, used a sonoprobe—a sound-wave device that geologists use to discover rocks buried in ocean sediment—to survey the seabed off Takashima Island. He discovered that buried artifacts appeared as different colors on his screen.

A year later, Professor Mozai’s team pinpointed many objects that divers then recovered. The artifacts attest to the diversity of the invading force and its weapons, as well as its need for provisions. In addition to spearheads, war helmets, stone balls for catapults and a cavalry officer’s sword discovered sticking upright in the mud—exactly where it had been dropped seven hundred years earlier—the divers found stone handmills for grinding gunpowder, iron ingots, stone anchor stocks and mortars for pounding rice or corn. The discoveries made international headlines (and a
National Geographic
magazine article) in 1981, the seven hundredth anniversary of the second Mongol invasion, and sparked the creation of a new museum on Takashima Island. The opening of the museum inspired a number of local fishermen to donate their own discoveries, including a bronze statue of Buddha dating to the twelfth century and a bronze seal of authority that had belonged to a Mongol commander of a thousand-man group.

Since 1991, the Kyushu Okinawa Society for Underwater Archeology (
KOSUWA
), under the leadership of Dr. Kenzo Hayashida, has been conducting surveys and excavations off Takashima’s shores. In 1994, they discovered three wood and stone anchors from the Mongol invasion fleet, buried in the mud 400 feet offshore and in 40 feet of water. One of the anchors is 21 feet long and weighs one ton. Analysis of the
wood used in the anchor showed it was red oak dating to within a few years of the Mongol invasion. Analysis of the stone used in the anchor showed that it was granite from China’s Fujian province, from which most of Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet sailed to the shores of Japan. Of even greater interest were the remains of the anchor cable, which lay stretched out straight from the anchor to the shore, indicating the possible presence of a wreck. Excavations recovered 135 scattered artifacts, but the wreck itself remained elusive.

In October 2001,
KOSUWA’S
hard work paid off with the exciting discovery of a ship from Kublai Khan’s fleet. The wreck lay in Kozaki harbor, a small indentation on Takashima’s southern coast on the shore of Imari Bay. In all the years of work at Takashima, never before had the remains of one of the ships been discovered. In fact, only two other Asian shipwrecks of this age ever have been found, one at Shinan in Korea and the other at Guangzhou in China. Finding another ship from the thirteenth century, a time when Chinese ships were the best examples of shipbuilding in the world, made the wreck at Takashima a very significant discovery in the world of maritime archeology. What the excavation of the site revealed in 2002, however, made it one of the greatest underwater archeological discoveries of the century.

The catch was that the archeologists had to work fast, as construction of a new fishing harbor at the site meant that they had to completely remove the wreck before October 2002. They met the deadline and recovered nearly eight hundred artifacts, ranging in size from a small tortoiseshell comb to what may be part of the ship’s large keel or backbone. Now their work continues in the laboratory.

When
The Sea Hunters
team arrives, only half of the wreck has been cleared. Each morning begins with a briefing for all divers, and then the first Japanese team gears up to get to work. They wear masks that cover their faces, and they are connected to shore by air hoses and an underwater communications system. They are continuously fed air
and report on what they are doing to the dive supervisor and the supervising archeologist in the control room. We gear up to go in with them, donning wetsuits, heavy tanks and our survey equipment. Stepping up to the edge of the concrete dock, I check my air, make sure all my straps are tight, then step off the edge, falling feet first into the water.

As the froth and bubbles from my jump clear, I check to ensure all my equipment is in place. A single line leads down the slope to the wreck, which rests in 43 feet of water. I swim in the gray haze of the warm sea, visibility only 5 feet, until I hear a loud humming sound. To my left, I see the air hoses of the first team and a thick, flexible tube that vibrates when I place my hand on it. This is the outtake for a large underwater suction dredge that the crew is using to uncover the wreck. I follow the tube to a cloud of silt and the excavation.

The seabed is covered with a thick, viscous, almost gelatinous ooze that the archeologists have to dig through to reach the wreck. The task of moving all that mud is immense, as the area of the site covers about two city blocks. The archeologists carefully sweep the handheld underwater suction dredge over the bottom, lying down alongside the thick corrugated hose and gently fanning the mud into the dredge with their hands.

The divers work in shifts, slowly cutting through 5 feet of mud to uncover the wreck, which lies on what was the seabed in 1281. This historic level is hard-packed, coarse gray sand mixed with shell. When the dredge exposes an artifact, a diver carefully fans away the silt and mud to clean it off while reporting his find back to the surface over his communications system. The dive supervisor and archeologist in the control room make notes on what has been found and assign a number to the discovery; the diver then sticks a large numbered tag into the seabed next to it. A team of diving archeologists will carefully map, photograph and draw the object before another team removes it to shore for analysis.

Swimming over the site, I pass through a maze of metal pins with tags—nearly a hundred of them—marking artifacts. A grid of metal legs and twine covers the entire site, dividing it into square units. I swim up to one unit and see scattered broken pots and dishes, timbers and a round object. The round object is only 5½ inches in diameter, but it is one of the most significant discoveries made to date. It is a
tetsuhau
, or an exploding shell. Chinese alchemists invented gunpowder around
A.D.
300, and by the year 1100, huge bombs, much like giant firecrackers, were being used in battle. The first reference to exploding projectiles thrown by catapults appears around 1221, when Chinese sources describe hollow shells packed with gunpowder. Some historians have doubted that such shells were made this early, and even recently suggested, in a new book on the Mongol invasion, that the scene in Suenaga’s scroll, in which the wounded samurai is falling from his horse as a bomb explodes above him, was painted long after the fact because bombs did not exist then.