Adventures of a Sea Hunter

by James P. Delgado

  The discovery of Vrouw Maria poses a unique opportunity and a challenge. This intact wooden ship of 1771 is a time capsule. Packed full of merchandise as well as Catherine the Great’s collection of paintings, the ship, when excavated, will yield valuable details about European trade of the time and Russia’s rapid pace of westernization. As for the thirty-five or so lost paintings that still rest in Vrouw Maria, they may very well not be in as good condition as the ship. Even if the panels and canvas have survived, the paint may not. Conservators, the scientists who meticulously battle the ravages of time and the elements to restore and repair antiquities, are sure that any watercolors are gone. Other paints may have emulsified or washed away after two centuries in the sea. But paintings have survived Baltic immersion, including one from a seventeenth-century shipwreck, and Catherine’s paintings may have been sealed in waterproof containers. It will be years, however, before Vrouw Maria and her cargo are raised and every crate is carefully unpacked in the laboratory.

  Our last day on the site comes as the Maritime Museum of Finland crew also prepares to leave for the winter. Soon the ice will come and lock up the Turko Archipelago. That’s one form of protection for a rare treasure. Another is the surveillance cameras that the Finnish Coast Guard has installed around the wreck, feeding continuous video images back to land to ensure that no souvenir hunters or looters seek to plunder the site.

  Meanwhile, the Finnish government is examining plans to raise and restore Vrouw Maria and display her cargo, perhaps in a new state-of-the-art museum in Helsinki. If that course is pursued, it will take years of planning and cost millions to raise the ship and then to preserve it, because the moment the ship is lifted out of her grave, she will begin to deteriorate, and in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, some delicate bits will disintegrate.

  The costs are huge, but the revenues could also be significant. Vasa is a major attraction in Sweden’s tourism market, and the unique sight of the tiny Vrouw Maria from 1771, still laden with the goods she was carrying, would also appeal to tourists. Some supporters, including Finland’s Minister of Culture, believe that the time has come to bring Vrouw Maria ashore, but how to accomplish that job is unclear. Some argue for a slow excavation at the wreck site, but the depth limits diving time and places humans in a stressful and dangerous environment. Others think that the ship could be braced and moved to shallower water, or placed in a large tank and studied at a shore (and publicly accessible) facility, but whether or not the hull would withstand the stress of bracing and moving is unknown. More studies and more discussions are needed.

  As we pack our gear and leave, I am still in a state of awe over what we’ve just seen. Never before in my career have I seen a wreck as intact as this. It’s only our third foray as The Sea Hunters team, but everyone agrees that the privilege we’ve been extended is rare and wonderful. I’ve always thought that the seabed was the greatest museum in the world, and now I’ve literally seen a shipwreck that is a museum in its own right, including paintings originally intended for an empress’s private gallery. I wonder if our next adventure and the ones that follow can ever top this experience.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  KUBLAI KHAN’S LOST FLEET

  AT HAKOZAKI SHRINE IN JAPAN

  A gentle breeze sighs through the trees and leaves flutter gently in response. Robed priests slowly walk through the shrine’s precincts, stopping in front of the main altar to clap loudly and bow. The smoke of incense fills the air, and wooden placards painted with the prayers of the devout line the walkway. I am inside Hakozaki, one of Japan’s three most sacred Shinto shrines. Established in 923, Hakozaki has existed for more than a thousand years. The grounds of the shrine are filled with monuments and buildings, and it is in front of one of them that I stand gazing at a stone weight for an ancient ship’s anchor. A small plaque, in English and Japanese, explains that it came from a lost ship, part of a fleet sent by China’s Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan, to invade Japan in 1274.

  A stone tablet nearby has musical notes and writing in kanji, or traditional Japanese script. I am told that it is a traditional song about the Mongol invasion. To my surprise and delight, our host stops a tour group of Japanese schoolgirls and requests them to sing the song. I ask my host and translator what the words are, and, with less grace than the girls but with gusto, he sings the song for us in English. The last stanza is the most significant:

  Heaven grew angry, and the ocean’s

  Billows were in tempest tossed;

  They who came to work us evil,

  Thousands of the Mongol host,

  Sank and perished in the seaweed.

  Of that horde survived but three;

  Swift the sky was clear, and moonbeams

  Shone upon the Ghenkai sea.

  There it is, the story of how the gods sent a divine wind to sink the Mongol invasion fleet and save Japan. The anchor stone is displayed at Hakozaki as proof of that long-ago event and as a reminder of how Japan’s shores were protected by that wind—a wind whose name in Japanese is kamikaze.

  The story of the kamikaze was used to lethal effect in the Second World War. In the name of that “divine wind,” nearly two thousand young Japanese men strapped themselves into airplanes and dove out of the sky to suicidally crash onto the decks of American and Allied warships. The deadly toll they wrought did not turn the tides of war, however. In defeat, the Japanese were told that their emperor was not a god and that the ancient story of the kamikaze was a myth. But the story of the Mongol invasion and the kamikaze remains a powerful part of the national consciousness of modern Japanese.

  I’ve journeyed to Japan with fellow members of The Sea Hunters to visit an archeological site where a lost ship of Kublai Khan’s fleet has surfaced from the gray-green waters near Takashima, a tiny island off Japan’s southwest coast. History, myth or a combination of both? The remains of the ancient ship will tell us much about what really happened off these shores more than seven centuries ago.

  THE MONGOL INVASIONS OF JAPAN! 1274 AND 1281

  Under Chinggis Khan, a great horde of “barbarians” swept out of the Mongolian plains in 1206 to win a series of military conquests that made them not only the masters of much of Asia but also of an army poised on the doorstep of Europe and the Middle East. History would have been very different had the Mongols achieved Chinggis Khan’s dream of absolute conquest. As it was, the world will never forget the saga of the Mongols and of battles like their capture of the Turkmen city of Merv in 1221. In revenge for the death of his son-in-law, Chinggis ordered the death of every living thing in the city, and seven hundred thousand people were put to the sword.

  Battles against the Muslims, the Russians and other eastern European kingdoms continued under Chinggis’s son Ögodäi; however, the death of Ögodäi’successor not only doomed the Muslim campaign but stalled the conquest of China. The next Mongol leader, Kublai Khan, soon controlled more territory than any sovereign in history. But he wanted more territory, more riches and, above all else, recognition of his supreme status as ruler of much of the world.

  Even while he was engaged in a bitter struggle to conquer China, Kublai sent envoys to the Japanese court in 1268 to demand subservience. The Japanese military dictatorship, the bakufu, ignored the Mongol demands. In response to this defiance, Kublai Khan ordered his vassals in the subjugated Korean state of Koryo to build a fleet of nine hundred ships to invade Japan. The relatively narrow straits of Tsushima, spanning 284 miles between Korea and the coast of Japan’s Kyushu Island, had been a trade route for centuries. Now it would become a highway for war.

  The invasion fleet departed from Koryo on October 3, 1274, after embarking twenty-three thousand soldiers and seven thousand sailors. Two days later, the fleet attacked the island of Tsushima in the middle of the strait, overwhelming the eighty Japanese troops stationed there. The island garrison of Iki, closer to the Japanese coast, fell next. On October 14, the Mongol fleet attacked the Kyushu port of Hirado, and then moved north to
land at various points along Hakata Bay (near modern Fukuoka). Groups of samurai and their retainers rushed to meet the invaders at Hakata Bay—in all, historians estimate that some six thousand Japanese defenders stood ready to fight the far more substantial Mongol army.

  Among the defenders was a samurai named Takezaki Suenaga. He left the only contemporary pictorial records of the Mongol invasion on two scrolls that he commissioned later in order to petition the government for a reward for his services. The scrolls, known as the Moko Shurai Ekotoba, are one of Japan’s great cultural treasures.

  Dating to around 1294, the first scroll unrolls to reveal samurai in armor riding off to battle in 1274. The battle was unequal not only in numbers but in weapons and tactics. Mongol weapons were more advanced than those of the samurai: their bows had greater range, firing poisoned arrows, and they also had explosive shells hurled by catapults. In battle, the Mongols advanced en masse and fought as a unit, while the samurai, true to their code, ventured out to fight individual duels. In a week of fighting, the Japanese were slowly forced to give way. The scroll shows the Mongol forces firing arrows as horses and men fall, and Suenaga himself bleeding and falling from his horse as a bomb explodes in the air above him. The Japanese retreated, falling back to Daizafu, the fortified capital of Kyushu. The Mongols sacked and burned Hakata, but time was running out for them: Japanese reinforcements were pouring in from the surrounding countryside. The Mongol commander was wounded, and the sailors aboard the invading ships were wary of an incoming storm that threatened the fleet in its crowded anchorage.

  On October 20, the wind shifted, and a number of Mongol ships dragged anchor, capsizing or driving ashore. In all, some three hundred ships and 13,500 men were lost. Battered and depleted, the surviving Mongols retreated to Koryo, leaving the Japanese to cheer their salvation thanks to the storm that had ended the invasion.

  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.

  RELICS OF THE KAMIKAZE

  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 discov
er 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.