Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [52]
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.
Some tetsuhau, hollow ceramic shells packed with gunpowder and metal shrapnel. They are the world’s oldest exploding projectiles and were found in the wreck of a Mongol ship off Japan. Courtesy of Kyushu Okinawa Society for Underwater Archeology
The discovery of not one but six tetsuhau proves that the old samurai was right. While four of them are broken, two are intact. X-ray analysis of the two intact bombs shows that one is packed just with gunpowder, while the other is filled with gunpowder and more than a dozen half-inch thick pieces of iron — shrapnel — to cut down the enemy. They are the world’s oldest exploding projectiles. They date to a century before Europeans first used guns at sea, and centuries before Europeans replaced solid stone and iron cannonballs with shells that exploded. Just a week before our arrival, the discovery of these tetsuhau made national news in Japan, though almost no one in the West has heard about the discovery. And here I am, hovering over this unique, technologically advanced and deadly weapon from more than 720 years ago.
Nearby lies a bunch of what looks like rust-colored twigs stuck together. It is a bundle of iron arrows. Japanese accounts of the invasion mention showers of Mongol arrows falling from the skies, impaling men and horses. Mongol soldiers used powerful laminated bows and could fire them rapidly — and from horseback. They were the undisputed master archers of their age. In 1245, a papal envoy, Friar John of Piano Carpini, visited the Mongols and described their bows and arrows: “They are required to have these weapons: two long bows or one good one at least, three quivers full of arrows . . . the heads of their arrows are exceedingly sharp, cutting both ways like a two-edged sword, and they always carry a file in their quivers to sharpen their arrowheads.” Interestingly, the rusted mass I am floating over is the third bundle of arrows found at the site, and I wonder about the “three quivers” comment of the old priest. Could these be the arms of a single Mongol soldier?
Each of the seventy arrows in the bundle could easily penetrate the armor of a samurai. According to Father John, this was because of the Mongol technique of dipping forged iron arrows “red-hot into salt water, that they may be strong enough to pierce the enemy’s armor.” Some of the Mongol arrows were dipped in poison to weaken their opponents, and looking at the bundle of