Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [53]
Another exciting find, resting upright on the seabed, is a Mongol war helmet. Close beside it are small fragments of red leather from a suit of Mongol armor, originally made of laminated strips of leather bound with brass. The mud has preserved these fragile traces by burying them out of the reach of the water. Along with the armor, the dredge gently uncovers a small tortoiseshell comb, a fragment of red leather still clinging to one side. I think about another discovery nearby—the bones of a drowned member of the ship’s complement, perhaps a Mongol warrior. The proximity of bones, helmet, armor and arrows raises the question of whether or not they all belong to one victim of the wreck. In the laboratory, just before the dive, I had looked at a broken skull that was found lying face down in the mud, and wondered what stories this victim of an ancient shipwreck could tell.
Some artifacts do tell tales. A small bowl, broken and found upside down, is painted with the name of its owner and his rank. One of my dive partners, Mitsu Ogawa, later tells me that the man’s name was Weng and that he commanded a hundred troops. I wonder if it is Weng’s armor, helmet, weapons and bones that lie together in the mud. Other artifacts tell us that the preparations for the invasion were hasty. Many of the ceramic jars are sloppily made, misshapen and badly fired, rushed into production for the war. The ship’s massive anchor may also be proof of haste. Unlike the one-piece stone weight for the anchor at Hakozaki Shrine, this anchor’s stones—and others found nearby at Takashima— are made of two crudely shaped pieces. The anchor for the ship now being excavated dragged in the mud and broke apart where the two stone weights were joined by wood and lashings—a fatal shortcut.
After our dive ends, we get into a discussion on the dock with Kenzo Hayashida. What sank this ship? The anchor is set tight, as if the ship dragged in heavy waves and then broke up. A storm might have sent the ship into the shallows and smashed it into the many pieces the Japanese are recovering. “The question is whether there was one storm,” says Hayashida, or “several centuries of storms.” I get his point. The periodic typhoons that lash this coast sweep into Imari Bay and churn up the seabed. The breakup and scatter of the huge wooden wreck being mapped by the archeologists may be the result of generations of storms, not a single catastrophic kamikaze sent by the gods. The timbers of the vessel also show evidence of burning. Did this ship go to the bottom as a result of a Japanese attack with a straw-filled “fire ship?” The fragmented remains may never reveal all their secrets, but they have already enabled archeologists to refute a few stories. Hayashida, who bases his opinion of just how many wrecks should be on the bottom of the bay from 1281 on years of surveys and the information they provide, firmly believes that the figure of four thousand is a gross exaggeration. “How many ships?” I ask him. “Maybe four hundred,” he answers with a smile.
Over the next week, we make more dives and watch as more artifacts slowly emerge from the mud. Broken timbers from the ship, including the sockets where a mast would have fit into the bottom of the hull; shattered planks; ceramic bowls and pots once filled with provisions; weapons and armor; and personal possessions, like a small delicately cast bronze mirror, are reminders of the individuals behind the myths and the big sweep of history. The personal items and bones are all that remain of the forgotten warriors who came here, on the orders of Kublai Khan, to expand an empire and an emperor’s prestige, and instead met their deaths far from home. I think of all the dead of 1281. And I think of the millions who died later in the 1930s and ’40s, victims of what was, if not a false legend about the kamikaze, then a distorted and exaggerated one that