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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 a
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 co
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 fa
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.
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 ca