yanked out, we’d lose important clues as to what had happened. We’d lose some of those evocative connections across time, like the single handspike in the windlass, indicating where a sailor stepped away from working the anchor lines to start pumping. It is one thing to read about events in an old logbook; it is another thing altogether to have the privilege to see the scene exactly as that writer left it.
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 Ogodai; however, the death of Ogodai’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
