Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

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.

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.

DIVING INTO THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

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 connected to shore by air hoses and an underwater communications system. They are continuously fed air and report on what they are doing to the dive supervisor and the supervising archeologist in the control room. We gear up to go in with them, donning wetsuits, heavy tanks and our survey equipment. Stepping up to the edge of the concrete dock, I check my air, make sure all my straps are tight, then step off the edge, falling feet first into the water.

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 fanning the mud into the dredge with their hands.

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 5? 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 arrows, which rust has melded into a nearly shapeless mass, it is ironic to see how the salt water that once hardened them to make them more deadly has now taken the sting from them.

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