Archeology: 'The Bay Was Packed With Ships'; How did a 'divine wind' save Japan from Mongolian invaders 700 years ago?

Byline: Hideo Takayama

Kublai Khan was a conqueror of boundless appetite. When Japan refused to obey and pay tribute to the Mongolian ruler, he was outraged. Twice during the 13th century he sent massive fleets to invade Japan, possibly trying to seize its storied gold. Each time, though, the khan's aggression was repelled not by the Japanese military but by sudden storms that killed most of the invaders and destroyed their ships. The Japanese dubbed these storms kamikaze, or divine wind.

That's the myth, but what exactly happened in the high seas more than 700 years ago? Archeologists have been trying for decades to nail down the specifics. From which direction did the kamikaze blow? How strong was it? For that matter, how big were the Mongolian ships? And how did they manage to sink? Now, more than seven centuries after the fact, Japanese archeologists are finally getting some answers. Artifacts uncovered in an expedition that ended last week tell more about the battles that took place off the coast of the tiny island of Takashima at the mouth of Imari Bay, 1,000 kilometers southwest of Tokyo.

Digging up the sea bottom to salvage the pieces from the Mongols' invasions is a difficult task, to say the least. Excavations that started in the 1980s, now led by Kenzo Hayashida, archeologist and president of the Kyushu and Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology, managed to uncover many ceramic jars used for containers. In recent years his team found Mongolian pottery-shelled bombs, swords, large anchors and a bowl with Chinese characters that belonged to a 100-man unit under a commander named Wang. In July his team of scientists and divers worked on a site about 70 meters from the shore and 13 meters below the surface of the sea. By pumping water through a hose and suctioning up the sand, they found human-skull parts, animal bones, timbers from the ships and an anchor rope.

Hayashida and his crew fell short of finding an intact ship. The reason: shipworms most likely have reduced these once mighty vessels to shards. "It is like having 4,000 different sets of puzzles," says Randall Sasaki, a graduate student in the nautical-archeology program at Texas A&M ...