New look at Mongol invasion of Japan

Storms finished off the two Mongol invasion fleets, but the fleets might not have been the best for the job, either:

Ancient documents describing winds that blew down trees suggest that there was indeed a big storm in Japan in 1281, although the evidence is unclear as to how bad the winds really were and how they might have affected the Mongolian fleet.

I don't see the need to question the historicity of the storm, save to (unnecessarily) inflate the importance of the findings as cited below.

New evidence, though, suggests that poor design and shoddy workmanship may have been the principal cause of the Mongols' defeat, the British weekly New Scientist says in its next issue, out on Saturday.

Randall Sasaki, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University, has pored over fragmented remains of the 1281 fleet that were found in 1981. . .

Sasaki has studied around 500 of the fragments and says many of the timbers have nails placed very close together, sometimes with five or six in the same location. "This suggests the timbers were recycled to construct these ships," he told New Scientist. "Also, some of the timbers were themselves of poor quality."

As for the design of the ship, Chinese documents suggest that many of the vessels in the 1281 fleet were flat-bottomed river boats, which would have been unstable in the open sea.

"So far, we have found no evidence of sea-going, V-shaped keels at Takashima," says Kenzo Hayashida of the Kyushu Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology, which found the remains of the fleet in 1981.

Still much more of the site to be explored, however. Full story here.

Posted by David on January 21, 2005 3:31 PM