Khubilai Khan's Lost Fleet -- In Search of a Legendary Armada by James P. Delgado, UCalifornia Press '08, 225 pages, ISBN #0520259769. Index, notes, sources, grouping of b&w glossy images.
For more than seven centuries, an Asian mystery has haunted Chinese and Japanese scholars. After conquering China in 1279, the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan dispatched forty-four hundred ships to invade Japan. The gargantuan fleet never returned. Over the years, folklore evolved that Khan's ships fell victim to a "divine wind," in common terms, a typhoon so fierce as to send so many ships and 100,000 troops to the bottom of the ocean.
In recent years, a Japanese team set out to search for the remains of the failed expedition. James P. Delgado not only narrates this archaeological saga of momentous proportions; as a prominent archaeologist and historian himself, he was part of it. He describes the task of his team members as they examine sunken ships, hand-painted scrolls, drowned bodies, and historical and literary records:
"They practice a unique form of science, stripping away the mud and mapping with care the well-preserved but shattered remains of ships that are surrounded by scattered provisions, weapons and more intimate finds like the bones and shredded leather armor of a drowned soldier. These scientists then bring their finds to the surface to begin years of treatment in laboratories to ensure the relics and remains do not disintegrate after their long burial."
James P. Delgado is the president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and has written many books.
