Adventures of a Sea Hunter (16 page)

A drawing of the bow of
Vrouw Maria.
Piirtänyt Kalle Salonen, Nauvo Trunsjö

Museum of Finland curator Ismo Malinen has suggested that as many as thirty-five of the Braamcamps paintings ended up on the ill-fated ship.

Vague descriptions exist for many of the paintings, outside of brief notations in the Braamcamps auction catalog printed in July 1771. There were two paintings by Coedyk, a tableau and a scene of a man and woman sitting at a table. There was a Rubens portrait of “one of the four evangelists,” and a “portrait of a man” by Rembrandt. There was a painting of a “lady at a table” by Gerard Douw, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, and a scene of a man driving a herd of bulls by another Dutch master, Paulus Potter. Van Balen and Bruegel’s
The Virgin and Infant Jesus
, and three other Bruegels of unidentified landscapes and people, were packed in with paintings by Joseph Laquy, Jan van den Helden, Adriaen van Ostade, Jan van Gooyen, Adriaen van de Velde, Philips Wouwerman, Guido Reni, Lo Spagnoletto and several other artists. One of the paintings was
an appropriate subject to be in a shipwrecked and sunken art collection: Abraham Stork’s
Ships at Sea.

The narrow tin crates in the hold of
Vrouw Maria
may very well contain these paintings, but we will not know for sure until the archeologists methodically excavate the ship and every crate is raised to the surface, then carefully and scientifically opened in the lab.

Mike approaches the bow, and the bluff, almost apple-cheeked shape of the old ship comes into view. The open hawse pipes gape like empty eye sockets. Trailing off the bow is a fallen section of mast that has an end shaped like the side of a giant cello. The age of the ship is apparent, and for me, it is thrilling to see, close up and in detail, a type of ship that has not sailed the oceans for centuries and which most of us have only seen as an engraved drawing in an old book. Mike moves along the port side of the wreck, and there, cemented to the hull planks by rust, is one of
Vrouw Maria’s
iron anchors. From its position, it looks as if the anchor was lashed up against the hull, its hooks pointing skyward and not hanging down, as we might expect. The anchor may have been tied by rope that has disintegrated, because something had to hold it against the planks long enough for the rust to bind with the wood. But why it is where it is, and how it was set, are mysteries.

As Mike continues back to the stern, we see that the lintel above the entrance to Lorentz’s cabin is beautifully carved with a scroll decoration. It is a lovely touch on a utilitarian, hardworking ship, and a reminder that people loved and cared for her. That hint of a long-ago emotion has survived the wreck and
Vrouw Maria’s
long slumber in the deep.

The time has come for Mike to start ascending, but he pauses for a moment to gaze back at
Vrouw Maria
, lying silent in the cold greenish-blue gloom of a Baltic grave. Then he begins the long slow climb back up to the surface, pausing to decompress as we share notes and observations.

We’ll repeat this process tomorrow and in the days that follow, and the Finnish team also will send down their divers, with cameras and measuring devices, to meticulously plot and document every loose plank, every artifact on the deck, every fallen spar, to create a detailed
record of
Vrouw Maria
as she now is. This level of painstaking documentation is absolutely essential before anything is disturbed or removed, a scientific protocol that separates us from souvenir hunters. If the lead line was taken away or some of the crates 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.

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.

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 Ögodäi; however, the death of Ögodäi’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 Koryo to build a fleet of nine hundred ships to invade Japan. The relatively narrow straits of Tsushima, spanning 284 miles between Korea and the coast of Japan’s Kyushu Island, had been a trade route for centuries. Now it would become a highway for war.

The invasion fleet departed from Koryo on October 3, 1274, after embarking twenty-three thousand soldiers and seven thousand sailors. Two days later, the fleet attacked the island of Tsushima in the middle of the strait, overwhelming the eighty Japanese troops stationed there. The island garrison of Iki, closer to the Japanese coast, fell next. On October 14, the Mongol fleet attacked the Kyushu port of Hirado, and then moved north to land at various points along Hakata Bay (near modern Fukuoka). Groups of samurai and their retainers rushed to meet the invaders at Hakata Bay—in all, historians estimate that some six thousand Japanese defenders stood ready to fight the far more substantial Mongol army.

Among the defenders was a samurai named Takezaki Suenaga. He left the only contemporary pictorial records of the Mongol invasion on two scrolls that he commissioned later in order to petition the government for a reward for his services. The scrolls, known as the Moko Shurai Ekotoba, are one of Japan’s great cultural treasures.

Dating to around 1294, the first scroll unrolls to reveal samurai in armor riding off to battle in 1274. The battle was unequal not only in numbers but in weapons and tactics. Mongol weapons were more advanced than those of the samurai: their bows had greater range, firing poisoned arrows, and they also had explosive shells hurled by catapults. In battle, the Mongols advanced en masse and fought as a unit, while the samurai, true to their code, ventured out to fight individual duels. In a week of fighting, the Japanese were slowly forced to give way. The scroll shows the Mongol forces firing arrows as horses and men fall, and Suenaga himself bleeding and falling from his horse as a bomb explodes in the air above him. The Japanese retreated, falling back to Daizafu, the fortified capital of Kyushu. The Mongols sacked and burned Hakata, but time was running out for them: Japanese reinforcements were pouring in from the surrounding countryside. The Mongol commander was wounded, and the sailors aboard the invading ships were wary of an incoming storm that threatened the fleet in its crowded anchorage.

On October 20, the wind shifted, and a number of Mongol ships dragged anchor, capsizing or driving ashore. In all, some three hundred ships and 13,500 men were lost. Battered and depleted, the surviving Mongols retreated to Koryo, leaving the Japanese to cheer their salvation thanks to the storm that had ended the invasion.