| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"desertphile@hot mail. com Desertphile, American Patriot" |
| Date: |
07 Mar 2005 09:41:52 AM |
| Object: |
Japanese miracle debunked |
http://www.chn.ir/english/eshownews.asp?no=4615
1/21/2005 11:07:00 AM
Poor ships saved Japan from Mongolian invasion
PARIS - Jan 19: Science has dealt a blow to a Japanese legend
which says the country was twice saved from a Mongolian fleet
thanks to a "divine wind," or kamikaze, that destroyed the
invaders' ships.
A 900-ship fleet, sent by the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan in
1274, met resistance from Japanese samurai before being forced
into retreat by bad weather and was then ripped to pieces by the
kamikaze.
Kublai Khan tried again eight years later, amassing a vast fleet
of 4,400 ships from China and Korea, most of which were sunk by
strong winds off the island of Takashima, in southern Japan.
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.
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. Of about 700 pieces of ship hauled up from the seabed off
Takashima, none was larger than three metres (10 feet), and most
are between 10 centimetres (four inches) and one metre (3.25
feet).
The find initially disappointed many who had hoped for something
bigger, but a closer examination of these pieces has given
insights into Mongolian workmanship, New Scientist says.
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. Sasaki hopes more will be revealed by sonar and
ground-penetrating radar, for less than 0.5 percent of the site
where the fleet sank has been studied so far.
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