Khubilai Khan's Lost Fleet

A gripping account of the seafaring adventures of the Mongol Empire under Khubilai Khan. In 1279, off China's southeast coast, Khubilai Khan routed the Song navy and completed the grand dream of his grandfather, Genghis Khan -- the conquest of China. The Grand Khan now ruled the largest empire the world had ever seen, stretching from the China Sea to the plains of Hungary. Having also inadvertently inherited the world's largest navy -- more than seven hundred ships -- the Mongols began audacious attacks on Japan, Vietnam and Java. Yet within fifteen years, Khubilai had squandered his massive fleet, and the Mongols were a spent maritime force. Considered for centuries to be little more than legend, the story of the Mongols' fleet has finally been confirmed. Renowned archaeologist and historian James P. Delgado has dived with the Japanese team studying the remains of the Khan's lost fleet at Takashima. Using original sources as diverse as actual sunken ships, land excavations, temple inscriptions, hand-painted scrolls and historical and literary records from China, Japan and Vietnam, Delgado takes the reader on an exciting history of Khubilai Khan's great Mongol navy, whose rise and fall presaged the great fleets of the fifteenth-century Ming Dynasty, made famous in the best-seller 1421. A long and bitter struggle to conquer Japan led to two massive naval invasions, in 1274 and 1281. The struggle entered the realm of legend when the Khan's fleet was supposedly destroyed by a "divine wind" or kamikaze. Delgado has dived with the Japanese archaeologists studying the remains of the lost fleet at Takashima, and explains how hasty preparations, a poorly led force, and inferior tactics led the Khan to squander his massive numerical and technological advantages. Retreating from Japan, Kublai Khan turned his attention to Southeast Asia. Again, the Khan lost his advantage when the Vietnamese lured his navy into the delta of the Mekong River. As the water fell with the tide, large wooden stakes impaled the Mongol ships and the Vietnamese emerged from the shadows to destroy the soldiers in a rain of arrows and fire. The Mongol dream of ruling the waves was over.