Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/121

 contingent of forty thousand troops. It took time to do this, and all sorts of vexatious delays occurred, so that it was not until 1 273 that the army was ready to take boat across the straits, and then it numbered only twenty-five thousand men ; so slightingly did the Mongol conqueror gauge the prowess of the Japanese. The expedition ended as might have been expected. Nine hundred boats sailed from the Korean coast, and fifteen thousand Korean soldiers went as auxiliaries. After taking a thousand Japanese heads on one of the undefended islands, the invaders landed on the mainland. There they found they were no match for the hardy Japanese. They made their way back to their boats, but Nature aided the Japanese, and a typhoon wrecked many of the vessels and scattered others far over the sea. Out of a total of forty thousand men thirteen thousand were lost. The vessels finally rendezvoused at an island in the Korean straits, and then made their way sadly back to Korea.

But the Emperor was quite unconvinced. He could not imagine the Japanese attempting to withstand his will, and set down the defeat of his army to a panic or some other extraneous cause. He soon began the welding of another bolt to launch at the island empire. This was ready in 1282, and consisted of fifty thousand Mongol regulars, one hundred thousand from the allied tribes, and twenty thousand and seventy Koryu auxiliaries. This was indeed a formidable force, and rightly handled might have made trouble even for Japan ; but as fortune would have it, a great storm arose in their rear as they approached the mainland of Japan, and as all the thousand boats made at once for the mouth of the harbor, they jammed in the offing and foundered, grinding ships and men in one great mill of slaughter. It is said that one could walk across from one point of land to the other upon the solid pile of wreckage. Thus were upwards of one hundred thousand men done to death without a stroke being made by the Japanese. It must have been a wonderful and awe-inspiring spectacle. Of those who perished thus miserably, eight thousand were Koryu men. Those in the rear, being thus