Divine Wind pgs.3-17

If it wasn't for the two typhoons, Japan just might be part of China in todays world. In the year 1259 Kublai Khan the grandson of Genghis Kahn became the emperor of Mongolia and renamed it Yuan, or meaning " the first beginning. Between 1231 and 1238 the Mongols had conquered northern China, they also overran the Korean Peninsula. By 1267 Kahn sent a couple a emissaries to Japan demanding that there emperor give in or submit to a fatal invasion. Soon after that on October 29th, 1274 they began there invasion on Japan. over 40,000 men including about 25,000 Mongolians and Chinese, over 8,000 Korean troops, and 7,000 Chinese and Korean seamen set sail from Korea in about just over 900 ships. They had invaded Japan with no problems at all except for the deaths of the Kamkazies, but thats what they were hired for, and also the diasters of the two typhoons that seperated the countries. It wasnt until the early 19 century that naturalists began to accept that hurricanes are boundless vortices, or just oversized whirlwinds. William Renfield, year 1821 a New England meteorologist traveled all over to inspect and study the damaged of hurricane that swept the Mid-Atlantic States. Renfield and some other people beleived that hurricanes extend upward only about a mile or so into the atmosphere. From my knowledge of thunderstorms and hurricanes I know for a fact that they extend all the way up into the upper troposphere and into the lower stratosphere, sometimes reaching about 18-20 km converting into 11 miles in the sky. That is the reason I chose to read this book because this is what I find intersesting and amusing. The art of how hurricanes and thunderstorms are brought up and what people way before our time thought they were and how they reacted. Now we have all the technology in the world to know when there gunna hit how fast there moving and about what the damage is gunna be so that we can warn people and get them out of its path.