Posted on 10/31/2002 3:18:43 PM PST by pistola
Historian - Chinese Mapped World Centuries Before Columbus
By Tim Castle
10-31-2
LONDON (Reuters) - Debunking Christopher Columbus has become a full-time occupation for retired British submarine commander Gavin Menzies.
Next week the urbane 65-year-old begins a global publicity campaign to promote his extraordinary claim that Chinese sailors discovered America 70 years before Columbus and mapped the whole world centuries before European explorers.
Despite criticism from academics that his theory is no more than "a tower of hypotheses," publisher Transworld paid 500,000 pounds ($780,000) for the rights to "1421 -- The Year China Discovered the World," a huge sum for an unknown author.
A longer U.S. edition appears in January, with translations following in China, Japan, Spain and Portugal, while Britain's Pearson Broadband outbid 46 others to snap up television rights.
"The extraordinary thing about it is that there is nothing new in my theory at all," Menzies told Reuters in an interview ahead of his book's November 4 publication.
Menzies has stirred up a whirlwind of discovery and debate since he first detailed his theory at a London lecture in March.
He now employs four researchers to handle "the torrent of information" from around the globe supporting his claim.
His book expands his theory that the Chinese circled the world in fleets of vast many-masted ships between 1421 and 1423, reaching as far as America, Australia and Greenland.
WESTERN EXPLORERS
Little is known of the voyages because the fleet's records were destroyed shortly after it returned.
Menzies says academics, particularly in Europe, have been blind to the possibility that someone beat Western explorers like Columbus, Magellan and Cook to the New World.
"There has been a concerted effort to suppress the truth. I'm not saying it's necessarily a conspiracy. But it has served a lot of people to maintain the old status quo," he said.
"There have been good livings made out of Columbus," such as debating which Caribbean island he reached in 1492.
"All of that becomes much less interesting and less important if it's known that Columbus didn't discover the Americas and that he used someone else's knowledge to do so."
Menzies says contemporary accounts show that all the European explorers set sail with maps of where they were going.
He says these charts were copied from a now-lost master map of the world held secretly by the King of Portugal, itself derived from information brought back by the Chinese fleets.
Elements of this map survive in 15th and 16th-century European maps which apparently show the Caribbean, America and Australia long before Europe reached the New World.
In addition, the book draws on previously unexplained archaeological finds to support Menzies' premise that not only did Chinese sailors reach the Americas, they also settled there, influencing local culture and agriculture.
ACCOUNTS IGNORED
Menzies admits he is not the first to suggest that Columbus was beaten to the Americas, but says other accounts have been ignored.
He recommends a two-volume 1990 bibliography -- "Pre-Columban Contact with the Americas Across the Ocean" -- listing hundreds of existing publications on the subject.
"There is only one library in England that has got this bibliography, that's the Bodleian (at Oxford University)," he said. "It's just ridiculous."
Plans are under way in China to rebuild four of the huge ships in which Chinese admirals Zheng He, Hong Bao and Zhou Man sailed, and recreate the voyages Menzies says they took by sailing them to America and Australia.
There are also plans to create museums across China to celebrate the admirals, who until now had been largely forgotten even in their own country.
Pearson Broadband, for a four-part documentary, will investigate a ship buried beneath California's Sacramento River to test if it is a lost junk from the Chinese fleet.
Menzies says his theory could be vindicated by the discovery of a Chinese body in the Americas pre-dating the European explorers, which will be detailed in his book's U.S. edition.
"It's got Chinese Jade on the throat and up its nostrils and is apparently a Chinese or Mongolian skeleton."
Another interesting fact - A few very ancient Chinese villages have been found on the western coast of Mexico. These were fishing/sea-trading encampments. Archeologists just DON'T want to even discuss these...lol.
Don't you just hate it when that happens. I'm sure Thongor of Atlantis was equally annoyed when the records of his circumnavigation in 10,500 BC got lost.
9,400 Year Old Spirit Cave Man Found In Nevada
11,500 Year Old Luzia Found In Brazil. The Oldest Human Skeleton Ever Found In The Americas. (It gets real complicated)
I know sweetie, I've been 'there' a number of times. (It is real complicated.) Tell Cyber hi.
Gran Villaya, the city of "Cloud People", the largest pre-Columbian city of the Americas, was once inhabited by the Chachapoyas, legend says, a group of tall, blue-eyed blondes. Today the ancient city is shrouded by overgrowth in the high tropical rain forest of northern Peru, but just a millennium ago, it was still a grand metropolis of fortresses and farms that covered 100 square miles.
The Chachapoyas were conquered by the Incas in 1480. Spaniards reported it, the Incas reported it, and as you go deeper into the dense jungle, tall, blonde, blue-eyed people are still found. Up until very recently, some of these people still used mummy caves (like their Aryan-Egyptian relatives).
There are 10,000 stone structures, complex units of circular buildings. Stairways run up terraces for several hundred yards, and there are underground caverns and about 24,000 circular structures of cut limestone. Kirelap, a great elliptical fortress whose walls soar to 60 feet, and which is thought to have once reached 150 feet, defends Gran Villaya from the east.
From the west, the city and its agricultural terraces are guarded by a chain of fortifications. Local myths trace the Chachapoya culture to the 10th century BC.
The people there were architects, farmers, and engineers who built aqueducts, canals, bridges, and once were in contact with the seas. The archaeological discoveries of Gran Villaya have already located 43 lost cities high in the Andes.
Researchers have found roads built from huge stones leading down to the Amazon. There are few stones in the jungle, so they were likely transported there. Pizzaro, the Spanish conqueror of Peru, recording the persistence of white blood at that time, wrote that "The ruling class in the kingdom of Peru was fair-skinned with fair hair about the color of ripe wheat."
Anthropologists in 1971 discovered a tribe of white-skinned Indians in the depths of these jungles. English explorer Colonel P.H. Fawcett, wrote in 1924 of also finding remote South American tribes with blue eyes and auburn hair.
The Bible says David (1000 BC) was "ruddy and fair". He was of the Tribe of Judah, cousins to the Tribe of Dan, from whence probably came the Danes, and many other Europeans.
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