Posted on 01/13/2006 10:31:34 AM PST by West Coast Conservative
It's not the inland features which call the map into question. If you notice, all the rivers are simply haphazardly located, with no relation to reality. For instance, there is a major river system flowing eastward, darining most of middle America into the Atlantic. Of course, no such river system exists. The mapper did the same thing with haphazard mountains spread evenly over each continent.
The problem is that he is perfectly accurate in his drawing of MezoAmerica, Greenland, and both shores of Africa, and repeats the errors of Spanish explorers who didn't realized the California Baja was only a bay. According to the map, this navigator not only discovered America, but exlored the entire globe in precisely the same references that later european explorers, such as Cortez, Balboa, deGama, and Cartier did.
In the peanut galley:
Democrat: China...
Republican: Mexico..
Observer (back row) to another: They have point we are quite screwed..
IOW, for a map created in 1421, it captures perfectly European's 17th-century perception of the entire globe.
I notice that the redoubtable Admiral managed to get both the Northern ice pack and Antarctica as well. Interestingly enough, he even managed to navigate the Northwest passage, in a small, flat-fronted vessel.
:') Any mapping of the Arctic coastlines would have to occurred prior to the early 14th century, during the medieval warming period. So, if the dating of the map were a little older (mid-18th century is a bit late, I think, eh?) it would still have to have been been a composite of information from a number of earlier maps. The main reason old maps have some wild features, weird angles, and non-existent islands, is that there were so many unrelated sources of the 'fo, and they had different levels of reliability.
Although there is alot for which to question the map, you are wrong about the abilities of Chinese naval vessels at the time.
The travels of the famous Chinese admiral in the book "1421, The Year China Discovered America" are documented in and outside of China, though the western-most extent of his expeditions are the least-well recorded and some are speculative.
The problem (a profound problem) was the Chinese Emperor at the time of that famous admiral's expeditions. Due to a complex set of internal, domestic reasons that Emperor had the admiral's entire fleet destroyed and banned any further such expeditions. That imperial attitude, about China's need to investigate things foreign prevailed under every Emperor thereafter and made China a "hermit", leading to technological and cultural stagnation at home while Europe advanced.
It is not a stretch to realize that a different decision by that Emperor and his successors may have produced a China that was not in comparatively dis-advantageous positions when industrialized Europe and Japan came calling in the 19th century.
With all that said, it is a stretch to characterize the map as representing any "claim" on America, no matter what is determined about its authenticity. Certainly, in terms of active settlement, the most prolific earliest "foreign" settlers in North America were the Vikings and their descendents from Greenland.
Au contraire. The Chinese gov't built quite large vessels. Trading vessels throughout time and geography have varied a great deal in size. Roman era vessels on the India trading run were quite large; grain haulers were generally larger still; some of the largest were used to transport 200 ton columns and whatnot from Egypt to Rome.
Has science really degenerated to the extent that such a statement can be made with a straight face?
I think thats supposed to be vancouver island
"Zheng He, a Muslim mariner and explorer"
Uhmm...Sounds like justification for the ROP to 'reclaim' America...What a pantload.
RD
It's ridiculous on its face. How would he have known about Hudson Bay, for instance? The scale is too close to true to be credible. Only a person completely ignorant of cartography and navigation could credit it.
It depends, I suppose, on your definition of "discovered".
The extent to which Marxism had negatively affected human intelligence is breathtaking.
Prior to 1960, it was understood that in historical context, "discovery" had a specific and logical commonly accepted meaning:
Found, documented, and shared to the extent that the existing cultures could share and use the information as common knowlege.
None of the other claims, including the Vikings', qualify.
Having said that, the book, 1621 is a fascinating chronicle of the possible Chinese voyages, and the possibility through inference, that they might have visited America. All based on inferences and "possibilities", since part of the discussion accepts that the rulers of China ordered all traces of these voyages destroyed (conveniently, and absolutely).
Actually, I've read claims that the biblical "ship's of Tyre" (Phoenicians) probably sailed as far a Greenland and perhaps as far as North America.
No, but it is a Mercator projection. It is a compilation of older maps, but it shows the west coast of the Americas, distorted as should be expected, rather than the east coast as the Piri Re'is [compiled] map does. The original sources would be partly the same as Ptolemy's sources, partly Phoenician, in particular drawing from traders who ran the Ethiopia-India route. Early voyages to the Americas are included; although they did not go far inland they crossed the isthmus of Panama but did not enter the Caribbean--they were on foot then, having left their ships anchored in Nicaragua for the time being.
"The Chinese could not possibly have mapped both North and South America in the 15th century. Their ships were small and barely seaworthy."
Actually they could have in the 15th century, but the emperor ordered the fleet destroyed later. You need to read the history of the eunuch courtesan.
I did not claim that the detail of the inland rivers was the only thing that calls the map into question; only that it was one of the questionable features.
And, not all inland river systems on all old maps were pure fictions. In many old maps some inland river systems had been "mapped" by explorers who sailed up some of the rivers; with ships that, at the time, had a much shallower draft than todays ocean going vessels. Some of the early errors in ancient mapping of those river systems came from a poorer sense of precise longitude and latitude and consequently the true course of the rivers.
Da-doo,
I was walkin' in the wholesale map district that day
Shoop da-doo,
and I passed by this place where this old Chinese man
Chang da-doo
he sometimes sells me weird and exotic clippings,
Snip da-doo,
'cause he knows, you see, that strange maps are my hobby.
Da da da da da da-doo.
He didn't have anything unusual there that day.
Nope, da-doo,
so I was just about to, ya know, walk on by,
Good for you,
when suddenly,
Da doo
and without warning, there was this total eclipse of the sun.
It got very dark and there was this strange
sound like something from another world.
Da-doo,
And when the light came back this map was just sitting there,
whoop-see-doo
just, you know, stuck in, among the Rand McNally's.
pre-1492.
I coulda sworn it hadn't been there before,
but the old Chinese man sold it to me anyways,
for a dollar ninety-five.
Sha la la, la la la, la la la loo.
Pretty cool since the Chinese admiral also made it to the EAST coast of Central America (see Panama and the islands in the Caribbean)and the East Coast of the US and also Hudson's Bay.
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