Posted on 01/20/2006 8:18:53 AM PST by blam
Of course the Chinese didn't discover America. But then nor did Columbus
A map supporting claims that the admiral Zheng He reached the New World in the early 15th century is plainly a hoax
Simon Jenkins
Friday January 20, 2006
The Guardian (UK)
We all know that a lie goes halfway round the world while truth is putting on its boots. But what if the lie goes the whole way? What if it claims to circumnavigate the globe?
Last week came purported evidence that the Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed his great fleet of junks round the world a century before Columbus, Da Gama and Magellan. An 18th-century copy of a map dated 1418 has emerged from a Shanghai bookshop, depicting North and South America, Australia and Antarctica. The map was bought by a Chinese lawyer, Liu Gang, and was reportedly to go on display on Tuesday in London's Maritime Museum. (The museum denies all knowledge of it.) The map challenges the customary Euro-centric version of global discovery and can thus rely on a weight of political correctness in support. It appears to stake China's claim to have "discovered" America first.
This comes as a surprise to those of us who know for a fact that America was discovered by Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd in 1170. He landed at Mobile, Alabama, on the orders of the family druid and asserted Wales's claim to King Arthur's North Atlantic empire. Making his way across country, he settled west of the Mississippi, where the Mandan tribe were encountered in the 18th century, fair-skinned and speaking a dialect of Welsh. Unfortunately Madoc's arrival had been forestalled by St Brendan in the seventh century. He sailed to America in a leather-bound coracle, as Tim Severin proved in 1977.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
The Australian Aboriginies never adopted the bow and arrow either even after being exposed to it by the New Gueineans(sp) sometime in the BC's.
Worse, the first New Zealanders lost the ability to make fire after having it at one time.
Don't know about these folks.
It has been said that Thomas Jefferson told Lewis & Clark not to mention anything about the blue-eyed Indians they found on their expedition out west for fear that some other European power would use that as a claim on the American west. (I don't know if this is true or not.)
I think that's the Lumbee tribe. There is a theory -- I'm not sure how strongly backed it is -- that they rescued, then intermarried with the survivors of the lost Roanoke colony. That would account for fair hair and blue eyes.
That's what I have read. Yes, the Indians saved those settlers from death.
The particular artifacts I'm referring to are called runestones; they are drawings and inscriptions inside of cave-like dwellings that evidently served as shelter. But they were clearly Viking in nature and origin.
I'm sure there's info out there; I only happened to know about it because I lived in Okla for many years and had friends in the Heavener area who were very familiar with them.
The Chinese came very close, though. They were on the verge of doing it in the early 15th century, when a new set of rulers, when a change of rulers ended the age of Chinese exploration and expansion.
I'm just glad that someone discovered America.
I thought that was the Jackson Whites?
POWs escaped quite regularly. And then there those "blue eyed" Spaniards from Galicia ~ they are called Galicians. They play bagpipes. Many have red hair. Another source of red-hair among the Spanish arrived with King San Cho Noe I, from Cornwall.
All you needed was a Spaniard riding through the woods and next thing you know there'd be red heads with blue-eyes all over the place.
"There is a theory -- I'm not sure how strongly backed it is -- that they rescued"
How about a theory that they attacked the colony, killed the men, and made off with the women and some children?
Why do we have to presume that stone-age savages were morally superior?
Gloria Farley was born in Heavener, Oklahoma and did a lot of research around that area. Click on her name to read more about her and her work.
"Gloria Stewart Farley was born in Heavener, Oklahoma, a small town near the Arkansas state line. Her father, Matthew Stewart, had come there in 1902 as a physician, when Oklahoma was still Indian Territory. She has lived all her life except 13 years, on a beloved hill with a view of Poteau Mountain to the east. When she was 12 years old, she was taken to this mountain to see a certain stone, a tall slab standing upright in a ravine protected by a U-shaped cliff. Little did she realize that this day was the beginning of a lifetime of research on a controversial Pre-Columbian subject: that many Old World cultures had visited America centuries before Columbus and some even before Christ."
I know what runes are.
If they are genuine, they were written in Old Norse, not a modern Scandinavian Language.
Has anyone tried translating them?
A simialr "runestone" called the Kensington Stone was dug up some time ago by a Scandinavian immigrnat in Minnesota.
I don't think its status is resolved yet.
Thanks for that info. I thought it was NC...
Jackson Whites, name applied to a group of people of mixed descent (African, European, and Native American) living in the Ramapo Mts. along the New Jersey–New York state line.
OK, how do we explain the Melundgeons? Shipwrecked Portuguese sailors? Gypsies?
Why do we have to presume that stone-age savages were morally superior?
It's not a matter of presuming moral superiority or inferiority. It's a matter of having a passing interest in the matter, ever since I visited the site of the colony, when I was 10, and reading up on it now and again.
For one thing, it's inconsistent with the message the colonists left that they had "gone to Croatoan." If they had been attacked -- and the relationships between the colonists and the Croatoan Indians were dicey at times -- any message left behind would likely have made a point of mentioning they had been attacked.
There were also reports that some fifty years later, some of the Croatoans were practicing Christianity. If true -- again, reports are questionable -- that's a development that's more likely to come from a peaceful merger of tribe and colony than the tribe conquering the colony.
BTW, there is a question of whether the Croatoans and the Lumbee are the same tribe at different points in history. So even if one tribe took in the colonists, the question of whether the Lumbees are their descendents is an open one.
In any case, there was one Indian leader who claimed he had wiped out the Roanoke colony. That was Chief Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas. He claimed they had become part of a tribe that would now join Powhatan's confederacy and that he had wiped them out. That tribe, however, does not appear to have been the Croatoans, so that opens up a whole other set of questions.
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