Posted on 03/04/2002 3:24:49 PM PST by blam
Explorer from China who 'beat Columbus to America'
By Elizabeth Grice
(Filed: 04/03/2002)
HISTORY books in 23 countries may need to be rewritten in the light of new evidence that Chinese explorers had discovered most parts of the world by the mid-15th century.
Next week, an amateur historian will expound his theory - backed up by charts, ancient artefacts and anthropological research - that when Columbus discovered America in 1492, he was 72 years too late.
And so were other explorers, such as Cook, Magellan and Da Gama, whose heroic voyages took them to Australia, South America and India.
Instead, according to Gavin Menzies, a former submarine commanding officer who has spent 14 years charting the movements of a Chinese expeditionary fleet between 1421 and 1423, the eunuch admiral, Zheng He, was there first.
According to Menzies, it was Zheng He, in his colossal multi-masted ships stuffed with treasure, silks and porcelain, who made the first circumnavigation of the world, beating the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan by a century.
Menzies will present his findings at the Royal Geographical Society on March 15 before an invited audience of more than 200 diplomats, academics, naval officers and publishers. Their initial reaction, based on an outline of his thesis, ranges from excitement to scepticism.
But if the number of acceptances - 85 per cent - is anything to go by, he will not be ignored.
He originally intended to write a book about the significance of the year 1421 around the world. While researching it in Venice, he was shown a planisphere, dated 1459, which included southern Africa and the Cape of Good Hope.
Yet the Cape was not "discovered" as a sea route by Vasco da Gama until 1497. On the planisphere was a note in medieval Phoenician about a voyage round the Cape to the Cape Verde Islands in 1420 - and a picture of a Chinese junk.
Menzies felt he was on to something.
Using Chinese star charts and maps that pre-date the expeditions of Cook, Magellan, de Gama and Columbus, he has reconstructed what he believes is the epic voyage of Zheng He.
He says his knowledge of astro-navigation helped him to work out that the Chinese, using the brilliant star Canopus to chart their course, had sailed close to the South Pole.
He determined their latitude and went on to find literary and archaeological evidence to show that the Chinese had effectively circumnavigated the world.
Menzies, 64, admits that his greatest fear was being ridiculed.
He said: "When I started, I was terrified people would think I was a crank. But although my claim is complicated and stands history on its head, I am confident of my ground.
He added: "What nobody has explained is why the European explorers had maps. Who drew the maps? There are millions of square miles of ocean. It required huge fleets to chart them. If you say it wasn't the Chinese, with the biggest fleets and ships in the world, then who was it?"
Admiral Sir John Woodward, who served on submarines with Menzies in the 1960s and will be at his lecture, describes him as a brilliant maverick.
He said: "I was his teacher on a commanding officers' qualifying course and he was the cleverest, sharpest and best I had seen. He is not some mad eccentric but a rational man, good at analysis - and he certainly knows all about charts."
Chinese ocean-going supremacy in the first half of the 15th century is not in question.
The expeditionary junks were three times the size of Nelson's Victory and dwarfed the 16th century ocean-going European caravels. Under his patron, the Yong-le Emperor Zhui Di, Zheng He made seven great voyages to bring foreigners into China's tribute system.
When he returned in October 1423, China was in political and economic chaos. The treasure fleet, now considered frivolous, was mothballed, admirals pensioned off and shipyards closed.
Although most of the records of Zheng He's voyage were expunged, a few maps and star charts survived.
Menzies believes they were taken to Venice by a merchant traveller, Nicolo da Conti, who had joined one of the Chinese junks in India. In his travel book published in 1434, da Conti claims to have sailed to China via Australia - 350 years before Captain Cook.
Menzies argues that, on his way through Venice in 1428, the King of Portugal's eldest son obtained the salvaged maps and incorporated them into a map of the world.
The most controversial part of his theory is that copies of parts of this mappa mundi were used by da Gama, Magellan and Cook. Some of these still survive in museums: Patagonia (1513), North America (1507), Africa (1502) and Asia and Australia (1542).
The letters and logs of the European explorers - including Columbus - certainly acknowledge that they had maps, says Menzies. "They knew where they were going before they set out."
Using his knowledge of winds and tides, Menzies has located what he believes are nine Chinese leviathans wrecked in the Caribbean in December 1421.
Pictures of the hull ballast on the seabed show stones identical in shape and size to those found in a Chinese treasure ship recently excavated in the Philippines.
Menzies declines to name the uninhabited island because he believes some of the ships may still contain treasure and he wants to investigate them.
Gillian Hutchinson, curator of the history of cartography at the National Maritime Museum, is not persuaded that there is a provable link between the Chinese maps and those the Europeans used.
She says: "It is possible that Chinese geographical knowledge had reached Europe before the Age of Discovery. But Mr Menzies is absolutely certain of it, and that makes it difficult to separate evidence from wishful thinking."
Diplomats of the countries whose early history may be affected by his thesis are reacting with a surprising degree of warmth.
Gregory Baughen, first secretary at the New Zealand High Commission, says: "It sounds exciting. We're all ears. Chinese artefacts have been found around the coast for some time."
Luis de Sousa, press councillor at the Portuguese Embassy, says: "Magellan is in all the books and his descendants carry his name with -+pride. But if the Chinese circumnavigated the world first, which is quite possible, then let's give them their 15 minutes of limelight."
I'm a strong believer in early and continuous (interrupted) contact between the 'new' and 'old' worlds (tens of thousands of years). This question has baffled me for a long time. Now, recently I've read an article that pushes the date of the arrival of TB in the Americas back by 1,000 years.
Maybe. But cocaine residue has definitely been found in the stomachs of Egyptian mummies. Cocoa being strictly a product of the Americas.
Yes, but what they meant was they know from the strata of the layers of soil and clay that that level of clay was deposited 125 million years ago. 100 feet is a long way down. There was an electronic resistor-like part discovered in rock several years ago plus other artifacts found deep in the earth. And there is biblical support for an event that wiped out everything millions of years ago, much more devastating than Noah's flood.
These links test the limits of one's open-mindedness as to the history of intelligent existence on the earth. :^)
Haven't been there now since 1993.
The reason the Amerindian population was so weak immunologically, was its extreme inbredness. Over 90% of all American Indians, from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego, are descended from just four women.
While the separatists are technically wrong, and boats were landing here or there all the time, most of those people just starved, perished, were murdered where they landed.
The boaters had major cultural and religious effect, but were few and male and could not much impact the genetic picture, nor could their small craft be packed with enough artifacts to convince all of today's skeptics.
Yet genetically it is the diffusionists who are wrong, and the whole aboriginal population of both continents and the Caribbean too, is still basically descended from a single boatload of Asians, apparently with just four breeding females, that landed in SOUTH America in a time of high antiquity indeed, some 35 to 39.5 thousand years ago.
It may well have floated with the clockwise current around the Pacific rim from the Sakhalin/Korea area all the way to Chile before finally coming ashore. See Monte Verde, Popiapo, etc.
Geez...You're making me think now. It must have been 1989-90 since I was there. I do remember that the room at Club Med was $6.00 a night. LOL, I stayed there for two days even though I already had accomodations in Kozumel.
Thanks, from a fellow Ancient American subscriber.
How do you explain Luzia? (post #58)
This was before (IMO) we had the Mongoloid race developed fully as it is today, and in any event those On The Boat would have looked more Caucasian to us, than Mongolian, and that is true of Lucia. I don't think science has a good answer, so I will just say that whoever might have been alive in that area of Asia at that time, that is who went to Chile. Some 39000 years ago.
Notice how both with her, and with Kennewick Man, the skull restorers both in features and in coloration, did their best to make what is really a fairly typical Caucasoid skull...seem to be dark skinned or possibly (Amerind looking in Kennewick) and (African looking in Luzia) to suit the present racial politics in the USA and Brazil respectively.
Kennewick Man, who lived some 9000 yrs ago, is so Europoid or Caucasian, that if he had been found in England like Cheddar Man, of the same vintage, the two could easily have been related.
A year or so ago I wrote on a thread that I think Kennewick Man might have been an explorer, an early Viking or Lewis-&-Clark type. European man has always been curious, and tends to like to see what was out there. Could easily have just been an old Norseman or Englishman.
Yes, that's it. Thanks you. That fact reveals to me that folks have been traversing the ocean for a long, long time!
I doubt Zheng made it to America, however. The voyages into the Indian Ocean are well documented, but there is nothing about sailing east across the Pacific. The maps are easily explained because the Chinese were well informed about the outlines of Asia and knew the geographical relationship between Asia and Europe across the Silk Road.
What Columbus did not know was how far Europe was from Asia going west from Europe. Had Zheng cirumnavigated the globe, the Chinese would have known that.
Well, the falls on the Ohio at Louisville might well encourage early explorers to travel up the Wabash and take the first large tributary to the East to see if they could find a portage. That would be the East Fork of the White River. This takes you to the Muscatatuck. It is in this basin that these peculiar brown birch trees grow.
If you keep on going East you have a short land portage to the another Ohio tributary.
However, none of these rivers are particularly deep. You would kind of dead end on this trip about Seymour, Indiana.
There you will find a major council circle of ancient vintage. The town itself is built on mounds without any buried remains or artifacts. This has frequently led folks to believe these are natural mounds. On the other hand, they are resident on about 10 square miles of perfectly flat land in the midst of a naturally rolling terrain.
The mounds are regularly spaced and shaped. You can make out the remains of ceremonial courtyards. The layout in both size and shape is very similar to Tiotihuacan.
1. John Day's letter
'It is considered certain that the cape of the said land was found and discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found Brasil, as your Lordship well knows. It was called the Island of Brasil and it is assumed and believed to be the mainland that the men from Bristol found.' (From the letter written by the English spy John Day between mid-December 1497 and mid-March 1498 to "The most magnificent and most worthy lord, the Lord Grand Admiral" in Spain (likely Christopher Columbus). The letter was discovered in the Spanish archives in 1955 by the American researcher Dr. Louis Andre Vigneras. This English translation published in Canadian Historical Review, volume XXXVIII (1957), pages 219-228).
2. Sir Francis Bacon:
'..it is likely that the discovery first began where the lands did nearest meet. And there had been before that time a discovery of some lands, which they took to be islands, and were indeed the continent of America, towards the north-west. And it may be, that some relation of this nature coming afterwards to the knowledge of Columbus, and by him suppressed (desirous rather to make his enterprise the child of his science and fortune than the follower of a former discovery), did give him better assurance that all was not sea from the west of Europe and Africke.'
(Fragment from Sir Francis Bacon's Historie of the Reigne of King Henry the Seventh [written in 1621, published in 1638]).
Those would be the Jomon/Ainu, European origins via Siberia.
"This was before (IMO) we had the Mongoloid race developed fully as it is today, and in any event those On The Boat would have looked more Caucasian to us, than Mongolian, and that is true of Lucia."
I agree with you on the appearance of those on 'the boat' except for Luzia. The North Chinese had not had their population explosion yet. (They would become The American Indians about 6,000 year ago). The American Indians displaced the Joman/Ainu (Kennewick Man) in North America."
"A year or so ago I wrote on a thread that I think Kennewick Man might have been an explorer, an early Viking or Lewis-&-Clark type."
There are a number of Kennewick Man's relatives out there (Skeletons), he's just the most famous.
I think Luzia (and her group) came across the Atlantic.
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