There's another one I haven't read: The Classic of Mountains and Seas by Anne Birrell.
Plus, there's another book written by a Chinese missionary who documents a lot of it. I can't remember his name - my son in Maine has the book.
That's why I find it so amusing when people say the Olmnec heads are negroid. As far as I am concerned, they have Asian features.
Here's something about Henrietta Mertz:
Very often the researches of educated amateurs uncover more information and understanding than the work of specialists limited by unproved theories that have hardened into 'fact.' For instance, Henrietta Mertz' little-known but perceptive book Pale Ink examines texts of some ancient Chinese voyagers, and by careful analysis shows them to provide exact descriptions of the topography of western America, especially California and Mexico. She identifies Quetzalcoatl with one of the early navigators.
These Chinese writings are the precis of previously condensed versions of yet earlier works written by the very persons who set sail in various expeditions -- from hundreds of years B.C. to the early centuries A.D. -- and reached the Pacific shores of the Americas. The original accounts have disappeared because every now and then the Emperors of China would order a drastic reduction of the vast accumulation of literature. Those items worth preserving were reduced to the bare essentials; in the process the genuine travelogs were so constricted that the meaning was lost to later generations who assumed that the reports of unfamiliar landscapes and strange peoples were mere fables, figments of someone's imagination.
Zheng sailed west and definitely was in Arab world and E Africa, but no evidence he ever entered the Atlantic or Mediterranean. Or sailed East, across Pacific to America.
Good morning JudyB. This is Luzia, the oldest dated (11,500 years old) human skeleton ever found in the Americas (Brazil). Now, there is a new one Arlington Springs Woman (Santa Rosa Island, Calif.) who has tenetively been dated at 13,000 years old who may take the top slot as earliest 'in the Americas' shortly. (I don't see any Asian features on Luzia)