Posted on 01/07/2003 4:49:27 PM PST by yankeedame
Critics say new book is all junk
A British author claims the Chinese, not Columbus, found America first.
By Ted Bell -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Tuesday, January 7, 2003
British author Gavin Menzies' controversial book "1421 -- The Year China Discovered America", which goes on sale in the United States this week, claims that America was discovered by Chinese explorers 70 years before Columbus arrived. Part of the alleged proof behind Menzies' theory -- which is being heatedly contested by more traditional historians -- purportedly rests beneath about 40 feet of Glenn County mud in the form of an ancient Chinese junk, itself the subject of considerable debate.
As a starting point, the retired Royal Navy submarine commander relies heavily on the 1421 voyage of a great fleet of oceangoing Chinese junks under the command of the eunuch admiral Zheng He.
Two years later, seven ships returned and the Ming emperor ordered them all to be dismantled, the sailors paid off and all records of the voyage destroyed.
Traditional historians have, for years, agreed that the Zheng He fleet did sail, made it to East Africa, then turned around and came home in 1423.
Menzies, an amateur historian, insists that the fleet never turned back, but instead rounded the Cape of Good Hope and then went on to discover the New World.
According to Menzies' view, the Chinese sent expeditions in North America as far inland as Kansas and, from San Francisco Bay, up the Sacramento River into Glenn County.
Menzies claims the California evidence is an unseen Chinese junk entombed in mud in a former Sacramento River channel near the tiny hamlet of Glenn, about 15 miles southwest of Chico. Medieval Chinese armor was supposedly found at the site, but alas, it was loaned to a local high school and lost, he said.
As in Europe, the book's publication in the United States is being preceded by a healthy publicity campaign. The book's U.S. publisher is William Morrow & Co. of New York.
Pearson Broadband, the multimedia division of the London-based global media giant Pearson PLC, is providing funds for more archaeological work at the Glenn County site and also is underwriting a television series on the Ming fleet, "When China Discovered the World," based in part on "1421."
"Gavin is not a scholar or a scientist. He's a detective," said Pearson Broadband executive producer John Steele. "He's opened a door that we're going to take our viewers through."
The Menzies book hasn't been warmly received by traditional historians in Europe. In it, Menzies depicts such European explorers as Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus and Francisco Pizarro as bloodthirsty criminals while the Chinese were peaceful traders.
In an article published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week, Oxford University professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto said Menzies had put "five gallons in a half-pint pot" and said Menzies' theories weren't even worth addressing.
"It's not really worth my time," Fernandez-Armesto told the Times. "What's really interesting about it is that the book's taken off. It's like some Elvis fad!"
The controversy about a purported pre-Columbus Chinese visit is well under way in Glenn County.
Rumors of a Chinese ship have circulated in that county for 70 years, ever since two farmers hand-boring a well said they found some bronze artifacts that someone, somehow, authenticated as Chinese armor.
In 1979, Dave Stewart, whose grandfather farmed just downriver from the Glenn County site, said he discovered an iron ingot there and that an unspecified laboratory at California State University, Chico, tested it and found that it came from a low-temperature blast furnace and had been poured into a sand mold.
Stewart said he also learned that the Chinese used iron ingots as ballast for their junks.
Stewart asked John Furry, a Butte Community College instructor who had explored many Northern California areas, to work on the site using his magnetometer.
Furry says his instrument, which detects disturbances in Earth's magnetic field -- has shown the presence of something shaped like an 85-foot-long ship with its bow pointed upstream.
Since then, Furry and Stewart say that boring samples at the site have pulled up shards of pottery and pieces of wood some experts believe are from trees that grow only in Asia, and huge amounts of seeds that may have been in storage containers.
Furry said Monday that Menzies contacted him after reading about his claims in a 2001 Sacramento Bee report on the Internet.
One of the California history experts who says it is all nonsense is Greg White, director of the Archeological Research Program at Chico State.
"To my knowledge, there has been no evidence to support these claims," White said Monday.
Besides the lack of any validated and published evidence, White said the pieces of "pottery" brought to Chico State for analysis turned out to be pieces of sandstone shaped by the boring machine.
White also questions that any magnetometer, let alone Furry's relatively simple one, could detect the outline of a ship deeper than 16 feet below the surface.
Getting a ship that far upriver also is improbable, White said. The Sacramento River in Glenn County was systematically blocked by gravel bars throughout history until diesel dredges were taken up there.
"To suggest that (the river channel) could have been navigated is absurd," While said.
Such skepticism apparently hasn't daunted Menzies or Pearson, which is launching what it calls "the incredible true story" with the claim that "Gavin Menzies's extraordinary findings rewrite history."
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My professor was a well-educated fellow, remember him as Mr. Svanevek. He stated that the Chinese had several settlements in Mexico, and there was some interbreeding with some of the local natives. That there were many similarities between the two cultures - some artifacts, some language and writings. The kicker is that some of the historical writings in China from the 7th century period identify journeys to lands across the seas with pictures and text describing plants that only grow in Mexico.
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