index index index index From time to time, this reviewer comes across a publication so crackpot that I hardly know where to start in reviewing it here. I'm happy to see that Gavin Menzies' thesis in 1421: The Year China Discovered America, that a Chinese fleet launched in 1421, embarked on a tour around the world, discovering all major points before Europeans and leaving artifacts, has already been generally debunked by numerous sources. Perhaps the most substantial is Robert Finlay's review "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America" in the Journal of World History, June 2004, where Finlay shows that there are no "lost years" in Ming dynasty sailing, and so Menzies' book is completely without foundation. My fellow reviewers here have also offered some important critiques. I would like to offer a perspective from my own individual profession, linguistics. Menzies writes, for example:

"Linguistics provide further evidence. The people of the Eten and Monsefu villages in the Lambayeque province of Peru can understand Chinese but not each otherâ(tm)s patois, despite living only three miles apart. Stephen Powers, a nineteenth-century inspector employed by the government of California to survey the native population, found linguistic evidence of a Chinese-speaking colony in the state."

The first assertion, on the Peruvian village, is not sourced at all and is either the personal fancy of the author or some minor crank idea. The second, however, is cited to an 19th-century bit of scholarship evidentally done without appropriate field methods. He goes on to claim that Chinese sailors shipwrecked on the East Coast of the United States would have been able to communicate with locals, as these would have included Chinese who had walked over the Bering Strait. Chinese walk across to Alaska and across all North America, but end up speaking Middle Chinese, and yet leave no trace of this dialect on neighbouring Native American languages? Risible fantasy. There's even an assertion that Navajo elders understand Chinese conversation, and an assertion that the Peruvian village name Chanchan must be Chinese because it sounds (at least to him) like "Canton". Perhaps the silliest Peruvian connection is between Chinese "qipu" and Quechua "quipu"; Menzies seemingly doesn't understand that "q" represents a completely different sound in each language. So, I hope that the reader with some training in linguistics can see what kind of arguments are used in the book, and beware accordingly.

If I may be permitted one final indulgence, I should like to protest Menzies' weird view of Chinese culture. He blasts European explorers for committing genocide, claiming that continued Chinese expansion would have led instead to a world of peace and Confucian harmony. This is the naive romantic view of the Orient held by a child flipping through National Geographic. A man of Menzies' age and experience should have realized that all civilizations have it within them to commit do in indigenous peoples--the marginalization of Tibetan and Uighur language and culture and the disappearance already of a distinct Manchu people stand as proof that the Chinese are no exception.Gavin spent over a decade in researching and following the sea route in writing this impressive volume - 1421 the year China discovered America. With his professional training, experience, and the determination to find the historical truth, he came to the logical conclusion with convincing objective support of plants, architecture, drawing, animals, DNA, culture, custom, language, rituals and Chinese influence on the local people. He documented in great details in this Chinese expedition around the world. This pioneer adventure was under-covered even in China. He did intensive and extensive scholarly work in reminding the world this forgotten first round the world voyage which paved the seaway with maps for Europeans to follow with different impact and outcome. This book attracted world-wide interest. The Chinese version updates and corrects some of the mistakes in this American text.

China in the Ming Dynasty was advance in technology, powerful culturally, politically and economically. With the surplus of free trade, China was capable of building the Chinese Armada - a fleet of over hundred of ships and thirty thousand crews. With compass, sun dial and the guide of the Stars, the China fleet set up observatories in making calculation and charting maps with amazing accuracy. China brought and shared the well-developed civilization and technology to people around the world without conquer, convert or discrimination, contrary to subsequent imperialist, colonist and missionary in suppression, massacre and brutality. China earned respect, trust and honor without shock and awe nor establishment of a Chinese Empire even she was capable of. With gifts, goodwill and friendship, China won hearts and minds and people of distant lands were willing to learn and follow.

This book is an eye and mind opener especially for American hawks who currently cry "CHINA THREAT". If Ming Dynasty China behaved as European Christians, Africa, America and Australia would be Chinese speaking, Confucian culture Empire with towns New Peking instead of New England, New Nanking instead of New South Wales.

Reading this book help review the history of these three continents under the doctrine of "love your neighbor as yourself" and Confucius' teaching of "among four seas, all are brothers & sisters". This book is meaningful and significant in our annual celebration of Columbus Day in America.
OK, so Columbus didn't discover America, no big news here since from the sound of it the Americas must have been a major crossroads of commerce when Columbus joined the party late.

But here's a bit of a surprise. Not only didn't he discover America, he wasn't a brave adventurer going out into the vast unknown with no maps and the fear falling off the edge of a flat earth, and in fact even the premise of his trip wasn't above board--his own brother cooked the (map) books to make it look impossible to go the other way.

And here's the real kicker--Columbus knew where he was going because he had maps of the world prepared by the Portuguese who copied from the Chinese who not only discovered America but discovered and mapped the world in 1421!

Menzies begins with basic knowledge of navigation by wind and sea currents, appends ancient Chinese history, then piles on layer after layer of circumstantial evidence that, while thin in places, builds to critical mass.

Interesting followup: Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (P.S.) uses Menzies ideas to help build a circumstantial case that some of Magellan's actions on his circumnavigation were based on knowledge of and from the Chinese expeditions.Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America
(William Morrow, New York) 2003
xxiv+552 pages
ISBN 0-08-053763-9

Critiqued by Frederic Jueneman

The early Fifteenth Century saw a burgeoning of The Renaissance in Europe--a stirring of intellectual, religious, and philosophical thought that also gave rise to visions of empire and conquest. And, apparently so too in the Far East, for Ming Emperor Zhu Di of China, in his infinite imperial wisdom countermanded his conservative-minded mandarin advisors and commissioned an unprecedented fleet of ships to explore the entire globe in 1421, and to bring veneration and tribute to his sovereign majesty, the Son of Heaven.

At this time Europe was relatively unaware of any lands in the Western oceanic expanse and traded overland to Middle Eastern and Asiatic marketplaces, paying baksheesh and bribes to the wealthy and avaricious Mongol and Persian potentates along the Silk Road, while complaining over the ever-increasing prices in such trades and looking for alternate passages. This was a very old complaint, as the Roman statesman Seneca in the First Century AD had also bemoaned the high costs of goods and spices from the Orient and predicted that another route across the Western expanse beyond the Pillars of Hercules would some day be found. But, until the Portuguese Prince Henry "The Navigator" sent a paltry few but successful lanteen-sailed fleets to explore the west coast of Africa and eventually sail around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, little was known of any sea lanes other than those in the Mediterranean and along the western Atlantic shores of Europe.

Henry the Navigator procured his clues secretively from the 1428 World Map provided to cartographer Fra Mauro by the Venetian trader Niccolò da Conti, who arrived in 1420 at Calicut, a major trading port on the Malabar coast of India, just prior to the launching of the four square-masted "treasure" armadas of exploration and commerce by Zhu Di. Da Conti undoubtedly was also able to secure a berth on one of the junks then currently plying the Seven Seas as well as access to navigation charts used by these intrepid traders in the Orient. One is led to think that Venetians had a special place in oriental esteem since the excursions of Marco Polo in the late 13th Century. For, at the time of Zhu Di, the Chinese already had at least eight centuries of seafaring experience. (In AD 499 the Buddhist priest Hoei-Shin returned from a land twenty thousand li (8000 nautical miles) east of China, naming this continent Fusang after the red-fruited maguey trees that grow in Central and South America.)

Prince Henry himself had a special heritage in seafaring. His grandfather was the English prince, John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, who in turn had sent his prelate Nicholas of Lynn on a westward voyage of exploration in 1360 to find the fabled Avalon of King Arthur. Henry's mother was Queen Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt and wife of John I of Portugal. The English and Portuguese enjoyed a unique mar¬time relationship through their royal lines and patronage, while maintaining an uneasy truce with Aragon and Castile, the two Spanish kingdoms (which were later united with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella).

The 1428 World Map was a chart of sea routes, but also showed a passage around the southern tip of Africa. So, when the Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus came on the scene there was sufficient knowledge of the seas to whet his appetite for westward trade routes across the Atlantic. His voyage on a English ship in 1477 at least as far west as Greenland showed such feasibility. However, John II of Portugal refused to support Columbus' offer to voyage westward, as the Portuguese previously knew of the islands in the New World, having already explored and colonized them for some years, not to mention the sea routes around Africa, and were jeal¬ously guarding this information as regnal trade secrets, punishable by death if they were revealed. And yet, Columbus may even had sailed west in 1485, on a secretive voyage sponsored by Pope Innocent VIII, visiting the island of Antilia.

But, Bartolomeu Dias' voyage of 1487 around the Cape and the subsequent unauthorized and incorrect copying of his maps by the Italian Henricus Martellus blew the lid off of this secrecy. The egregious inaccuracies of the maps have been attributed to Columbus' brother Bartholomew, deliberately showing that no sea route to China from India was possible. Columbus himself took this misinformation to Spain, and persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella that he alone had the knowledge to get to China by a westward passage across the Atlantic. The rest should have been history, except that--and this is not found in Menzies' extensive references--the 19th century American essayist and historian Washington Irving almost single-handedly created the Columbus Day observance out of whole cloth, whitewashing the misdeeds of his hero while fabricating a new-fashioned tradition.

The islands in the western Atlantic marked on the 1428 World Map--the same year Joan of Arc led the French army against the English--which was brought from Italy in that year by the Portuguese regent Dom Pedro, son of João I, were commissioned by Henry the Navigator in 1431 to be rediscovered, explored, and perhaps colonized, sending his admiral Gonzalo Velho Cabral in search of these landfalls. The major island in the group established by Portuguese that same year was named Antilia, modern-day Puerto Rico, the colonists of which were still there when visited by Lisbon navigators in 1447. In fact, Andrea Bianco's 1436 map of the Atlantic also shows the Sargasso Sea, a vast seaweed-choked area in the mid-Atlantic that could only have been mapped by visiting seamen. But who were these mariners?

The four fleets--collectively termed the Sixth Voyage--sent out by Emperor Zhu Di (Yong Le) early in 1421 were commanded by the eunuch Admiral Zheng He, who himself remained in the Asian sphere while his four eunuch sub-admirals, Hong Bao, Zhou Man, Zhou Wen, and Yang Qing, collectively and respectively sailed to South America, Antarctica, Australia, and the Pacific, to the coasts of Africa and both coasts of North America, and into the North Atlantic and the Arctic. These voyages extended over some two-and-a-half years, and of the over one hundred shallow-drafted treasure vessels, warships, and supply junks sent out in 1421 only a handful returned late in 1423, considerably worse for wear. Author Gavin Menzies, himself an experienced naval officer, gives a detailed description of each admiral's expedition, which we won't recount here since the author himself describes an exquisite elaboration.

But no heroes welcome greeted these returning seafarers, as the educated Confucian mandarins had in the interim acceded to domination over a dying and powerless emperor and who had always considered the voyages a scandalous waste of assets. The emperor had already committed vast resources in repairing and adding to the Great Wall that was first built in the 3rd century BC and fallen into disrepair for centuries. He engaged hundreds of thousands of artisans and workers by moving the capital to Beijing and reconstructing the complex begun by the Mongol Kublai Khan into what became the Forbidden City, and by denuding whole forests of hardwoods to build trade ships and grain barges for domestic and foreign use, as well as for the Temple of Heaven and outer buildings within the Forbidden City. All the kings and princes of the rich provinces of India, Africa, and the Middle East had been summoned to the dedication, but European monarchs were considered too backward and unenlightened to invite.

Within two months after the outset of the voyages, disaster struck. The newly built palace in the Forbidden City, completed with no expense spared, was struck by lightning during an awesome thunderstorm and set afire. The emperor's favorite concubine died in the conflagration, sending him into a grief-stricken self-imposed seclusion, exacerbating the effects of his previous strokes leaving the Son of Heaven in ill-health and gravely frail.

Subsequently, upon return of the ships, their official records were seized by the Confucians, and upon Zhu Di's death his son Zhu Gaozhi reinstated the imperious mandarins. and followed in turn by his son Zhu Zhanji, who intensified the line of an agrarian China with a policy of increasing isolation--a position which continued until the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty took control in 1644 and systematically destroyed the archives leaving no certified chronicle of the four separate voyages of exploration, and China itself went into a profound isolationist seclusion.

In 1423 the highly educated and elite mandarins were still smarting from their loss of influence when Zhu Di wrested the kingdom from his nephew Zhu Yunwen twenty years before, aided by the eunuch insurgents. There was no love lost between the Confucian mandarins and the Muslim eunuchs. The lowly eunuchs were often privy to the inner secrets of the palace as well as influence that aroused hostile envy among the mandarins, even while they enjoyed prestige and position under Zhu Yunwen and the previous emperors. So, the details of the otherwise well-documented history of the voyages were scattered but not completely lost, even after the collapse of the Ming Dynasty. Fortuitously, the detailed methods of navigation, the Wu Pei Chi, were among the few records that survived the pogrom.

However, with the survival of some records along with several copies of maps scattered across the civilized world, pieces of the puzzle are just now beginning to take shape. Voyages of trade among the sea¬faring peoples of medieval Africa, India, Indonesia, and the Middle East were themselves not without maps and charts, many gleaned from those of the meticulous Chinese explorers. These are the Catalan atlas of 1376, the Kangnido map of 1420, the Zuane Pizzigano of 1424, the Genoese map of 1457, the Fra Mauro of 1459, the bogus Martellus of 1489, the Alberto Cantino of 1502, the Martin Waldseemüller of 1507, the Piri Reis of 1513, and the Jean Rotz of 1542, among others.

There were also the small colonies of Chinese and Asiatic peoples left abandoned in various ports and islands around the globe, hopeful of rescue by returning countrymen, a deliverance which never came. These voyagers planted seeds, animals, and people wherever they went, and also left artifacts and inscribed stones in evidence of their passing. They, moreover, removed like samples of the places visited, such as fine Aztec porcelains, New World yams, and even the now extinct South American mylodon (depicted on the Piri Reis map).
The rumored presence of such people in the Americas prior to the celebrated voyages of Columbus, not to mention the later ones of Giovanni Verrazano and Amerigo Vespucci, inter alios, might have persuaded Columbus that China was closer than it really was by sailing west across the Atlantic. But, knowing the perfidy of Columbus, it might have merely been another justification for his and his brother's deception with the king and queen of Spain.

The Columbus cult, perhaps initiated early in the 19th Century, denies any previous contact with the Americas by other cultures, or even voyagers, except perhaps for occasional unfortunate Vikings who were somehow blown off course--despite the fact that prevailing winds and currents are in the wrong direction. All the surviving maps--or copies of earlier pre-Columbian drafts--are either considered suspect or outright forgeries. And yet, Ferdinand Magellan made sail around Cape Horn below Tierra del Fuego at the nethermost tip of South America with the foreknowledge that such passage was possible, not to mention the information available to Henry the Navigator early in the 15th century.

The Jean Rotz map of 1542, included in his Boke of Ideography presented to Henry VIII, depicted Australia two centuries before Capt. James Cook discovered it. A copied portion of the now lost 1428 World Map, showing a portion of South America and Antarctica. had been taken from the effects of a mariner, who had previously sailed with Columbus, when the unfortunate sailor's ship was captured by the Ottomans around 1513, and this part was then incorporated into the map of Admiral Piri Reis. The Cantino map of 1502 had unusually correct longi¬tudes of East Africa within some 30 miles accuracy over a thousand miles of coastline, a precision not yet known to the Portuguese mariners, despite the earlier voyages of Vasco da Gama, Pedro Àlvares Cabral, and Diego Dias.

The controversial Vinland map (also called the Yale map), ostensibly from 1420-1440 and depicting high northern latitudes of eastern North America and Greenland, couldn't have been drawn by Norsemen as they had an oral rather than a literary tradition, and so it too was considered suspect. Walter McCrone, the late physical chemist and critic of the map, and personally known to this reviewer, considered it a forgery because of the presence of anatase in the ink. Anatase is one crystalline form of titanium dioxide, first produced commercially around 1920, and now permeating the global environment because of its widespread use in latex paints. (Rutile is the other more naturally prevalent crystalline form of titanium dioxide, often found in beach sand.)
Furthermore, the black ink outline of the Vinland map overlays a yellow line, giving the appearance of antiquity by the "bleeding" of the black ink over time. But, unfortunately, the two ink lines were chemically determined not to be from the same bottle. It's little wonder the critics thought it was a clever forgery.

However, in counterargument, it is also known that cartologists often draw a light colored outline before detailing with a darker ink, and in the instance of the Vinland map there is no such bleeding in evidence with the accompanying text. It seems that the light yellow line itself is what has darkened with age. Moreover, it was also discovered that anatase was occasionally found in inks used in medieval monasteries. So the jury is still out on the Yale map.

But then, according to Menzies, it was Admiral Zhou Wen who had the duty of sailing around Greenland after charting the eastern shores of North America. And, amazingly, the Arctic climate in the early 15th Century was relatively ice-free and temperate enough for such an excursion. But, according to various oceanographers, sealevels have been rising at the rate of two to four millimeters per year, so that over the last 600 years, submerged lands that are from four to eight feet under water today were then above sealevel. This meant that for essentially ice-free Greenland and Arctic regions considerably more glaciation must have existed on the Antarctic continent and Tierra del Fuego, which is what Admirals Zhou Man and especially Hong Bao have noted in their South Pacific and Antarctic sectors. (For the most part Yang Qing remained in the vicinity of the Indian Ocean.)

Moreover, Zhou Wen himself touched on the northern shores of Iceland and then continued northward across the Arctic along the Siberian coast, and through the Bering Strait past Japan to his home port near Beijing. Even in Columbus' own notes from his 1477 voyage it is stated, "Men have come here [to Iceland] from Cathay."
The original Vinland map could only have been detailed by such a voyage during the summer of 1423, for an Atlantic hurricane had decimated his fleet earlier, forcing protracted layovers for repairs. Furthermore, the map shows large areas of land that are today underwater, with particular emphasis on the so-called "Bimini Wall" that Zhou Wen may have had constructed for repair of his ships. And, not many years after a mini-Ice Age descended on the Arctic, curtailing any shipboard navigation into such high latitudes, at least until the most recent years of our own time.

In retrospect, when the Europeans finished plundering the New World, destroying most of its records and precious artifacts in the process, there was meager evidence left for later scholars that the Chinese had ever visited the region. The legend of Quetzalcoatl's return was transferred to Hernando Cortez by the Aztec ruler Montezuma, and later savants suggested Brendan of Clonfert and Nicholas of Lynn among others as the earlier apotheosis of the Aztec numen. But apparently, until now, no one thought of a Chinese treasure armada, with the image of a pale-skinned and bearded Muslim eunuch from across the sea dressed in an oriental robe fashioned like a feathered dragon.

Indeed, the pillaged gold and silver carried back to Europe was squandered in supporting a European vision of empire, for by 1588 the hubristic Spanish Armada financed by what remained of this treasure was itself destroyed.

Menzies remarkably had spent some 15 years researching his material on the Chinese discovery of not just the Americas but of the entire world, and has presented us with a wealth of information, collected and collated from his own travels around the globe. In fact, when the late Zheng He scholar Wei Chuh-Hsien's final book, The Chinese Discovery of America, is published and translated, it should be equally as eye-opening.

1421 is a must read for history buffs.This book is full of modals; "must have", "could've", etc. These are built one on top of the other. This makes the foundation very flimsy. But the reading is entertaining nevertheless.
The incredible true story of the discovery of America before Columbus was even born. Gavin Menzies's extraordinary findings rewrite history.

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was "to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. Their journey would last more than two years and circle the globe.

When they returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships, now considered frivolous, were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Also concealed were how the Chinese colonized America before the Europeans and transplanted to America, Australia, New Zealand and South America the principal economic crops that have fed and clothed the world.

Now, in a landmark historical journey, Gavin Menzies, who spent fifteen years tracing the astonishing voyages of the Chinese fleet, shares the remarkable account of his discoveries and the incontrovertible evidence to support them. His compelling narrative pulls together ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy and the surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and the later European navigators to prove that the Chinese had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years ahead of the Europeans. 1421 describes the artifacts and inscribed stones left behind by the emperor's fleet, the evidence of wrecked junks along its route -- discovered in locations ranging from the middle of the Mississippi River to tributaries of the Amazon -- and the ornate votive offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, in honor of Shao Lin, goddess of the sea.

1421: The Year China Discovered America is the story of a remarkable journey of discovery that rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has been commonly accepted for centuries must now be reconceived due to this classic work of historical detection.

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