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Europe's age of exploration followed the footsteps of the Chinese

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Jan 19, 2003, Page 18

Publication Notes: 1421: The Year China Discovered the World By Gavin Menzies 520 pages Bantam

What Gavin Menzies claims in this book is that between 1421 and 1423 Chinese mariners not only sailed round the world but landed in America, Australia and New Zealand, and even made their way to both the Arctic and Antarctic.

Forget about Columbus, Magellan and Cook, he's saying. Historians have got it wrong all along. The first voyagers to "discover" just about everywhere were actually the Chinese.

Menzies is no professional historian. Instead, he is a retired British naval officer with a bee in his bonnet. He has pursued his idea -- hunch, theory, piece of wishful thinking, call it what you will -- round the world. This book contains the fruit of his labors.

He seems to be a man possessed by a demon that will not let him rest. All historians agree that a Chinese fleet under its eunuch admiral Zheng He set off in 1421 to tour the lands of the barbarians and exact tribute for the Son of Heaven. It had previously been agreed that they went to areas such as the Arabian peninsula, East Africa and Indonesia, all places with which China had trading links. But Menzies claims they went to the Caribbean as well, and in those days that involved sailing round the southern tip of Africa. This alone would have had them going twice as far as had previously been assumed.

Menzies first thought the Chinese must have been to the West Indies when he saw a Venetian map dated 1424 on which were marked two Caribbean islands, more or less correctly drawn. But no European had ever recorded having gone to these islands -- this was, after all, two generations before Columbus. So where did the map-maker get his information? Only one country had the naval technology to enable its mariners to sail that far, Menzies asserts -- China.

The cartographer must therefore have got his information about these two islands from Chinese maps.

By now Menzies has got the bit between his teeth. If the Chinese could sail to the Caribbean, where couldn't they go? They must have gone on to the North American mainland at least. But what about Australia, and New Zealand?

And, to cap it all, why not the North Pole as well, and perhaps even the Antarctic? With regard to the north, at least, the argument is more than guesswork -- Columbus himself, after all, wrote in the margin of a map showing Iceland "Men have come hither from Cathay [China] in the Orient."

In the face of claims such as these, you can do nothing but ask to see the evidence. Unfortunately the Chinese authorities destroyed all records relating to the voyages, Menzies sadly relates. This is itself astonishing, as no people on earth kept records as assiduously as the Chinese. Well, says Menzies, society was in turmoil, there was a change of emperor, and the new one didn't approve of expensive voyages, so he ordered the fleet to be left to rot and all records of its discoveries torched.

So, what about the rest of the evidence? Of course the book contains plenty of supporting material, though most if it is rather vague. Among the important areas are European maps detailing lands the Europeans hadn't in fact visited, plants and animals supposedly taken by the Chinese from one continent to another, local legends (eg among the Australian Aborigines) and Chinese or Asiatic peoples found in the New World by the first European explorers. (DNA tests will, it is hoped, soon throw more light on this last item).

An interesting feature of the history of this publication is that professional historians have so far been notably slow to come forward with their judgments. What would be marvelous would be to read a review of this book by, say, Jonathan Spence. But few reviews have so far appeared.

The whole Western scholarly enterprise has united in the view that it was the European powers in their Age of Exploration who first charted the globe's major waterways and mapped the continents. Columbus, an Italian navigator in the service of Spain, "discovered" America in 1492, one ship in the fleet of Magellan, a Portuguese navigator also in the service of Spain, was the first vessel to circumnavigate the world in 1522, Cook, a British captain, visited eastern Australia and circumnavigated New Zealand in the 18th century, the North Pole wasn't reached until the early 20th century, and so on.

No, cries Menzies. Not only did the Chinese go to some of these places earlier -- they went to them all! And they probably went to them in the space of a mere three years into the bargain.

No layman is in a position to offer an assessment of such claims. Even so, it has to be said that the whole theory appears at best highly speculative.

The publishers claim that Menzies gave a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London in March 2002, prior to this book's publication, and that his views were respectfully received. The truth appears to be, however, that he merely hired a room on the society's premises and invited an audience.

Whatever else Menzies is, he is certainly not an insider.

There's a touch of conspiracy theory to this book as well. At one point Menzies says that the great European explorers knew that they were sailing where others had already gone because they were using their maps. The famed European dominance of world exploration, in other words, was something of a ruse.

There is a current fashion for claiming that all history is a fabrication of those in power. According to this belief, the idea that Europeans discovered the rest of the world was successfully promulgated during the period of European political domination. If one day China comes to dominate the world, then here is a theory of their having done all the discovering lying conveniently to hand. If Menzies' theory is substantiated -- and even, perhaps, if it isn't -- it will prove very useful to some people.

The universal verdict on this book is likely to be that the author may indeed be onto something, but for the time being his case must be judged as not only "not proven" but also not yet comprehensively presented. In the meantime, new evidence supporting his claims will be posted online at http://www.1421.tv.
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