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

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).