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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A former submarine commander in Britain's Royal Navy, Menzies must enjoy doing battle. The amateur historian's lightly footnoted, heavily speculative re-creation of little-known voyages made by Chinese ships in the early 1400s goes far beyond what most experts in and outside of China are willing to assert and will surely set tongues wagging. According to Menzies's brazen but dull account of the Middle Kingdom's exploits at sea, Magellan, Dias, da Gama, Cabral and Cook only "discovered" lands the Chinese had already visited, and they sailed with maps drawn from Chinese charts. Menzies alleges that the Chinese not only discovered America, but also established colonies here long before Columbus set out to sea. Because China burned the records of its historic expeditions led by Zheng He, the famed eunuch admiral and the focus of this account, Menzies is forced to defend his argument by compiling a tedious package of circumstantial evidence that ranges from reasonable to ridiculous. While the book does contain some compelling claims-for example, that the Chinese were able to calculate longitude long before Western explorers-drawn from Menzies's experiences at sea, his overall credibility is undermined by dubious research methods. In just one instance, when confounded by the derivation of cryptic words on a Venetian map, Menzies first consults an expert at crossword puzzles rather than an etymologist. Such an approach to scholarship, along with a promise of more proof to come in the paperback edition, casts a shadow of doubt over Menzies's discoveries. 32 pages of color illus., 27 maps and diagrams. Book-of-the-Month Club alternate. (On sale Jan. 7) Forecast: Menzies's theory was featured in the New York Times and elsewhere last March after he spoke at the Royal Geographical Society in London (see Book News, Nov. 25, 2002). Controversy surrounding the book should be lively, generating sales. In addition, PBS will air a documentary series in 2004. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
Not every book is a labour of love, but here we have a couple that certainly are. With a dozen well-regarded volumes behind him, Raleigh Trevelyan turned to the great Elizabethan hero because of "a tenuous family connection" as much as anything; whereas Gavin Menzies's first effort has been fuelled by his birth in and enduring fascination with China, and his subsequent career in the Royal Navy, during which he com- manded a nuclear submarine. Trevelyan offers an absorbing investigation into Raleigh's life which, if it has a fault, consists in so great a density of detail that it is sometimes a bit hard to see the wood for the trees: there is so much about the doings of others that Raleigh occasionally disappears from view in the bustle of comings and goings, and we also get rather more than we may wish to know about commercial oil production in Trinidad, a hydro-electric dam in Guyana and the French convict Papillon. Even Lawrence of Arabia's dad appears in a walk-on part. There is no need for these modern reference points because the central character's story is compelling enough. Raleigh's name rings alongside those of Hawkins, Frobisher and Drake because the swaggering exploits of that quartet secured Elizabeth's throne and gave it a lustre that still shines after 500 years. Of the four, Raleigh was the odd man out in many ways. He was less the great sailor than the others (he was chronically seasick for a start), more the maritime entrepreneur, pirating Spanish treasure ships for loot - never set sail without that in mind - questing for other commodities, planting settlements in the New World. He was the one closest to the monarch, their mutual affection so blatant that some thought he was her lover. Trevelyan disagrees, though the business with the cloak "could easily have been true"; and, certainly, the manipulative queen (who was toying with young Essex at the same time) was so possessive that Raleigh thought it prudent to keep his marriage to homely Bess Throckmorton a secret for as long as possible. He had notable literary gifts, including very decent poetry, which Trevelyan quotes extensively (one piece, addressed to Bess, is among "the great love letters from husband to wife"), and William Byrd set some of it to music; while his History of the World outsold Shakespeare when it first came out. His other credentials as renaissance man are also persuasive, for he was a ship designer as well as a privateer, and he dabbled in ways of purifying sea water at the same time as advocating tobacco for its medicinal qualities, especially its relief of headaches. He was, above all perhaps, an enigma, who convinced some people that he was an atheist, whereas the truth was that he simply enjoyed an argument in which he was quite willing to play devil's advocate. He may have been one of Walsingham's agents: he was certainly No 24 in the spymaster's code book, and he had a taste for intrigue that makes this notion very plausible. He was capable of atrocious behaviour in Ireland, but in Guyana he made his men pay the natives for whatever food they requisitioned and at home he advocated higher taxation of the rich in order to benefit the poor. He became an MP but the focus of his life in England, apart from a property he cherished in Sherborne, was Elizabeth's court, where dangerous games were played and where enmities were easily made. Raleigh's particular bete noire was Henry Howard, grandson of Henry VIII's chief commander, who was another unprincipled schemer. Essex, too, had to be watched because there was jealousy for Gloriana's favour at the bottom of a usually bitter rivalry, though the pair were friends for a while after a bonding action at Cadiz, which left Raleigh with a permanent limp and in need of a walking stick. Howard's malice almost cost Raleigh his life when he was accused of cheating James I of some revenues. What did for him in the end, though, was the offence he caused Spain by his various enterprises on land and sea, when it was important to the king that the Spaniards should be wooed for dynastic purposes. Typically, Elizabeth's old charmer swaggered to the block in style, writing his final couplet the night before his execution, smoking a pipe after his last breakfast, testing the axeman's blade with his thumb in what Trevelyan describes as "a superb piece of theatre". One of Raleigh's more discreditable acts had been to ignore the plight of some colonists who disappeared after being settled in Virginia. There is an echo of this in Gavin Menzies's book, a work vastly different from Trevelyan's painstaking re-examination of well- trodden ground, because Menzies has come up with something entirely new. He is proposing nothing less than a scenario in which five Chinese fleets, setting sail in 1421, commissioned by the third Ming emperor, Zhu Di, to "proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas . . . to attract all under heaven to be civilised in Confucian harmony", succeeded in circumnavigating the globe when Europeans were only just beginning to grope their way down the coast of Africa. Furthermore, Menzies reckons that, consequently, the Chinese discovered America decades before Columbus and Australia and New Zealand centuries before Cook. He believes they voyaged to Antarctica, found a method of establishing longi tude many generations before John Harrison perfected his chronometer, and produced charts of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans which the Europeans subsequently made use of themselves. In other words, Columbus never did sail into the completely unknown. Nor did Raleigh. It is a startling claim and it will doubtless be contested by some, though it seems to me that the particular genius of Menzies has been to link most convincingly many bits and pieces of information that have been known by different experts (including the great sinologist Joseph Needham) for a long time but which no one before him has had the wit to put together. This begins with the composition of the fleets - some of the vessels were prodigiously huge, with nine masts and rudders taller than the average European ship was long: the biggest of them were 480 feet from stem to stern, which is longer by some 50 feet than a modern destroyer. Each fleet sailed under the orders of a different admiral and each of these was a eunuch, a prerequisite for high office in the service of the priapic Zhu Di. Between them, they carried 28,000 men, including artisans as well as seamen, and interpreters skilled in 17 different Indian and African languages; also an unspecified number of concubines, who were there to provide colonial breeding stock as much as to ease the hardships of life aboard a junk. The colonists never saw China again, being left (like Raleigh's settlers) to fend for themselves when the battered remnants of the five fleets came home two years later. They returned to a China which had turned away from the outside world in the meantime, following the emperor's death and a natural disaster in the Forbidden City which was taken to indicate divine displeasure with openness. Added to his own high skill in navigation, to his familiarity with Chinese language and culture (as well as with most of the seas Zhu Di's fleets sailed across), and to his industry in pursuing archaeological, botanical and other evidence, is the generous help Menzies seems to have received from academics in this and other countries. Some of their smaller colleagues - the ones who can't abide any poacher on "their" territory - will probably nit-pick at his findings in the hope of discrediting his book. Before they start, these should bear in mind one incontrovertible fact: no man was ever given command of a nuclear submarine without excelling in various forms of precision, among them reading charts, tide tables and other documents. Geoffrey Moorhouse's most recent book is The Pilgrimage of Grace: The Rebellion that Shook Henry VIII's Throne . To order Sir Walter Raleigh for pounds 22, or 1421 for pounds 17, both plus p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-raleigh.1 There is no need for these modern reference points because the central character's story is compelling enough. Raleigh's name rings alongside those of Hawkins, Frobisher and Drake because the swaggering exploits of that quartet secured Elizabeth's throne and gave it a lustre that still shines after 500 years. Of the four, Raleigh was the odd man out in many ways. He was less the great sailor than the others (he was chronically seasick for a start), more the maritime entrepreneur, pirating Spanish treasure ships for loot - never set sail without that in mind - questing for other commodities, planting settlements in the New World. He was the one closest to the monarch, their mutual affection so blatant that some thought he was her lover. [Raleigh Trevelyan] disagrees, though the business with the cloak "could easily have been true"; and, certainly, the manipulative queen (who was toying with young Essex at the same time) was so possessive that Raleigh thought it prudent to keep his marriage to homely Bess Throckmorton a secret for as long as possible. One of Raleigh's more discreditable acts had been to ignore the plight of some colonists who disappeared after being settled in Virginia. There is an echo of this in Gavin Menzies's book, a work vastly different from Trevelyan's painstaking re-examination of well- trodden ground, because [Menzies] has come up with something entirely new. He is proposing nothing less than a scenario in which five Chinese fleets, setting sail in 1421, commissioned by the third Ming emperor, Zhu Di, to "proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas . . . to attract all under heaven to be civilised in Confucian harmony", succeeded in circumnavigating the globe when Europeans were only just beginning to grope their way down the coast of Africa. Furthermore, Menzies reckons that, consequently, the Chinese discovered America decades before Columbus and Australia and New Zealand centuries before Cook. He believes they voyaged to Antarctica, found a method of establishing longi tude many generations before John Harrison perfected his chronometer, and produced charts of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans which the Europeans subsequently made use of themselves. In other words, Columbus never did sail into the completely unknown. Nor did Raleigh. It is a startling claim and it will doubtless be contested by some, though it seems to me that the particular genius of Menzies has been to link most convincingly many bits and pieces of information that have been known by different experts (including the great sinologist Joseph Needham) for a long time but which no one before him has had the wit to put together. - Geoffrey Moorhouse.
Booklist Review
Menzies makes the fascinating argument that the Chinese discovered the Americas a full 70 years before Columbus. Not only did the Chinese discover America first, but they also, according to the author, established a number of subsequently lost colonies in the Caribbean. Furthermore, he asserts that the Chinese circumnavigated the globe, desalinated water, and perfected the art of cartography. In fact, he believes that most of the renowned European explorers actually sailed with maps charted by the Chinese. Though most historical records were destroyed during centuries of turmoil in the Far East, he manages to cobble together some feasible evidence supporting his controversial conclusions. Sure to cause a stir among historians, this questionable tale of adventure on the high seas will be hotly debated in academic circles. --Margaret Flanagan
Library Journal Review
In this bold feat of historical imagination, Menzies asserts that 15th-century Chinese navigators charted the world's oceans, made landfall, and established colonies in North and South America as well as many other places long before the European voyages of "discovery" by Christopher Columbus and other early European explorers. Menzies, a retired British navy commander, amasses a wealth of circumstantial evidence from early maps, folklore, the distribution of flora and fauna, shipwrecks, material artifacts, and so on in support of his thesis that Columbus and his peers actually sailed with maps that showed the New World they were credited with discovering. Admiral Zheng He and his fellow Ming dynasty navigators were far in advance of European navigation at the time and deserve credit, Menzies says, for unsurpassed feats of seamanship that have been lost to history because of the deliberate destruction of the Chinese records after their return home. Whether Menzies's claims have any historical merit is a matter for specialists to debate as his research is reviewed. But fact or fantasy, Menzies has produced an exciting and eminently readable work that both the armchair traveler and the amateur historian are certain to enjoy.-Steven U. Levine, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1421 The Year China Discovered America Chapter One The Emperor's Grand Plan On 2 february 1421, China dwarfed every nation on earth. On that Chinese New Year's Day, kings and envoys from the length and breadth of Asia, Arabia, Africa and the Indian Ocean assembled amid the splendours of Beijing to pay homage to the Emperor Zhu Di, the Son of Heaven. A fleet of leviathan ships, navigating the oceans with pinpoint accuracy, had brought the rulers and their envoys to pay tribute to the emperor and bear witness to the inauguration of his majestic and mysterious walled capital, the Forbidden City. No fewer than twenty-eight heads of state were present, but the Holy Roman Emperor, the Emperor of Byzantium, the Doge of Venice and the kings of England, France, Spain and Portugal were not among them. They had not been invited, for such backward states, lacking trade goods or any worthwhile scientific knowledge, ranked low on the Chinese emperor's scale of priorities. Zhu Di was the fourth son of Zhu Yuanzhang, who had risen to become the first Ming emperor despite his lowly birth as the son of a hired labourer from one of the poorest parts of China. In 1352, eight years before Zhu Di's birth, a terrible flood had struck parts of China. The Yellow River had burst its banks, submerging vast areas of farmland, washing away villages and leaving famine and disease in its wake. The country was still in the throes of a terrible epidemic. The Mongols had ruled China since its conquest in 1279 by the great Kublai Khan, grandson of the greatest warlord of them all, Genghis Khan. But in 1352, plagued by famine and disease and desperately poor as a result of the depredations of their Mongol overlords, the peasants around Guangzhou on the Pearl River delta rose in revolt. Zhu Yuanzhang joined the rebels and rapidly emerged as their leader, rallying soldiers and farmers to his cause. During the next three years the revolt spread throughout China. Over decades of peace, the once ferocious Mongol warriors, the scourge of all Asia, had grown idle and complacent. Riven by internal dissension, they proved no match for the army raised by Zhu Di's father. In 1356, his forces captured Nanjing and cut off corn supplies to the Mongols' northern capital, Ta-tu (Beijing). Zhu Di was eight years old when his father's army entered Ta-tu itself. The last Mongol Emperor of China, Toghon Temur, fled the country, retreating north to the steppe, the Mongol heartland. Zhu Yuanzhang pronounced a new dynasty, the Ming, and proclaimed himself the first emperor, taking the dynastic title Hong Wu. Zhu Di joined the Chinese cavalry and proved himself a brave and skilful officer. At the age of twenty-one he was sent to join the campaign against the Mongol forces still occupying the mountainous south-western province of Yunnan, bordering modern Tibet and Laos, and in 1382 he was ordered to destroy Kun Ming, to the south of the Cloud Mountains, the remaining Mongol stronghold in the province. After the city was taken, the Chinese butchered the adult defenders and castrated those prisoners who had not reached puberty. Thousands of young Mongol boys had their penises and testicles severed. Many perished of shock and disease; the surviving eunuchs were conscripted into the imperial armies or kept as servants or retainers. Eunuchs served as 'palace menials, harem watch dogs and spies' for rulers throughout the ancient world, in Rome, Greece, North Africa and much of Asia, and they had played an important role throughout Chinese history. Surprisingly, they were intensely loyal to the emperors who had authorized their mutilation. There had been eunuchs at the imperial court since at least the eighth century BC and as many as seventy thousand were employed in and around the capital. Only sexless males were permitted to act as personal servants to the emperor and to guard the women of his family and the quarters occupied by his concubines in the 'Great Within', inside the palace doors. Emperors retained thousands of concubines both as a symbol of their power and to ensure a number of male heirs at a time of high infant mortality; guaranteeing the continuity of the dynasty and the worship of ancestors was a vital part of Chinese cultural rites. Non-eunuchs, even relatives of the emperor and his consorts, were barred from the vicinity of the women's quarters on pain of death. The absence of potent males ensured that any children born to the concubines had been sired by the emperor alone. Eunuchs also helped to preserve the aura of sanctity and secrecy that surrounded the imperial throne. While the gods granted a 'Mandate of Heaven' to legitimize the emperor's rule, they could rescind it if he proved guilty of human failings, misgovernment or misconduct. It was forbidden to look upon the emperor: even senior officials kept their eyes downcast in the imperial presence, and when he passed through the streets, screens were erected to shield him from public gaze. Only the 'effeminate, cringing eunuchs', slavishly dependent upon the emperor for their very lives, were considered cowed enough to be silent witnesses to his private foibles and weaknesses. Ma He, one of the boys castrated at Kun Ming, was billeted in the household of Zhu Di, where his name was changed to Zheng He. Many of the Mongols whom Zhu Di and his father expelled had adopted the Muslim faith. Zheng He was a devout Muslim besides being a formidable soldier, and he became Zhu Di's closest adviser. He was a powerful figure, towering above Zhu Di; some accounts say he was over two metres tall and weighed over a hundred kilograms, with 'a stride like a tiger's'. When Zhu Di was elevated to Prince of Yen -- a region centred on Beijing -- and given the new and more important responsibility of guarding China's northern provinces, Zheng He went with him. 1421 The Year China Discovered America . Copyright © by Gavin Menzies. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from 1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
List of Maps and Diagrams | p. 9 |
List of Plates | p. 11 |
Chinese Nomenclature | p. 14 |
Acknowledgements | p. 15 |
Introduction | p. 27 |
I Imperial China | |
1 The Emperor's Grand Plan | p. 43 |
2 A Thunderbolt Strikes | p. 73 |
3 The Fleets Set Sail | p. 87 |
II The Guiding Stars | |
4 Rounding the Cape | p. 109 |
5 The New World | p. 143 |
III The Voyage of Hong Bao | |
6 Voyage to Antarctica and Australia | p. 167 |
IV The Voyage of Zhou Man | |
7 Australia | p. 195 |
8 The Barrier Reef and the Spice Islands | p. 215 |
9 The First Colony in the Americas | p. 235 |
10 Colonies in Central America | p. 255 |
V The Voyage of Zhou Wen | |
11 Satan's Island | p. 279 |
12 The Treasure Fleet Runs Aground | p. 305 |
13 Settlement in North America | p. 321 |
14 Expedition to the North Pole | p. 341 |
VI The Voyage of Yang Qing | |
15 Solving the Riddle | p. 361 |
VII Portugal Inherits the Crown | |
16 Where the Earth End | p. 381 |
17 Colonizing the New World | p. 401 |
18 On the Shoulders of Giants | p. 419 |
Epilogue: The Chinese Legacy | p. 439 |
Postscript | p. 457 |
Appendices | |
1 Chinese Circumnavigation of the World 1421-3: Synopsis of Evidence | p. 493 |
2 The Determination of Longitude | p. 597 |
Notes | p. 609 |
Index | p. 631 |