1421: The Year China Discovered the World

1421: The Year China Discovered the World is a book written by retired submarine commander and amateur historian Gavin Menzies positing that explored the world before s. It was first published in 2002 in Great Britain and was published in the United States under the title 1421: The Year China Discovered America. It has become the focus of much controversy and criticism, and has been translated into several languages other than .

Synopsis

Menzies states in the introduction that the book is an attempt to answer the following question:

''On some early European world maps, it appears that someone had charted and surveyed lands supposedly unknown to the Europeans. Who could have charted and surveyed these lands before they were "discovered"?''

Menzies concludes that only China had the time, money, manpower and leadership to send such expeditions. The book then sets out to prove that the Chinese visited these unknown lands. Menzies claims that from 1421 to 1423, during the Ming Dynasty of China, ships in the fleet of Emperor and Admiral Zheng He and commanded by the Chinese captains Zhou Wen , Zhou Man , Yang Qing and Hong Bao travelled to many parts of the world that were unknown to Europeans at that time. Menzies produces what he calls "indisputable evidence" that the Chinese discovered Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, Antarctica, the Northeast Passage, circumnavigated Greenland, made attempts to reach both the and South Poles, and circumnavigated the world before Ferdinand Magellan. Menzies puts this forward as the "1421 hypothesis".



Menzies claims that knowledge of these discoveries was subsequently lost because the bureaucrats of the Imperial court feared that the costs of further voyages would ruin the Chinese economy. According to Menzies, when Zhu Di died in 1424 the new Hongxi Emperor forbade further expeditions, and the Mandarins hid or destroyed the records of previous exploration to discourage further voyages.

Menzies discusses the first European attempts to colonize the New World and identifies the maps he used as evidence for his theories.

The 1421 hypothesis is moderately popular among the general public, but has been dismissed by and professional historians. Menzies has been criticized for his "reckless manner of dealing with evidence" that led him to propose hypotheses "without a shred of proof".

Method

The hypothesis is based on Menzies' unconventional interpretations of evidence from shipwrecks, old Chinese and European maps, a translation of an inscription set up by Zheng He, Chinese literature that survives from the time, DNA evidence, and accounts written by navigators such as Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. The hypothesis also includes claims that allegedly unexplained structures such as the and the Bimini Road were constructed by Zheng He's men.

Menzies bases his book on the accepted history of the voyages of Zheng He who took a large group of treasure ships on a series of voyages between 1405 and 1433 ranging over most of the Indian Ocean, including trips to the Red Sea and East Africa. There is an unproved speculation that on one of these voyages his ships may have rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Atlantic Ocean. This is derived from the account given in the Fra Mauro map of reports from junks from India in around 1420 which completed a 4000 mile trip round the cape. Several other maps show the approximate shape of southern Africa well before it was rounded by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488.

Beyond this the evidence in the book changes character. Menzies continues to use the appearance of modern scholarship - footnotes, academic references and promises of what will appear on his website - without the scientific rigour of proof. When he gets to the central part of his thesis: the claim that the fleet divided in the Southern Atlantic into three parts under separate admirals, he offers no evidence of any sort that this happened. The names of the admirals and their courses are simply asserted. From here on his reasoning is entirely presumptive. His logic appears to follow the reasoning that if something could be explained by a Chinese visit, it happened during this set of voyages. The entertaining nature of the narrative alone carries the story forward.

Maps

''1421'' refers to several maps:
* The Cantino planisphere
* The Kangnido map
* The Fra Mauro map
* The Pizzigano map
* The Piri Reis map
* The Jean Rotz map
* The Johannes Sch?ner globe
* The Vinland map
* The De Virga world map
* The Waldseemüller map
* The ''Wu Pei Chi map''

Criticism

Despite significant book sales, Menzies' views in the 1421 hypothesis are widely dismissed by and professional historians. Menzies cannot read Chinese, so the book lacks any citation of Chinese sources. There are numerous mistakes in the book and most "evidence" could not be pinpointed to peer-reviewed articles.

Menzies' methodology has been criticised on many grounds. Robert Finlay writes:

The 1421 hypothesis is based on some documents of debatable provenance and on novel interpretations of already accepted documents as well as uncategorized archaeological findings.

Some critics focus their skepticism on the conspicuous absence of an explanation of why these Chinese fleets seemed to touch every coastline of the world except that of Europe. The absence of any European records corroborating such an exploration is glaringly absent. Such a record, if it existed, would certainly have been handed down.

While it represents a minor part of Menzies' argument, some critics also maintain that the linguistic evidence cited by Menzies is highly questionable. It is inevitable that similarities between words taken from any pair of languages will exist-- even if only by pure chance. Thus, the short lists provided by Menzies are considered by some to represent unsatisfactory evidence. Furthermore, none of the alleged Chinese words listed by Menzies as similar to words of the same meaning in the Squamish language of British Columbia are actual Chinese words. Similarly, the presence of Chinese-speaking people in various locations in the Americas could be explained by immigration after Columbus, yet Menzies cites no evidence that these communities existed prior to Columbus.

Menzies' critics note that throughout the book he displays a lack of chronological control e.g. p138 with a story of a map dated to 120 years before 1528; Menzies dates the map to 1428 not 1408. Critics also claim that many true but irrelevant facts are included in the argument, presumably to confuse the reader. In other cases, they say supposed relevant facts are due to mistranscriptions.

Another criticism is that Menzies did not consult the most obvious source of information on the Zheng He voyages, namely the Chinese records from the period themselves. Menzies asserts that most Chinese documents relating to the travels of Zheng He were destroyed by the same Mandarins responsible for the closing of China's borders in the years following 1421. While it can be supposed that most of the records have been destroyed, other records remain in extensive form, including the account by Ma Huan published in 1433 and other information in the Ming dynastic histories. These records have even served as the basis for previous historical accounts of the Zheng He voyages, such as that by Louise Levathes.

Some critics have also questioned whether Menzies has the nautical knowledge he claims. Some feel that his unsubstantiated claim to have actually sailed the same seas is suspect, particularly while commanding . Menzies and his publisher have also been criticized for misrepresenting his background as an expert on China.

Menzies makes another argument both in his book and also in a PBS program based on similarities between appearance of Native Americans and Chinese. Menzies claims that Columbus believed until he died that he had reached China because he saw Chinese people in the New World and not because he thought the globe was much smaller than it actually was. Menzies uses this statement to claim that Columbus saw the previously settled Chinese "colonizers" from Zheng He's voyage. Columbus actually believed he had reached India and he thought the people he saw were Indians.

An additional problem posed by the theory of Chinese-Native American contact is that of the lack of Native American immunity to Eurasian diseases. According to Jared Diamond's ''Guns, Germs, and Steel,'' advanced agricultural societies living in populations with livestock carry and develop immunities to diseases not found in the populations of the New World, where there were fewer domesticated animals. There are no indications of any die-out consistent with Eurasian-American contact prior to Columbus's landing. Should the Native Americans have been exposed to such a catastrophe prior to 1492, they would have been prepared for it with immunities and not suffered such hideous losses.

Australia

Menzies cites several stone structures in and around Sydney and Newcastle as evidence of pre-European contact with Australia by the Chinese. On page 203 of his book, Menzies writes of the 'Chinese' ruins in Bittangabee Bay. However significant research on this site has been conducted by Michael Pearson, former Historian for the which has identified the ruins as having been built in the early 1840s as a store house by the Imlay brothers, early European inhabitants, who had whaling and pastoral interests in the area. On page 220 there is the claim that "A beautiful carved stone head of the goddess Ma Tsu...is now in the Kedumba Nature Museum in Katoomba." In fact no such museum currently exists. There once was a curio stand in Katoomba called "Kedumba Nature Display" but it closed down in the 1980s.

Later on in the book, Menzies recruits "a local researcher", Rex Gilroy, for his valuable discovery of a Chinese pyramid in Queensland: the Gympie Pyramid. Menzies claims that the Gympie pyramid is "the most direct and persuasive evidence of the Chinese visits to Australia". However, this is the same Rex Gilroy who at one time ran the "Kedumba Museum" and purportedly found the Chinese carved goddess Ma Tsu from the Chinese Fleets, a connection which Menzies fails to mention. The Gympie Pyramid has been researched independently and found to be part of a retaining wall built by an Italian farmer to stop erosion on a natural mesa on his property.