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Review Article
How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America
Robert Finlay
| In 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2002), aspires to rewrite world history on a grand scale. He maintains that Gavin Menzies)four Chinese fleets, comprising twenty-five to thirty ships and at least 7,000 persons each, visited every part of the world except Europe between 1421 and 1423. Trained by Zheng He, the famous eunuch-admiral, Chinese captains carried out the orders of Zhu Di (r. 1402–1424), the third Ming emperor, to map coastlines, settle new territories, and establish a global maritime empire. According to Menzies, proof of the passage of the Ming fleets to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Polynesia is overwhelming and indisputable. His "index of supporting evidence" (pp. 429–462) includes thousands of items from the fields of archaeology, cartography, astronomy, and anthropology; his footnotes and bibliography include publications in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic, and Hebrew. |
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Menzies claims that Chinese mariners explored the islands of Cape Verde, the Azores, the Bahamas, and the Falklands; they established colonies in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, California, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island; they introduced horses to the Americas, rice to California, chickens to South America, coffee to Puerto Rico, South American sloths to Australia, sea otters to New Zealand, and maize to the Philippines. In addition, Chinese seamen toured the temples and palaces of the Maya center of Palenque in Mexico, hunted walruses and smelted copper in Greenland, mined for lead and saltpeter in northern Australia, and established trading posts for diamonds along the Amazon and its tributaries. |
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Inasmuch as Menzies believes that he has collected a veritable mountain of evidence, he is not disheartened by skepticism about some of his astonishing assertions. As he told People Magazine (24 February 2003) after 1421 hit the New York Times bestseller list, "[t]here's not one chance in a hundred million that I'm wrong!" He regards his investigation as an ongoing project: a website (www.1421.tv) provides yet more evidence, further revelations will appear in the forthcoming paperback edition, and a team of researchers currently is assisting him in combing medieval Spanish and Portuguese documents for added proof of his contentions. 1421, he informs the reader, will be published in more than sixteen countries, a PBS series is in production, and television rights have been sold around the world. |
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Menzies is contemptuous of professional historians who ignore evidence of Chinese influence in the Americas, "presumably because it contradicts the accepted wisdom on which not a few careers have been based" (p. 232). He explains that he has uncovered information that has eluded many eminent historians of China, even though it was right before their eyes, "only because I knew how to interpret the extraordinary maps and charts that reveal the course and the extent of the voyages of the great Chinese fleets between 1421 and 1423" (pp. 11–12). A former submarine commander in the British Royal Navy, he has sailed in the wake of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and James Cook, hence he recognizes that those mariners, who navigated with copies of Chinese maps in hand, were themselves merely sailing in the backwash of Zheng He's fleets (pp. 9, 12). |
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