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Articles by John Keahey

   February 9, 2003
   '1421' Makes a Compelling Case for Chinese Exploration of New World
   By John Keahey
   © 2003, The Salt Lake Tribune

    Many of us, reared in the Western world and ingrained in Euro-centric culture, customs and traditions, often do not look beyond the conventional western wisdom that Columbus, or earlier Europeans, discovered the New World. We periodically hear reports that Norsemen sailed to the east coast of what is now Canada, and perhaps even to the U.S. eastern seaboard, centuries before the Genoese explorer made landfall on the continent's outer rim in 1492.
    Columbus's legacy is based on well-documented journeys that opened the door to colonization of the New World. This historical record rises above scraps of incomplete records and legends that populate our shadowy past. But a new book, more than a decade in the making, may shatter Westerners' preconceptions of who came first.
    Gavin Menzies, a retired British submarine commander and self-proclaimed "mere amateur" historian, has published 1421: The Year China Discovered America (William Morrow, January 2003). He lays out, in exacting but lively detail, how a massive Chinese fleet -- made up of junks, each with a crew of 1,000 and five times larger than Columbus's tiny ships -- set sail in the waning years of an enlightened Chinese emperor's reign.
    At the time, (the 11th to 13th centuries) China was thirsty for knowledge and printing books 30 years before Gutenberg printed the Bible. "Although Europe was on the eve of the Renaissance that was to transform its culture and scientific knowledge, it lagged far behind China," writes Menzies, who describes Beijing of the time as an "intellectual paradise."
    Menzies maintains that not only did the Chinese junks that set sail in 1421 reach the east coast of Africa, they also sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, its southern tip, 66 years before Portuguese sailor Bartolomeu Dias was the first European to do so. The Chinese, following counter-clockwise currents in the South Atlantic, rounding the Horn of Africa on that continent's west coast and eventually reaching the east coast of the North American continent seven decades before Columbus.
    They didn't stop there, Menzies says. He believes they foraged their way down the east coast of South America, passed through what later became known to Europeans as the Straits of Magellan and up the west coast of South and North America, even entering San Francisco Bay and sailing part way up the Sacramento River, where archaeological evidence points to a Chinese presence. All this happened decades before Europeans Cook, Magellan and Drake made their historic expeditions and took credit for being first, Menzies maintains.
    Ironically, as the ships launched their two-year exploration of the known and unknown world under command of the royal eunuch Zheng He, the reign of emperor Zhu Di was nearing an end, and within three years -- a year after the fleet had returned with only seven ships remaining -- Zhu Di's son and successor ordered all such voyages halted.
    Menzies tells us: "The ships that had made those voyages were left to rot and were never replaced. The logs and records were destroyed and the memory of them expunged so completely over the succeeding decades that they might never have existed. As China turned its back on its glorious maritime and scientific heritage and retreated into a long, self-imposed isolation from the outside world, other nations took up the torch."
    Traditional historians, who acknowledge the existence of this great fleet of exploration, believe Zheng He's junks only made it to the east coast of Africa, leaving the rest of the western world to be discovered by Europeans. Menzies evidence is strong but whether it stands depends on the outcome of continuing debate.
    Menzies contends the Europeans used maps drawn by Venetians who had access to Chinese maps that survived the successor emperor's burning of records. In fact, Menzies says the whole world appeared on charts before Europeans even set sail. He also relates descriptions that some European explorers (Verazzano, Coronado and even Columbus himself) made of Chinese-appearing people discovered in these new lands -- Vancouver Island in present-day British Columbia, several Caribbean islands, the area around present-day Boston and Rhode Island, southern California and a Chinese colony in Peru.
    The author maintains the Chinese sailed up major rivers, such as the Sacramento and the Mississippi, penetrating North America's heartland. He suspects that at several points, they left behind handfuls of colonists who would have been abandoned and forgotten when the new emperor stopped all voyages of exploration. One wonders what would have happened if China's era of exploration had continued and these far-flung colonies, if they truly existed, had been replenished.
    1421 is richly illustrated, and Menzies' documentation is extensive. The case he makes is compelling. Still, his premise is being challenged by traditional historians and some Chinese historians. Whether he is proved correct will have to stand the test of further research. But Menzies has succeeded in triggering a debate and forcing a reconsideration of everything we Westerners have held sacred.
    The book is lively reading. It provides a short course in Medieval Chinese history and shows us how much more advanced Chinese scientists and philosophers were at a time Western Europe was still shaking off the cobwebs of the Dark Ages.