A nineteenth-century engraving of the skeleton of a mylodon.
Later I was to find a Chinese book published in 1430 entitled The Illustrated Record of Strange Countries. As its title implies, this book records the strange animals the Chinese found on their travels. A dog-headed creature very similar to that drawn on the Piri Reis map is shown, with a note – the only part of the document that has yet been translated – stating that it was found after travelling for two years west of China.
The Chinese must have looked upon such alien creatures with wonder, and at once would have begun efforts to capture some specimens. When encountering strange and exotic animals, it was their custom to take them back to China to present to the emperor for his zoo.8 A stream of quilins (giraffes) had returned with Zheng He’s captains to astound and delight Zhu Di, and I believe that a number of mylodons were also taken aboard the Chinese junks, two of which did reach China.9 I could imagine the Chinese seamen luring these lumbering, dog-headed creatures out of their caves and onto the giant ships, accompanied by tons of leaves for them to eat.
The Piri Reis map was so accurate both in its depictions of physical features and its descriptions of animals unique to South America that it could only be charting Patagonia. For that reason, I was also certain that the mountains drawn on the western side were the Andes. These mountains, running northwards up the Pacific coast, are not visible from the Atlantic; they are hundreds of miles away from the east coast. The original cartographer must have sailed that Pacific coast long before the first Europeans reached South America or the Pacific, and the fleet that carried him can only have passed through the Strait of Magellan or braved the blizzards, incessant gales and mountainous seas of Cape Horn.
The Falkland Islands on the Piri Reis, compared to a modern map.
Knowing the size of Patagonia, I could accurately determine the scale of the Piri Reis map and fix the latitudes of the land and islands shown on it. Cabo Blanco is at 47°20′S, so the islands shown at the bottom of the Piri Reis must be at 68°43′S – exactly the latitude of the South Shetland Islands. I now knew that the original cartographer had been aboard a ship that had discovered the Antarctic continent and the South Shetland Islands four centuries before the first Europeans reached them. As I was later to discover, these obscure, almost uninhabited islands were of vital importance to the Chinese.
It must have taken thousands of man-hours for the skilled surveyors and navigators to chart such a large area of land and ocean, stretching thousands of miles from Antarctica in the south to the Peruvian Andes in the north. To cover such vast distances, the charting must have been co-ordinated, involving the use of different fleets. Before Europeans reached the South Atlantic, the only nation capable of putting such fleets to sea was China, and the only plausible opportunity was provided by the Chinese treasure fleets during the ‘missing’ two years of the great voyage of 1421–3. Although I was convinced I was right, I had not yet found any first-hand evidence of a Chinese visit to South America. The clearest evidence would come from the surviving wreck of a treasure ship full of early Ming porcelain. Such wrecks were to play a vital part in establishing the presence of the Chinese treasure fleets elsewhere in the world, but finding such a wreck on the coasts of South America is likely to be a lengthy task. The seas are buffeted by incessant storms and strong tides break up and sweep away wreckage and spilled cargoes. The search is in hand, but it is unlikely to yield short-term results.
Meanwhile, I needed an interim solution. For example, did the first Europeans to reach South America find plants or animals unique to China when they landed there, or were plants unique to the Americas seen in China when the first Europeans arrived there? If so, had the Chinese junks carried them home with them? Fortunately, a number of distinguished scholars have worked on this problem for many years.10 I was led to their work as a result of waking at cockcrow on my first morning during a visit to Peru. I had lived in Malaysia and remembered well how the morning call of Asiatic hens – ‘kik-kiri-kee’ – was markedly different from the ‘cock-a-doodle-do’ of their European counterparts. As I lay in bed, I recognized the familiar ‘kik-kiri-kee’ and began to wonder how Asiatic rather than European hens had come to be in Peru.
The domesticated Asiatic cock and hen originated several thousand years ago in the jungles of south-east Asia, in South China, Annam, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia. The strain remains quite distinct from the European hen. When Magellan arrived off Rio (as it is now called), he ‘picked up a great store of chickens … for one fish hook or a knife, they gave me six chickens, fearing even so that they were cheating me’.11 But the chickens Magellan and the Spanish conquistadors found in South America had virtually nothing in common with European ‘dunghill fowl’. They were of four principal, wholly different types. The Malay class were tall and thin – the cocks were able to peck food off a dinner table. They had thin heads, more like a turkey’s than a chicken’s, with a bare throat and a bare strip running down the breast. The Chinese class had stocky, heavy bodies, fluffy feathers, short wings and feathered legs. The cocks had modest tail feathers and very small, short, blunt spurs. They were poor flyers and notably tame. To this day, the silky-feathered melanotic chicken (‘melanotic’ denotes the black feathers, skin, flesh and bones of this strange bird) is found throughout Latin America; I have seen them in Amazonian villages. The fourth type of hen was the Asian frizzle fowl, with feathers that curve back towards the body instead of lying flat. Again, there was nothing remotely resembling this bird in the Mediterranean world of 1500, when frizzle fowl were found all over South America. Perhaps the most striking difference was that the Asiatic hens laid blue-shelled eggs whereas those of European hens were white or cream. Blue eggs are still found all the way from Chile to Mexico.
There were two other significant differences. If the Europeans had brought chickens, then the European name would have been adopted by the Indians of South America. This did not happen. The Arawak of northern South America called melanotic chickens karaka; the Indian name is karaknath. In north-west Mexico, chicken was tori; in Japanese it is nihuatori, meaning ‘yard bird’. The Inca emperors, who were just embarking on a period of imperial expansion in 1421, frequently wore feathers and adopted the names of birds. In their Quechua language, chicken was hualpa, and the name Yupánqui (c. 1438–1493) was adopted; Atahualpa was the formal name of the emperor overthrown by Francisco Pizarro. The Incas therefore had a word for chicken at least forty years before the arrival of the conquistadors.
The Chinese practices of divination using eggs or dripping chicken blood on bark paper before burning the paper, and the belief that a melanotic chicken protects the household from evil spirits, were also found in South America. Like the Chinese, the Amerindians used them for sacrifice, divination and healing the sick.
Asiatic chickens were found the length of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the Americas as far north as Rhode Island. These birds cannot fly and must have been brought by ship. The only non-European ships that could travel such vast distances were Chinese. The spread of Asiatic chickens prior to the European conquest closely correlates with the lands shown on the Piri Reis map – the Amazon and Orinoco deltas in Venezuela, Brazil, Patagonia, Chile and Peru. Even today, in areas of South America where there has been minimal Spanish (or other European) influence, one still finds chickens which lay pale blue eggs and possess other Asiatic characteristics unknown in European birds.12 The conclusion is inescapable: Chinese fleets must have brought chickens to South America.
The frizzle fowl from Aldrovandi’s Ornithologia, 1604.
Since the Asiatic chickens are very different from the Mediterranean chickens and most of the traits that reappear in the flocks of the Amerindians are found in Asia, the obvious conclusion would be that the Amerind chickens were first introduced [to South America] from Asia and not from the Mediterranean …13
When one considers the total data available on the chicken in America, a conclusion for a Spanish or P
ortuguese first introduction of chickens into America is simply counter to all the evidence. The Mediterraneans, as late as 1600, did not have, and did not even know of, the galaxy of chickens present in Amerind hands … If a scholarly and scientific approach to the subject is taken, an approach that pays attention to the data instead of the clichés of the past, then the only possible conclusion is that chickens were introduced from across the Pacific, probably repeatedly, long before the Mediterranean discoveries of America.14
The second line of evidence came from maize, a very unusual plant that originated in the Americas and was unknown in China before Zheng He’s voyages. Just as chickens cannot fly, maize is incapable of self-propagation. Wherever it is found, it has been propagated by man. There is considerable evidence that maize was carried to Asia before Columbus landed in America in 1492.15 For example, within his description of the expedition landing at Limasava in the Philippines in 1520, Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s diarist, noted this: ‘The islanders invited the General [Magellan] into their boats in which were their merchandise, viz. cloves, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, nutmegs and maize.’16 There is no possibility that Pigafetta had misidentified the plant. In his notes in the original Italian, maize is translated as miglio against which Pigafetta had written the Caribbean word, maíz. He knew what maize looked like – it had ‘ears like Indian corn and is shelled off and called lada’ – and not only had he spent months with Magellan in South America on his way to Limasava but several seamen aboard had also served with Columbus in the Caribbean.17 Chinese records state that Zheng He’s admirals brought back ‘extraordinarily large ears of grain’.18 The Chinese were used to rice with ears the size of barley. The only ‘extraordinarily large’ ears compared to rice were those of maize. There is a wealth of further evidence, for the Portuguese also found maize in Indonesia, the Philippines and China, and metates – utensils for grinding maize unique to South America – were found in the hold of a junk, built in 1414, that was recently discovered on the sea-bed at Pandanan in the south-west Philippines where it had sunk in about 1423.
There was now not a scintilla of doubt in my mind that the Chinese fleet had been in South America in 1421 and had surveyed the lands shown on the Piri Reis map a century before Magellan. But they were sailing on this epic voyage to bring the entire world into the Chinese tribute system. Why should they have taken such inordinate trouble to chart this part of inhospitable Patagonia, a land of driving snow and bitter cold occupied only by unsophisticated, naked people with nothing to trade and with little natural wealth save for burberries and fish?
Could the Piri Reis map provide a further clue? At first it seemed only to deepen the mystery, for it showed a series of ‘spokes’ extending from the Patagonian coast and intersecting in a hub – the centre of a compass-rose – in the wastes of the South Atlantic. These spokes are what navigators call ‘portolan lines’, used in portolan navigation, also known as triangulation. Comparing the Piri Reis with a modern map, I identified the prominent points on the Patagonian coast from where each portolan line was drawn. The cartographers must have been aboard seven ships that set sail from Puntas Guzmán and Mercedes on the northern coast, Cabos Curioso and San Francisco in the centre and Punta Norte, Cabos Buen Tempo and Espíritu Santo in the south.
Knowing the scale of the Piri Reis map, I could now readily identify the true location of the centre of the compass-rose. The portolan lines intersected in King George’s Bay in the West Falkland Islands. At the absolute centre of the compass-rose is Mount Adams (2,917 feet), the most conspicuous mountain in the Falklands. Was either Zhou Man or Hong Bao a secret mountaineer at heart? Is that why the ships were ordered to steer towards a mountain peak? For weeks I was baffled by this conundrum, then suddenly the answer came to me. The Chinese needed a star in the southern hemisphere to replace Polaris in the northern, and in the event they selected two: Canopus for latitude and the Southern Cross for navigation.19
Canopus, a yellow-white, super giant star, sits in space three hundred light years from Earth towards the South Pole and pumps out more than a thousand times the power of the sun. The combination of its power and distance makes it the second brightest star in the sky, nearly as bright as Venus, and instantly identifiable because of the colour of its light. Like the Southern Cross, Canopus is in the far south but not directly above the South Pole. To use Canopus for latitude, the Chinese had to determine its precise position by sailing to a point directly underneath the star. The Southern Cross points to the South Pole but, unlike Polaris, it is not directly above the Pole. To be able to use the Southern Cross for accurate navigation, the Chinese also had to locate its position in the sky – its height and longitude. Once again, the only way to calculate the precise position of the Southern Cross was to sail to a position directly beneath it.
The Chinese had been attempting to locate the positions of both the Southern Cross and Canopus for centuries:
In the eighth month of the twelfth year of the Khai-Yuan period [in the eighth century AD] [an expedition was sent to the] south seas to observe Lao Jen [Canopus] at high altitudes and all the stars still further south [Southern Cross] which, though large, brilliant and numerous, had never in former times been named and charted. They were all observed to about 20° from the south [Celestial] Pole [viz. 70°S]. This is the region that the astronomers of old considered was always hidden and invisible below the horizon.20
Only when Canopus and the Southern Cross had been located could new lands in the southern hemisphere be accurately placed on charts. When they reached Mount Adams in the West Falklands the Chinese cartographers were nearly underneath Canopus. They were taking such pains to fix their position so that they could calculate their precise latitude: 52°40′ South. By cross-referencing Canopus to Polaris they could establish Canopus’s height and then use that star to obtain their latitude anywhere in the southern oceans, just as they used Polaris in the northern hemisphere. Given the importance of this location to them, I would expect the Chinese to have erected a carved stone near Mount Adams, and I have asked the governor of the Falklands for his help in organizing a search for it.
Once the latitude of Canopus had been discovered, the fleets of Zhou Man and Hong Bao could have returned independently to China, sailing westwards across the Pacific and eastwards across the southern oceans, along the same line of latitude, directly under Canopus. By doing so, all ships would be conducting surveys from the same latitude. I also came to the conclusion that it would have been logical to survey the world at latitudes where the position of other stars could be precisely determined, for example at 3°40′N, where Polaris disappeared below the horizon. It also seemed logical to expect that other latitudes of particular significance to the Chinese, for example that of their capital city Beijing at 39°53′N, might also have served the same function. As will be seen, my hunches were to prove correct.
The first Chinese ‘anchor point’ was the Falkland Islands, selected because they are not only underneath Canopus but also almost exactly half the world away (179°) from Beijing. At this stage, although the Chinese could not measure longitude they knew the earth was a sphere. Moreover, by using Polaris they could determine the semi-circumference of that sphere (180° × 60 nautical miles) and thus approximate when they were half the world away from Beijing (days sailed multiplied by average speed). If a fleet sailed westwards from this anchor position in the Falklands and found another island south of Australia at 52°40′ South, the cartographers could chart that continent by triangulation as precisely as they had charted Patagonia. Similarly, a fleet sailing eastwards and finding another island south of Africa at 52°40′ South could chart the Indian Ocean.
I pondered how I could track the onward movements of the Chinese fleets from this anchor position. I already knew the dates on which the fleets under Zhou Man and Hong Bao had eventually returned to China and the number of ambassadors each one had brought with them. I soon realized that by using the charts and maps, and noting the locations from whic
h the ambassadors had been collected, I could make a rational deduction about the course each fleet had followed in the intervening period. It was another significant link in the chain of evidence leading me in the wake of the treasure fleets.
Whereas the fleet under the senior admiral, Yang Qing, had remained in the Indian Ocean throughout the duration of the voyage, and returned to China in September 1422 with seventeen envoys from states in East Africa and India, Zhou Man and Hong Bao did not reach China until the autumn of 1423. Zhou Man brought no ambassadors and Hong Bao only one, from Calicut. From that, I deduced that Admiral Zhou Man’s fleet had sailed westwards to chart the Pacific and returned via the Spice Islands. Admiral Hong Bao’s fleet had sailed southwards for Antarctica to measure the Southern Cross and then made its way home eastwards via the southern oceans, Malacca and Calicut. I began the search for traces of their voyages, first of all by tracking Hong Bao across the southern oceans.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 12