Locating the Southern Cross. The darker shaded portion is what is shown on the Piri Reis; the light areas are what is shown on modern Admiralty charts.
I could only shake my head in wonder at the skill and sophistication of these Chinese mariners of so many centuries ago. The Chinese astronomers’ determination of the positions of Canopus and the Southern Cross in the sky was a pivotal moment in the history of man’s knowledge of the globe. Because they knew the circumference of the earth, they could now calculate the true position of the South Pole. By observing the difference between the true bearing shown by the Southern Cross and that shown by their magnetic compasses, they could determine the position of the Magnetic South Pole and therefore make the necessary corrections to their compasses. In 1421–3, the stars of the Southern Cross and Canopus could be observed as far as 28°N – the latitude of the Canary Islands – where Polaris was also clearly visible.16 A cross-reference to check latitudes could be obtained by comparing the latitudes derived from Canopus and Polaris. The Wu Pei Chi confirms that this was indeed a practice of Chinese navigators, whereas the Portuguese did not adopt this method of calculating latitude for another fifty years.
The Chinese could now steer a completely accurate course in the southern as well as the northern hemisphere and determine exact latitudes. Only the problem of longitude remained to be solved. Once true latitudes in the southern hemisphere could be calculated, Chinese charts could be drawn in a readily comprehensible form – not as a table or as a long strip of sailing directions such as the Wu Pei Chi, but as a recognizable geometric depiction. A note appended to the Piri Reis map confirms this change: ‘[This map was] drawn … from about twenty charts and mappae mundi … which shows the countries of Sint, Hint, and Cin [China] geometrically drawn … By reducing all these maps to one scale, this final form was arrived at.’17
To have found a way of accurately charting the whole world in a recognizable form must have been an incredibly exciting, triumphant moment for the Chinese astronomers, navigators and cartographers, just as it was for the Europeans when they made the same discoveries in 1473. The Chinese fleets could now go on to survey the world, using the latitude of Canopus as a baseline. They had accomplished one of the prime tasks their emperor had set them. They could now brave the biting cold of the air to enjoy a hot bath in the lagoon inside Deception Island, gather up penguins for food and cut off blocks of ice for fresh water. This would have been the moment to enjoy a cask of rice wine and feast on some of the pigs, before setting sail once again to explore the Antarctic mainland further south.
As the junks sailed through the strait separating the South Shetlands from the Antarctic peninsula, the islands would still have been visible thirty-five miles away to the north-west, with the mainland twenty miles to the south. At that range they would have seen only mountains, but they located them, with just a very small error. Their charting of mainland Antarctica was equally accurate. I was able to identify sixty-three prominent features of the Antarctic mainland on the Piri Reis map. My detailed working drawings will appear on the website. Only one thing seemed out of place – a strange serpent shown resting on the ice of Elephant Island. But the leopard seal resembles a serpent as it slithers across the ice, and, like serpents, leopard seals have fangs. East of Elephant Island, the Weddell Sea was shown as solid ice, and it is indeed ice-bound throughout the year. It is remarkably accurate cartography.
There was no longer the slightest shred of doubt in my mind. There was no need to summon ancient Egyptians or space aliens to explain how the Piri Reis map could have depicted Antarctica with such accuracy four hundred years before the first Europeans arrived there. The information came from surveyors aboard Admiral Hong Bao’s fleet in 1422, who had been charting the precise position of the Southern Cross.
The Piri Reis map also showed another, smaller compass-rose south-east of the Falklands and north-east of the South Shetlands. The centre of this secondary rose corresponds to Bird Island, the north-west island of South Georgia. As its name implies, Bird Island is populated by millions of sea-birds using it as a launching platform for feeding forays into the plankton- and fish-rich Antarctic Ocean. It is a tiny island, two miles long and nowhere more than half a mile wide, fringed by sheer one-thousand-foot cliffs on its north side but with sandy beaches to the south.
The compass-rose showed that Bird Island was used as a pivotal point by the Chinese cartographers. Having established the course and distances the fleet had sailed from the South Shetlands and the Falklands to Bird Island, they could reduce longitude errors by cross-referencing the three. I applied the same scale as I had worked out for measuring Patagonia and discovered that the distance shown on the Piri Reis map from Deception Island in the Antarctic to Bird Island was correct. The only mistake was that both the South Shetlands and South Georgia were shown further east than they should be. Once again, the circumpolar current accounted for the longitudinal error.
After he had reached and charted Bird Island, Admiral Hong Bao would have had no choice but to continue eastwards, sailing beneath Canopus, for around these latitudes, as the name implies, the Roaring Forties would have driven his ships before the wind to the east. These are winds to test the courage of the bravest sailor. They howl over towering seas, great walls of green water capped with foam, hurling spume through the air. Seamen would have worked frozen and soaked to the skin and shouted themselves hoarse in a vain attempt to be heard amid the shrieking of the wind through the rigging, the creaks and groans of timbers as the hull flexed and twisted in a swell like none other on earth, and the roar and hiss of waves breaking over the bows and foaming away through the scuppers. The prow would have dragged itself free of one giant wave only to bury itself immediately in the next. There would have been little respite for the men below decks, their clothes permanently sodden and the pitching and heaving of the ship so severe that sleep would have been all but impossible.
Driven eastwards by the relentless winds, Admiral Hong Bao would not have anchored until he next found land along 52°40′S, enabling him to conduct another detailed cartographic survey, just as he had in South America. But travelling eastwards at this latitude there is no substantial landmass, only a few scattered islands. At last, after a voyage of some five thousand miles across the southern oceans, all the time with the brilliant yellow-white Canopus directly above him, the increasing numbers of sea-birds – albatross, terns, skua and petrels – would have alerted him to the fact that land was nearby, and at last his look-outs would have spotted the volcanic Mawson’s Peak on Heard Island silhouetted above a group of smaller islands just fifteen miles to the south. Now he could begin a survey to establish another ‘anchor’ position for his cartographers.
Heard Island would have seemed a far from inviting prospect to Hong Bao and his men. It is heavily glaciated and much of the coastline is covered by ice cliffs. There are a few isolated patches of tussock grass, moss and lichen, but 80 per cent of the island is permanently ice-bound. However, a group of somewhat less forbidding islands, the Kerguelens – named after the Frenchman Le Comte Yves de Kerguelen-Tremarec, who is credited with discovering them on 12 February 1772 – lies three hundred miles to the north. The driving winds in that region mean that the Kerguelens can most readily be approached by square-rigged ships from the west – from South America, precisely the direction from which Hong Bao’s fleet was sailing.
I found some independent evidence18 that Hong Bao’s fleet had reached the islands: the Dictionary of Ming Biography records, ‘Some of the ships reached as far as a place called Habuer which may be identified as Kerguelen Island in the Antarctic Ocean.’19 The island of Ha-bu-er is also shown on the Chinese Mao Kun chart, part of the Wu Pei Chi, compiled around 1422,20 alongside a note stating that ‘storms prevented the fleet sailing further south’. Hong Bao had found more new lands.
Dominated by the six-thousand-foot Mount Ross, the main island of Kerguelen is sufficiently barren to have been described as ‘Desolation Islan
d’ by Captain Cook. Rain, sleet or snow falls on three hundred days a year and 30 per cent of the island is permanently ice-covered, but the coasts are rich in penguins and elephant seals, and Kerguelen cabbages, very valuable plants for seamen, grow among the tussock grass and moss. A relative of our own cabbage, Kerguelen cabbages are rich in vitamin C and were much harvested and eaten by whalers and sealers in the following centuries to prevent scurvy. Hong Bao’s crew would almost certainly have been suffering from scurvy after their marathon voyage across the southern oceans and would have gathered as many cabbages as possible, but Kerguelen’s sour and barren soil did not support anywhere near enough of the plants to feed the thousands of men carried by the fleet. The search for fresh supplies would now have been becoming urgent.
The revelation that the Chinese had discovered Ha-bu-er/Kerguelen Island filled me with excitement, for after leaving the island Hong Bao’s ships could have sailed in only one direction. As the Mao Kun says, the Roaring Forties would have prevented them from sailing further south, and they would also have stopped them from going north or retracing their route westwards. Instead, the Chinese junks would have been propelled eastwards before mountainous waves along a sea-corridor that led straight to the south-west coast of Australia. I had no doubt that Hong Bao must have reached Australia, so I returned to the British Library to search for a chart of the continent that had been surveyed and drawn before the first Europeans discovered it.
Hong Bao’s journey to Australia.
Australia is not depicted on the Piri Reis map, but it is shown on another very early chart, held by the British Library. It was drawn by Jean Rotz, appointed ‘Hydrographer to the King’ by Henry VIII of England, and was included in the Boke of Idrography Rotz presented to the king in 1542, two centuries before Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia. Rotz came from the Dieppe School of Cartography, celebrated throughout Europe for the clarity and accuracy of the maps and charts they produced. He was the leading mapmaker of his day, renowned for the meticulousness with which he depicted new lands. He never invented or fudged; what is shown on his charts is exactly what he had seen on older charts.
It is commonly accepted21 that Rotz, and indeed the other Dieppe cartographers of his day, copied much older Portuguese charts. The styles of the Piri Reis and Jean Rotz charts are very similar, and both use Portuguese names to describe the newly discovered lands. The Rotz chart shows Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam and China all the way up to modern Hong Kong, and the whole coast is extremely well charted. The Persian Gulf, India and south-east Asia are also instantly recognizable. The original chart can only have been drawn by someone with intimate knowledge of the coastlines of the Indian Ocean, China and Indochina. That at once ruled out the Portuguese, for although the Rotz chart was made after Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world, neither Magellan nor the Portuguese explorers who followed him spent long enough on the Chinese coast to chart it with such compelling accuracy. Their target was the Spice Islands; they were making for the Moluccas far further south. If the original cartographer was not Portuguese, he in turn must have copied an earlier original.
Despite his accurate depiction of the coasts of China, Asia, India and Africa, many historians have failed to identify a vast new landmass Rotz showed south of the equator. It consists of two islands, ‘Little Java’ south of Sumatra and ‘Greater Java’, a huge continent stretching away from near the equator towards the South Pole. At its northern end, this continent has a protruding spit resembling Cape York, the northernmost tip of Australia. The north-east part of this southern continent also resembles the north-east Australian coast, but the land shown on the Rotz chart stretches far further to the south-east than Australia actually does.
The theories of Ptolemy – the astronomer, mathematician and geographer who lived in Alexandria in Egypt c. AD 87–150 – had been rediscovered in the late Middle Ages. Ptolemy’s belief in the symmetry of the stars and the planets had led him to advance a theory in his book Geographia that a substantial southern landmass must exist to ‘balance’ the continents of Europe and Asia in the northern hemisphere. My first assumption was that when drawing the land in the far south the original cartographer of the Rotz chart had based it not on observation but on Ptolemy’s forecast, but this did not square with Rotz’s reputation for precision. For the moment I had to set that puzzle aside and concentrate my attention on the south-west coast of ‘Greater Java’, which was depicted with considerably more accuracy. The shape of the coast accords with Hong Bao’s fleet having made a landfall near modern Bunbury, a hundred miles to the south of Perth in Western Australia. The prevailing wind and current would then have driven them up the coast to an anchor point in the estuary of the Swan River that separates modern Perth and Fremantle, shown as a deep indentation on the Rotz chart.
The Kerguelen cabbages they had collected would have been of only modest help in staving off scurvy among the crew of the fleet, but in south-west Australia they would have found plentiful supplies of vitamin C in the berries that abound in the area. Blue fairy penguins and manna crabs were also there for the taking, the quokkas (small wallabies) were slow, timid and easy prey, and the jarrah, marri and karri trees would have provided plenty of hardwood for repairing their junks. Although the Rotz chart also shows the eastern and northern coasts of the Australian continent with great fidelity, the west coast is drawn no further south than Bunbury, where it ends abruptly. The most plausible reason for this curtailment of the survey, I would argue, is that the junk despatched by Admiral Hong Bao to chart the south coast of Australia foundered off Warrnambool in modern Victoria, south-east Australia, where a wreck was indeed discovered 166 years ago that could well have been a ship from Hong Bao’s fleet.
In 1836, three men hunting seals sailed into the muddy Hopkins River and continued westwards down the small estuaries and lagoons of that coast. Where the Merri River joins the sea, they came across the wreck of a very old ship known from that day to this as the ‘Mahogany Ship’ because of the timber used in its construction. Seven years later, Captain Mills, a local harbour master, inspected the wreck on behalf of the government. He was astonished at the hardness of the wood; when he tried to cut a piece, his knife was useless, ‘like glancing off iron’.22 European ships were not then built of mahogany – the contemporary name used for any of a variety of reddish-brown hardwood trees – for there were no such trees in Europe, but Chinese ships were built of teak, a reddish-brown hardwood from the forests of Annam. Captain Mills was also baffled by the ship’s origins: ‘She struck me as a vessel of a model altogether unfamiliar and at variance in some respects with the rules of shipbuilding as far as we know them … As regards to the nationality of the wreck, I do not profess to be a judge … I should say the wreck in question is connected with neither [Spanish or Portuguese] build.’23
Twenty years later, an Australian woman, Mrs Manifold, examined the wreck, one of a further twenty-five people to record their impressions of it. She was impressed by the internal bulkheads, ‘stout and strong’.24 I am confident that this is probably a missing ship from Hong Bao’s fleet.25 The Aboriginal Yangery tribe, who then lived on the mainland close to the wreck-site of the ship, have a legend that ‘yellow men’ long ago settled among them.26 Since then many observers have commented on the distinctive colour and facial characteristics of Aborigines who come from this small area of southern Australia. Pending carbon-dating of the material to establish the date of the wreck, at the very least it is arguable that sailors aboard the ship detached by Admiral Hong Bao to chart the south Australian coast were shipwrecked, and that some of the men and their concubines managed to reach the shore and settled among the Aborigines. Professor Wei Chuh-Hsien (Wei Chu Xian) goes further, believing that the men wrecked at Warrnambool rode on horseback up the valleys of the Murray, Darling and Murrambidgee Rivers to what is now Cooktown, leaving traces of their journey along the route.27 Professor Wei’s theory seems to be corroborated by Toscanelli’s map of 1474 which shows the rive
rs explored by the Chinese cavalry.
By March 1423, the Chinese fleets had been at sea for two years and had sailed the nethermost reaches of the oceans. Admirals Hong Bao and Zhou Man had accomplished the major part of their mission – locating Canopus and the Southern Cross and going on to chart the southern hemisphere – but one aspect of the voyage had not gone according to plan. After leaving the Indian Ocean, the admirals had expected to greet foreign potentates and present them with fine silks and porcelains, bringing their countries into China’s tribute system. Yet the people they had met along the route were unused to trade and appeared to have no kings. The Bantu in South Africa, Aborigines in Australia and naked men in Patagonia had no use for silk or porcelain, and places such as the Antarctic and Cape Verde Islands were uninhabited. Life in the lands the Chinese had discovered was far more primitive than they had expected, and as a consequence the holds of their surviving ships must still have been full of their ‘treasure’ of porcelain and silks. But as he set sail from the west coast of Australia, Hong Bao would have known that he still had the opportunity to trade his goods before making for home, for the Spice Islands and the great trading port of Malacca were well within his reach.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 14