The Rotz chart depicts western Australia, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, Indochina and the west coast of Borneo with considerable accuracy. This suggests that, having sailed north-westwards from Perth, the remainder of the fleet under Hong Bao circumnavigated Sumatra, berthed at Malacca, one of the prime trading ports in the Indian Ocean, and then returned home through the South China Sea, sailing along the west coast of Borneo – the east coast is not charted – and to the west of the Philippines before eventually arriving home on 22 October 1423.
Admiral Hong Bao’s fleet had been the first voyagers ever to sail through the Strait of Magellan. They had discovered the Antarctic continent and reached southern Australia over two centuries before Abel Tasman (1603–c. 1659), who discovered the island of Tasmania that bears his name. Taken in isolation, Hong Bao’s voyage would have been more than worthy of modern commemoration. He had made one of the epic journeys in the history of mankind’s exploration of the planet and his name deserves to be remembered and celebrated. But that was not the end of the Chinese achievements. As Hong Bao prepared to return home in triumph, another Chinese fleet under Admiral Zhou Man was also sailing along southern latitudes making for Australia from the opposite direction, crossing the Pacific a century before Magellan.
IV
The Voyage of Zhou Man
7
AUSTRALIA
THE DESIGNATED TASK of Zhou Man was to survey the world west of South America; like Admiral Hong Bao, who had sailed eastwards, Zhou Man would have needed ‘anchor’ reference points at 52°40′S as he crossed the oceans beneath Canopus. But as his fleet entered the Pacific, the square-rigged junks would have met the cold Humboldt current and been swept northwards up the coast of what is now Chile. Magellan, Carteret, Bougainville and countless other explorers following in the wake of the Chinese had the same experience. The depiction of the Andes on the Piri Reis map1 gives clear evidence that this had also happened to Zhou Man’s fleet, but I did not yet know how far north the Chinese had travelled and whether they had reached Peru or met the Incas, one of the great civilizations of pre-Columbian South America.
For once, there was a helpful Chinese document that had escaped destruction by the mandarins. Dr Wang Tao of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London told me of a novel about Zheng He’s voyages written in 1597, the Hsi-Yang-Chi (Xi Yang Ji). It became hugely popular in China after its publication, but is now so rare that the copy held by the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies is the only one in the world. Although it was written the best part of two centuries after the voyages it describes, and most of the book is taken up with fanciful adventures, the author did the modern researcher a valuable service by giving a detailed list of the tributes offered to the Chinese fleet by the barbarians they encountered on their voyages. The descriptions differ from the lists of goods given by Ma Huan (who never sailed beyond the Indian Ocean), suggesting that the author must have drawn on a different, now vanished source, but the detail and oddity of the list makes a convincing impression:
One pair of whale’s eyes, commonly called bright-eyed pearls.
Two bream whiskers. These are lustrous and may be used for hairpins or ear-ornaments. The price is very high.
One pair of camels that go to a thousand li [four hundred miles – possibly a reference to the distance the animals could travel without water].
Four boxes of dragon’s saliva [ambergris].
Eight boxes of frankincense.
Four pairs of landscape porcelain bowls. In these is a landscape; by pouring water into the bowl, the mountains become blue and the water green.
Four pairs of porcelain bowls with representations of men and things: by pouring water into them there is gradually a picture of men saluting each other.
Four pairs of porcelain bowls with flowers and plants. In these are flowers and plants. By pouring water into them, they appear to move and wave.
Four pairs of porcelain bowls with feathers. In these are feathers, and by pouring water into them, they appear to fly.2
Clearly, these bowls greatly impressed the Chinese, who had prided themselves on making the world’s finest and thinnest porcelain. These bowls must have been even finer. They became translucent when filled with water, allowing scenes painted on the undersides to be seen through the porcelain. It was beyond the capacity of any Indian, African or Islamic states of that or any earlier era to produce ceramics of such quality, and Europeans did not discover the technology to produce fine porcelain until the early eighteenth century. The only porcelain of that thinness at the time came from Cholula (in modern Mexico); the Aztec emperor Montezuma II (1480–1520) was eating off Cholula ware when the Spanish conquistadors encountered him. It was literally eggshell-thin, extremely expensive and much sought after, and was exported from Cholula to the Pacific coast and South America.
At the time of the Chinese voyages, Cholula was in its prime, producing huge quantities of this renowned porcelain and building pyramids more colossal than those of Egypt. Assuming that ‘the pair of camels’ were llamas (camelids), then everything in the tribute list, including the ambergris (from small whales called cachalots), could have been found in northern Peru. Asiatic hens were found there when the Spanish first landed, and at the very least it is arguable that they could have been left by Zhou Man’s fleet after an exchange of gifts with the bird-loving Incas. I was later to find overwhelming evidence of pre-Columbian voyages between China and the Americas in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, as will be discussed later.
I returned to the task of tracing the course taken by Zhou Man. After leaving Peru, his fleet would first have been carried by the equatorial current as far north as Ecuador, where the current turns due west and carries mariners across the Pacific, the route along which explorer after explorer was swept in later centuries. Don Luis Arias, a Spanish envoy to South America in the sixteenth century, sent a memorandum to his king describing a South American legend of a Pacific crossing from Chile before the European voyages of discovery, carried out by ‘light coloured or white skinned people … who wore white woven garments’.3
The course followed by the fleet would have taken it through the Tuamotu archipelago, four thousand miles west of South America. In 1606, Pedro Fernandez de Quirós (1565–1615), a Portuguese explorer working for the Spanish Crown, landed at Hao Atoll in the Tuamotu archipelago.4 There he encountered an old lady wearing a gold ring set with an emerald. He offered trade goods for it but she greeted his offer with disdain – it was far too valuable. Neither gold nor emeralds are found within thousands of miles of the Tuamotu archipelago, but it is well documented that such rings were exported during the early Ming dynasty and given as presents by Zhu Di’s ambassadors. Stepped pyramids were also found along this south-western route and in Australia, and the first Europeans to reach Fiji found that someone had been mining copper before them – something the locals did not do. Polynesians could have carried artefacts across the Pacific in their canoes, but that does not explain the Chinese hens and artefacts found in the Americas or the sheer volume of goods carried from the Americas to the Pacific. I would suggest that the only logical explanation is that they were carried by the junks of a Chinese treasure fleet and the ships of the traders that accompanied them.
When those legendary voyagers reached the mid-Pacific off Samoa, they found that the south equatorial current split there, just as it does today. The northern part carries on towards the Carolines, New Guinea and the Philippines; the southern part sweeps south-west towards Australia.
There is substantial evidence that Zhou Man’s fleet separated at this point. The northern squadron built observation platforms at Kiribati in the Carolines, and another five in New Guinea. They were stepped pyramids with truncated tops like those in China. Rose-pink beads, made by rubbing a spiny oyster against cowrie shells, exactly similar in size and design to those found in the rivers of Mitla in Central America were found in the Caroline Islands last century, together
with a fragment of obsidian and a piece of iron resembling a spearhead – all items foreign to the islands. Chinese hens were found in Peru by the first European explorers; maize, indigenous to the Americas, was found by the first Europeans to reach the Philippines; metates – tools used to grind maize – were in the holds of the junk found on the sea-bed in the Philippines in 1993, which was believed to have sunk about 1423. All of this is consistent with the Chinese sailing with the wind up the west coast of South America (shown on the Piri Reis map) and then across the Pacific.
The southern squadron swept on to chart Norfolk Island and, still carried westward by the current, made a landfall on the east coast of Australia just north of where Sydney is sited today. The great voyage across the Pacific had covered more than seven thousand miles and taken around three months. The current turns to the south when it meets the Australian coast, and Zhou Man’s fleet would have been carried with it towards the latitude of Canopus, their reference point.
Zhou Man’s journey to Australia.
Admiral Hong Bao’s voyage to Australia has been described in chapter 6. Admiral Zhou Man knew of Australia’s existence before he landed there, for since Sui dynasty times (AD 589–618) the Chinese had known of a great landmass peopled by men who threw boomerangs, one hundred days’ sailing south of Asia.5 In the Shan-Hai Jing (‘Classic of Mountains and Seas’), Chinese historians of that era described an animal with the head of a deer that hopped on its hind legs and had a second head in the middle of its body – the baby in the pouch. By the time Marco Polo reached China in the thirteenth century, Chinese charts were showing two Javas – the island we know today as Java and ‘Greater Java’, the source of the trepangs, or sea slugs, the Chinese ate with such relish. They remained a lucrative catch for fishing vessels and are still a highly prized delicacy in China. After his visit to China, Marco Polo called Greater Java ‘the largest island in the world’, and even before his time there were kangaroos in the imperial zoo in Beijing. Kangaroos, of course, are unique to Australia. Further evidence of the Chinese voyages to Australia could be seen at Taiwan University: a map on porcelain dated to 1447 showed the coastline of New Guinea, the east coast of Australia as far south as Victoria, and the north-east coast of Tasmania. Unfortunately, at the time of writing it appears this map has been lost.
It seemed probable that cartographers aboard Zhou Man’s fleet had surveyed these lands and provided the information for the charts, but since the records of his voyage were destroyed after he returned to China in 1423 I had to look abroad to find corroborative evidence of his landfall in Australia. My analysis started from the assumption that this great southern continent was already well known to the Chinese, but was surveyed in more detail during their 1421–3 voyage. If so, I expected the cartography to be of a very high standard, with the latitudes and the alignment of the land correct, but possibly with substantial errors in longitude.
The great landmass shown on the Jean Rotz chart (pp. 151-2) could be Australia, but with some longitudinal errors and some distortion of the land in the south-east of the continent. I began my investigation by examining the eastern coast of the continent from just south of Byron Bay in New South Wales down to Flinders Island off the south-eastern tip of Australia. A close examination of this part of the Rotz chart in comparison to a modern map showed that it depicted eastern Australia to a great degree of accuracy from Nelson Bay6 down to the southern tip of Tasmania.7 I could readily identify Port Stephens, Broken Bay and Botany Bay with their correct latitudes.
If Zhou Man’s fleet had reached south-east Australia after crossing the Pacific, there should be evidence of that landfall in the area depicted with most precision on the Rotz chart. As soon as I started a search of the coastline south of Newcastle, I found a mine of information. In the 1840s, a ruined fortress was found by Benjamin Boyd, one of the earliest European settlers, at Bittangabee Bay near Eden in the far south of New South Wales. He noted a large, fully mature old tree with its roots growing under the stones of the complex. Bittangabee’s substantial ruins comprise a square platform surrounded by large rocks that had once formed a sturdy, defensive perimeter wall. Foundations and parts of the walls of a blockhouse formed by large stones bound with mortar lie inside the perimeter wall. It must have taken a large labour force to bring the stones to the site and then dress and erect them. There is no evidence anywhere in Australia of Aborigines constructing such fortifications, and the age of the tree and the position of its roots show that construction can only have been carried out long before the British first arrived. More stone buildings erected before Europeans reached Australia can be found south of Sydney; a group of twenty, like a small village, are set beside the coast, and there are well-built paths leading from a reservoir to a fifteen-metre stone wharf beside the sea. Similar stone dwellings are found at Newcastle.
Further indications that visitors had landed in Australia were found in ancient Aboriginal rock carvings depicting a foreign ship similar to a junk on the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney. There are similar carvings further up the coast at Cape York, Gympie, and in Arnhem Land. This does not, of course, guarantee that the foreigners were Chinese – they might have arrived on an unknown Portuguese voyage – but rock carvings near the Hawkesbury River show people wearing long robes, which narrows the choice to Asian or Chinese people. Furthermore, an Aboriginal tradition from the Tweed River area tells of strange visitors attempting to mine metals in the Mount Warning area, south-west of Brisbane, many generations before the British did so.
The most compelling evidence for the date of these foreign visits came from shipwrecks, especially one found near Byron Bay in northern New South Wales. Two wooden pegs were unearthed, provisionally carbon-dated to the mid-fifteenth century but with a potential error of plus or minus fifty years. Before sand-mining destroyed the wreck, local people had described part of the hull and three masts protruding from the sand. In 1965, sand-miners unearthed a huge wooden rudder from this site; some said it was 40 feet (12.2 metres) high. If this description was even remotely accurate, it eliminates the possibility of an unknown Portuguese or Dutch voyage, for their caravels weren’t much bigger than that rudder. It can only have come from an enormous ship several hundred feet long – the rudders of treasure ships were 36 feet high. The wreckage of another ancient ship was found at Wollongong on the coast south of Sydney, and two more were found in swampland near Perth. An ancient Chinese stone head depicting a goddess has also been found at Ulladulla,8 south of Wollongong, and a similar votive offering was unearthed on the Nepean River.
Reconstruction of the rudder of a treasure ship with a figure to the left for scale.
Evidence of the visit of the Chinese treasure fleet to Australia.
The ‘mahogany ship’ at Warrnambool, the similarities of the three wrecks at Perth and Wollongong, the age of the wooden pin and the size of the huge rudder in Byron Bay point to a Chinese origin. Only the Chinese built ships that could house a rudder the size of that found in Byron Bay, and only they could afford to lose so many ships in one area. The addition of the findings from the wrecks to the Aboriginal legends and carvings depicting foreigners in robes arriving by ship, the groups of stone buildings and the votive offerings produces powerful if not yet conclusive evidence that a large Chinese fleet visited south-east Australia in the fifteenth century.
South of Bittangabee Bay, the original cartographer of the Rotz chart drew the southern curved part of Tasmania, but the chart also shows what appears to be a great landmass running first eastwards then southwards. This has always baffled professional cartographers, but when I compared the Jean Rotz and Piri Reis charts at the same latitude I saw at once that what appears to be land south of Tasmania is in fact ice. It is drawn in identical fashion to the ice shown on the Piri Reis map, and the line drawn on the Rotz chart corresponds to the northern limit of pack ice to the south of Tasmania in midwinter (June) in 1421–3.
At a stroke this would have solved the mystery of the apparent landm
ass to the south and south-east of Australia were it not for two rivers shown on the Rotz chart flowing eastwards out of the ice. These two ‘rivers’ are shown well south of New Zealand; there are none there, of course. There appeared to be nothing but ocean at those latitudes, but when I examined a large-scale map I discovered two small islands of which I had previously been ignorant, Auckland Island and Campbell Island, at a similar latitude to Tierra del Fuego. Both have identical long thin bays lying east–west, precisely as drawn on the Rotz chart, and at the same latitude.
The two islands were shown at the edge of the normal limit of the pack ice that links them in midwinter. This explains the apparent anomaly on the Rotz chart. The Chinese could not possibly have known that they were islands rather than part of an ice-bound landmass because continuous ice lay between them and stretched away north to Tasmania; once again, they had drawn precisely what they saw. They were sailing to Campbell Island to fix the position of Canopus – 52°40′S, precisely the latitude of the southernmost tip of the island. They had their reference position, and they could now start a detailed survey of this part of the world.
Auckland and Campbell Islands, as shown on the Jean Rotz map.
I found further indications that Zhou Man’s fleet had reached Campbell Island in the accounts of the early Europeans who explored the island, discovered by Frederick Hasseburg, the captain of a sealing ship, in 1810. In Camp Cove, they found the wreck of an old wooden ship and a tree stunted by the endless winds, but recognizable as a mature Norfolk Island pine, a tree unique to Norfolk Island. It was the Chinese custom to collect saplings, seeds and pine-cones on their voyages, planting them as shrines at places where they made landfall and burying votive offerings in the roots. The Norfolk Island pine on Campbell Island could well have been brought there by one of Zhou Man’s junks.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 15