1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  The translation that caused me most difficulty was asal. My dictionary8 said that the word is derived from the Latin acinus, meaning ‘berry, especially grape, also any berry or the seeds in a berry’, but asal is placed on the chart on a mountain slope behind Ponce. Winters in Puerto Rico are too hot for grapes – they need very cold winters to thrive – but asal was written above modern-day Yauco, the ‘coffee capital’ of Puerto Rico, so I wondered if the Portuguese were describing coffee beans. This theory provoked a vigorous debate among the historians advising me. Some pointed out that coffee was indigenous to East Africa and was introduced to the Caribbean by the Spanish, so it could not have been marked on charts made before the Spanish landed. But further research9 revealed that at least nineteen strains of coffee were found in the Caribbean before the Spanish arrived. It grew on mountain slopes, usually between three and four and a half thousand feet, in temperate climates within the tropics where there is no wind but plenty of morning sun. These conditions are found on the southern slopes of the Cordillera Central behind Ponce, just where asal is marked on the charts of Antilia. Could the Chinese have introduced coffee when they arrived in late 1421?

  The second translation that provoked a heated debate was cua cusa – pumpkin – shown on the coastal plain in the east near Naguabo. Had pumpkins and squashes really grown there? It transpired that they still do. On a visit to Puerto Rico while researching this book, I took photographs of twenty varieties piled in heaps beside the road: long yellow, champion market, hackensack, manu, rocky ford and white Japan musk squashes; yellow, crookneck, orange, white, delicate and golden scalloped melons; and an assortment of cucumbers, gherkins and eggplants.10 They grow in such variety and profusion and to such a size because of the sunshine, volcanic soil and moderate rainfall particular to the eastern coastal strip of Puerto Rico.

  The really fascinating aspect of the translations of these names is that they were shown on charts published before Columbus set sail and they describe plants foreign to Puerto Rico. Coffee was then native to Africa, cucumbers to India, mangoes to south-east Asia. Columbus also found coconuts, native to the Pacific. Not only had someone reached the Caribbean before Columbus and drawn Puerto Rico with incredible accuracy, they had also brought plants there from all over the world. It seems to me that only the great Chinese fleet commanded by Admiral Zhou Wen could have achieved these things.

  Marolio was another interesting name, on a chart drawn by Albino Canepa in the 1480s. It was placed in the same position as marnlio on the Pizzigano chart; I assumed that the lower edge of the o had become erased. Marolio is medieval Portuguese for ‘plants of the Annonaceae family’ – star fruit, sweet and sour sops, pawpaws and custard apples. On both charts the cartographer had placed the description just north of modern Ponce in the middle of the south coast. This area remains the centre of the tropical fruit industry of Puerto Rico, rejoicing in plantations of star fruit, sour sops and papaya. Their juice is exported all over the Americas and forms the basis for the rum punches tourists continue to enjoy. These fruits were indigenous to south-east Asia and South America. Once again, I concluded that the Chinese had introduced them to Puerto Rico in 1421.

  The cartographers depicted Satanazes (Guadeloupe) in an entirely different light to Puerto Rico. They changed the name from Satan’s or Devil’s Island to Saluagio (Island of Savages) in later charts.11 Those later charts of Guadeloupe merely amplified what could be seen from the sea – a second volcano (con), Mont Carmichael at 1,414 metres, with a plateau (silla) between it and La Souffrière. The waterfalls flowing down the east side of La Souffrière (Karukeka and Trois Rivières) had the soubriquets duchal and tubo de agua – ‘showers from heaven’. Villages and cultivated fields (aralia y sya) are shown on the low land on the west coast of Grande Terre, just where Columbus described them as he sailed past years later. Satanazes is clearly a horrible place, summarized by Albino Canepa as nar i sua, ‘nothing but sweltering heat’, but the description of the island of Saya (Les Saintes), ‘any number of tropical birds’, was apt, for the island is still renowned for its kingfishers, hummingbirds and bananaquits – little flying jewels flitting across the turquoise sea that separates the islands.

  The most unusual name Zuane Pizzigano had written on Antilia (in the south-east, covering Vieques Island) was ura, placed next to con on later charts. Uracano is Venetian for ‘violent explosion’, ‘eruption’ or ‘tempest’. By 1421, the volcanoes on the south-east coast of Puerto Rico had long been extinct, and earthquakes were and are more prevalent on the west of the island, near Mayaguez, but hurricanes invariably approach from the east and roar north-westwards from Vieques Island to San Juan. I was sure that this was what the Chinese cartographer had seen when the junks arrived in November, during the hurricane season that runs from June to the end of November.

  All these names, coupled with the physical similarity between the islands on the Pizzigano chart (and others) and what is actually there, put it beyond argument that Antilia is Puerto Rico, Satanazes is Guadeloupe and Saya is Les Saintes. Although it is possible to quibble over the nuances of a few of the medieval Catalan or Castilian translations, continued debate about the identity of the Antilia group of islands is pointless. These names and maps are unequivocal proof that the islands were continuously settled by the Portuguese from before 1447 until 1492, the time of Columbus’s first voyage. The plants foreign to Puerto Rico were brought there before Columbus set sail. To my mind, this is proof that the Chinese discovered Puerto Rico.

  Although the depiction of the islands was accurate, their location and orientation was not. They were shown in the Atlantic rather than in the Caribbean, more than two thousand miles away from their correct position. The error was gradually corrected by succeeding cartographers. By 1448, the islands were 1,500 miles west of the Canaries (750 miles in error), and by 1474 they had again shifted westwards, just 500 miles in error. The mistake is easily explicable. In 1431, Henry’s captains did not have good astrolabes (sextants), nor did they understand declination. Portuguese navigators did not know how to use Polaris until 1451; only after 1473, using declination tables, could they finally determine latitude with accuracy (Toscanelli’s 1474 chart places Antilia at the correct latitude). Longitude remained a problem. Columbus put the Americas a thousand miles out for longitude, as well as twenty degrees for latitude. When he returned from his first voyage, he did not know where he had gone, what he had found or where it was. He thought he had reached China.

  In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese navigated by compass and measured their speed through the water by throwing logs off the bow. They positioned the islands by dead reckoning, calculating their position by speed through the water multiplied by the number of days travelled. But they did not realize that the great mass of water over which they were sailing was itself moving, taking them away from their dead-reckoning position. Like Columbus, the Portuguese did not know where they had gone. When I made adjustments to allow for the movement of water during their ten-week voyage from Madeira to Guadeloupe,12 I found that the Portuguese had placed the islands in their correct dead-reckoning position and orientation.

  I felt that there were two further questions about the Pizzigano chart still to be answered. The first concerned the size of the islands. In the earlier charts, Antilia was depicted as bigger than Puerto Rico, and Satanazes was also shown larger than Guadeloupe; a mistake caused, I believe, by transposing not only the wrong position of the islands but their scale from the earlier (Chinese) map onto a European one. The other outstanding question was when and where the Pizzigano chart had been made. It seems likely that he was working under the direction of Dom Pedro, whose cartographers were searching for information about new lands in order to create a world map for Prince Henry. I knew that the Holy Roman Emperor had given Dom Pedro substantial estates in the Veneto at Treviso, fifteen miles north of Venice, and this became the Portuguese delegation’s base. It struck me that the Portuguese cartographers probably met Niccolò da
Conti there in 1424. He, of course, had spent years aboard a junk of the Chinese treasure fleet, the original discoverers of Antilia. The chart was almost certainly made in Treviso, since the majority of the ‘non-Portuguese’ names on the chart were in the dialect of Veneto rather than Venice. Pizzigano may have been a monk at the great Dominican sanctuary of San Niccolò at Treviso.

  The Pizzigano chart depicted Puerto Rico so accurately that whoever collated the information must have been a master of his craft; in that era, that meant the original cartographer can only have been Chinese. The importance of the chart and those that followed is twofold: not only do they provide evidence that the Chinese discovered the Americas seventy years before Columbus, they also show that Puerto Rico had become a permanent Portuguese settlement before 1447. The names on the subsequent charts continually hone the descriptions of the islands long before Columbus reached them. The positions of the islands were also continually corrected, and the charts from 1463 and 1470 contain a wealth of additional information about Antilia, including further bays on the north-west and east coasts, and the slightly exaggerated south-west tip was redrawn with greater accuracy. The island of Ymana, to the north of Puerto Rico, was also better drawn on later charts, its name changed to Rosellia. As European navigators discovered declination and the measurement of latitude, and improved their sextants and their measurement of time, the positions of the islands on the charts were moved to the south-west.13

  Identifying Antilia and Satanazes enabled me to pinpoint the other ‘islands’ surrounding them on the medieval charts. Andrea Bianco’s chart of 1448, for example, includes the north-east coast of Brazil, and Cristobal Soligo’s 1489 chart14 shows a further seven ‘islands’ – the tip of Hispaniola in the west, Trinidad, the Virgin Islands, St Vincent, St Lucia, Barbados and the north coast of Venezuela in the south – all before Columbus had even set sail.

  I returned to the chart of Puerto Rico and began to search for the probable site of the first settlement. Both the Portuguese and the Chinese must have approached from the south-east on the prevailing winds. The southern and western coasts of Antilia were more accurately drawn on the Pizzigano chart than the northern or eastern coasts, so I concentrated the search there.

  The Pizzigano chart has cyodue, ‘incessant rain’, to the west, ansuly, ‘lack of fertile land’, in the south-west and ura, ‘hurricane’, to the east; none of these sounded a particularly inviting place to settle. On the other hand, marolio, ‘luscious tropical fruit’, is shown just north of Ponce, and Ponce Bay was drawn with striking accuracy on all the charts, showing a prominent headland, La Guancha, to the east of the bay. For centuries, this headland has provided sheltered anchorage from the easterly winds. The sea abounds in fish and, located as it is in the rain shadow of the mountains, Ponce has by far the best climate in Puerto Rico. When I flew there to take a look on the ground, I could see the purple clouds of an afternoon thunderstorm breaking on the central Cordillera to the north, leaving the town dry. Not without reason was Ponce named ‘the pearl of the south’. It is likely the Portuguese made their first settlement here; this is where they would have greeted newcomers on the 1447 voyage and invited them to attend divine service.

  The river leading from the harbour into the old town still retains the name Rio Portugués. The brilliant-white cathedral of Our Lady of Guadeloupe stands on its banks, and as I sat in the main square of Ponce one evening, sipping bitter black Puerto Rican coffee at the end of another day spent combing the island for evidence of the Chinese voyages and the early Portuguese colonists, I watched people pouring into the cathedral to attend evening mass. Some men had red hair, the women fine chiselled faces, sharper features and paler skins than in the north. In their looks, their way of life, their fado songs and their ferrapeira dances, the people of Ponce to this day resemble their Portuguese ancestors from the Algarve. Will the bones of their brave forefathers who set sail from Sagres long ago to found this, the first European colony in the New World, one day be found beneath the cathedral of Our Lady of Guadeloupe?

  The Portuguese had taken their first steps into the New World that the Chinese had discovered, but despite the evidence offered by copies of the charts drawn by the Chinese, one obstacle – as much psychological as physical – remained to be overcome before the Portuguese empire could spread across the globe. The fear of the unknown still dominated the minds of ordinary Portuguese seamen, and a lifetime of myth, legend and superstition could not be erased overnight. Magellan was still struggling to overcome the fears of his crewmen in the early years of the sixteenth century as he tried to coax them through the strait that was to bear his name.

  In the summer of 1432, with Madeira, the Azores (discovered by La Salle) and Puerto Rico already colonized, Prince Henry called Gil Eannes, a skilled seaman and loyal retainer, to his court at Sagres. Eannes had been despatched on a mission the previous year to the Canary Islands. Now Henry insisted that, come what may, he must round Cape Bojador on the coast of modern Western Sahara, to the south of Morocco. The cape featured in many lurid seamen’s myths about the unknown world. It was a place where vast cataracts crashed into the sea, fierce currents dragged ships to their doom and even the sea-water itself had been turned into ‘red slime’.

  Eannes followed Prince Henry’s commands with understandable caution, standing well out to sea so as to approach the dreaded Cape Bojador from the south and thus avoid the legendary waterfall off the cape, but he found no serpents or giant sea monsters as he made his first landfall a few miles beyond the cape. The land appeared uninhabited; there were even a few flowers on the beach. Eannes plucked a bouquet for Prince Henry: ‘My Lord, I thought that I ought to bring some token of the land since I was on it. I gathered these herbs which I here present to your gaze, which we in this country call Roses of Saint Mary.’15 Returning northwards to Bojador itself, Eannes found the ‘eternally rushing water’ was but vast shoals of grey mullet, the ‘waterfalls tumbling off the earth’ were cliffs, rising sheer from the sea, and the ‘sea baked into red slime’ was water discoloured by the red Sahara sand.

  Eannes’s achievement in rounding Cape Bojador completely changed European man’s attitude to seafaring. At a stroke, he had shattered centuries of legend and superstition. If a ship could safely round Cape Bojador, man could sail anywhere. There was no need for irrational fears about falling off the edge of the earth. With the Chinese charts to guide them, there was nowhere the Portuguese sea-captains would not venture, once they had persuaded their men to follow where they led; exploring the limits of the world became merely a matter of time.

  18

  ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

  BY 1460, THE year henry the navigator died, Puerto Rico was well known and Portuguese exploration of the three groups of islands in the Atlantic – the Azores, the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands – was complete. The islands were stocked with animals and became bases for explorers making their way between North and South America and Africa. By a fortunate coincidence, all lay in the track of the circulatory wind systems; the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands on the way out to the Americas and the Azores on the way back. Gradually, Europeans reached the lands the Chinese admirals had discovered.

  In parallel with his systematic and continual improvements to ocean navigation, Henry the Navigator had relentlessly pushed his captains further and further across the seas. By the time Portuguese ships set sail for the Cape of Good Hope, the measurement of latitude in the northern hemisphere was as accurate as the Chinese calculations had been years earlier.

  Bartolomeu Dias (c. 1450–1500) led the way. In 1482, he was captain of one of the ships exploring the Gold Coast and Africa past the ‘bulge’, and in 1487 he was appointed to the command of a small squadron of three ships that was to attempt to round the southern tip of Africa. Neither Dias nor his masters knew how far south the Cape really stretched – the charting of West Africa by the Chinese fleet had been carried out before they had mastered the calculation of latitude in the
southern hemisphere – but they had no doubts that it could be rounded. Dom Pedro’s map of 1428 had showed the Cape’s triangular shape, and before Dias set sail the Portuguese king gave his emissary, Pêro da Covilha, a map of the world (Carta de Marear) showing that the Cape could be rounded to reach India. When Dias duly reached the Cape, he

  came in sight of that Great and Famous Cape concealed for so many centuries, which when it was seen made known not only itself but also another new world of countries. Bartolomeu Dias, and those of his company, because of the perils and storms they had endured in doubling it, called it the Stormy Cape, but on their return to the Kingdom, the King Dom João gave it another illustrious name, calling it the Cape of Good Hope [my italics].1

  Dias was followed by Vasco da Gama (c. 1469–1525) who was ordered to continue round the Cape to India and the source of spice. Da Gama was provided with charts showing the Cape, and precise declination tables:

  Tables showing the declination of the sun were provided by the Astronomer Royal, Abraham Zacuto Ben Samuel. These … had been translated from Hebrew into Latin the previous year and printed at Leira under the title Almanach Perpetuum Celestium Motuum Cujus Radix Est 1473. Other books, maps and charts were supplied … amongst these documents almost certainly … [were] the log and charts of Dias.2