1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  Now that my central thesis was accepted, many Chinese historians cast their eyes once again over official Chinese histories. Many separate accounts were found claiming that not only had Zheng He’s fleets been away for more than four years (not two and a half, as I stated) but that his fleets had reached North and South America and Australia. No longer were Professor Bi Quanzhong and I lone voices; we were suddenly in the majority. (Please refer to the Synopsis of Evidence for details of official records recently found or retranslated.)

  It also transpired that I may have been too conservative in my estimate of the size of the Chinese fleets. Professor Robert Finlay called my attention to the accounts of Vasco da Gama arriving in Calicut to be told of a fleet of eight hundred ships having visited the port some eighty years earlier; the fleet had been joined by junks from the Ryuku Islands (Japan) and by Korean, Burmese and Indian ships. That would explain not only the wealth of evidence left around the world but the traces of the Japanese language and ‘Chinese’ DNA found among the Zuni peoples of Pacific America. It also explains the Korean DNA that regularly turns up in the blood of Norwegian fishermen – in my book I contend that one squadron had sailed past the north coast of Norway, along the coast of Siberia and through the Bering Straits.

  I was also delighted to have independent evidence for the authenticity of the Vinland Map and the capacity of the Chinese to circumnavigate Greenland in 1422. I knew that bringing the Vinland Map into the book would unleash a storm, as indeed it did. The nitpickers had a field day, for they claimed a mini ice age had started in the fourteenth century, Greenland could not have been circumnavigated, the Vinland Map could not have been drawn and thus my book was clearly rubbish from beginning to end. Late in 2002, the age of the parchment of the Vinland Map was dated by D. J. Donahue, J. S. Olin and G. Harbottle, and the results were published in Radiocarbon (vol. 44). The radiocarbon age of the map’s parchment, as determined by accelerator mass spectrometry with a 95 per cent confidence level, is AD 1411–1468. Even more devastating for the ‘forgery’ school, an ink transfer was found hidden under the end papers of the binding. It related to the appointment of the notary Bartholomaeus Poignare to the Council of Basle on 16 September 1435. The Delft Technical University in the Netherlands has carried out a study into Arctic sea ice and concluded that ‘Five consecutive extremely warm winters could lead to the complete melting of the ice in the Arctic Sea.’ The Dutch Meteorological Institute KNMI, in collaboration with the European Union, found that the 1420, 1422 and 1428 summers in northern Europe were extremely dry and hot. This backed up my evidence of the strontium 90 levels in Greenland’s glaciers between 1400 and 1450, of the thickness of tooth enamel on skeletons in graves in Greenland, and of the absence of certain houseflies in Greenland’s dwellings. In short, not only was the Vinland map genuine, Greenland could indeed have been circumnavigated in 1422.

  Our travels, delightful as they were, ensured that we missed the traditional parties leading up to Christmas with the result that I set off for the launch of the American edition of this book on 4 January 2003 with a reasonably clear head and healthy liver. Shortly before leaving for America I had received a summary of a review which, it was said, would skewer my arguments. Arriving gravely concerned in a blizzard in New York, I hastily scanned the New York Times. Its review was, in my opinion, pretty awful, but the public ignored it for the book went from 2,834th in the New York Times list to the third-placed bestseller in a week, and it stayed a bestseller until April.

  By this stage we had our website, www.gavinmenzies.net, up and running with a team to handle the torrent of new evidence (we’d received 16,000 emails since the book was published in the UK in the autumn of 2002). Every day while I was in America, I emailed my team in London a summary of the phone calls and emails I had received, and they in turn emailed me a synopsis of everything they had received. The stream of evidence became a river, then a flood. It became clear after a few days that thousands of people agreed with my theories.

  As more time went by, I became less defensive and started to ask people what they thought. For example, I asked Bostonians whether they had ever had their blood analysed to see if they had Chinese forebears (this, incidentally, produced several who had Chinese teeth, or the Chinese ‘purple spot’ on their buttocks, and a score of them went off to have their DNA tested). In California, I asked how many of the audience had collected Chinese artefacts from the seashore. This triggered dozens of emails: people had found Ming brass plates, ceramics, stones incised with Chinese writings and Chinese jade. They knew of local legends describing Chinese people landing in California; they knew of a Chinese wreck off Santa Catalina; they knew of Chinese trees, plants and bushes; they knew of Chinese colonies that had existed in California until the last century; they knew of Native Americans in California who understood Chinese; they knew that early European explorers had found Chinese people, and that Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries found those same people a century later toiling away in California’s rice fields. Hardly anyone doubted that the Chinese had arrived in California before Europeans. With this new evidence we could pinpoint the locations of Chinese colonies down the Pacific coast of North America: in Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia; in Washington State; in Oregon near Neahkahnie Beach; in California between the Sacramento and Russian Rivers; in Mexico on the Yucatán peninsula.

  The next step was obvious – to read and, if necessary, translate the original diaries of the Europeans who first arrived in those places. Did they find Chinese people? The full results are on the website, but in short in almost every place where I claim the Chinese settled, the first Europeans met Chinese people. To me, this was once again incredible. How had ‘professional’ historians managed to ignore Coronado’s accounts of finding Chinese junks with gilded sterns? How could they explain away Columbus’s secret records describing his meeting with Chinese miners in ‘bird’ ships, or the accounts of José de Acosta, Antonio Galvão, Giovanni de Verrazzano, Pedro de Castaneda, González de Mendoza, Father Antonio de la Calancha, Carlos Prince, Cabrillo, Bartolomeo Ferrello, Pedro Menendez de Aviles and Father Louis Sales OP, all of whom found Chinese people or Chinese junks when they first arrived in the Americas? How could they not have tackled the fact that all the great European explorers – da Gama, Columbus, Magellan, Dias, Cabral – set sail with maps showing them their destination.

  The final piece of the jigsaw was DNA evidence. In the places where the first European explorers met Chinese people, did the indigenous Native American people have Chinese DNA?

  I was not prepared for how immediate and powerful the DNA evidence would be. When my researcher Antonia Bowen-Jones handed me a copy of Professor Novick and colleague’s report in Human Biology (vol. 70) entitled ‘Polymorphic Alu Insertions and the Asian Origin of Native American Populations’, I nearly fainted. Alu sequences are, the authors state, ‘exceptional genetic markers’. The report summarises:

  The results corroborate the Asian origin of Native American populations but do not support the multiple-wave hypothesis supposedly responsible for the tripartite Eskaleut, Nadene and Amerind linguistic groups. Instead, these populations exhibit three major identifiable clusters reflecting geographic distribution. Close similarity between the Chinese and Native Americans suggests recent gene flow from Asia.

  Figure 1 of that report shows the geographic distribution of the people tested – it was as if my map showing where the Chinese had settled had been transcribed by Professor Novick and his colleagues. (This, of course, could not have been the case, for their research had been carried out years before my book was written and I did not read their report until five months after my book was published.) Figure 2 shows the ‘maximum likelihood tree’ – that is, how close Native American peoples’ DNA is to Chinese DNA, and how much that DNA has been diluted over the years. It can be seen that the phylogenetic link between the Buctzozt Maya (Yucatán peninsula) and the Chinese is so close that these people could be more accurately classified as
Chinese. In short, 22 of the 24 Native American populations whose DNA was analysed are from areas where I contend the Chinese fleet settled: far down the Amazon River; on the banks of the Paraná and Paraguay tributaries; in California; in Tiguex (Colorado/Arizona); on the Yucatán peninsula; in Peru; on the Venezuela/Colombian borders; and even at Hvalsey in south Greenland, where the Pope described the local people being carried off by barbarians before being brought home. Professor Novick’s report will be placed on my website once his permission is obtained.

  Figure 2 also shows that the DNA of the Aleut people of Alaska is virtually identical to that found in Hvalsey, yet these places are thousands of miles apart. If the people of Greenland had started their journey in the Aleutians, then marched eastward to Greenland, the people of North America between those two areas should have similar DNA – but they don’t. Similarly, the DNA of the Maya people of Yucatán is far closer to the Chinese, Aleuts and Greenlanders than to that of the native populations who lived around them. All the Native American peoples with DNA described in the Novick report as having close similarity with Chinese DNA can be reached by sea. This also applies to the Amazon and Paraguay River peoples, and to the Sioux and Cree Ojibwa, reached via the Mississippi. The inescapable conclusion is that Chinese DNA was brought by sea, and the only recent sea voyage carried out by very large numbers of Chinese – sufficient to create the twenty-four settlements cited in Professor Novick’s report – was that of Admiral Zheng He. In my submission, Carlos Prince was correct all those centuries ago. He researched Chinese records that claimed ‘Chinese … with Tartairs, Japanese and Koreans … crossed the maritime stretch … into the Kingdom of Quivira [Arkansas], Mexico, Panama, Peru and other eastern countries of the Indies …’ long before Europeans reached the Americas. The synopsis (and my website) details more supporting evidence, such as the existence of American populations with genetic markers for hookworm and roundworm, which cannot survive Arctic crossings on account of the cold.

  I believe the evidence to be near incontrovertible, and more evidence continues to pour in. The talk I gave at the Royal Geographical Society in March 2002 created such interest and produced so much new evidence that by the time the UK book went to print that summer it had trebled in size. In the months since then, people who had been chary of giving me explosive evidence came forward in large numbers. As a result, I now feel free to throw off the constraining shackles of caution and go much further than I’ve gone so far – starting in North America with the research of Jerry Warsing.

  Several years ago, long before my book was published, Jerry came to the conclusion that a huge Chinese fleet under the command of Admiral Zheng He encountered a severe storm off South Africa and was blown north-westwards to the Atlantic coast of North America. His evidence, which has taken years to assemble, is wide-ranging and fascinating. Jerry believes up to two hundred ships were wrecked on the coast between Florida and Newport, Virginia; separated by the storm, they landed in small numbers at different places. Because of the close similarity between the Ming dynasty spoken language and the language of earlier Chinese who had come across the Bering Straits, they were able to understand the local people and assimilate. One of these groups was the Oceanye Ho, who landed near Norfolk, Virginia. Oceanye Ho has since been corrupted to Shawnee. Another group, the Ming Ho, landed 150 miles further south, near Southport, North Carolina. A third group, the Wyo Ming, marched inland and settled in a rugged mountainous area of the Appalachians. A fourth, the Lyco Ming, trekked from the coast to a county in Pennsylvania adjacent to Wyoming country.

  Jerry’s first line of evidence is Machado-Joseph disease, which is prevalent among these peoples. It is ‘accepted’ that Machado-Joseph disease spread via Portuguese sea routes in the mid to late fifteenth century. However, the disease appeared in the Yunnan province of China (Zheng He’s birthplace) before the Portuguese reached China. It was also found in Arnhem Land and the Yemen, which were not visited on early Portuguese voyages. Every place the disease has been found is a location where the Chinese fleet visited. It is at the least arguable that the Chinese brought Machado-Joseph disease to the eastern seaboard of North America, and to the Azores, where the Portuguese contracted it.

  Jerry’s second line of evidence comes from the accounts of captured Shawnee prisoners at the battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), who protested they were not Native Americans (as reported by Captain John Smith in his Notes taken while Prisoner of Powhatan). The third line of evidence is Chinese plants and trees found by the first European settlers. His fourth is Virginia’s array of ancient stone buildings – Native American peoples did not build in stone. My evidence is the DNA of the local (Moskoke) people mentioned earlier; Pedro Menendez de Aviles’ accounts of finding Chinese junks wrecked off the coast when he arrived; and Giovanni de Verrazzano’s report to the King of France that he found Chinese people in what is now New York. Finally, an old Chinese junk was discovered by George Washington’s friends when they started draining the Great Dismal Swamp – further evidence that the Chinese landed on the eastern seaboard before Europeans arrived. The theory can be further validated by DNA tests on the Ming Ho people, and Jerry is attempting to obtain their co-operation for this.

  We now get progressively more controversial. In the first part of this postscript, published in the American edition of 1421, I wrote, ‘the wreck of a very old, large ship or junk [was] found near Fraser Island, off Queensland in Australia’, and continued, ‘however, on 8 November 2002, before the cannon or other artefacts could be raised from the sea-bed, the local authorities reclassified the area as a “heritage” site. Only government-appointed archaeologists are now allowed to continue investigations there …’

  As may be expected my book raised a furore in Australia. Those who wished to maintain the fairy tales that the Dutch or Captain Cook first discovered Australia leapt on the retraction Greg Jeffreys, leader of the excavation team, was forced to make about the Fraser Island junk. He accepted the local authority’s claim that in fact it was an Italian liner, the Marloo, which sank there last century, and that the cannon found by Jeffreys’ team are in fact the stanchions of the Marloo’s lifeboats. But why classify the wreck of an Italian liner as a National Heritage site? I have seen photographs of the same wreck taken in 1919 and again in 1972; the earlier ones clearly show wooden ribs that had washed away by October 2002, when Jeffreys’ team excavated again. All three sets of photos were taken exactly where John Green vividly described the Chinese junk rising out of the sea on 28 February 1862. In addition, I have received photos of a Ming wine cooler excavated from the site and Chinese teak wood (the Marloo was built of steel), which is currently being dated. It is a great pity that those dedicated to the memory of Captain Cook, the finest navigator of all time, should wish to deny the public the opportunity of having the Fraser Island wreck excavated.

  The same goes for southern Australia, where my claim that the Warrnambool wreck was a Chinese junk created hysteria among ‘professional’ Australian historians. Since my book was published, a huge amount of new evidence has poured in about Zhou Man’s fleet reaching southern Australia from the Antarctic, but only a short synopsis can be given here. What happened was that Zhou Man lost one junk in Storm Bay, Tasmania, and a second on King Island in the Bass Strait; the third made it to Warrnambool, where it was wrecked. The survivors clambered ashore with their horses and set up a farm, connected to the sea near Warrnambool, where they smoked eels and elvers exported by horseback up the Glenlenty, Murray, Darling and Murrambidgee Rivers – hence the depiction of Australia’s rivers on Toscanelli’s chart of 1474 and Vallard’s 1536 map of Australia, and of Chinese people on horseback in Aboriginal paintings.

  We now up the ante once again, this time in Peru. My claim that Peru was de facto a Chinese colony was greeted with incredulity, not least the fact that nearly a hundred villages to this day have Chinese names. Not one of the detractors took up my offer to visit us to inspect our large-scale maps of the Ancash province to
see the Chinese names for themselves. No-one has any explanation of Father Antonio de la Calancha’s description of Chinese cavalry; neither could anyone explain the mass of Chinese artefacts, plants and animals found by the first Europeans to reach Peru. Now we have the DNA of the Incas from two sources: the Novick report, and the analysis of the body of the ice maiden ‘Juanita’ carried out in Japan. Inca DNA is so close to Chinese (Novick et al) that one can reasonably argue that some of them were Chinese.

  And last of all comes the biggest controversy. New Zealand historians have been the most apoplectic of all about my book. Anything that challenges Maori legend is to be resisted at all costs! Accepted New Zealand history has it that the foreign animals and plants found by the first Europeans were brought by the Maoris in their open canoes – that is, horses, pigs, dogs, rats and an array of plants from South America, North America, Asia and the Pacific. According to New Zealand historians, the Maoris traded all over the world.

  A number of critics have emailed me about the size of the tankers required by Zheng He’s fleets to provide water for horses, arguing that the limiting factor on the number of horses was the number of water tankers; it would have been impossible to desalinate anywhere near enough water to satisfy more than a handful of horses as each needs about three gallons a day. Now, apply this to the Maori scenario, travelling from Tahiti to New Zealand in open canoes. They must have brought at least two horses to breed as one pregnant mare would not produce a line. I have taken my submarine from New Zealand to Tahiti; the seas are short and choppy most of the year which makes for a difficult journey which would probably have taken at least six weeks. Horses drink more in exposed conditions of high humidity such as spray in an open boat, so the consumption is likely to have been at least five gallons a day per horse, which for a six-week journey amounts to 420 gallons or around a ton of water per animal. Then, of course, the animals would have needed hay, and that’s not to mention food and water for the boats’ crews. I submit that it would have been impossible for Maoris to bring horses to New Zealand. The wild Kaimanawa ponies on North Island must therefore have been brought by others, either Europeans or Chinese. DNA tests are in hand for the Kaimanawa, the Pasos of Peru, the Assateague of the islands off Virginia and the Kiger mustangs of North America. I believe their common ancestor will turn out to be the blood horses of Tajikistan which were the mounts of the Chinese cavalry. Emperor Zhu Di imported millions to China during his reign.