Updated 9 December 2005
The May-June 2005 issue of the Melbourne-based magazine, New Dawn, carried an article I wrote on 1421, the book by UK writer Gavin Menzies, which proposes that from 1421AD, in a few years, Chinese mariners mapped the entire globe. And thus implicitly, they discovered America decades before Columbus did. Below is one of the original versions of what I wrote (though a little rewritten just now), which includes a section on New Guinea edited out of the published article.
Pre-publication, the edited-out section was concerned with what Menzies suggests had happened with the Chinese mapping of New Guinea/Northern Australia. I personally consider that what Menzies suggests happened with the mapping of New Guinea (or not) is one of the major flaws of his entire argument. Suffice to say, I regard Menzies' book as wonderful science-fiction, and quite fascinating, but certainly, not proper maritime history. Whatever, 1421 certainly proposes the basis of what could one day become an extraordinarily interesting movie. Which I would dearly love to see, as movie, not history.
The edited-out section was deleted from the published version as in terms of mapping history, it was considered that the ideas presented were too complicated for the ordinary magazine reader. So the below material can be considered to be more for the reader with special interests.
I must say, that Gavin Menzies as a so-called historian, has been quoted as once saying, something to the effect that, "there's not a chance in a million I am wrong", about Chinese mariners being the first to map the entire globe. My point is that this is not how serious historians regard anything; properly-prepared history is about a near-infinite number of things other than the statistics of anyone being more right, or less wrong, about anything at all, for whatever sets of reasons. Menzies' very terminology proves that he is not, in fact, a proper historian. What kind of writer he should be considered, should perhaps be best left to his readers around the world. I merely regard Menzies - conspicuously imaginative - as being an unusual kind of sci-fi writer.
China and 1421, British author Gavin Menzies, and Warrnambool’s Mahogany Ship – the great controversy about The Great Southland
| Synopsis: The book 1421: The Year China Discovered The World, is causing a global controversy about history-writing. Much new debate arises about when and how the world was mapped by Europeans during The Age of Discovery after earlier Chinese voyages. Dan Byrnes explores how Australia fits into the global pattern. |
Gavin Menzies, a former British submariner/navigator, author of 1421: The Year That China Discovered The World, is visiting Warrnambool in September this year (2005) to test his startling theory against resolution of the mystery of The Mahogany Ship. (Note: Menzies finally did not attend, due to ill-health.)
A fascinating contest between maritime history mystery theories is now being proposed.
Since he published, Menzies has maintained a website (www.1421.tv) to present evidence he believes to be confirming his theory. World-wide, about 13,000 contributors have assisted him so far.
Menzies’s website carries news that a film based on 1421 is to be produced by Californian, Samantha Olsson. Will Australian waters be shown? Menzies in 1421 is adamant that Chinese shipping made multiple landfalls at Australian locations, long before Europeans.
So what are the prospects that Warrnambool’s Mahogany Ship will turn out to be the remains of a Chinese junk? An artefact of a stupendous effort by an early Chinese Ming dynasty government to map the world under the leadership of the mighty eunuch admiral, Zheng He?
During 2004, two sets of wood samples possibly from the Warrnambool wreck were sent for examination to China, where interest in Zheng He’s career now rises strongly. Test results are not yet known.
If these test samples are indeed from the wreck, four possibilities arise:
(1) the wreck was a lighter of odd construction, about 50-100 tons; built for sealing/whaling work;
(2) she was of origins yet unguessed (but not a vessel used by escaping convicts);
(3) a lost Portuguese caravel, one of Cristovao de Mendonca’s ships of 1521-1522, as suggested by the Australian writer, Gordon McIntyre, in his Secret Discovery of Australia (1977);
(4) a large Chinese junk, as suggested by Menzies.
Though often searched for, the Mahogany Ship remains a reclusive wreck. It remained unseen for the entire Twentieth Century! The issues will be re-explored by a Mahogany Ship Committee Symposium to be held at Warrnambool Entertainment Centre on 24-25 September 2005.
What happens for Australians when we backdate a mystery that is both Local-In-Its-Own-Right, and part of a controversy now raging world-wide? If we let it, the controversy fuelled by the 1421 website (www.1421.tv) could rage Australia-wide. But it isn’t just Australia, it’s Australasia! New Zealand researchers are remaining defensive about and sceptical of Menzies’ claims, partly as he challenges their views on the origins and traditions of Maori people. What gives?
Which mystery gives in? Which set of mysteries survives best? After considerable publicity on these old, claimed connections between China and Australia during 2003-2004, fascinating new perspectives unfold for world mapping history.
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Menzies’ 1421 website cites the following Australian locations for claimed Chinese influence (given here in no particular order and not all included):
Visits to the south-western, eastern and northern coasts. To around Warrnambool (a wrecked junk). To the Perth area, about Darwin. Any DNA evidence provided by Aboriginal people from Darwin and Fraser Island, Broome, the Perth area, the Gunditjmara Aboriginals of Southern Victoria/South Australia will prove fascinating. There are claims that maps have been drawn depicting Australian river systems (eg, the 1474 Map of Toscanelli), derived from Chinese information.
The Chinese mounted observation platforms west of the Blue Mountains, and at Penrith, Gympie, Atherton and along the northern coasts. Erected a stone building at Tin Can Bay, Gympie. The brumby horses of Fraser Island possibly originated in Tajikistan?
Other notes can be made: of Chinese pheasants on Rottnest Island, WA. King Island (a wrecked junk). Tasmania’s Storm Bay. Byron Bay (remains of a 40-foot-high Chinese rudder?) An artefact at Wollongong dated about 1410AD. Along the South Australian coast. The Far West of Central Queensland. Arnhem Land. Lady Elliot Island at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. Trepang Bay. Palmer River area (goldfields). Menzies asks: are Australia’s feral pigs of Chinese origin?
By now some 8000+ reviews of Menzies’ book have appeared. The best précis is still the arresting publisher’s blurb to the paperback edition.
“On 8 March 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. The ships, some nearly five hundred feet long, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. Their orders were `to proceed all the way to the end of the earth'. The voyage would last for two years and by the time the fleet returned, China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. And so the great ships were left to rot, and the records of their journey destroyed.”
“And with them, the knowledge that the Chinese had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, reached America seventy years before Columbus, and Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook.”
“The result of fifteen years research, 1421 is Gavin Menzies' enthralling account of this remarkable journey, of his discoveries and the persuasive evidence to support them: ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy, surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and later European navigators as well as the traces the fleet left behind.”
“Revised and updated with new material - including evidence of an entire Chinese fleet wrecked on New Zealand's South Island - for this paperback edition, 1421 is a brilliant, epoch-making work of historical detection that radically alters our understanding of world exploration and rewrites history itself.”
Updates arose for Menzies’ claims in 2004, some lodged on his website. As to mention of “an entire Chinese fleet wrecked on New Zealand’s South Island”, possibly by a tsunami after a comet strike (October 1422), it is so far apparent that New Zealand researchers remain sternly unconvinced by Menzies’ treatment.
We speak of the great Chinese admiral, Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho, 1371-1435). When the Chinese premier, Hu Jintao, spoke to the Australian Parliament on 24 October 2003, he alluded to age-old contacts between China and Australia, coming surprisingly close to dignifying Menzies’ views on Zheng He’s career. An indication, surely, of interest in Zheng He rising in China.
 A standard "portrait" of Admiral Zheng He now often seen on websites. |
But there is a downside to the 1421 story. Menzies writes, when the surviving ships of the 1421 fleet returned home, having exercised curiosities as they had, a regime change meant that the information gathered was suppressed, even destroyed, in the interests of Imperial reclusiveness.
If so, then the Confucian officials responsible, motivated by ideology, can be blamed for one of the single greatest acts of intellectual vandalism in world history, best comparable perhaps to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. But the truth of any such destruction is not yet fully established.
There is also, says Menzies, the matter of the 1421-1423 fleet being of 107 ships, though only a handful returned home. There is so far then, no way of assessing whether Chinese efforts to preserve, collate and interpret information newly-gathered by a large but badly-depleted fleet were successful or not.
If the Warrnambool relic was indeed manned by sailors of the great Chinese fleets of 1421-1423, then they evidently solved millennia-old problems of world navigation and mapping – how to derive both latitude and longitude – and a fascinating Antarctic-Australian scenario unfolds…
Menzies’ reasons for seeing the Chinese as interested in both the North and South Poles, on the same great expedition has much to do with a stupendous, dazzling idea, the very astronomical heart of 1421.
If Menzies is correct, the great Chinese fleets of 1421-1423 were to verify new hypotheses about astronomy and geography. If so, a scintillating set of ideas had begun to fascinate the top levels of Imperial Chinese society, the Heavenly Throne itself.
The heavens are stable, the world is round beneath them, and the world’s circumference is known. The Chinese mariners spoke thus (as it were): We know that Polaris, the Pole Star, the Chinese Celestial Pole, fixes the locality of the North Pole, which our lodestone-compasses point to. Our astronomers can predict both lunar and solar eclipses and draw interesting conclusions.
We (the Chinese mariners) also know from our methods of measuring time how roughly to fix latitude. But we do not know longitude. However, if the world is round, the South Pole should be symmetrically opposite to the North Pole. If we can find a useful set of both geographic and astronomical fixing points, with reference to both Polaris and Beijing, plus the South Pole (and the Malacca Straits, actually)… Then we can more accurately establish where the lands and peoples of the world are!
It’s a brilliant idea, easily enough outlined on paper. So to believe 1421: did the Chinese government actually send out four squadrons of a great fleet to explore such hypotheses? Importantly, European expansionism would often look to the fabled East, “to Cathay”. But obviously, being themselves “the East”, when they looked anywhere, the Chinese looked west, south, and further east.
As I read 1421, these are Menzies’ reasons for seeing the Chinese as interested in both the North and South poles on the same great expedition. Exploring not just “the world”, but exploring also a dazzling astronomical idea; an idea to which Columbus, looking for “China”, was a latecomer.
1421 tells us that as a maritime-expansionist, the early Ming emperor, Zhu Di (d. 1424), had a personal interest in astronomy. His people already had 2000 years’ experience with astronomy. Zhu Di renewed the nightly practice of recording the stars, partly as he desired to improve navigation and expand maritime activity to exact tribute for his Imperial coffers.
So the Emperor wished his mariners to locate new territories more correctly, and wanted Beijing’s great new observatory to become a major reference point (as the Greenwich Meridian and Mean Time later became for Britain).
Menzies cites the C17th Wu Pei Chi, “a set of sailing instructions” detailing latitudes, star positions, bearings. Chinese astronomy calculated latitude by the Pole Star, Polaris, above the North Pole, and also relying on lunar observations. (The Portuguese by 1474 used the Sun and the Equator as their reference points.)
Here is a grand difference, with basic reference points being the North Pole, not the Equator. So, by their sixth great set of voyages, the Chinese still had few clues on establishing longitude, which for Europeans - firstly the Portuguese - was Equator-based. The Chinese already knew they made great errors in longitude, problems found as they’d coursed the Indian Ocean as far west as East Africa before 1421.
Zheng He’s fleet sailing from March 1421 split into squadrons under different admirals, each charged with examining a different part of the world. Admiral Hong Bao’s ships supposedly cruised from the Antarctic to south-western Australia, (then north for Sumatra/Malacca Straits) and also east along the southern Australian coast (To the Warrnambool area?)
At the South Pole, the only direction to follow is north. This is why some of the 1421 fleet ships were ordered to venture to Antarctica. They first moved south from the tip of South America.
Menzies writes, the way the South Magnetic Pole varies would have given the Chinese problems with their north-pointing lodestones, However, they had determined to try to get a fix on Canopus, to at least to try to get under Crucis Alpha, the leading star of the Southern Cross.
Their intent was to compare latitudes between Polaris (in the North) and Canopus (in the South). If they could measure the elapsing of time and the speed of their own movements, which they could, any findable astronomical fix would at least verify their views on latitude. Then, only the further problems remained of establishing longitude.
Menzies says there are no necessary connection(s) between Chinese thought, clocks, and calculation of longitude, since longitude can be established without clocks/chronometers (as Cook used).
The Chinese measured duration-of-time by lengths of the casting of shadows, but this varies with latitude. Still, they knew how to predict eclipses solar and lunar, knew that such events had to be visible from everywhere on earth. Using techniques derived from this knowledge, they could roughly estimate longitude.
Establishing Canopus well enough, Admiral Hong Bao sailing north-east from a cruise near the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, next sailed for about 52 degrees 40 degrees south, as far as he could go across the landless Southern Ocean, luckily to Heard Island, the Kergeluen Islands. And then if his ships hit the Roaring Forties (which belt the southern latitudes, with which they’d have been unfamiliar) they’d be heading north-east yet again for south-western Australia, but be no longer able to sail further south.
Menzies’ theory suggests that that Admiral Hong Bao from south-west Australia sent a ship east to cruise the Southern coast of Australia, which foundered off Warrnambool - thus becoming "The Mahogany Ship".
Here then we have a conflict of mysteries. Are Australians merely the meat in the sandwich here? It’s a contest between The Chinese versus The Portuguese, as moderated for today on a website managed by Gavin Menzies (www.1421.tv).
Controversy is not new to Australian maritime history. (And more than 6500 shipwrecks have littered the long coastlines of Australia.)
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To explain some mapping history briefly… Until 1770, when Cook used a chronometer as he mapped the east coast of Australia, testing “modern methods”, Australia’s general shape was only guessed at, differently, somewhat south-east of the Indonesian archipelago, by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and French. The English did the best they could with maps from those countries.
Each European exploring nation might have used a different name and shape for a guessed-at landmass of the Southern Hemisphere: terra australis incognita, Java-la-Grande, or “the Great Southland”, which might be depicted anything up to 800 miles or so east or west of its actual location. Also unknown were the actual shapes of our neighbours, New Guinea, New Zealand and Antarctica. The Dutch with their “New Holland” were better mapmakers – for Western Australia, that is.
These matters should be stressed since the mapping history can quickly become very muddy and complicated. Across centuries, few if any cartographic arguments from any direction at all can remain free of speculation.
Worse, there was an old European belief that from the southern half of western South America, there stretched west to an unknown extent an amazing land called “Beach”. Indeed, one old map depicts “Beach” stretching south-east from somewhat south of Darwin.
Facts were so few that a mapmaker could easily have depicted “Beach” (perhaps a giant archipelago?) as stretching from south-east of the Malacca Straits between Malaya and Sumatra (the Spice Islands region), right across the Pacific to near the Straits of Magellan.
Whereas from today’s satellite photography we know the Pacific region as a yawning absence of landmass. Thus, depending on the European nationality of any explorer, “Australia” was visualized differently – often confusingly.
Even to 1699, as Dampier made his second trip to north-western Australian coasts, it is hard to imagine what he had visualized and re-visualized as he worked. And Dampier did not become aware that water (Torres Strait, as sailed by Torres in 1606) separates eastern New Guinea and the tip of Cape York, the northern edge of north-eastern Australia. Cook solved that problem, Torres did not.
And all this is without mentioning the oddities of various map projections used across centuries by successive mapmakers. Luis Vaz de Torres was aware that New Guinea (probably) had a south coast, and in the opinion of McIntyre in Secret Discovery (page 182 and see below), Torres sailed east-to-west through Torres Strait without realizing its significance vis-à-vis Australia’s Cape York. Cook, coming from a different direction, north up the eastern Australian coast, well appreciated the significance!)
Ironically, though he insists that the Chinese were familiar with Australia, and a major world map of Chinese voyages in 1421 indicates admiral Hong Bao’s ships sailed Torres Strait from east-to-west, Menzies in 1421 is unable to demonstrate that the Chinese had solved the geographic problems of the eastern ends of New Guinea/ Torres Strait/ Cape York – a weak point in his theory. Simply, though he maps the proposition, Menzies does not demonstrate that New Guinea was actually circumnavigated by Chinese mariners. Is it possible that Menzies, a Britisher, and a navigator, has gravely under-estimated the achievements of Britain's supreme navigator, Capt. James Cook?
This is significant, since correct knowledge of the shape of Papua-New Guinea puts entire regions into better perspectives - the Spice Islands, The Philippines, Australia. Importantly, if it is known that there are only islands east and south-east of New Guinea, not any large land mass, then ideas of where "the Great Southland" might be, must change.
We cannot even find from the Net who first circumnavigated New Guinea. We only find that Torres is the first to circumnavigate “most of it”. Abel Tasman on his Voyage 2 sought a passage between New Guinea and ”Southland” in 1644 - and failed. A loose view on a website is that Cook’s voyage II dispelled all earlier illusions re terra australis incognita as myths. (A website agreeing with McIntyre’s assessment on Torres and the Torres Strait, is at www.pacifictravel.com/books_and_maps/detorres.asp/).
Torres Strait was named not by de Torres. It was named much later after Torres sailed, by the official hydrographer (map keeper) for the English East India Company, Alexander Dalrymple (1737-1808) - who knew a great deal about South-East Asian geography. Dalrymple when he died had a personal collection of 20,000 maps (as McIntyre’s book indicates, p. 186).
Dalrymple by the way believed not in Java-la-Grande, he believed in the existence of The Great Southland – well, till Cook’s information became available, that is. Ask yourself, if Dalrymple in 1770 had gone looking in the Pacific for The Great Southland, would he have found it? Where?
Here we also see, that Australia's Torres Strait was in part named due to the authority held by the East India Company regarding matters maritime, not by the British Admiralty, and not by Torres’ employers.
One has to be very careful with maritime history, because often, each relevant fact can have an individual career, but the collectivity of facts when they are discussed can land the reader with a great deal of contradictory discussion either in text, in citations and/or footnotes, along with unexamined assumptions. (A great many of the fans of 1421 seem to argue from the position: "I may not know much about archaeology or navigation or maritime history, but I know what I like, I like a good yarn". )
These are extra reasons why excessive passion about the topics raised by 1421 will be counter-productive; excessive passion will impede discussions, fail to improve them, and will ensure that citations and footnotes remain in a mess. Matters here with discussing Torres Strait can be commented extensively, and are complicated, partly as Menzies claims that Bartholomew, the brother of Christopher Columbus, once forged a map which confused matters on whether a voyage between India and China was actually convenient – due to landmasses... which if so, would have confused matters for perceptions of areas south of South East Asia, The Philippines, and anywhere south of there. To wit: re Australia! Or, the Great Southland.
Menzies is also clear that the Chinese were quite familiar with the interior of Arnhem Land. What are the facts? From Menzies we find that re Chinese observation posts, the Chinese put one on Yap Island (GMT+1000), of the Western Caroline Islands, Micronesia, west of Guam and 850 miles east of Mindanao, and north of western New Guinea, later possessed by Spain.
Now, we can find that the Spaniard de Quiros knew that New Guinea had a south coast. But he decided not to inspect it since the season was bad with south-west winds. (See McIntyre, Secret Discovery, pp. 143-145,178-190.) Prior to his Introduction, Menzies on a world map of Chinese voyages has Chinese ships moving east-west 1421-1423 through Torres Strait. Torres himself is not indexed in Menzies' book, but Menzies does say that Chinese mariners placed observation platforms, including five on New Guinea, also at Madagascar, and some north of New Guinea.
Meanwhile, for Europeans, and until Cook’s visit, the Torres Strait problem helped to keep hidden the most enticing areas of Australia for settlement, the south-east.
An earlier idea has been that Warrnambool’s Mahogany Ship was Portuguese (captained by Cristovao de Mendonca), circa 1521 or later. Consciously, Mendonca was seeking to discover Java-la-Grande from the west, and he failed.
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The question is raised by Menzies: was the Warrnambool relic once manned by Chinese sailors of the great Chinese fleets of 1421-1423 that solved millennia-old problems of world navigation and mapping: – how to derive both latitude and longitude - using a lunar-based theory of navigation?
Australia’s maritime history is much ignored since it’s much concerned, post-Cook, with the painful topic of transporting convicts. So how many Australians will see the Mahogany Ship controversy as a form of intellectual gambling about high stakes in World History?
This is why the New Guinea/Torres Strait problem is important, though the nearby Philippines were well-known to traders of several eras, more so after the Spanish landed on those islands.
Views that the “Mahogany Ship” is a Portuguese relic have long circulated via McIntyre’s book, Secret Discovery of Australia, a book demanding close reading. Ironically, part of McIntyre’s theory (p. 165) relies on “a giant wave” possibly throwing one of Mendonca’s ships onto sand dunes near Warrnambool, say 1521-1522.
Thus, the Australian reader of 1421 finds two competing theories about the same mystery relic, both suggesting that “a giant wave” became significant, leaving behind a wreck.
For Menzies, a comet strike in the Tasman Sea, somewhat west of Stewart Island, south of New Zealand’s south island, produced a tsunami which wrecked yet another squadron of Chinese explorer-ships, about October 1422.
As with Menzies’ list of Chinese-Australian mysteries, McIntyre as evidence lists Portuguese artefacts found in various parts of coastal Australia, all of which still beggar explanation.
So oddly enough, both Menzies and McIntyre wish to argue that a “huge wave” can be part-explanation for the location of the so-called Mahogany Ship. As well, both argue that some ship’s remains to be found in New Zealand will prove connected to the Warrnambool mystery.
The odds against either “huge wave” proposition being satisfactorily provable seem long.
Yet another major claim made in McIntyre’s Secret Discovery is that Capt. James Cook did not actually discover the eastern Australian coast, he simply verified an old Portuguese mapping, and corrected its rather odd projection, after which the real shape of Australia fell naturally into place.
If Menzies’ 1421 theory can be verified regarding Australian locations, then it will suggest that the Portuguese used even earlier Chinese mapping work as they struggled to understand the geography of Australia. Cook will then owe an extra debt to Chinese mariners? But it was Cook who solved the New Guinea / Torres Strait problem.
Of course, the idea of Portuguese mariners following the leads of earlier Chinese mapmakers would be widely regarded as heresy in Australasia.
Interest surges. During 2004, fresh attempts were made from Melbourne to establish more facts on the Mahogany Ship. Wood samples have been sent to China for examination, and Chinese media outlets have been enthusiastically reporting.
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At Warrnambool, the book 1421 risks gaining or losing a strong plank of evidence. If many people take this over-seriously, what will be the outcome for McIntyre’s theory about Mendonca’s lost Portuguese caravel?
What is occurring is a duel between theories produced by two passionate writers and mariners/astronomers, Menzies and McIntyre. Who will win? Unfortunately, McIntyre, author of Secret Discovery, died in May 2004, so he will never know how his conundrums are solved. But we will.
There is, however, nothing new about interest in China’s eunuch admiral, Zheng He, who was a Muslim. Two writers preceding Menzies in print are Louise Levathes and Nicholas Kristof. Levathes once worked for National Geographic magazine; Kristof has been Tokyo bureau chief for New York Times. (Menzies, incidentally, does not read Chinese, Levathes does.)
Levathes’s book is a sedate, scholarly treatment tracing the routes of Zheng He’s ships yes, to South-East Asia, India, yes, to Arabian ports, yes to the East African coast; but not as far as Menzies’ ships sailed.
For any partisans of China’s maritime extraordinaire, Levathe’s remains a perfectly contenting book. (Cited by Menzies, Chapter 1, Note 10. See Louise Levathes, When China Ruled The Seas, The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433. New York, Oxford University Press, 1994.)
Menzies “has not, unfortunately, discovered anything new”, Levathes has been quoted as saying. A former visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Chinese and American Studies in China, Levathes has faulted Menzies for ignoring original sources that do detail the voyages of the treasure fleets, but make no mention of the Americas.
The theory behind 1421 is bold, imaginative, daring and arresting. Menzies’ writing moves far beyond what scholarship has ever been able to provide (and a third edition is eagerly awaited).
Still, 1421 provides too few clues as to why Europeans, with or without the aid of borrowed Chinese findings, took so long to solve the problem of locating Australia accurately and usefully, from 1521 – Mendonca’s time – to Cook’s in 1770.
Always remaining will be the mundane suggestion that the Mahogany Ship is merely an oddly-built lighter built for local sealing/whaling work around Port Fairy.
In the nineteenth century, most mariners who after 1836 saw parts of the "Mahogany Ship" wreck agreed, she was decidedly oddly-built. No one from the Warrnambool area has suggested the wreck might be any remains of a possible Chinese junk. The wreck was possibly something built by European men largely ignorant of ship construction, somewhat before 1836?
Kristof’s view is that Zheng He made history, but that he did not change history. Zheng He and his men explored a variety of places, but it is still contentious that all the locations claimed by Menzies were followed up usefully by the Chinese government or large-scale traders.
If we want to discuss the history of exploration in any consistent way, as to Australia, the works of Zheng He and his men will have to be put into a category of achievement built for them alone, I [the present writer] think.
Louise Levathes, When China Ruled The Seas, The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433. New York, Oxford University Press, 1994.
Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 250 Years before Capt. Cook. Revised. Sydney, Pan, 1977. (paperback, pp. 140ff re Mendonca.)
Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered The World. London, Bantam, 2003, paperback edition.)
Michael Nash, Cargo for the Colony: The 1797 Wreck of the merchant ship Sydney Cove. Woden, Australian Capital Territory, Navarine Publishing, 2001. (A second edition) (p. 173 re number of wrecks on Australian coasts. For an overview of maritime history and modern marine archaeology.)
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Gavin Menzies' own 1421 website at: http://www.1421.tv/
See also: http://www.booksattransworld.co.uk/
Menzies’ website at www.1421.tv/pages/evidence/content.asp?EvidenceID=379. This website contains much information that Menzies and his team have gathered since he published, with about 13,000 people already having sent Menzies supplementary information. The present writer feels that the volume and nature of the information treated are almost demanding an improved website design, as by now it is too difficult to find a suitable answer to any of the many questions raised on the website. The website’s “information architecture” by now (early 2005) has serious scoping problems. Gavin Menzies seems disinclined to fix them.
A website agreeing with McIntyre’s assessment on Torres and the Torres Strait, at www.pacifictravel.com/books_and_maps/detorres.asp/
A useful index of newspaper articles on the Mahogany Ship mystery is at: http://www.swtafe.vic.edu.au/lrc/collections/mahoganyship/tableofcontents.htm
On Admiral Zheng He see: http://www.zhenge.org.cn/
Comment on Gavin Menzies’ book at: http://www.worldofthestrange.com/modules.php?name=Forums& file =viewtopic&t=2016&view=previous/
Comment on Menzies book at: http://www.kenspy.com/Menzies/ and see also http://www.dightonrock.com/gavinmenziesisapseudoscientist.htm which gives us - Gavin Menzies is a pseudo scientist! By Manuel Luciano da Silva, Medical Doctor 22 July, 2004. Concerned mainly with North American issues, da Silva has conspicuously enlisted the the views of a fierce Menzies critic, Bill Hartz, which are well worth studying.
Source: Pioneer Press –for a view on the cartographic-historical aspects of Menzies’ theory is at: www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/living/education/8187620.htm/
For a positive view from China today, see item of 16 March 2002, by Siu-Leung Lee, PhD, info at: http://www.chinapage.com/history/zhengehe2.html - item drawn from official history of Ming Dynasty, with some datings been corrected, re a talk given by Gavin Menzies of 15 March 2002.
See also Dennis De Witt, 'Cheng Ho and the Ming Treasure Fleets', Dutch Courier, February 2003., pages 20 and 29. (The author is from Malacca, of Dutch descent, and maintains interest in the Dutch influence in Malaysia. Check a Dutch Descendants website: http://www.geocities.com/dutchdescendants/)
A website on some points, quoting Patrick Connelly, chair in 2005 of Warrnambool Mahogany Ship Committee, is at: http://www.dahew.com/ww/2004-12/25/content_103315.htm, dated 25-12-2004 from Crienglish.com).
A Victorian web commentator, Bellamy, suggests that Zheng He’s ships visited Timor; the junks were made of persea nan-mu, (tree laurel), also called oak or cedar. Bellamy feels the Mahogany Ship relic may be just a larger lighter (used for sealing work), made of a dark red wood, of an odd construction, of maybe 70 tons burden. The relic has been estimated variously as of 50, 70, 100, or 300 tons. The web article on the Mahogany Ship by Bellamy is at: http://mh2001.murdoch.edu.au/links/submissions/bellamy.html
Menzies distills the essence of his book as follows: [Story by Allan Koary, 1 February 2005 at http://thestar.com.my] His evidence, he [Menzies] said, can be broken down into three basic parts. First is that the European explorers such as Magellan, Christopher Columbus, Vasco Da Gama and Captain Cook all had maps showing them the way to their respective destinations. Secondly, when the explorers got to the Americas, they found Chinese people there. And lastly, Zheng He's records of his travels still exist, despite the belief that they had been destroyed by the Ming emperors as advised by xenophobic Confucian officials. In fact, Menzies claimed that in China, Hong Kong and Singapore today, one can get on a bus to a public library and read about it all.”
See item by Siu-Leung Lee at http://www.chinapage.com/history/zhenghe2.html giving... The list of countries and territories covered and recorded in the official Ming history includes Java, Sumatra, Vietnam, Siam, Cambodia, Philippines, Ceylon, Bangladesh, India, Yemen, Arabia, Somalia, Mogadishu. As a clear demonstration of his travel to Africa, among the souvenirs he brought back to China were giraffes and lions, indigenous animals of Africa. The official history also mentioned "Franca" (which was the territory to describe today's France and Portugal) and Holland. The Hollanders were described as tall people with red hair and beard, long nose, and deep eye sockets. If any Chinese ships did meet with the Europeans in their native countries, then the only way would be to navigate around the Cape of Good Hope before the Suez Canal was a throughway. Unfortunately, Zheng He's magnificent accomplishment was later targeted by other courtiers as wasteful. Most of his records were destroyed and building of ships with more than three masts were considered crimes punishable by death. So, a large part of his excursion (which might include the America part) may have been unreported.
For a relevant news story by Allan Koay at http://thestar.com.my/ Or, http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2005/2/1/features/10044399&sec=features)
Koay writes: “Menzies's website (www.1421.tv) gets 1,000 visitors a day, and some of them share their own evidence and results of their own research. And in the last two years, through the website, Menzies and his team have managed to gather some 13,000 people from 120 countries to help them in their continuing research. One visitor to his website said that when the Vikings reached North America at the end of the 10th century, they found Chinese people there, which means that the Chinese had traversed the world even before Zheng He. Menzies said, "One of the big mistakes that I made in my book, which I will correct in my next edition, is that I put everything down to Zheng He," Menzies explained. "But I found out that his predecessor, Kublai Khan, had charted almost all of the world, including the Americas. Zheng He owed a huge amount to Kublai Khan. "We subsequently found Chinese maps of the Americas which predates Kublai Khan. These maps will be released to the general public on May 16 which will show that the Chinese had been mapping the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North and South America for nearly 2,000 years." Ends extract from Koay story.
A website sceptical of Menzies at: http://www.kenspy.com/Menzies/maps.html/ - Sceptical about Menzies also at: http://hnn.us/articles/1308.html
See a typical review of 1421 at - http://www.bookfinder.us/review6/0060537639.html/ For accusations of Menzies as an exponent of pseudo-science, see http://baheyeldin.com/pseudoscience/gavin-menzies-1421-china-discovers-the-world.html/
On Kristof's views, see also, http://www.huaren.org/diaspora/background/doc/kristof.html - and the same story is at http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m3/kristof.html
For an entertaining debunking of Menzies' "linquistic evidence", see material from University Pennsylvnia/Bill Poser of 1 Feb., 2004 at: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languageslog/archives/000409.html -
For a genealogical view on the (alleged) builder George Lawton of the Newport Tower, in about 1650-1655, see: http://www.realm.lawton.net/OSM.html - where OSM is Old Stone Mill, that is, the mysterious Tower of Newport, Rhode Island, identified by Menzies as built earlier by the Chinese.
For a non-detailed debunking of Menzies' 1421 by an Australian, see article, '1421: The Year China Didn't Discover Terribly Much', by Peter Barrett, (vice-president of Canberra Skeptics), The Skeptic, Vol. 25, No. 3, Spring 2005., pp. 48-51.
Images left: The tomb of Zheng He, and a coin commemorating the famed admiral. The tomb image was lifted from www.islamfortoday.com/zhenghe.htm (Zheng He being a Muslim) and the coin image from www.chinapage.org/zhengehe.htm
J. R. Carroll, Harpoons to Harvest: The story of Charles and John Mills, Pioneers of Port Fairy. Warrnambool Institute Press, Warrnambool, Victoria, 1989.
Compilation, Mahogany Ship Committee (1985), The Proceedings of the first Australian Symposium of the Mahogany Ship – relic or legend? Warrnambool, Victoria. (Reporting also on a search made in 1981.)
J. W Powling, The Mahogany Ship: A Survey of the Evidence. 2003.
Contra to Gavin Menzies' 1421 is Phil Rivers, (Capt.), 1421 Voyages: Fact and Fantasy. [monograph No 11.] 2004. Malaysia, first edition. ISBN 9834 055641. (Rebutting Menzies on three fronts: documents, nautical and geographical aspects, and general lacks of evidence).
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