This page: 1421: The Year China Discovered America | Category: | index pages:
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1421 The Year China Discovered America Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Gavin Menzies (continued) | |||
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V The Voyage of Zhou Wen |
11 Satans Island |
Note (Hals): Evidence:
end note | |
Many of the islands seem to bear little relation to their present sizes and shapes, and I was baffled as to why it was so much in error. I struggled to make sense of this for some considerable time; then, all at once, the answer came to me. Sea levels in 1421 were lower than they are today. Global warming has caused the polar ice to melt, causing sea levels to rise slowly but inexorably. | |||
Columbus was a poor cartographer. On his first voyage his calculations of latitude were twenty degrees out he believed he was somewhere in Nova Scotia and his longitude was a thousand miles in error. Even if Columbus had a secret, and rather better, cartographer aboard who could have accurately drawn the Caribbean islands shown on the Cantino during all four of Columbus voyages, that still left hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean and islands shown on the Cantino that neither Columbus nor any other European explorer reached until twenty years after the chart was drawn. | |||
To achieve the remarkable precision and wealth of detail of the Cantino and Piri Reis charts would have required at least thirty ships just to survey the Indian Ocean, let alone South America, Antarctica and Africa. Neither Portugal nor Spain could have sent so many huge fleets simultaneously to different quarters of the world. | |||
12 The Treasure Fleet Runs Aground | Note (Hals): Evidence:
end note | ||
In 1974, an American scientist, Dr David Zink, led an expedition (the first of nine) to survey these mysterious stones. He produced overwhelming evidence that the road was man-made. Small stones are placed underneath large ones, apparently to make the sea-bed level, and the larger of the two structures contains arrow-shaped pointers that can only have been man-made. Parts of the road contain stones cut to the same size and laid in rows, and some small square stones have tongued and grooved joints. The mineral micrite, foreign to America and almost always found in association with lead and zinc ores, was also lying on the sea-bed around the stones. They have been submerged over a long span of time, for the edges of some have become rounded by wave action, giving them something of the appearance of huge loaves of bread. Some of them were not of Caribbean origin. The road is clearly visible from the air through the azure water. It runs straight as a die down into the depths, a broad band of beige stone. | |||
Dr. Zink later reached the bizarre conclusion that the stones of the Bimini Road were part of the fallen pillars of a sacred temple built about 28,000 BC by a long-lost civilization, the Atlanteans, who employed aliens from the star cluster Pleiades to build a megalithic temple complex similar to Stonehenge. | |||
Dr. Zink sent a sample to the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. As it had never been fired in a kiln, they were unable to carbon-date the blocks but the head chemist, Dr Edward V. Sayre, confirmed that some of the smaller square blocks were made with a sandstone-limestone mixture and suggested that they might have been created by an ancient technique of mass production. Moreover, each building block was tongued and grooved to slot into its neighbour, and although they had square sides, they tapered in thickness. There appeared to be no need for the tongue and groove on the sea-bed, for the stones were not joined together with them. The solution could be that the building blocks were tongued and grooved so that they could be joined together around ballast in the bottom of a junk, preventing the large stones from moving in a heavy sea and damaging the hull. Note (Hals): end note | |||
13 Settlement in North America |
Note (Hals): Evidence:
end note | ||
14 Expedition to the North Pole |
Note (Hals): Evidence:
end note | ||
The cumulative evidence the Chinese reaching the Caribbean, the currents and winds that could have carried them from there around Greenland, the Popes letter and the stone village is suggestive of a Chinese attempt to reach the North Pole. By reaching Greenland they failed only by four hundred nautical miles . . . or did they? The most exquisite artefacts snow geese, polar bears, seals and walruses of sumptuous workmanship carved from walrus ivory have been found in the High Arctic even further north than Greenland, within 250 miles of the North Pole. They were designed by artists of genius. Could the Inuit have made them, or were they the art of a civilization almost as old as time?
Note (Hals): If artworks usually attributed to the Inuit can be linked to Ming Chinese techniques or styles, let the evidence be considered. Menzies describes none; he appears to be claiming the art for China solely on the basis of its quality. Wishful thinking I can deal with, but outright cultural chauvinism, sans evidence, deserves no quarter. end note | |||
VI The Voyage of Yang Qing |
15 Solving the Riddle |
Note (Hals): Evidence:
end note | |
We decided to go on a crocodile shoot in the estuary of the Limpopo, and duly borrowed the ships motor boat, several rifles and a crate of rum. We arrived in the glassy, greasy estuary under a leaden sky, a scene Kipling would have recognized. There were no crocodiles but plenty of hippos with their ugly snouts and big ears showing above the muddy water. This was sport! We soon discovered two things: hippos hides are tough (the bullets bounced off) and hippos do not enjoy being peppered with shot. One charged us; I can see the boat now, flying through the air upside down, its propellers whirring away as it passed overhead. Both we and the hippo retired bruised but otherwise undamaged. | Topic: | ||
If a sufficiently large fleet was deployed, there is no reason why longitudes across the whole of the Indian Ocean should not have been established in a single lunar eclipse. Men would have been despatched to different locations in readiness to take readings of the lunar eclipse, all on the same night. They could then return to base to compare measurements. | Topic: | ||
Though the Western world is largely silent on the origin of these extraordinary world maps, now correct both for latitude and longitude, the inscription on the stone erected by Zheng He in commemoration of his voyages shows where the credit is due: And now as a result of the voyages the distances and courses between the distant lands may be calculated. It was another towering achievement by the Chinese fleets, one that should have burned like a beacon in the annals of global history. Instead, it was to be snuffed out and forgotten, along with the discovery of the Americas, Australia, Antarctica and the Arctic; Europeans would claim the glory that should have belonged to the great Chinese admirals and their fleets. | |||
VII Portugal Inherits the Crown |
16 Where the Earth Ends |
Note (Hals): Henry and his brother, Dom Pedro, acquire maps based on Ptolemys Geographia (from Byzantines fleeing the Ottoman conquest) and, by 1428, charts based on the Chinese voyages, brought from the East by Niccolò da Conti. Paolo Toscanelli interviews da Conti and supplies maps to Columbus and to Behain of Bohemia. Evidence:
end note | |
Another of Zarcos shipmates, Bartolomeu Perestrello, was sent to establish a colony on the neighbouring island of Porto Santo. It was an ill-starred choice. Perestrellos children had a pet rabbit, a doe. It gave birth to a litter during the voyage to Porto Santo, and when the colonizers settled on the island the rabbits multiplied so fast without natural predators to control their numbers that the island was soon reduced to a desert. | |||
There are some parts of the ocean where a mariner knows his position by the smell of the sea. The Grand Banks off Newfoundland is one, the Straits of Malacca another, but most potent of all is the scent of pines off Sagres on a warm summers night, a smell that for me always brings back memories of voyages to the East, for after Sagres one alters course to the south-east for the Mediterranean and the lands beyond. | Topic: | ||
Arabs had used compasses for centuries, after obtaining the device from the Chinese with whom they regularly swapped nautical knowledge. However, the Chinese knowledge of navigation, astronomy and the means by which latitude and longitude could be calculated, perfected on the last great voyage of the treasure fleets from 1421 to 1423, remained theirs alone. Others, even the Arabs but particularly the Europeans, were still floundering in their wake decades, and in the case of longitude centuries, later. | |||
17 Colonizing the New World |
Note (Hals): Evidence:
end note | ||
In times of trouble, my habit is to pray to the Virgin and eat bacon sandwiches. | Topic: | ||
18 On the Shoulders of Giants |
Note (Hals): Christopher Columbus and his brother Bartholomew (still working for the Portuguese as a cartographer) create the Martellus map: a tracing of the secret Portuguese world map, with distortions placing Africas tip further south, attaching a land mass south of Malay, and increasing the longitudinal distances east of Europe (with consequent reductions on the westward route to China). They use this to convince Spanish royalty and financiers that a westward route to the East would be competitive. Cooks discoveries were also based on maps already known. Evidence:
Comment: The traditional Columbus story seems to require an amazing combination of knowledge and ignorance; the suggestion that he was deliberately falsifying evidence makes more sense than any other explanation I have seen. end note | ||
In several ways, the forged Martellus maps depicted a monumental eastward journey, whereas by sailing westwards for Antilia to China, Spanish ships could pass through the Strait of Magellan and beat the Portuguese to it. This is the reason, I submit, why the Portuguese concentrated on the eastern route to China and the Spanish tried to reach the same destination via South America. Bartholomew Columbus stole the intellectual property of the Portuguese government. He then forged a chart he and Christopher knew was bogus, and both of them used that chart to extract money and backing under false pretences from the Bank of Genoa and the Catholic monarchs of Spain. Columbuss true legacy to posterity is not the discovery of the Americas, but of the circulatory wind systems of the Atlantic he so brilliantly analysed and exploited on his later voyages. | Topic: | ||
text checked (see note) Feb 2005 |