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Gavin Menzies usually gets inspiration from 'bacon
sandwiches' and prayers 'to the Virgin', but his real breakthrough came, he
says, when 'I spent a misty evening in a bar on Lisbon's waterfront'. Thus
far, readers can believe him. He claims that in the course of two simultaneous expeditions
between 1421 and 1423, Chinese explorers anticipated most of the great
maritime discoveries usually attributed to the work of the next four of five
centuries: finding, inter alia, America, Australia, New Zealand and
Antarctica. They crossed the Pacific and Atlantic, charted most of the
coastlines of the world, circumnavigated Greenland and got home by sailing
along the normally ice-bound northern coast of Eurasia from west to east.
Along the way, they established 'permanent colonies
from California to
Peru' and in such equally improbable spots as Australia, New Zealand and
Easter and Pitcairn Islands, to say nothing of outposts, for instance, in
Rhode Island and along the River Zaire. Columbus, Magellan, Vasco da Gama and
Captain Cook succeeded only because they were 'carrying copies of Chinese
maps'. 'I could only shake my head in wonder,' Mr Menzies confesses, 'at the
skill and sophistication of these Chinese mariners of so many centuries ago.'
That, too, we can believe. Shake on. The voyages to which Mr Menzies ascribes these surprising
achievements are well known. By the standards of navigations of the time,
they are extremely well documented. But there are gaps in the record, and there
have been plenty of fantasists eager to fill them with speculations as wild
as any of Mr Menzies's. His originality consists in taking all the nonsense
which has ever been aired about these voyages and stuffing it into a single
volume. How does he do it? Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance allied to
outrageous chutzpah, shorn of critical intelligence. The result is heroically
defiant of logic, evidence, scholarship and sense. Mr Menzies says that he has been able to spot truths
undetected by professionals because of his 'knowledge of astro-navigation and
the world's oceans'. These qualifications, it seems, were largely acquired
during a voyage from Singapore in a submarine in 1959. It is hard to respect
the navigational knowledge of someone who thinks 'portolan navigation' is the
same as triangulation. Even if Mr Menzies's periscope gave him some strangely
privileged view of the world, he ought surely still to be aware that
practical seafarers, as well as professional scholars, have beaten him to the
field, and anticipated and exploded almost all his claims. Most of his delusions arise from elementary methodological
errors. Dearth of Chinese documents, he admits, drove him to scour European
maps for support for his conclusions. Anyone familiar with medieval maps
knows their data should never be accepted without corroboration, for no other
type of document is so vulnerable to emendation and forgery. Moreover, it was
the normal practice of cartographers of the day to fill their maps, beyond the
limits of the known, with speculative lands and seas. Mr Menzies is
indifferent to these reasons for caution. He repeatedly tells us that 'as
soon as' he compared old maps with new ones he 'saw at once' resemblances
which he seems to think eluded earlier scrutineers. His conclusions become boringly
predictable: a slip or squiggle on an old map means someone 'must have' seen
and charted some real topographical feature. And who could the discoverer be
but a member of the Chinese expeditions of the 1420s? According to a sample
of the author's reasoning, 'their landfall [in South America] must have been
around the Orinoco delta, for the Piri Reis map shows they had surveyed that
small part of the coast with great accuracy.' But the Piri Reis map dates
from 1513 and was compiled with access to the charts of European explorers
who were well acquainted with that coast by then. Like all the weirdest
theories, those of Mr Menzies also rely on flagrantly wishful readings of
toponyms. The word 'con' on a speculative island on a fifteenth-century map
is wrenched to mean 'volcano' and is instantly, bewilderingly transformed
into 'solid evidence that someone had reached the Caribbean and established a
secret colony there.' To reckless reliance on misread maps, Mr Menzies adds
childish misuse of objects of material culture. He infers 'early Chinese
presence' in Mexico from items which are indeed old and Chinese but which
were introduced to the country of their present location in recent times. Are
there Chinese silks in the Philippines or pepper in Peking? They must have
been brought by his pet explorers, rather than arriving as the documents say
they arrived, by the normal processes of trade. Are there bananas in Hawaii
or sweet potatoes in Polynesia? His Chinese must have taken them there. Is
there an unusual ruin in Newport? Mr Menzies makes it out to be a Chinese
astronomical observatory. Cynocephali a decorative favourite with medieval
mapmakers are misrepresented as giant sloths trapped by the Chinese in Chile
and transported to Peking. And 'how could drawings of cossacks have been
made' in a Chinese book 'without a visit to the Arctic?' Instances of this
breathtaking logic are legion. 'The Incas had a word for chicken at least
forty years before the arrival of the conquerors' and so must have got it
from the Chinese. Chickens, indeed, are a favourite preoccupation of our
author. 'I had lived in Malaysia,' he enthuses in a characteristic passage,
'and remembered well how the morning call of Asiatic hens kik-kiri-kee
was markedly different from the cock-a-doodle-doo of their European
counterparts;' so when he awakens in Peru to 'the familiar kik-kiri-kee' he
leaps to a conclusion which will no longer surprise the reader. The author's quest for the routes of the Chinese explorers
follows not only chickens but also canards, wild geese and absolute turkeys.
No doubt it will lead to big sales among readers of the Daily Star and Sunday
Sport. It is the historical equivalent of stories about Elvis Presley in Tesco
and close encounters with alien hamsters. It will mislead many and
disillusion many more, setting back efforts to get western readers to
acknowledge the real achievements of Chinese science and navigation of the
middle ages. The publishers and PR types who have clustered round Mr Menzies
with contracts for TV and syndication-rights are callous exploiters of vulgar
sensationalism. Their protιgι, however, seems honestly inebriated by those
bar-room nights or enraptured by prayerful helpings of bacon sandwiches. Or
maybe he is a devilishly clever ironist. One feature of the book suggests
this: the alleged trail of the Chinese explorers from Mexico to Arnhem Land
via Ruapuke is marked by what our author claims are documented sightings of
'men in white garments', who, he concludes, can only have been members of the
Chinese expeditions. Perhaps, however, they were figments of a prophetic
vision: the real men in white coats may yet be on their way. Posted with the permission of
the author, Dr. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Article to be in an upcoming
issue of Literary Review (London, UK). |
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