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1421: the Year China Discovered
the World by Gavin Menzies Did medieval Chinese sailors
really span the globe? T H Barrett takes issue with junk history 15 November 2002 Gavin Menzies, who turned to
nautical history after a successful career as a submarine commander, is a
born optimist. Most academics are convinced pessimists. True, they do not
normally face being blown up or drowned – even if they must become reconciled
to seeing their pay and conditions slip behind other professions. What
teaches them never to look on the bright side is the experience of rigorous
research, in which the last, oddly shaped piece in the jigsaw always turns
out to be the bomb that blows the picture apart. Menzies, by contrast, seems
to be working with infinitely elastic pieces, which naturally fit together to
create a picture on a far grander scale than any academic will recognise. "What is wrong with this
picture?" might provide a fitting title for the enterprise. Its
ostensible theme is the early 15th-century voyages of the Chinese eunuch
admiral Zheng He, who sailed the Indian Ocean with a retinue of tens of
thousands at least as far as the east coast of Africa. It is possible that by
this stage the Chinese had some awareness of Australia – they had been
trading with Timor for 150 years or more – and sporadic contacts across the
Pacific. The technological capabilities of the Chinese are not in doubt, and
far flimsier craft had already been used to colonise Madagascar across the
Indian Ocean from Indonesia, and Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand across
the Pacific. Despite this, we may rest
assured that in 1421 the fleets under Zheng He's command did not
circumnavigate the globe, did not explore the Atlantic from Arctic to
Antarctic, and did not plant colonies around the Pacific rim, in the
Caribbean, or in Massachusetts. Menzies has only reached these conclusions by
ignoring five basic principles of research. First, like a good commander, he
has not questioned the overall strategy implied by his big picture. True, the
Chinese emperor may have held a conception of empire closer to that of the
Mongols, who he helped to eject from China, than to most of his successors. But
this had already involved him in attempting to conquer the remnant of their
regime in Mongolia and also the Vietnamese: tough opponents on both northern
and southern borders. Even before the cancellation of Zheng He's further
voyages he was retrenching on frontier defence, and while the Indian Ocean
voyages probably paid for themselves in prestige and profits, there would
have been no point in risking ships and men in the attempt to chart the world
beyond trade routes known to Arabs, Tamils and Malays – on whose information
the Chinese relied. Border troubles aside, there was
plenty to do at home. We know that when the voyages were cancelled, his army
of 10,000, an important element in the fleet's strike force, was kept busy
being redeployed as construction workers, so that the southern capital of
Nanjing expanded to match the glories of Beijing. That fact undermines
completely Menzies' account of the handful of survivors from a decimated
fleet, struggling home from the ends of the earth. As for colonising, the
emperor did not even colonise Taiwan, which was only settled gradually by
Chinese private enterprise. Second, every hypothesis
favourable to Menzies' version becomes a fact before we turn the page, while
every other possibility sinks without trace. A string of doubtful decisions
leads him further and further off-course. He has clearly read a recent
monograph on the Piri Reis map that gives an explanation of why a compass
rose is depicted off the coast of Patagonia in 1513, which does not require the
presence of a flotilla of Chinese cartographers in the Falkland Islands 90
years earlier. Of these explanations, we hear not a word. Third, every text is taken at
its word in English translation, with no regard for the literary modes of the
original. When we are told that strangers attacked the Viking settlements in
Greenland with "fire and sword", to Menzies this can only refer to
his Chinese voyagers, since Canada's First Nations never used swords. To
believe this, we must suppose our source would otherwise have written
"with war whoop and tomahawk", even though he had no experience of
such things. Similarly, when Zheng He represents himself in translation as
having journeyed "to the ends of the earth", he must have done just
that. Fourth, the author's heavy
investment in his project has obliged him to find a publisher capable of
showing a decent return on his outlay. No one could fault Bantam's
enthusiastic promotion. But there still exist elsewhere editors prepared to
check the plausibility, if not the accuracy, of their authors. Had Menzies
taken the precaution of finding one, he would have been spared some
unfortunate errors. His notion that the Chinese loaded up a few mylodons
(giant ground sloths) in Patagonia, only to let one escape in Australia,
would not have withstood a couple of minutes on the internet. Mylodons, to
judge from the solid evidence we have, became extinct several thousand years
ago. Fifth, he has not stopped to
think about the implications of his arguments. If the maps that appear to
show portions of the New World before Columbus do derive from the
cartographic activities of the Chinese in 1421, why are their depictions of
China so inaccurate? If the Portuguese did colonise Puerto Rico in the early
15th century, what became of them? Bold and imaginative solutions are all
well and good, but if they simply generate further mysteries, perhaps there
is something to be said for a more conventional approach. Menzies makes much of his
periscope-level approach to world history, and there is a tang of salt spray
about his narrative that could have made it an excellent work of
popularisation. Zheng He's achievements do deserve to be more widely known.
But by overlooking these simple rules, he has ended up cast away upon the
desolate shores of Alternative History. There, spacemen, Atlanteans and
Templars jostle endlessly in the propagation of arcane knowledge, in a
picture of the past that never was. Both Zheng He and Gavin Menzies deserve
better. Professor T H Barrett teaches at
SOAS, University of London © 2002 Independent Digital (UK)
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