 |
| |
|
|
Ramo
|
 |
Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999
time: 23:18
|
|
World spins on claim China discovered America
By Tim Castle
LONDON (Reuters) - Is it good-bye Columbus?
A British historian's claim that a Chinese admiral reached America decades before the Italian explorer has unleashed a frenzy of media interest in a theory that could force the rewriting of history.
Gavin Menzies, 64, a former Royal Navy submarine commander, provoked headlines around the globe last week after a newspaper published an outline of his thesis that China "discovered" the New World 70 years before the West.
Based on contemporary European maps and records, Chinese star charts and archaeological finds, Menzies' case is that Chinese sailors mapped the world in the early 1400s before abandoning global seafaring in the middle of the 15th century.
Historians contacted by Reuters say the amateur historian's thesis is speculative and leaps to conclusions that may be correct but have yet to be proved.
Menzies says Chinese maps passed to the West through the Portuguese, by way of an Italian traveller, Nicolo da Conti, who went on some of their voyages. Don Pedro, son of Portugal's King Joao I kept the resulting map of the world as a state secret.
But elements of this map, drawn in 1428 and now lost, leaked out and were copied into other charts, says Menzies.
These revealed parts of America and Australia before they were "rediscovered" by Europe's Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook.
"Every single one of them refers to maps he's either got with him or seen before he set sail," Menzies told Reuters.
"My argument is somebody must have drawn these maps before the Europeans got there. Who was it?"
EUNUCH ADMIRALS
For Menzies the answer is Admiral Zheng He, a Grand Eunuch who commanded seven voyages of exploration from 1403 to 1433.
In huge many-masted ships, the largest four times the size of Columbus's Santa Maria, the Chinese made increasingly ambitious tours of Indonesia and the southern Asian coastline.
Historians agree that the fleet reached east Africa and may have rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
Menzies says the 107-strong armada of the sixth voyage of 1421-3 went further, reaching Latin America, the Caribbean and Australia, circumnavigating the globe a century before Magellan.
Wherever they went, split into four flotillas, they left porcelain, votive offerings and wrecks, he says.
"There are 10,000 pieces of evidence," he said.
"It's so blindingly obvious now that it's not Columbus. How he's got away with it for so long mystifies me," he added.
He says the honour should go to two of Zheng He's fellow eunuch admirals, Heng-Bao and Zhou-Man, who continued the sixth voyage after Zheng He returned early to China.
A starting point for Menzies' thesis is a 1424 map of Europe and the Atlantic that he says shows Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe nearly 70 years before 1492.
His identification is backed by Carol Urness, Emeritus Curator of the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where the "Pizzigano" map is held.
"I think he has made a very good argument for those identifications for the 1424 map," she told Reuters.
"Now the question is whether the prototype for this map is a lost European map or is the Chinese map. That's going to be the harder leap."
Gillian Hutchinson, Curator of the History of Cartography at London's National Maritime Museum, said she was unconvinced.
"It shows that people knew that there were islands out into the Atlantic, but it doesn't necessarily mean they can be identified with any island we know of," she said.
Menzies, who plans to publish his findings in a book, will attempt to answer some of those questions before an invited audience on March 15 at London's Royal Geographical Society.
Whatever the truth of his claims, a worldwide audience is guaranteed: "I can show without any doubt whatsoever that the whole world was charted long before the Europeans set sail."
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020309/80/ctkki.html
|
|
| |
|
|
|
mindseye
|
 |
A Yankee living in Shanghai
Apr 1999
time: 13:18
|
|
quote:
Chinese sailing vessels were certainly advanced for their time, but I don't think they can compare with the maneuverability of Euro ships a full century of intense exploration and improvement later. |
I'm not sure that's true at all. The largest of the Chinese ships, known as "treasure ships" were undoubtedly not as maneuverable simply due to their size. They were nearly twice as large as the largest clippers, and among the largest sailing ships ever built. Surviving sternposts, shipyard remains, and plentiful documentation substantiate this. But the treasure ships were not "one-offs", they were the end products of a long, highly advanced line of Ming ship design that included technologies such as surface-skimming anti-ship cruise missiles!
The treasure ships were not the only class of vessel in Zheng He's fleets - in fact, only about a dozen of these monsters were built. The fleets included ships of all sizes and types, some approaching the treasure ships in scale. These included warships, water tankers, troop carriers and horse ships. The Chinese had all sorts of ship designs including more speedy, maneuverable coastal defense ships for running down pirate vessels, and even sidewheelers for use on rivers and lakes!
Had it not been for the political changes which occurred in 15th century China, who knows what might have taken place? With vessels and fleets of this size, the possibilities are limitless. Imagine a massive red-sailed missile-armed Chinese fleet appearing off the Thames of Elizabethan England. 
One of my students pointed out to me what she said was a telling difference between East and West: when the Zheng He discovered new lands, the Chinese brought tribute and opened trade. When the Europeans discovered new lands, they claimed them as their own and slaughtered the inhabitants. 
Last edited by mindseye on 11-03-2002 at 03:59
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Urban Ranger
|
|
Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
|
|
Here's a comment from a Slashdot thread on the same topic:
quote:
Before I add my comments, let me just say that I have been studying archaeology for over 6 years, so I feel as if I am qualified to say a little bit about the facts behind this issue and some of the more ridiculous comments I've seen posted about it.
1st, it is well known that multiple cultures "discovered" what has come to be known as America before Columbus did in 1492. First and foremost by far, of course, were the ancestors of the native peoples of America, who appear to have arrived in several waves of migration via the Alaskan land bridge and possibly via maritime travel from Polynesia. There are arguments about exactly how old the earliest sites (including Monte Verdi in South America, and Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania) are, but most scholars accept them as being at least 10,000 years old and perhaps as old as 25,000 years. This beats anyone else by a long shot.
After this migration, however, the ONLY incontrovertible archaeological evidence we have for precolumbian contact comes from Viking Sites of around 1000 AD, including L'Anse Aux Meadows, which I believe is in Newfoundland.
The only other group that has any kind of solid archaeological claim to precolumbian discovery is the Chinese. Their presence seems to be attested by anchor stones found off the coast of California which closely match those from Chinese ship types which existed before the era of Columbus. There is, however, NO secure precolumbian artifactual evidence from the Chinese. This one's really a tossup, so I'd like to see what Menzies has to say.
Now when it comes to all of these other claims - Egyptians, Subsaharan Africans, Phonecians, Welsh, etc. etc., what we're seeing is a lot of bad scholarship. Most of this can be traced to 19th century racist hyperdiffusional accounts which attempted to explain how monumental architecture and such could have been produced by such "primitive" (or in some accounts sub-human) people as the Native Americans. Most of these centered around the Egyptians, mainly due to superficial similarities between Egyptian Pyramids and Mesoamerican "pyramid" platforms, which in actuality are designed and built in entirely different ways. Furthermore, neither the Egyptians, nor even the Phonecians, who are often supposed to have ferried the Egyptians across the Atlantic, possessed the kind of ship technology which would make regular oceanic voyaging possible. These were unreinforced, open-decked, square-rigged boats with no navigational instruments. We're not talking Spanish Naos or Chinese Junks (or even Viking boats) here.
The rest of the so-called evidence rests on overinterpretation of existing evidence (Olmec heads as evidence of African Contact, St. Brendan's Chronicles as an actual account - yeah, they just ran into Judas Iscariot in Massachussetts), proven hoaxes (Cuneiform tablets in Tennessee), or the psychotic ramblings of UFO cultists like Zecharia Sitchin.
Anyway, despite my little tirade, I don't want to rule out that other civilizations couldhave made it to the Americas. There is just no evidence. So here is how it stands on Precolumbian contact:
North Asians : Yes Vikings : Yes Chinese : Chances are pretty good Egyptians, Phonecians, Africans, Welsh : Highly Doubtful Everyone Else : Who the hell knows? |
|
|
| |
|
| |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:18.
Apolyton Time is 00:18. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|
11-03-2002 00:46
and scientists had good evidence to show.
|