1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  Despite the wholesale destruction of Chinese records carried out in the fifteenth century, I now had a trail of evidence of the treasure fleets’ movements from departure from Tanggu to arrival in the Cape Verde Islands in September 1421. Ma Huan had described the voyage from China via Malacca to Calicut, and the Mao Kun chart of 1422 had then put the armada off Sofala in south-eastern Africa. My evidence for it having rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed north up the west coast of Africa was provided by the Kangnido map in Japan, and corroborated by Mauro/da Conti’s descriptions. Their accounts, together with the inscribed stones, also showed that ‘Garbin’ in the middle of the west coast of Africa was the Matadi Falls, and that ‘Isole Verde’ was Santo Antão in the Cape Verde Islands. The Chinese were sailing before the wind and current all the way. It was precisely the route a ship sailing from India would have been obliged to follow, and at the Chinese average speed of 4.8 knots the latter part of the voyage would have lasted the forty days Fra Mauro had stated.

  The great Chinese armada had already voyaged far into the distant and uncharted oceans, but I now had to discover where they had sailed next. The account by Mauro/da Conti described a seventy-day voyage after leaving the Cape Verde Islands, through le oscuritade, which can be translated as ‘the obscured islands’ or ‘darkness’. My task was now to identify them. My first line of approach was to search for independent evidence of the next part of the Chinese voyage, for example in another chart that might throw some light on the location of these ‘obscured islands’. In that era, Venice was the cartographic capital of Europe. If such a map existed, Venice was the most likely source.

  During my researches in Venice I was told of a description by the Portuguese historian Antonio Galvão (died 1557) of a world map the Portuguese dauphin, Dom Pedro, Henry the Navigator’s brother, had brought back with him from Venice in 1428 (my italics):

  In the yeere 1428, it is written that Dom Peter, the King of Portugal’s eldest sonne, was a great traveller. He went into England, France, Almaine [Germany] and from thence into the Holy Land, and to other places; and came home by Italie, taking Rome and Venice in his way: from whence he brought a map of the world, which had all the parts of the world and earth described. The Streight of Magelan was called in it the dragon’s taile: the Cape of Boa Esperança, the forefront of Afrike and so foorth of other places: by which Map Dom Henry the King’s third sonne was much helped and furthered in his Discouveries.19

  Here was an unequivocal assertion that by 1428 both the Cape of Good Hope (Boa Esperança) and ‘the Streight of Magelan’ (separating Argentina from Tierra del Fuego) had been charted on a map. It was an extraordinary claim. How could the Strait of Magellan have appeared on a map – for simplicity, I shall call it the 1428 World Map – nearly a century before Ferdinand Magellan discovered it? To emphasize that this was no mistake, Galvão continued:

  It was tolde me by Francis de Sousa Tavares that in the yeere 1528, Dom Fernando, the King’s sonne and heire did show him a map which was found in the studie of the Alcobaza [a renowned Cistercian monastery traditionally used as a library by Portuguese kings] which had beene made 120 yeeres before which map did set forth all the navigation of the East Indies with the Cape of Boa Esperança according as our later maps have described it; whereby it appeareth that in ancient time there was as much or more discovered than now there is.20

  This 1428 World Map was of huge importance to the Portuguese government, for in December 1421 the overland route to China and the Spice Islands – the great Silk Road running from China right across central Asia to the Middle East – had been blocked when the Ottomans surrounded Byzantium. In that same climactic month, on 6 December, the Mamluk Sultan Barsbey seized power in Egypt and nationalized the spice trade. The effect of the two events was to ruin the merchants who had controlled the spice trade, seal Egypt’s borders to international trade and sever the sea route through the Bosphorus to the western end of the Silk Road. With the canal linking the Red Sea and the Nile (completed in the tenth century) collapsing and unusable, all land and sea routes to the East were now closed to Christians. A new ocean route to the East had to be found.

  I knew from Antonio Galvão’s description that the 1428 World Map showed the ‘East Indies’ (the Indian Ocean and what is now Indonesia) and revealed the ocean routes to the Spice Islands (Ternate and Tidore in eastern Indonesia), Asia and China round the Cape of Good Hope and through the Strait of Magellan. The information it contained was of incalculable commercial value and it was kept for decades under lock and key in the Portuguese treasury in Lisbon. However, the secret eventually leaked out and others became determined to get their hands on this vital map, even though the penalty for stealing it was death.21 Certainly, Christopher Columbus was in possession of a copy in 1492 (see chapter 18).

  The 1428 World Map has long been lost, but the information contained on some sections of it has survived, the most important of which is the section showing South America. A Spanish seaman who had sailed to the Americas with Columbus kept that portion of the map together with some notes Columbus had written about it. In 1501, the Ottomans captured the ship in which the seaman was serving; he still had the map in his possession. Neither the seaman nor any other who sailed with Columbus could have been the originator of this map because Columbus never sailed south of the equator. The information can only have come from the 1428 map.

  Appreciating the extraordinary value of this captured document, the Ottoman Admiral Piri Reis incorporated it into a map known from that day to this as the Piri Reis map of 1513. This beautiful map can be seen today in the Topkapi Serai Museum high above the Bosphorus in Istanbul. It was based on several different maps, pieced together by the admiral from a number of different sources, and parts of it are unreliable, but the south-western portion based on the map taken from Columbus’s seaman is very accurate. The trail I had begun to follow the day I visited the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon and read Antonio Galvão’s description of a mysterious map that had come into Portuguese hands in 1428 had now led me to another chart that would prove one of the most valuable keys to unlocking the secrets of the Chinese voyages.

  In recreating the Chinese route I remained certain of one thing: because of the hull shape of the Chinese junks, they would have had to sail before the wind. Their route after leaving the Cape Verde Islands was not hard to establish for there, as Admiral McIntosh described so many centuries later, the wind blows relentlessly westwards, towards South America. Moreover, at the Cape Verde Islands ‘the north equatorial and south equatorial current converge, forming a broad belt of current setting west. Average rates reach two knots.’22 The converged currents separate near the Caribbean: the northern part sweeps through the Caribbean to New England where it becomes the Gulf Stream; the southern part turns south-west towards South America.

  My study of the old maps and charts, together with the evidence from wrecks and artefacts found around South America and in the Caribbean (to be examined more fully later), led me to conclude that the Chinese fleets had separated with the current. Admiral Zhou Wen sailed north-west through the Caribbean towards North America, while Admirals Hong Bao and Zhou Man took the south-west branch of the equatorial current towards South America. It must have been an emotional parting as the great ships began to drift apart, gathering speed as the wind filled their sails. They were sailing into hazardous, uncharted waters and the admirals and their men would have been well aware that they might never set eyes on their companions again.

  The evidence of the Piri Reis map and of the winds and currents seemed conclusive; the Chinese fleet must have sailed in this direction from the Cape Verde islands. Perhaps I would find the answer to the mystery of the ‘obscured islands’ somewhere off the coast of the Americas. I would return later to track the northward voyage of Zhou Wen’s fleet, but for the moment I had to follow the course of Zhou Man and Hong Bao on their south-west track towards the ‘New World’.

  5

  THE NEW WORLD

/>   THE FLEETS OF Hong Bao and Zhou Man would have sighted the coast of what is now Brazil approximately three weeks after leaving the Cape Verde Islands. What a moment that must have been, a sprawling, unknown land filling the horizon before them, the air full of unfamiliar scents and the calls of strange birds. They may well have wondered if this was the land of Fusang, described by their forebears almost a thousand years earlier.

  During the Northern and Southern dynasties in the first year of the ‘Everlasting Origin’ Emperor, AD 499, a Buddhist priest named Hoei-Shin (‘Universal Compassion’) returned from a land twenty thousand li (eight thousand nautical miles) east of China. He named this continent Fusang after the trees that grew there. The Fusang tree bore fruit like a red pear, and had edible shoots and bark the inhabitants used for clothing and paper. Coupled with his statement that the country had no iron, Hoei-Shin’s description suggests that the Fusang was the maguey tree that grows only in Central and South America. It bears red fruit and is also used in the other ways he described. Iron is found in almost every part of the world except for Central America, just as Hoei-Shin indicated. Whether or not Hoei-Shin reached the Americas, the Chinese certainly believed he had, for his report was regularly entered in the yearbooks or annals (official histories) of the Chinese Empire. From there it passed not only to historians but also to poets and writers, and down the centuries innumerable tales were told of Hoei-Shin’s exploits and adventures in the land of Fusang.

  Fusang is about twenty thousand Chinese miles [eight thousand nautical miles] in an easterly direction from Tahan, and east of the Middle Kingdoms [China]. Many fusang trees grow there, whose leaves resemble the Dryanda cordifolia; the sprouts, on the contrary, resemble those of the bamboo tree, and are eaten by the inhabitants of the land. The fruit is like a pear in form but is red. From the bark they prepare a sort of linen which they use for clothing … The houses are built of wooden beams; fortified and walled places are there unknown … They have written characters in this land [which the Olmecs did have] and prepare paper from the bark of the Fusang [which the Olmecs did from the maguey tree, which indeed has red fruit like pears].1

  Zheng He and his admirals certainly knew these tales when they set sail, as did the Chinese seamen crowding at the rail for a sight of this new land. Was it a land of no iron? Did it have the famous Fusang trees? No doubt they were nervous, perhaps even frightened, but they must also have been immensely curious. Their landfall must have been around the Orinoco delta, for the Piri Reis map shows that they had surveyed that small part of the coast with great accuracy. My search for the obscured islands Fra Mauro/da Conti had described during the junk’s seventy-day voyage after leaving the Cape Verde Islands could now begin in earnest.

  Just before the book went to print I was informed that a considerable amount of research had been carried out into the DNA of American Indian peoples of the Amazon and the Orinoco and the diseases that they carried which were otherwise unique to China and South East Asia. Briefly, it concerns a skin disease of the Indians of the Mato Grosso of Brazil; hookworms occurring in the Lengua Indians of Paraguay; roundworm in Peru and Mexico; ancylostoma duodenale in Mexico; and Chinese DNA in the Indian peoples of the Amazon, Brazil and Venezuela. It is conclusive proof of Chinese sea voyages to the Americas before Columbus. For the moment, however, I had to continue with the charts.

  After making landfall near the Orinoco, where they would have replenished their water and taken on fresh food, they would then have set sail once more for the south. The winds would have carried them past the Amazon delta down the east coast of Brazil to Cabo Blanco in southern Argentina. I had found an inscription on the southern part of the Piri Reis map stating: ‘It is related by the Portuguese Infidel [Columbus] that in this place, night and day are, at their shortest period, of two hours duration, and at their longest phase of 22 hours.’2 For the winter daylight to have lasted only two hours, the man who originally drew the chart and made that note must have been in the deep south at a latitude of about 60°S, well to the south of the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego. The map also shows what appears to be ice connecting the tip of South America to Antarctica.

  The journey to Tierra del Fuego.

  I was able to use the inscription on the Piri Reis map and the position of the ice shown on it to fix the southern tip of South America to approximately 55°S, the northern limit of drift ice. Establishing the latitude of Tierra del Fuego allowed me to make a closer examination of the southern part of the Piri Reis and compare it with a modern chart. This revealed at once that the original cartographer had drawn the east coast of Patagonia with great accuracy. The prominent features of the coastline – headlands, bays, rivers, estuaries and ports – tally from Cabo Blanco in the north to the entrance of the Strait of Magellan in the south. The cartographer of the Piri Reis also drew a number of animals on the land.

  It is a bleak, desolate, windswept region, as Darwin recalled: ‘Without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants … The plains of Patagonia are boundless, for the area is scarcely passable, and hence unknown.’3 Columbus could not possibly have been the original cartographer; he never got south of the equator. His knowledge of the region, including his description of the islands in the South Atlantic being in darkness – obscured – for twenty-two hours each day, can only have come from the inscriptions on another chart he had copied.

  The first European, Magellan, did not set sail for Patagonia until years after the Piri Reis was drawn. So who originally provided the information to enable Patagonia to be drawn on the Piri Reis, and how did he obtain it? Knowing I was looking at Patagonia, a desperate place but nonetheless one that supports animal life, I began to examine the five creatures depicted on the map.

  The Piri Reis map compared to modern Patagonia, showing the Strait of Magellan.

  The first, a deer with prominent horns, was superimposed on an area that has now been designated a national park, the Parque Nacional Perito Moreno. This animal is clearly a huemil, an Andean deer, with the head and antlers accurately depicted. There are still huge herds of these deer where the animal is shown on the Piri Reis. The next creature was placed in what is now the Monumento Natural Bosques Petrificados, 150 kilometres south of modern Caleta Olivia. I have spent some time photographing animals in the Andes and instantly recognized the creature as a guanaco. Guanacos are members of the camel family. They have curious, floppy ears which are bent forwards when they are excited or anxious. Andean people decorate guanacos’ ears with red tassels in the same way we would plait a horse’s mane. From a side view, the bent ears resemble forward-pointing horns. Clearly, the cartographer who copied the original chart mistook the bent ears for horns. Large herds of guanaco are found in the Monumento Natural Bosques Petrificados, just where they are shown on the Piri Reis, and, like the huemils, guanacos are unique to South America. The third animal, a mountain lion, was placed in what is now the Parque Nacional Monte León where, as the name indicates, mountain lions are common. All three animals were shown exactly where I have seen them in Patagonia and were drawn before Europeans arrived.

  There is also a drawing of a naked bearded man. At first glance, he appears to have his head in the middle of his body, but on closer examination it seems perfectly possible that he had been drawn in a crouching position, allowing his thick beard to cover his genitals. I surmised that the Turkish cartographer who copied the captured Portuguese chart onto the Piri Reis was almost certainly a Muslim. Muslims are very conservative about exposing their bodies; if the cartographer had indeed been of that faith, he would not have been comfortable depicting naked men. When Magellan arrived in Patagonia long after the original map was drawn, he was surprised to find that despite the cold weather the people did indeed go about naked, keeping themselves warm with fires, even when they were travelling in boats. As a result, he named the land ‘Tierra del Fuego’ – the land of fire.4

  That left one last creature to identify,
a beast that appeared to have come from fable: a dog-headed man. There were two notes describing the creature: ‘In this place there are … wild beasts of this shape’,5 and ‘These wild beasts attain a length of seven spans … between their eyes there is a distance of only one span [the distance between the outspread tips of the thumb and the little finger]. Yet it is said they are harmless souls.’6 The Piri Reis map had depicted the other Patagonian animals with remarkable accuracy and placed them precisely where they are found today. I could therefore expect the monster, if it ever really existed, to have lived in the south of the Santa Cruz province of Argentina or in the north part of the Chilean province of Magallanes. Did such monsters ever walk the earth there? London’s Natural History Museum could offer no help in identifying the creature, so I contacted natural history museums within a two-hundred-mile radius of where the monster was shown and described on the Piri Reis.

  My first call, to the Museo de Fauna, Rio Verde in Magellanes province, Chile, was answered in the negative, with barely suppressed mirth. The fourth call, to the nearby Museo de Sitio in Puerto Natales, was much more fruitful.

  ‘I’m looking for a monster twice the size of a human. Were there ever any creatures like that in your area?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does your museum exhibit one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is its name?’

  ‘The mylodon.’

  The mylodon is a creature of which I had been wholly ignorant until then, but London’s Natural History Museum now provided a wealth of information about it. The monster was a giant sloth weighing around two hundred kilograms, unique to South America. In 1834, Darwin found a skeleton on a beach at Bahía Blanca in Patagonia near to where the creature is shown on the Piri Reis map; from the oil still present in the remnants of attached flesh, he concluded that the creature’s demise was ‘recent’. He sent the bones to Dr Richard Owen at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, who reconstructed the skeleton. It resembled a giant man with a dog’s head, rearing on its haunches and using its legs and tail as a tripod while it knocked down small trees. It would strip the branches bare of fruit before lumbering off to demolish the next tree. The animal was said to reach three metres, sometimes even more, in height and slept for most of the time. The native people of Patagonia harnessed these ‘harmless souls’7 in caves during the winter, taking them out to graze in summer; their meat apparently tasted like bland mutton.