1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  III

  The Voyage of Hong Bao

  6

  VOYAGE TO ANTARCTICA AND AUSTRALIA

  ADMIRAL HONG BAO’S designated task was to chart the world eastwards from the fixed reference point established at the Falkland Islands – 52°40′S – but by now the rice in his container ships must have been running low and the bean shoots growing in tubs would all have been eaten. Before setting sail eastwards into the unknown waters of the southern oceans, he had to take on fresh supplies of food.

  The Falklands offered cabbage, wild celery, penguins, geese and fish, but little other meat and no fruit at all. The only mammal ever discovered on the Falkland Islands was the warrah, an indigenous fox, described by Charles Darwin: ‘There is no other instance in any part of the world of so small a mass of broken land, distant from a continent, possessing so large an aboriginal quadruped [the warrah] peculiar to itself … Within a very few years after these islands shall have become regularly settled, in all probability this fox will be classed with the dodo, as an animal which has perished from the face of the earth.’1

  There is something curious about this creature which, as Darwin predicted, was wiped out in the Falklands by the 1870s. Darwin and other naturalists remarked on the warrah’s extraordinary tameness. The British biologist Juliet Clutton-Brock has analysed the animal’s physical characteristics from specimens in the Natural History Museum in London and concluded that, like the aboriginal dingo, the warrah had once been domesticated. It was a cross between the South American fox and a feral dog brought across the sea to the Falklands before the Europeans arrived. The most plausible explanation of its origins is that the Chinese left some of their dogs on the Falklands (they bred them on the junks for food) which then interbred with the local foxes. A request has been made to the Natural History Museum in London for DNA samples from the now-extinct warrah so that they can be compared to the DNA of Chinese food dogs. Results will be posted on the website.

  If the Falklands offered a very limited food supply, Patagonia, three hundred nautical miles to the west, resembled an enormous larder, as later explorers were to find to their delight. Enough fish to feed the whole fleet could be netted in a morning; mussels the size of crabs littered the shallow pools. Guanaco, huemil and hares as large as dogs were almost tame; only snarling mountain lions stood between the sailors and limitless meat. Burberries and wild apples rich in vitamin C were also plentiful. Perhaps taking advantage of one of the periods of calm weather frequently found in an Antarctic summer, Admiral Hong Bao returned due west from the Falkland Islands to Patagonia to replenish his supplies. Still underneath Canopus at 52°40′S, he would have found what appeared to be a safe anchorage in a large bay just south of Cape Virgines. Unknown to him, the bay was the entrance to a strait leading to the Pacific. As he entered the bay, a ferocious current running at up to six knots would have dragged his fleet south-westwards through the strait like water down a plughole.

  By the next morning the fleet had been sucked halfway through the strait. At last out of the current, they found themselves off the Brunswick Peninsula (the southernmost tip of the South American mainland), clearly identifiable on the Piri Reis map. By now the fleet was south of Canopus, and Hong Bao would have wished to sail north to get underneath his reference point once again, the latitude from which he was to chart the world to the east. The strait becomes narrower and narrower leading into the Canal Geronimo – less than a mile wide and far too narrow for his huge ships to manoeuvre, their turning circle being nearly a mile. As a result, the fleet was forced to reverse its course, and hence the cartographers drew the Canal Geronimo as a river, just as it must have appeared to them.

  Back off the Brunswick Peninsula, the fleet took the Canal Magdalena south-westwards for the Pacific, entering the ocean near Isla Aguirre, a small, uninhabited island but one of the few out of the hundreds lining the coast to have been named, even today. The ‘Strait of Magellan’ had been discovered and charted by a complete accident: the latitude of the entrance to the strait is also the latitude of Canopus, the Chinese guiding star in the southern hemisphere. But although the Chinese had discovered the strait by chance, that does not diminish their astonishing achievement in piloting their enormous, square-sailed junks through such a narrow strait in the fierce gales and sudden violent snow squalls common in that region, which reduce visibility to a few yards. Magellan would not have known of this strait had the Chinese not charted it. Europeans thus owe a huge debt to the Chinese for pioneering the link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and opening up the sea route to the Spice Islands.

  Not without reason was the remote, inhospitable land on either side of the dreaded strait named ‘the uttermost part of the earth’ by the earliest European explorers. Despite the near-endless snowstorms, often driven horizontally across the land by the force of the wind, Tierra del Fuego has an enthralling grandeur. I have seen glaciers tumble vertically into the ocean, and ice-bound mountain peaks glistening like diamonds against the pale skies. Today, as for centuries past, navigators dread the violent currents that seem to start and finish without warning or apparent cause, and the westerly gales that spring from nowhere and whip the seas into a boiling cauldron within minutes. Until the nineteenth century, its howling gales and bleak terrain discouraged settlement, leaving the Yahgan natives who inhabited this grim terrain to live in peace, huddling around the fires that led Magellan to name the region Tierra del Fuego. The Yahgan seemed to Darwin ‘among the most abject and miserable creatures I ever saw, the difference between them and Europeans being greater than that between wild and domestic animals’.2

  The discovery that the Chinese had made the first ever voyage through this daunting region was a tremendous moment for me. I wondered if Hong Bao had also realized its remarkable importance and significance. I returned to the British Library to see if the diaries of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed with Magellan’s fleet, could offer any further verification of this ground-breaking voyage of a century before.

  Magellan renounced his own country and set sail on his great voyage of circumnavigation on 20 September 1519 under the colours of Spain. He had a fleet of five ships and a crew of 265 men. Only one ship and eighteen men survived to complete the circumnavigation. Magellan himself was fatally wounded in the Philippines on 27 April 1521 after becoming involved in a dispute between two warring tribes. Pigafetta had this to say about the critical point in their journey:

  After going and setting course to the fifty-second degree towards the said Antarctic Pole on the festival of the Eleven Thousand Virgins (19th October), we found by a miracle a Strait [near what] we called the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins [today Cape Virgines]. Which Strait is in length 110 leagues which are 440 miles and in width somewhat less than half a league.3

  The fact that they were ‘setting course to the fifty-second degree’ indicates that Magellan knew that at 52°S he would find the strait that was later to bear his name, linking the Atlantic with the Pacific. His fleet reached the dark and forbidding region on 19 October 1520. By that stage, Magellan and his crew were in a wretched state. Howling gales battered the ships and blizzards obscured both the passage ahead and the rocky islands surrounding them. He had problems finding an anchorage, many of his sailors were dying from scurvy, and he had succeeded in quelling a mutiny only by the brutal expedient of hanging, drawing and quartering the leaders. Now mutiny was again in the air.

  ‘This Strait was a circular place surrounded by mountains … and to most of those in the ships it seemed there was no way out from it to enter the said Pacific sea.’4 Magellan could not persuade his men that it was safe to go onward through the strait, so he ordered his critics to put their reasons in writing for either continuing or returning to Spain. He read their opinions aloud, then, taking a sacred oath on St James whose insignia he wore upon his cloak, he solemnly swore to his men that ‘there was another Strait which led out [to the Pacific] saying that he k
new it well and had seen it in a marine chart of the King of Portugal, which a great pilot and sailor named Martin of Bohemia [Martin Behain] had made’.5

  Magellan was telling the truth, though not the whole truth. The existence of the strait leading from the Atlantic to the Pacific was well known both to the King of Spain and Magellan before he set sail. He took with him on the voyage a marine chart that showed the strait and the Pacific Ocean beyond it. The contract he had signed with the king specified the aims of the voyage – to sail westwards for the Spice Islands – and the share of the profits each was to enjoy. Magellan wanted knowledge of the strait to be restricted to himself alone to prevent others from following in his wake and claiming their own share of the riches that awaited him, but the King of Spain was in no position to grant his request, for the Portuguese held the master chart.

  Magellan’s words, and his ruthless and inspired leadership, persuaded his men to continue, and they completed the passage of the strait that ever afterwards bore his name rather than that of the first man to do so, Hong Bao. In his description of the ships clearing the strait and entering the Pacific, Pigafetta made a vitally significant comment: ‘When we had left that Strait, if we had sailed always westwards, we should have gone without finding any island other than the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins … in 52 degrees of latitude exactly towards the Antarctic Pole.’6 Pigafetta’s statement contained information that could only have been obtained by someone who had either sailed the world at that latitude or seen a chart showing the Pacific empty of land at 52°S. Magellan turned to the north towards the equator when leaving the strait and so could not have discovered for himself that there was no land at that latitude. He must therefore have seen a chart. Magellan knew that he was not the first to sail through the strait, nor the first to cross the Pacific. Indeed, the first Spanish ships to pass through the strait found wrecked Chinese junks off the coast of Chile.

  Once again, Fra Mauro had been correct: a ship from India had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed to the ‘obscured islands’. The riddle of the Piri Reis map had also been solved. Patagonia and the ‘Strait of Magellan’ were indeed drawn long before Magellan set sail, but not by a civilization predating the Pharaohs, as one authority has suggested,7 nor by aliens from outer space, as another, rather less academic writer argued,8 but by a great Chinese treasure fleet during the ‘missing years’ of 1421–3.

  After passing through the strait, Admiral Hong Bao took his fleet southwards, sailing to the west of the islands of Tierra del Fuego. The cartography of the Piri Reis map clearly shows the route the fleet took: while Patagonia is very accurately charted, the low eastern islands of Tierra del Fuego are not recorded at all, indicating that the Chinese had sailed down the mountainous west coast.

  I compared the Piri Reis map with a modern satellite photograph and immediately identified the bays and small islands surrounding the Chinese passage to the south. Further down the coast, Cook Bay is accurately positioned, suggesting that Admiral Hong Bao had anchored there. From this anchorage, he would have seen the magnificent snow-capped mountains of the Cordillera Darwin towering in an arc to the east of him. They appear on the map as separate islands, for from that distance the cartographer could have seen only their snow-capped peaks. I magnified the Piri Reis map to the same scale as a modern chart9 and found that all eleven ‘islands’ shown on the Piri Reis south of Patagonia coincide with mountain peaks on the islands that collectively form western Tierra del Fuego. My detailed workings will appear on the website.

  The Chinese had already established the position of Canopus in the sky, the nearest and brightest equivalent in the southern hemisphere to Polaris in the northern, but to fix its position relative to the South Pole they had to establish the precise position of the pole itself. Only then would they be able to navigate and chart lands as accurately as they did in the northern hemisphere. Since they already knew from their observations of the night sky that the two leading stars of the Southern Cross, Crucis Gamma and Crucis Alpha, were aligned with the pole, they believed that they only had to sail in the same direction to reach the pole.

  The polar regions can be a terrible place for a mariner. In summer there are periods of flat calm, clear skies and limpid blue seas speckled with ice floes, but when the weather breaks massive waves crash over the bows and the wind screams through the sails, driving squalls and flurries of snow and ice that sting the skin like needles. For weeks in midwinter there is unbroken black darkness; even when the sun does begin to reappear it is no more than a brief, dim disc on the northern horizon. Often cloud and freezing mist cloak every outline, leaving the seamen on watch straining their eyes into the murk for the first warning sign of drifting ice floes or a towering iceberg in their track.

  However, the prospect of sailing into these frozen regions would have held few terrors for the Chinese, who had eight centuries’ experience of navigating in northern polar latitudes behind them and a thousand-year tradition of navigating in ice: the nearest port to Beijing, Tanggu, is ice-bound for three months each year. I found the first anecdotal evidence that the Chinese had indeed attempted to set sail for the South Pole after leaving Cook Bay in an account10 of the travels of a young nobleman from Bologna, Ludovico de Varthema, in 1506. Ludovico de Varthema was sailing between Borneo and Java where he was told a strange tale. His companions, two Chinese Christians and an East Indian navigator, told him sailors from the other (Chinese) side of Java had sailed by the Southern Cross to regions where it was very cold and the days were only four hours long.11 How could they have known without sailing there?

  The Piri Reis map provided further evidence that they had sailed south. Ice is shown running due south of the Strait of Magellan, and to have drawn it the Chinese must have been sailing alongside it. They were heading due south, making straight for the South Pole. The two leading stars of the Southern Cross were overhead,12 pointing in the direction they had to sail. Some two hundred miles south of Tierra del Fuego,13 they met the first drift ice, which had begun to curve to the east, drawn as a C-shaped arc on the Piri Reis map. They attempted to continue southwards around the ice but were unable to do so and were obliged to alter course, first to the east and then to the south-east, all the time trying to find a way to continue towards the pole. After sailing another two hundred miles south,14 they met pack ice that continued all the way down to the Antarctic peninsula. The ice depicted on the Piri Reis map corresponds with the normal maximum limits of drift and pack ice in midsummer.15

  Admiral Hong Bao was now approaching the Antarctic Circle. At this latitude strange things happen. At the South Pole itself, longitude has no meaning. It becomes a dot; there are no directions other than north. In midsummer (December), the sun is always in the north and it is light all day; in winter, it is permanently dark. The navigational difficulties are exacerbated by magnetic anomalies caused by the South Magnetic Pole, far removed from the true South Pole. This would have played havoc with the Chinese magnetic compasses; the only navigational aids they could then rely on were bearings obtained from the constellation of the leading stars of the Southern Cross and the latitude of Canopus, both of which become circumpolar – never rising and setting and visible in the sky at all times – below 68°S. The intensity of its light and the clarity of the Antarctic air often make Canopus visible in daylight.

  The journey to Antarctica.

  The Piri Reis map shows Graham Land, the northern-extremity of the Antarctic peninsula, largely ice-free, confirming that the expedition reached the Antarctic in January 1422. The C-shape of the drift ice shown stretching from Cape Horn indicates that they had first met a current flowing from the east. Further south, where the current had more or less disappeared, the chart shows the pack ice stretching east–west before once again curving in a shallower curve to the south-east as it met another, weaker current. The uniform shape of these curves of ice showed that the Chinese were favoured with good weather and sailing into the circumpolar current before a light bre
eze, insufficient to break up the ice. I estimated that they would have made an average speed of approximately three knots. At that rate the voyage from Cape Horn to the Antarctic peninsula would have taken approximately fourteen days.

  A group of islands was shown on the Piri Reis map where none exists in reality. In shape they resembled the South Shetland Islands, and I wondered if they were indeed what the map was depicting. The Chinese could measure latitude precisely from Canopus, but they could not yet determine longitude with similar accuracy, and once again, I had to adjust the longitudinal positions of the islands recorded on the Piri Reis map to allow for the movement of the water in which the Chinese fleet was sailing, just as I had for the Kangnido map of Africa. Allowing for an average current of two-thirds of a knot against them during their passage south, the islands shown on the Piri Reis map would be in fact four hundred miles further west than they were charted – precisely the position of the South Shetlands.

  I knew from the Piri Reis map that the Chinese must have approached Antarctica from the north-west, skirting the edge of the ice, and would have made landfall on the south-western edge of the South Shetland Islands. Three of the islands are charted very accurately: Snow Island in the west, horseshoe-shaped Deception Island in the south, and four mountains on Livingstone Island in the north. A note near Deception Island also states: ‘Here it is hot’. At first sight this appears a curious comment to make about a snowbound island in the Antarctic, but Deception Island is volcanic and active. Modern cruise ships anchor in the lagoon to allow tourists to bathe in the hot volcanic waters of Benjamin Cove.

  Apart from Deception Island, the South Shetlands are an uninhabited wilderness of frost-shattered rock, glaciers and ice-fields, without so much as a blade of grass to be seen. As I knew from my own time in submarines sailing in polar regions, the cold can be so severe that metal objects stick to your fingers. To avoid tearing the flesh, you need to warm the fingers. The only way of doing so is usually to urinate on them, but if you attempt to do this while exposed to the Antarctic winds, you risk a very painful frostbite. The Chinese would have huddled below decks, trying to keep warm among their horses, pigs and dogs, returning to the upper deck for as short a time as possible. Their rice supplies would have had to be carefully covered and insulated to prevent the intense cold causing permanent damage to the grains, and the flooded sections of the holds where they kept their supplies of fish and their trained otters would have had to be emptied to prevent the water expanding as it froze, and forcing apart the seams of the hull. Furthermore, in these terrible conditions, surveying this part of the islands so precisely would have taken some considerable time. Why had the Chinese bothered to do so? I began to wonder if they really had gone there. Then the answer that I should have seen at once suddenly came to me. They had chosen to sail to the Antarctic in order to get underneath Crucis Alpha, the leading star of the Southern Cross.