1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  The fleet had now surveyed and charted eastern Australia from Nelson Bay down to Campbell Island in the far south, but they were faced with real difficulties when it came to setting course back to Australia. Unknown to them, the Antarctic drift current was pushing them to the east, towards the South Island of New Zealand. I have many happy memories of that beautiful land after taking my submarine there at Christmas in 1969. The South Island is a place of rugged grandeur, spectacular mountains and crystalline lakes, a land where the Antarctic winds scour the skies clean. However, the Tasman Sea is a nightmare for navigators. The skies are frequently clouded and the currents are irregular. They can reverse their direction without warning.

  The Chinese would have had to claw their way back against the current; as they did so, at least two of the great treasure ships were lost. The wreck of an old wooden ship was found two centuries ago at Dusky Sound in Fjordland at the south-west tip of New Zealand’s South Island. It was said to be very old and of Chinese build and ‘to have been there before Cook’, according to the local people.9 A Sydney packet visited Dusky Sound in 1831 and two sailors from the crew ‘saw a strange animal perching at the edge of the bush and nibbling the foliage. It stood on its hind legs, the lower part of its body curving to a thick pointed tail, and when they took note of the height it reached against the trees allowing a metre and a half for the tail, they estimated it stood nearly nine metres in height. The men were to windward of the animal and were able to watch it feeding for some time before it spotted them. They watched it pull down a heavy branch with comparative ease, turn it over and tilt it up to reach the leaves it wanted.’10 The animal described corresponds in size, posture and eating habits with the mylodons the Chinese could have taken aboard in Patagonia. Perhaps a pair escaped from the wreck, survived and bred in similar conditions to their home territory in Patagonia – the latitudes are the same. Sea-otters, which are not indigenous to New Zealand but, of course, were kept in the Chinese junks to herd fish, have been seen swimming in the fjords of South Island.

  Further north, on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand, the deck and sides of part of a large and very old ship were exposed in 1875 after a violent storm. The wreck was found near the mouth of the Torei Palma River at Whaingaroa; it is known as the Ruapuke Ship after the beach of that name. The wreck was said to have diagonal planking, and its internal bulkheads were bolted together by large brass pins, each weighing 6.3 kilograms. There has, though, been some dispute about the wood from which the wreck was built. Those who originally found it said that it was teak, but in May 2002 pieces of European oak were found in the area, leading certain experts to conclude that a European ship was wrecked there.

  However, a huge stone carved in what local experts say is Tamil calligraphy stands at the point where the river empties into a little harbour. In shape, size and location this stone corresponds with those set up by the Chinese mariners in the Yangtze estuary, at Dondra Head, at Cochin on the Malabar coast of India, at Janela in the Cape Verde Islands and by the Matadi Falls in the Congo delta. In addition to the calligraphy, the Ruapuke stone has the same patterns of concentric circles as the stone at Janela. I had already found a number of carved stones at sites visited by the Chinese fleets, so my next step was an obvious one. Sure enough, a search on the internet soon revealed several more on the route from the Cape Verde Islands down to Patagonia, at Santa Catarina, Coral Island, Campeche and Arrorado Island on the east coast of South America. Each is also sited beside a watering place and overlooks the sea, and the concentric circles inscribed on them match those at Ruapuke. But this could still have been a coincidence; after all, pyramids were built in Central and South America as well as in Egypt. The proof would be more conclusive if I could find similar carved stones in China. Another long search produced three more, at Wong Chuk Ha, Chang Zhou and Po Ti in Hong Kong. Again, these stones had similar markings to the ones I had already found. I now believed that the concentric circles were a ‘signature’ agreed upon before the armada set sail, denoting where each fleet had landed and watered.

  Perhaps the most controversial piece of evidence unearthed in New Zealand is the celebrated bell found near the wreck on Ruapuke beach, named the ‘Colenso Bell’ after Bishop Colenso who discovered it being used as a kettle by the Maoris. It looks like a smaller version of Zheng He’s bell cast after the sixth voyage, and the lip of the bell is inscribed in Tamil calligraphy similar to that carved on the stone near the wreck. It has been translated as ‘Bell of the ship Mohaideen Baksh’. The inscription suggests that the owner was a Muslim Tamil, probably from one of the well-known ship-owning families based on the port of Naga Pattinam on the eastern coast of Tamil Nadu in south-east India.11 This is evidence of an Indian not a Chinese ship, but, as the Pandanan wreck found in the Philippines (see chapter 10) demonstrates, it was common for local ship-owners to sail with Zheng He’s fleets for they not only provided protection from pirates, they also afforded valuable opportunities to trade. It seems most unlikely that a Tamil ship would have travelled from India to South America and then to New Zealand on its own.

  The journey around New Zealand.

  Within a mile of the Ruapuke wreck is a large fallen tree. When it was blown over in a gale, a duck, beautifully carved in dark green serpentine, was revealed nestling among its roots. The duck could well have been a Chinese votive offering. A similar offering, a lion, was found in East Africa, and others have been found in Queensland and the Northern Territory of Australia. This type of shrine is typical of, and unique to, the culture of southern China. Although they are clear evidence of Chinese visits to Australia, I accept that on their own the votive offerings are not proof of a landing by a treasure fleet; they could have been carried by Chinese merchants. However, the collective evidence – the ship, the votive offering, the bell, the stone and the carving – leads me to the conclusion that the ship at Ruapuke was almost certainly the wreck of a Tamil junk attached to the Chinese fleet.

  The final piece of evidence is another votive offering found on the banks of a tributary of the Waikato River some thirty miles north of the Ruapuke wreck. The find was made in the late 1800s by Elsdon Best, the distinguished historian and then curator of the Dominion Museum in Hamilton. The small oriental figurine was

  found under singular and interesting circumstances at Mauku near Auckland. The lands around the place of discovery have been uninhabited since the arrival of Europeans until twenty years ago, and since then merely occupied by farm employees; nor have these lands ever been ploughed. In pre-European times, however, natives occupied the place, as shown by the remains of old settlements … The figurine is undoubtedly Oriental in design and workmanship … having the grotesque aspect so common in Oriental designs, some form of turban-like head dress is depicted, also a loose cloak or wide-sleeved garment … Altogether, this snub-nosed Tartar-looking figure represents an interesting discovery when the conditions of that discovery are noted.12

  The routes of Hong Bao and Zhou Man around Australia.

  The Chinese fleets were losing ships with almost every landfall, a rate of attrition that continued throughout their voyages across the world, for of the 107 treasure ships that left China in 1421, a mere handful survived to return home in 1423. As the mandarins complained, ‘Myriads were lost.’ Those huge losses increase the likelihood that the wrecks at Ruapuke and elsewhere on the Chinese route were ships from the treasure fleets.

  If the ship at Ruapuke is a wrecked treasure ship, then tales of the shipwrecked crew must exist in local legends, just as they do in Central America and southern Australia near wreck-sites. When I investigated, I found that Maoris living near Ruapuke had just such a legend.13 The strangers who settled among them were called ‘Patupaiarehe’, or pale-skinned, almost supernatural people. Another meaning of the word is ‘fairies’. They wore white woven garments and also differed from the Maoris in having no tattoos and by carrying their children in their arms. Some married Maori women. I believe this local leg
end is true, and that the first non-Maori settlers in New Zealand were not Europeans, but Chinese. Subsequent DNA analysis (see postscript) has only strengthened my belief.

  8

  THE BARRIER REEF AND THE SPICE ISLANDS

  ONCE BACK IN the Tasman Sea, Zhou Man’s surviving ships entered a counter-clockwise, circular current that at last propelled them back to the Australian coast. The shape of the south-east Australian coast, coupled with the location of Campbell Island on the Jean Rotz chart and the wrecks in the south-west and north-west of New Zealand, are all consistent with the junks being swept before the winds and currents from the Australian coast down to Campbell Island and then in a loop with the wind back to New Zealand. Continuing before the wind would have caused them to make their second landfall on the Australian coast just north of Brisbane. Assuming an average speed of 4.8 knots, reduced to 3.8 by the current and storms, the journey down to Campbell Island and back again would have taken at least ten weeks.

  The coast around Brisbane is shown on the Rotz chart with incredible precision, and that chart was not the only one of Australia to be drawn by cartographers of the Dieppe School, all of them drawn centuries before Europeans reached Australia. The Dauphin chart of 1536 and those of Desliens (1551) and Desceliers (1553) gave an almost identical depiction of the continent. Two decades ago, one of the Dieppe maps was exhibited. Visitors were stunned: ‘Look at Brisbane. Look, there’s Stradbroke Island, Moreton Island, the Pine River, the Heads and Fraser Island. There’s the lagoon at Surfers’ Paradise.’1 The accuracy with which the eastern Australia coast had been drawn left me equally dumbstruck. To have surveyed it with such precision, the Chinese fleet must have spent some time on the east coast of Australia in what is now New South Wales and Queensland, and one obvious reason for that is the mineral wealth of the region.

  Perhaps the most commercially valuable scientists carried by the great treasure fleets were mining engineers. At that time, China and India together accounted for almost half the world’s entire wealth2 and Indian engineers led the world in mining technology. They had opened up gold and iron fields in East Africa, stimulating a flow of raw materials eastwards across the Indian Ocean. Indian engineers and metallurgists sailed with the treasure fleets, but China also had centuries of experience in geology, mineral extraction and processing. As is claimed in Chinese records of a much earlier period,3 the treasure fleets would have mined ores and carried gemstones and refined metals back to China in their holds, but the Chinese would also have set up longer-term settlements to exploit the mineral riches they discovered on their voyages.

  Chinese scientists had classified minerals into groups by the first century AD.4 Those early Chinese scientists could distinguish between different chlorides, sulphides and nitrates, and knew how to exploit them. They used mercuric sulphide (cinnabar) for red inks and paints; steatite was added to paper as a filler; and skins were first dried with saltpetre (potassium nitrate), then treated with ammonium chloride, and finally dyed with ferrous sulphate.

  They were equally skilled in geological prospecting, capable of detecting minerals and metals by magnetic surveys or by measuring shock waves caused by explosive detonations, even by the lie of the land. They also knew that the ores and minerals they sought were often geologically linked with others. Greenstones always occurred in the neighbourhood of copper ores. They even had a rhyme for such associations: ‘When there is cinnabar above, gold will be found below; when there is magnetite above, copper and gold will be found below.’5 Similarly, iron was associated with haematite on the surface, and both sulphur and iron pyrites signified alum. Chinese chemists had also deduced that certain plants thrived on particular minerals, to the extent that they changed colour and taste when growing near them. Cybule onions signified silver; shallots, gold; ginger, copper and tin. Western scientists did not establish until the eighteenth century what the Chinese had known for centuries, that some plants can indeed signal the presence of gold and other metals.6

  The Rotz chart of Australia and the wealth of wrecks and Chinese artefacts found in and around that country show that, by luck or design, the great Chinese fleets had discovered the location of some of the most varied and rich mineral seams in the world. They had done so accompanied by horse-ships. The Chinese took inordinate care in the selection of their horses. Their favourites were the famous ‘blood ponies’ of Tajikistan, so named because they supposedly sweated blood (the red markings on the skin were actually caused by a skin parasite). Blood ponies were bred in the high, rolling valleys of China’s Tian Shan – ‘Heavenly Mountains’ – where they galloped through the walnut forests that cloak the slopes. They were incredibly swift, but also hardy and strong enough to make their way through dense snow and survive the worst weather. Zhu Di imported millions during his reign, placing such a strain on the imperial treasury that a special ‘Tea for Horses’ bureau was established to barter tea for the animals, thus avoiding further payments in silver.

  Thousands of horses for the Chinese cavalry were carried on the horse-ships accompanying the treasure fleets. They were fed on mashed boiled rice, necessitating three gallons of water per horse per day. There is evidence that the Chinese took them ashore. Horses were then unknown in Australia, but they are beautifully depicted in drawings on the Vallard chart of the Dieppe School, although not, it must be said, on the Rotz chart. There was good pasturage for them around Sydney, from where an easy trail led up the Nepean and Hawkesbury valleys into the interior. A huge range of minerals including gold, silver, gemstones, coal and iron can be found within two hundred kilometres of Sydney. Further up the coast at Newcastle, also clearly identifiable on the Rotz chart, there was an equally spectacular array of riches. Within a week’s ride from the coast were diamonds, sapphires and a wealth of other minerals.

  Like their modern counterparts, the Chinese and Indian geologists with Zhou Man’s fleet must have felt they had arrived in a mineral paradise. Many of Australia’s minerals were of direct use to the fleet. Combining copper and zinc gave them brass; saltpetre mixed with sulphur and charcoal made gunpowder. Arsenic was a poison and insect repellent, yet also accelerated the growth of silkworms. White paint made of lead and copper prevented wood decay along the hull line. Kaolin was available for ceramics, while oxides of cobalt, copper and lead served for colours and glazes. Alum was particularly useful for making hides supple, for making drinking water potable and for its astringent properties. Asbestos has been used for fire protection since the sixth century BC: ‘When King Mu of the Zhou dynasty made an expedition to the western people … fireproof cloth was cleaned by being thrown into a fire … when taken out and shaken it became as white as snow.’7 Local Aboriginal legends mention foreign people coming to these parts and mining materials while ‘dressed in stone clothes’.8

  There is further evidence in the accounts of Franciscan missionaries to China in the sixteenth century, who spoke of Chinese expeditions to Australia recorded on copper scrolls (dating from the sixth century onwards) together with maps of the continent.9 These early Chinese records, which have since disappeared, described voyages carried out by gigantic fleets of massive junks (sixty to a hundred ships), each carrying several hundred men, with the aim of gathering minerals.

  The wrecks on the coast and the stone buildings ashore, Aboriginal rock carvings and paintings depicting foreigners in their long robes, and the carved votive offerings are all signs of a Chinese presence in the mining areas of New South Wales. A beautiful carved stone head of the goddess MaTsu, the protector of mariners at sea, was recovered from the beach front at Milton, New South Wales, in 1983. It is now in the Kedumba Nature Museum in Katoomba. Each of Zheng He’s ships had a small cabin dedicated to her. However, the most direct and persuasive evidence of the Chinese visits to Australia comes from Gympie, a mining area further up the coast, two hours’ drive north of Brisbane. In 1422, a creek connected Gympie to Tin Can Bay and the Pacific; according to ancient Aboriginal tradition, a race of ‘culture heroes’
sailed up this creek and into Gympie’s harbour in ships ‘shaped like birds’. They later returned to their ships carrying rocks.10

  While ashore, these mysterious people built truncated pyramids, one of which was discovered by a local researcher, Rex Gilroy, in 1975 and subsequently photographed. Now sadly vandalized, the pyramid was built of granite blocks and stood a hundred feet high, with the stepped construction typical of the other pyramids I had seen in South America and right across the Pacific. Mr Gilroy describes local people uncovering pre-European opencut copper, tin and gold mines, and he personally found an ancient pipe similar to those used to pour mercury to separate gold from ore. Half a mile from the Gympie pyramid, near an ancient opencast gold mine, were hearths that contained nodules of melted metal. Until 1920, Gympie remained Queensland’s largest and richest goldfield. Many other artefacts have been found in the area. Two beautifully carved votive offerings are of particular interest: one is of the Hindu god Ganesh, the elephant god, carved in beige granite; the other is of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, this time made of conglomerate ironstone. Ganesh and Hanuman are two of the most important deities of Hindu worshippers in southern India, whence the fleet sailed and where they embarked Hindu priests, mining engineers and geologists.