1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  Two equally fascinating carved animals can still be seen in the Gold Museum at Gympie today. The ‘Gympie ape’, dug up in 1966, is a monster with a head much larger than a human’s. Its snout has been broken off, but a photograph of the second animal (it has now disappeared) shows the snout, nose and mouth11 of a beast closely resembling a mylodon. Whether through intent or happenstance, animals were collected and carried from one continent to another – giraffes, ostriches and rhinoceros from Africa to China, Asiatic chickens to South America, Chinese ship dogs left in South America and on islands across the Pacific to New Zealand, kangaroos from Australia to China and otters from China to New Zealand. A number of mylodons might well have been captured and taken aboard the Chinese ships in Patagonia; one pair might have escaped in New Zealand and another pair landed in China. Perhaps Chinese sculptors wished to immortalize these strange creatures before the memory of them faded. A century later the arrival of exotic species brought back from the New World was to create a similar sensation in the courts of Europe.

  The purpose of the Gympie pyramid has baffled Australian observers, but its size, height and shape are typical of Ming dynasty observation platforms, and it would have been wholly logical for the Chinese to build observatories to determine precisely the location of the phenomenal riches they had discovered, so that future fleets could return to the same place.

  When Zhou Man’s fleet resumed its voyage, it sailed north up the Great Barrier Reef, again shown with amazing accuracy on the Rotz chart. The reef itself and the islands inside and outside it have the correct latitudes and can be clearly identified for more than a thousand miles. However, when they returned to Australia after their voyage to Campbell Island to locate Canopus, their calculations of longitude (as shown on the Rotz map) are twenty degrees in error. Why should they have believed they were 1,800 miles further west than they really were? The answer, of course, was that they had been in the Antarctic drift current during their ten weeks in the southern oceans. The body of water in which they had sailed was itself moving eastwards, and Admiral Zhou Man as yet had no means of measuring longitude accurately.

  I realized that the coastline of Australia on the Rotz chart north of where Zhou Man’s fleet returned had to be adjusted to the east by 1,800 miles. As soon as I did this, the result was electrifying. Australia was laid out before me. The cartographer had done a remarkable job and had made only one mistake – longitude, which he had had no means of measuring. He had drawn the eastern Australian coast and the Great Barrier Reef with phenomenal accuracy 247 years before Captain Cook was to do so. When I further corrected the southern coast of New South Wales and Tasmania by removing the ice, I had an instantly identifiable map of Australia.

  Cook was awestruck by the size and shape of the Great Barrier Reef, a type of structure ‘scarcely known in Europe. It is a wall of coral rock rising almost perpendicular out of the unfathomable Ocean.’12 For a mariner, any voyage near razor-sharp coral reefs is a nerve-racking prospect, particularly at night or in low visibility when the only warning is the noise of breaking surf. If your ship hits coral, it punctures the hull and it is difficult to get off the reef without tearing the vessel to bits. I knew the dangers only too well from my own experience of taking my submarine HMS Rorqual inside the Barrier Reef, and that was with accurate charts at my disposal. A voyage through uncharted reefs is a constant waking nightmare. At night one sees not a single light ashore, by day nothing but an unbroken belt of grey-green jungle, as if man had never penetrated this beautiful but forbidding region. The Barrier Reef stretches for more than 1,500 miles from Hickson Bay, south of Brisbane, up to Cape York in the north. Captain Cook narrowly escaped death after striking it, and like me, he had a chart to help him. It is inconceivable that Zhou Man’s fleet could have made the passage through those uncharted waters without suffering severe damage or loss of ships. To have got through it at all was an incredible feat.

  The Rotz chart shows the Great Barrier Reef, the islands between the reef and the coast, and yet more islands in the ocean beyond the reef. In many places, once inside the reef it is not possible to leave it. I remember very well how my submarine was hemmed in by the reef, and the relief I felt as I escaped from the straitjacket where the reef ends off Brisbane. The wealth of detail on the Rotz chart indicates that several Chinese ships must have been charting the coast, reef and islands. They would have been more or less in line abreast as they sailed north, some inside the reef and others in the ocean outside it. I estimate that there must have been at least six, probably ten or more ships to have gathered such a mass of information.

  The Barrier Reef itself, the coastline and the islands both inside and outside are particularly accurately charted around what is now Cooktown, indicating that the Chinese had spent some time surveying there. Captain Cook later used some of the maps of the Dieppe School to get to Cooktown, where he beached his ship, HMS Endeavour, after it hit a reef that was also shown on the earlier charts. The detail and precision of this part of the Rotz chart suggests that the Chinese might well have been forced to make a similar halt for repairs.

  The Barrier Reef ends abruptly north of the Cape York Peninsula. The nightmare was over, and those Chinese junks that had survived the hazardous passage – and there must have been several casualties – could at last set course to the north-west for China. What an incredible sense of relief the eunuch captains and navigators of the surviving Chinese ships must have felt as they rounded the northern tip of Australia and sailed on past Cape York and the islands to the west. Here, the junks entered the Torres Strait, separating Australia from New Guinea, where the current flows from the east, sweeping the mariner westwards across the Gulf of Carpentaria. The Gulf is shown on the Rotz chart narrower than it should be; once again, the Chinese underestimated their change in longitude as the body of water in which they were sailing moved westwards across northern Australia.13 (After publication of the hardback, it was pointed out to me that Zheng He’s charts show the Barrier Reef and northern Australia.)

  In the folio of charts he presented to Henry VIII of England, Jean Rotz included another map of this part of Australia drawn in greater detail and to a much larger scale. He drew the island of Lesser Java – the Chinese knew it as Little Java – separated from Greater Java by a narrow channel, though some of his contemporaries in the Dieppe School showed it as a river. It was a simple matter to determine who was right. I compared it with a modern map at the same latitude and saw at once that the channel Rotz had drawn was the Victoria River in the west and the Roper River in the east. Lesser Java on the Rotz chart is Arnhem Land, part of the mainland of Australia. The shape of north-east Australia was now instantly recognizable.

  A number of descriptions in medieval Portuguese were written on Rotz’s more detailed chart. The names are easy to translate and all of them correspond to what is found there today. Canal de Sonda – ‘narrow sea ford’ in medieval Portuguese – is marked where the long, narrow Apsley Strait bisects Melville and Bathurst Islands. Aguada dillim – ‘waterway leading to inland sea’ – corresponds to the Dundas Strait that does indeed lead into the Van Diemen Gulf. Agarsim – translated as ‘yes indeed water is here’ – is inscribed beside the Yellow Water Billabong in the Kakadu National Park, designated by the United Nations as ‘wet lands of international importance’. Nungrania means ‘no farmland’ – there is none there – and lingrania means ‘lime trees’, which still grow there today. The Gove Peninsula, the eastern tip of Arnhem Land, is finjava, or ‘the end of Java’. Only one inscription had me baffled – chumbão, or ‘lead’.

  The west coast of Arnhem Land is drawn with great fidelity. Rotz showed the main coastal features at their correct latitudes right up to 10°S, beyond the northern tip of Australia, and drew a mass of fishing stakes straddling Trepang Bay – as its name implies, the centre of sea-slug fishing. The first Chinese map of Australia was drawn by fishermen centuries before Europeans reached the continent, and Chinese boats still fish this part of th
e coast today for the much-prized trepang. All this remarkably precise information predates the arrival of the first Europeans by over two centuries. The chart also shows details of the interior – the Finniss River wending westwards, and trees recognizable as eucalyptus and blackwood pines, both common in Arnhem Land. A tall rock is also depicted on the chart by what is now the Nourlangie Anbanbang Billabong in the Kakadu National Park. The original cartographer must have seen the rock to have drawn it so accurately.

  As I studied the modern map of Arnhem Land, I realized I had found the answer to the mystery of the word chumbão. Lead is still mined in substantial quantities at the huge Jabiru Ranger Mines. It is the natural derivative of uranium 235 as it breaks down through the process of nuclear decay. Uranium is, of course, highly radioactive, and lethal to touch or ingest. The Jabiru Ranger Mines contain one of the world’s largest deposits of uranium 235. Not realizing the danger they were placing themselves in, the Chinese must have been digging uranium out of the ground alongside the lead ore they sought. This may help to account for the appalling loss of life among Zhou Man’s fleet, for only a tenth of the original nine thousand men remained alive when it finally reached home in October 1423.

  To discover the lead, the Chinese had to penetrate well into the interior of the country. At that time, as now, Aborigines had made Arnhem Land their spiritual home. They were skilful artists, painting beautiful frescoes in caves, and I hoped to find evidence of the Chinese visit depicted in their cave art. George Grey, later the governor of South Australia, led an expedition to Arnhem Land in 1838. When they entered a group of caves twenty miles upstream from where the Glenelg River pours into Colliers Bay, they saw a group of paintings prominent among which was ‘the figure of a man, 10ft 6in in height, clothed from the chin downwards in a red garment which reached to his wrists and ankles’.14 Captain Grey’s description accords with the picture drawn by the native Mexican tribes at Jucutácato (see chapter 10) of the Chinese arriving in their red robes reaching to their ankles. Grey’s find also accords with Aboriginal lore, which records that long before the Europeans a honey-coloured people settled north-east Arnhem Land. The men wore long robes and the women pantaloons. They went far inland for freshwater prawns, sandalwood and tortoiseshell, grew rice and lived in stone houses, unlike the Aborigines whose dwellings were of wood. The women wove silk dyed with local herbs.

  Adze anchors with the curved fluke (the piece that holds the anchor in the mud) set at right angles to the stock of the anchor – a Chinese design – have been discovered on the coastline of north-east Arnhem Land, and substantial quantities of broken Chinese ceramics dating from the Han dynasty (202 BC–AD 220 ) to the early Ming (1368–1644) have been found at Port Bradshaw on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria and on the nearby mainland, just where the currents and the reefs would make it likely that wrecks would be found.

  Even with horses, the Chinese would have needed several months to carry out the detailed survey of the coast and interior lands depicted on the Rotz chart. For this they would have needed a base in a protected anchorage with fresh water. I expected to locate it on the most accurately charted part of the coast. The Beagle Gulf off the north-west part of Arnhem Land is very well drawn, and Darwin, at the south-western end of the gulf, has a splendidly protected anchorage. Today, a hotel, the Banyan View Lodge, stands on Doctor’s Gully, shaded by a magnificent banyan tree. The stream running through Doctor’s Gully is now paved over, but in those days fresh water would have been available from it. The lodge is a popular haunt of backpackers drinking lager, oblivious of the history that surrounds them.

  Late in the nineteenth century, a figure of a Taoist immortal, Shu Lao, was found buried beneath that banyan tree. It is now in the Chinese collection of the Technological Museum in Sydney. Although very valuable, it had been deliberately wedged deep down in the roots. Dated by one expert as early Ming (late fourteenth century),15 the figure sits upon a deer and in its right hand carries a peach, the symbol of longevity. It is made from very fine pinite and is beautifully carved and polished. Shu Lao is one of the Triad of Gods of long life in the Taoist pantheon; unlike Buddhism and Confucianism, Taoism is a religion peculiar to China and was never disseminated overseas.

  Moreover, the banyan is foreign to Australia and must have been imported. This one was already several hundred years old when the statue was discovered over a century ago. In southern China and Burma, shrines were often built in cavities between the spreading roots of large trees such as banyans which are holy trees to Theravada Buddhists. The shrine at Darwin was almost certainly built by a Chinese centuries ago, and in structure and location it resembles the one at Ruapuke in New Zealand. It is theoretically possible that the shrines were created by the crews of Chinese boats fishing for trepang, but the possibility is very small indeed. No fishing boat would carry such a valuable statue – it would be worth a lifetime’s wages to the crew; it is far more likely that it belonged to a wealthy Chinese captain or admiral from a great ship. By far the most plausible explanation is that Zhou Man’s fleet used Darwin as its base and created a shrine in which the figure was placed in thanks for having survived a long voyage.

  I am strongly inclined to believe that the Venetian Niccolò da Conti was telling the truth when he informed the Papal Secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, that he had landed in Greater Java on a Chinese junk and had spent nine months there with his wife. Perhaps she was one of the women in pantaloons.

  When Europeans eventually arrived, they were not sailing blindly into a great unknown. The Dauphin chart, one of the other charts from the Dieppe School and almost identical to the Rotz chart, came into the possession of Edmund Harley, Earl of Oxford and First Lord of the Admiralty, in the mid-eighteenth century and became known as the Harleian. It was later acquired by Joseph Banks, the young scientist who sailed in the Endeavour with Captain Cook. At the time Captain Cook sailed, the British government therefore had access to both the Harleian and Rotz charts, since the latter was at that stage owned by the Admiralty. Cook’s orders from the Admiralty were to search down to 40°S – the latitude of South Australia shown on both charts – where they ‘had good reason’16 to suppose the southern continent existed. They certainly did – they already had two charts showing such a continent at 40°S.

  As they left Australia, like Hong Bao’s fleet before them Zhou Man’s ships were still laden with porcelain and silk, but the fabled Spice Islands lay between Australia and home, and spice was then an extremely valuable commodity in China. Even when the fleet had been reduced to a few ships, their holds could still carry thousands of tons of ceramics, and by sailing for the Spice Islands Zhou Man would at last have an opportunity to exchange them for goods of real value, such as nutmeg, pepper and cloves.

  If the Rotz chart was based on an earlier map drawn by cartographers aboard Zhou Man’s fleet, it should show the Spice Islands. It does. The importance of Ambon, then the collecting centre for the two Spice Islands of Ternate and Tidore – so tiny one can walk around them in a couple of days – is emphasized by its being coloured red. In the Middle Ages, Ternate and Tidore were the hub of the spice trade, far and away the most productive islands. They were legendary, and had been fought over for centuries, for virtually all spices could be obtained there in huge quantities. To this day, the distinctive scent of cloves is detectable far out at sea, long before the islands themselves are sighted.

  Further north, at a latitude of 10°N, the Rotz chart shows the channel between the Philippine islands of Mindanao in the south and Leyte in the north, but Rotz drew only the south coast of Leyte, leading to the obvious conclusion that the cartographer was in a ship passing down the middle of the channel. Using a similar common-sense approach, I could determine the angle from which the Spice Islands and the other islands between Australia and the Philippines were drawn, and hence deduce the route taken by Zhou Man’s fleet through the islands. Along the way, now sailing in calm and sunny seas, Zhou Man would have had many opportunitie
s not only to obtain spices but to barter his porcelain for batiks, artefacts, fresh water, fruit and meat.

  There would once have been plentiful examples of the silks and porcelain Zhou Man’s fleet had exchanged for spices and supplies, but would any traces remain today? How could I find such evidence after an interval of nearly six hundred years? I wondered if Magellan had also sailed this way on his circumnavigation of the world. If so, his account might throw some light on the question. When I went to the British Library and consulted a copy of the detailed map of Magellan’s route produced after his death, I was staggered to discover that his course from the Pacific through the Philippines and down to the Spice Islands, a distance of well over a thousand miles, was identical but in the opposite direction to the track of Zhou Man’s fleet I had just reconstructed. It was as if the two were using the same passage drawn on the same chart. The chances of this being a coincidence are microscopic. I surmise that Magellan’s chart showed Zhou Man’s route.

  Hong Bao’s journey home and Zhou Man’s journey through the Spice Islands.

  As well as Pigafetta’s description of Magellan’s voyage, I found that the British Library also held an account by the Genoese pilot who sailed with Magellan. He described Magellan’s landfall in the Philippines and how he found a strait leading from the Pacific to the Spice Islands – the same strait between Mindanao and Leyte shown on the Rotz chart. Magellan passed through this strait and anchored at the first island, Limasava, where the king greeted him. Pigafetta described the king and queen wearing Chinese silk and eating off Chinese porcelain that had been buried for fifty years to increase its value. Their houses had silk curtains and porcelain ornaments, and their trading currency was Chinese coins with square centres. The same story was repeated on island after island visited by Magellan’s ships en route to the Spice Islands. Zhou Man must have emptied his holds of porcelain as he went along, a century before Magellan.