Pigafetta also recounted Magellan’s meeting with the King of Limasava. Magellan showed him ‘the marine chart and the compass of his ship telling him how he had found the Strait to come hither and how many moons [months] he had spent in coming; also, he had not seen any land, in which the King marvelled’ (my italics). Magellan showed the king a chart depicting the strait and the empty Pacific. There was also a letter from Sebastian Alvarez, the King of Spain’s factor (a merchant buying and selling on commission), to his king: ‘From Cape Frío until the Islands of the Moloccas throughout this navigation there are no lands laid down in the maps they [Magellan’s expedition] carry with them.’17 Taken together, these accounts can mean only one thing. When Magellan sailed, he had with him a chart that not only showed the Strait of Magellan but also the Pacific at 52° South and an empty ocean from there to the Spice Islands on the equator. Someone must have sailed through the Strait of Magellan and across the Pacific before Magellan to make that chart. Who else but the Chinese, ‘the yellow men wearing long robes’?18
Fortunately, the evidence from Magellan’s visit to the Philippines was further confirmation of a Chinese voyage between 1421 and 1423. Chinese porcelain, silk and coinage of Zhu Di’s reign, seen by Magellan in the Philippines, might have been the result of Chinese trade before Zhou Man’s voyage, but Magellan noted substantial quantities on island after island. Clearly, huge amounts must have been exchanged, and that in turn must have resulted in Zhou Man taking aboard a vast quantity of traded goods, principally the greatly valued pepper. If so, that pepper would appear in the records of the Chinese stockpiles of the spice soon after he returned to China in October 1423.
I searched among copies of the few Chinese records that exist and found that my deductions were absolutely correct. By 1424 there were such massive stocks of pepper in the imperial warehouses that on his accession that year Emperor Zhu Gaozhi ordered much of it to be given away: ‘To each banner bearer, housekeeper, soldier and guardsman one catty [half a kilo] of pepper … to each first degree literary graduate and licentiate, district police chief, prison warder, astronomer and physician, one catty … to each resident of the city and the environs of Beijing, each Buddhist or Taoist priest, artisan, musician, professional cook … one catty.’19 The population of Beijing in 1423 certainly exceeded one million and the soldiers of the imperial army and their dependants accounted for another six hundred thousand people. The weight of pepper distributed is likely to have been more than 1,500 tons. When Magellan’s ship returned home, he had less than twenty-six tons of usable pepper aboard. It was sold at ten thousand times the price he had paid for it in the Spice Islands, sufficient to generate a profit for the entire voyage. Contrary to the claims of the Chinese mandarins, the voyages of the treasure ships brought substantial tangible rewards, for the pepper added to Chinese stockpiles late in 1423 was of colossal value on the international market.
Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s voyage yielded still more evidence that Zhou Man’s fleet had sailed from the Americas to the Spice Islands and the Philippines. Pigafetta described maize growing in the Philippines and Magellan’s crew loading it. Maize is not only unique to the Americas but a crop that can only be propagated by man. Furthermore, some of the surviving Chinese records state that Zheng He’s fleets brought back maize from their voyages. Not only had junks brought porcelain, silk and currency from China and carried pepper back there, they had also brought maize from South America to the Philippines.20
9
THE FIRST COLONY IN THE AMERICAS
ALTHOUGH HE WAS now little more than a thousand miles from the Chinese mainland, Zhou Man’s remarkable voyage was still far from over. I next had to track his fleet as it sailed onwards from the Philippines to reach the coast of yet another new land. After leaving the Spice Islands with his rich cargo, the most direct route home for his fleet would have been to continue north, sailing west of Mindoro in the Philippines. From there, the prevailing summer wind would have blown him north towards China. Yet the manner in which the islands were drawn on the Rotz chart suggests that Zhou Man had chosen to alter course to the east, passing south of Leyte and re-entering the Pacific.1 Assuming that he had left Darwin at the beginning of the south-west monsoon, in late April, he would have entered the Pacific by early June. I knew that Zhou Man had arrived in Nanjing on 8 October 1423, carrying no foreign envoys. What had he been doing and where had he sailed in the four months he had been in the Pacific?
The north Pacific is a vast circulatory system, with winds constantly blowing in a clockwise oval direction. In June, the prevailing wind off Leyte is to the north. As Admiral Zhou Man’s fleet entered the Pacific, the Kuroshio or Japanese current would also have carried them northwards before starting a clockwise sweep towards the coast of North America. In fact, had Zhou Man simply unfurled his sails off Leyte, the winds and currents would have carried him to the Pacific coast of modern Canada. The California current would then have taken over, sweeping the fleet southwards down the western seaboard of the United States to Panama. From there, the north equatorial current would carry a square-rigged ship back across the Pacific towards the Philippines. The whole round trip, before the wind and current all the way, would have been about sixteen thousand nautical miles. At an average of 4.8 knots, the voyage would have taken some four months, matching the date of Zhou Man’s return to Nanjing in October. My surmise, for reasons which will become apparent later, was that squadrons of ships from the main fleet were detached to establish colonies along the Pacific coast from California down to Ecuador.
I began the search for corroboration that Zhou Man’s fleet had indeed reached the Pacific coast of North America. The first European to explore that coast was Hernando de Alarcón in 1540. Having sought fame and fortune in New Spain, he left Acapulco on 9 May of that year in command of a fleet supporting the conquistador Coronado’s expedition to New Mexico. Alarcón first charted the peninsula of Baja California, and then California itself. I knew that he was the first European to chart it, for neither Columbus nor any of the other early explorers reached any part of the west coast of North America, so any map of the Pacific coast predating Alarcón’s voyage would be powerful evidence that he was not the first to reach it.
Such evidence does exist in the form of the Waldseemüller world map, published in 1507, the first to chart latitude and longitude with precision. Originally owned by Johannes Schöner (1477–1547), a Nuremberg astronomer and geographer, it had long been thought lost and was only rediscovered in 1901 in the castle of Wolfegg in southern Germany. It remained there in relative obscurity until 2001, when in a blaze of publicity the US Library of Congress acquired it from Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg for ten million dollars. The man who drew the map, Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470–1518), was German-born and one of the foremost cosmographers – combining the study of geography and astronomy – of his era. The globe and wall maps he made in 1507 are the first ever to call the continent ‘America’; for some unknown reason this was not included on the 1516 map. The 1516 map, Carta Marina – A Portuguese Navigational Seachart of the Known Earth and Oceans, was ‘the first and only printed version of the world charts previously known only to Spanish and Portuguese explorers and their patrons’.2 The east coast of North America is clearly charted, with several place names.
The Caribbean and Florida, shown on the Waldseemüller map, were also depicted on two earlier charts, the Cantino (1502) in the Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Italy – a map which would play a significant role in my researches elsewhere in the world (see chapter 11) – and the Caverio map (1505) in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. They too showed lands drawn before the first Europeans had reached them, but those maps cannot have been the original source of the Waldseemüller. The Great Bahama Bank is drawn identically on all three maps, but the Caverio map shows the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, which was not depicted on the earlier Cantino. Hence the Caverio cannot have been a copy of the Cantino, a
ny more than the Waldseemüller is a copy of them, for the latest of the three, the Waldseemüller, shows the Pacific coast of North America and the Cantino and Caverio do not. All three maps have different original features, and all must have been copied from an even earlier map.
The Pacific coast of America is strikingly drawn on the Waldseemüller chart and the latitudes correspond to those of Vancouver Island in Canada right down to Ecuador in the south. This is completely consistent with a cartographer aboard a ship sailing down the Pacific coast, but not charting the coast in great detail. Oregon is clearly identifiable, and several very old wrecks have been discovered there on the beach at Neahkahnie. One was of teak with a pulley for hoisting sails made of calophyllum, a wood unique to south-east Asia. The wood has yet to be carbon-dated, but if it proves to be from the early fifteenth century it will provide strong circumstantial evidence that one of Zhou Man’s junks was wrecked off Neahkahnie Beach. Some examiners of the wreckage there claim to have found paraffin wax, which was used by Zheng He’s fleet to desalinate sea-water for the horses.
Even without finds from wrecked junks, the Pacific coasts of Central and South America are full of evidence of Chinese voyages. The Asiatic chickens found from Chile to California were described in chapter 5, and many other flora and fauna were carried across the globe by the Chinese fleets. On my first visit to California many years ago, I remember coming across a bank of beautiful camellia roses (Rosa laevigata). It was a still summer’s evening and their lovely fragrance filled the air around me. In 1803, European settlers found a beautiful fragrant rose growing wild; they named it the Cherokee Rose. Yet it was indigenous to south-east China and had been illustrated in a twelfth-century Chinese pharmacopoeia. ‘When and by what means it reached America is one of the unsolved problems of plant introductions,’3 but it was a common practice for sailors aboard Zheng He’s junks to keep pots of roses, their scent an enduring reminder of home. The Chinese also took plants and seeds home with them. Amaranth, a native North American grain with a high protein content, was brought from America to Asia in the early fifteenth century, as of course was maize – brought to the Philippines and seen there by Magellan. Coconuts, native to the South Pacific, were found by the first Europeans on the Pacific coasts of Costa Rica, Panama and Ecuador and on Cocos Island west of Costa Rica. The carriers of grain from the Americas to Asia, of roses and chickens from China to the Americas, and coconuts from the South Pacific to Ecuador can only have been the Chinese.
San Francisco and Los Angeles are clearly depicted at the correct latitudes on the Waldseemüller chart, and I was certain that Zhou Man must have sailed down that coast. Crossing such an enormous expanse of ocean after two years at sea must have left some of his junks in bad condition and in urgent need of repair. Even the best-built ships could not remain at sea for such long periods without suffering at least some damage from storms and the pounding of the waves. At the very least they would have required running repairs and careening – scraping the barnacles from their hulls – and the most badly damaged might well have been cannibalized to repair the others. If so, the remains of these wrecked ships should have been found off the coast of California, just as other wrecks had been in Australia and other parts of the globe.
My enquiries into strange wrecks on the coast of California drew a blank, but I did discover that museums there held substantial quantities of Ming blue and white ceramics. The accepted wisdom is that these items were brought to California in the holds of Spanish galleons, but a number of medieval Chinese anchors have been found off the California coast, and these are unlikely to have been brought by Spanish ships. I began to question seriously the provenance of the Ming porcelain; had it really been brought by the Spanish? Medieval Chinese porcelain can be dated by its cobalt content: the greater the amount of iron in the cobalt, the deeper blue the glaze. The dark cobalt of the Mongol era came from Persia, also ruled by the Mongols, but Zhu Di’s father sealed the Chinese borders after he drove out the Mongols in 1368 and Persian cobalt was no longer available. However, Zhu Di reopened the frontiers and restored trade along the Silk Road through Asia allowing Persian cobalt to be imported once more. The period when Chinese pale blue porcelain was produced and used in Ming China is thus limited, and the colour of the porcelain held by Californian museums would indicate whether or not it was made during this period in China’s history.
I was certain that a great treasure fleet had discovered the Pacific coasts of North and South America, but my researches failed to uncover conclusive evidence such as the wreck of a Chinese junk. In the hope that others might have found traces I had missed, I decided to ‘go public’ on the issue in a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London in March 2002. It was broadcast around the world; within forty-eight hours reports began to come in from California, drawing my attention to the wreck of a medieval Chinese junk buried under a sandbank in the Sacramento River off the north-east corner of San Francisco Bay. My first reaction was to discount the reports – the site was more than a hundred miles from open sea and the discovery seemed too good to be true – but over the next few days more e-mails describing the same junk continued to arrive. As soon as I had carried out some preliminary research, I discovered that the prevailing north-easterly winds on this coast could have blown a junk straight across the bay and into the Sacramento River. Six centuries ago the river was broader and deeper than today, for deforestation and mining have caused the water level to fall. It was indeed possible, if not probable, that a junk entering San Francisco Bay would have been driven by the winds into the Sacramento River. The tide would also have carried the ship upstream as far as Sacramento.
Dr John Furry of the Natural History Museum of Northern California first became aware of the junk twenty years ago when he read an account of the strange armour that once had been found in its hold (the wreck was then evidently less deeply buried in sand and silt than it is now). The armour was of an unusual metal (native Americans did not know how to forge metal) and curiously silver-grey in colour. It was shown to a local expert who is said to have identified it as of medieval Chinese origin. Dr Furry’s attempts to pursue the story met a brick wall – the expert had died in the intervening years, and the armour had been lent to a local school and was now lost – but he was sufficiently intrigued to begin investigating the wreck-site.
The site was covered with a 40-foot layer of the accumulated sand and silt of centuries, so Dr Furry began by taking magnetometer readings of the area. These showed a strong magnetic anomaly outlining a buried object 85 feet long and 30 feet wide, very similar in size and shape to the trading junks that accompanied Zheng He’s fleets. Core samples were then extracted from the site. The fragments of wood brought up were carbon-dated to 1410, indicating that the junk was built in that year, ‘a period that included a maritime highpoint for the ancient Chinese’,4 as local newspapers laconically reported.
The San Francisco Bay area, showing the winds blowing into the Sacramento River.
The evidence from the carbon-dating encouraged Dr Furry to drill again with more sophisticated equipment. This yielded much larger samples including further pieces of wood and a compacted 80lb mass of millions of black seeds. He sent fragments of the wood and the seeds to China for analysis, and according to Dr Furry, the Chinese Academy of Forestry have provisionally identified the wood as Keteleria, a conifer native to south-east China but not to North America. In the Middle Ages, the Chinese cultivated Keteleria for ship-building. Dr Furry also told me that Dr Zhang Wenxu, a former professor at the Chinese Agricultural University in Beijing and the leading Chinese expert on ancient seeds, had provisionally identified four different types of seeds in the black mass brought up from the wreck-site. Three were native to both China and North America, but the other was found only in China. Most interesting of all, however, was Dr Furry’s further discovery of rice grains and the body of a beetle among the material raised. Rice, indigenous to Africa and China, was unknown in the Americas in the fifte
enth century. Further analysis of the rice and the beetle is being carried out as I write, but to date no written reports on the analysis of the wood or the seeds have been received from China.
I now had little doubt that the site contained the wreck of a Chinese junk; it was exactly the evidence I had been looking for. It seemed highly improbable that the crew would have drowned when the junk grounded on the sandbank in the Sacramento River. It was far more likely that they had come ashore onto the lush, fertile lands of the valley. Their first task would have been to rescue as much rice as possible from the holds of the ship. Much would have been needed to meet their short-term food requirements, but they would also have set some aside as seed and planted it in a suitable location – the floodplain of the Sacramento River.
It has long been claimed that rice was introduced to West Africa by Europeans and then to the Americas by the Spanish, but Professor Judith A. Carney of the University of California has argued that this thesis is fundamentally flawed. It is widely accepted that the Chinese made a major contribution to developing agriculture in the rich soils of California, particularly the cultivation of rice in the swamplands of the lower Sacramento. By the 1870s, 75 per cent of the farm labourers in California were of Chinese origin. ‘The Chinese actually taught the American farmer how to plant, cultivate and harvest.’5 But were these Chinese working in the fields and plantations of the Sacramento Valley all part of the great nineteenth-century waves of immigration into the United States, or could some have been descendants of settlers left on the banks of the Sacramento by Zhou Man in 1423? I found a clue to this mystery in an unlikely source.
In 1874, Stephen Powers, an official inspector appointed by the government of California who had spent years collecting data on the languages of the tribes of California, published an article claiming that he had found linguistic evidence of a Chinese colony on the Russian River in California, some seventy miles north-west of the Sacramento junk.6 Powers also claimed that diseases brought by European settlers had decimated this Chinese colony as well as the other Indian people of California, ‘[the] remittent fever which desolated the Sacramento valleys in 1833 and reduced these great plains from a condition of remarkable populousness to one of almost utter silence and solitude … there was scarcely a human being left alive’.7 Powers’ report was badly received by his government employers, and although he courteously and bravely attempted to maintain his position, his official report, published in 1877, is a watered-down version of his claims. Nonetheless, it makes for fascinating reading.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 18
