Of the 4,722 items brought up, about a thousand currently remain to be identified. When they have been, it should be possible to reconstruct the junk’s route. On the evidence already available, it appears to have returned from Central America with the north equatorial current (the route sailed by Zhou Man’s fleet) and been wrecked off Pandanan, perhaps in a sudden squall. This would put the date of its demise at about early September 1423, towards the end of the south-west monsoon, a time when there are unpredictable squalls.
Uncovering the evidence of these early-fifteenth-century Chinese voyages of discovery had been immensely stimulating and exciting, but the implications of what I was learning were now beginning to dawn on me. There seemed to be a mass of powerful evidence that the Chinese had not only traded with the Americas but set up colonies from California to Peru (indeed, recent DNA analysis shows conclusively that local peoples in Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru share Chinese DNA). They had also explored the world long before the Europeans and appeared to have been well on the way to setting up colonies in East Africa and Australia and across the Pacific as well as in America. If all this was true, history would need to be radically revised, but it seemed extremely presumptuous for a retired Royal Navy submarine captain to be the one initiating this process. Although I was confident in the veracity of the evidence I had assembled, the thought of the potential responses in academic circles was causing me nightmares. I decided it was imperative to find corroborative evidence from the academic world, for, generous though they had been in helping me so far, I could well imagine the reaction of some distinguished professors of history to a radical reinterpretation of the subject they had devoted their lives to studying and teaching.
Although all the Chinese records had allegedly been destroyed, I felt sure that somewhere something like the Wu Pei Chi and Ma Huan’s diaries must have been missed; the mandarins could not have been so thorough that they had obliterated every description, every letter, every mention of what had been found during the voyages. Surely another private memoir or account must have survived somewhere.
My first approach was to the Zheng He Museum in Nanjing. The museum is situated in the centre of the city in what used to be the private park encircling Zheng He’s palace and has been built in early Ming style, surrounded by bamboo groves and carpets of green grass dotted with flowers. The principal exhibit is entitled ‘Historical Relics and Material Exhibitions of Zheng He’s Expeditions’. The most interesting and important relic is the 36-foot-high rudder post. By the standards of conventional ship engineering, a vessel carrying such a gigantic rudder must have been around four hundred feet long. The only other artefacts of interest I found in the museum were Zheng He’s bell, resembling a larger version of that found at Ruapuke Beach, and the highly unusual claw-shaped anchors like those found in Australia.
These findings, though interesting, were inconclusive. I then wrote to professors in the Chinese or Asian Studies departments of the universities of California, world-renowned for their research into medieval China, to the relevant professors at Oxford and Cambridge and to the librarians of the great libraries of England, America and Australia to enquire if their collections included books of the early Ming era unknown to the outside world.
After a wealth of friendly but negative replies, I at last struck lucky. Professor Charles Aylmer, the librarian of the East Asian Collection at Cambridge University in England, informed me of a unique book, I Yü Thu Chih – ‘The Illustrated Record of Strange Countries’ – a compilation of the people and places known to the Chinese in 1430. The book’s cover page is missing so the author is not known for certain, but it is believed to have been written by the Ming prince Ning Xian Wang (Zhu Quan) and printed within a year or so of 1430. It formed part of the magnificent collection donated to the University of Cambridge in the late nineteenth century by Professor Wade, who had spent most of his life in China and was the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge. The Cambridge copy is the only one in existence, anywhere in the world. It has never been translated and only one photocopy has ever been taken, by the Chinese Embassy in London. Professor Aylmer and other learned sinologists are absolutely convinced of the provenance and authenticity of the book.
I hurried to Cambridge. Although the book itself is in very poor shape, Professor Aylmer had arranged for it to be photographed onto a microfiche which showed all ninety-eight pages with remarkable clarity. There are some eight thousand characters in medieval Chinese and 132 illustrations drawn by different artists. Some are quite brilliant, catching the atmosphere with a few strokes of the brush. There are plants, animals and people from practically every continent in the world. It is a most concise and powerful illustration of Chinese knowledge of the world and its creatures in 1430 – hence the title of the book. The Chinese incorporated only what they found strange, and there are therefore very few scenes of China itself. Instead, the illustrations showcase all the principal religions on earth: Muslims in long robes praying to Mecca; the Hindu trinity of Lord Brahma, the creator and supreme being with his four arms, Lord Vishnu, the maintainer and preserver of the universe, and Lord Shiva, its destroyer; there is Ganesh, the elephant god, and a wonderfully lively picture of monkeys dancing around Hanuman, the Indian monkey god; Buddha is depicted in contemplation under the holy tree and praying towards the holy mountain. The artist has drawn Sikhs in their turbans and Venetians in their distinctive hats, long boots and flowing cloaks, but most vivid of all are the animals: a well-fed zebra with its fat, rounded belly; African elephants and lions; Indian peacocks and tigers, all drawn with masterful economy of line. There are pictures of the deer of south-east Asia and the steppe, and the hunters who pursued them with their different weapons – the double-ended bow of the Mongols and the western Asian longbow. There are also drawings of creatures unique to the Americas: llamas, an armadillo plodding across the ground in search of ants, a jaguar with its slack belly, men chewing coca, the naked men of Patagonia, and the dog-headed mylodon, ‘which is found two years and nine months’ journey west of China’.14
Two things particularly surprised me. The first was the emphasis placed on people from the far north. There were Eskimos in their fur-lined hoods carrying harpoons, and a wonderful Cossack dancer. At that time, Moscow was the leading principality of Russia but had not yet started to expand eastwards across Asia. The Chinese could conceivably have seen Eskimos in the Aleutian Islands, but not Cossacks. There are no records in that era of any Chinese expeditions overland into Muscovy, but recently undertaken analysis shows that fishermen in northern Norway have Korean DNA, and Aleuts have Chinese DNA. It appears that Korean and Chinese ships did indeed sail along the coast of northern Siberia.
The second curious aspect was how little space was devoted to Australia; I could only assume that was because by 1430 it was no longer considered a ‘strange country’. By the fifteenth century there had been many descriptions of fleets of junks, each carrying hundreds of people on voyages from China to Australia. In one, the north coast of ‘the great south land of Chui Hiao’ was described as lying thirty thousand li – approximately twelve thousand miles – from China and being in the south temperate zone, where seasons are opposed to those in the northern hemisphere.15 It was inhabited by a race of small (just one metre tall) black people identified by the Australian anthropologist Norman B. Tyndale as Aborigines from the mountains above Cairns in north Queensland.16
In March 2002, the talk I gave at the Royal Geographical Society in London was broadcast live to Australia. The television station Channel 9 then invited me to take part in a live interview in which a number of distinguished Australian professors participated. The fact that Zheng He’s fleet had reached Australia came as no surprise to them, and I was subsequently referred to several books that made the same claim. If my theory seemed to be broadly accepted in Australia, did this hold true in China? Dr Wang Tao of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, kindly offered to introduce me to the w
idow of Professor Wei of Nanjing. Professor Wei’s life work was a study of Zheng He’s voyages, in particular his fleet’s discovery of the Americas. He was about to publish a book entitled The Chinese Discovery of America when, sadly, he died. Professor Wei’s work is widely known in the academic community in China, though it is yet to be translated into English (or published in China). The revelations in my book caused no particular surprise there either.
I began to wonder why American and European historians had managed to persuade the world for so long that Columbus had discovered America and Cook Australia. Were they ignorant of the Chinese voyages to the Americas before Columbus? I decided to find out. To my amazement, I discovered that there were more than a thousand books providing overwhelming evidence of pre-Columbian Chinese journeys to the Americas. This literature has even been summarized in a two-volume bibliography.17 As Professor George F. Carter, an expert on hens in the Americas and author of several fascinating books on the subject of early Chinese voyages, remarked, ‘Sinologists and Asiatic art historians are normally struck by the overwhelming, all-pervasive evidence of Chinese influence in Amerindian civilization. Seemingly the Americanists are not aware of the Chinese literature suggesting not only discovery but colonization of America.’18 Professor Carter’s phrasing is a masterpiece of tact. Perhaps, as he suggests, those academics are not aware of the evidence; perhaps they have chosen to ignore it, presumably because it contradicts the accepted wisdom on which not a few careers have been based. Academics with rather more open minds will look again.
Evidence of the visit of the Chinese treasure fleet to the Americas.
The thesis that the Chinese explored virtually the whole world between 1421 and 1423 might be a radical departure from convention when it comes to the dates of the discovery of these ‘new worlds’ and the identity of those who first explored and charted them, but I was confident that there was solid evidence to support it. My training in astro-navigation had also enabled me to find further proofs that no academic, unless he were an astronomer, could have reached. No matter what heavy artillery was brought to bear, I was confident the thesis could withstand it. Reassured, I turned the spotlight onto Admiral Zhou Wen and his fleet.
V
The Voyage of Zhou Wen
11
SATAN’S ISLAND
IN OCTOBER 1421, when the fleets of Hong Bao and Zhou Man had sailed south-west from the entrance to the Caribbean towards the coast of South America, they had left the fleet of Admiral Zhou Wen taking a course to the north-west following the northern branch of the equatorial current. I already knew that this fleet must have later reached the Azores, at the latitude of Beijing, for the islands appear on the Kangnido map, drawn before the first Europeans discovered those islands. My task was now to find where Zhou Wen had sailed between those two landfalls.
When Admiral Zhou Wen reached the Cape Verde Islands he had already sailed across a substantial part of the globe and must have known that the mysterious land of Fusang lay to the west of him. By the time of the great cartographer Chu Ssu Pen (1273–1337), the Chinese had made an accurate estimate of the distance from the Pacific to the Atlantic, but how far to the west Zhou Wen thought Fusang lay would depend on how far he considered he had already sailed. The Kangnido shows that, because of the effects of the ocean currents, the Chinese fleets had underestimated their voyage across the ‘bulge’ of Africa by a couple of thousand miles. As he lay at anchor at Santo Antão in the Cape Verde Islands, Zhou Wen might well have assumed that Fusang lay four thousand rather than two thousand miles to the west of him, but that was still well within his range, without the need for fresh provisions or water en route.
North of the equator, the Atlantic is a vast oval-shaped wind and current system rotating clockwise day in, day out, throughout the year. British Admiralty sailing directions advise mariners on how to make use of these winds and currents: ‘From Madeira the best track is to pass just west of, but in sight of, the Cape Verde Archipelago … from Cape Verde steer a direct course [for the Caribbean] … thereafter … the north equatorial current and south equatorial current converge, forming a broad band of current setting west. Average rates reach 2 knots.’1 From the Cape Verde Islands they carry the mariner due west to the Caribbean, then north-west towards Florida and north up the American seaboard before taking him clockwise to the east, where the current becomes the Gulf Stream carrying the mariner across the Atlantic to the Azores, a thousand miles west of Portugal. It then hooks southwards, back once again to the Cape Verde Islands. The commander of a ship with sufficient provisions can hoist sail off the Cape Verde Islands and sit back and do nothing. Provided he is not capsized by a storm, a common occurrence in the North Atlantic, he will eventually end up more or less where he started.
The westerly current from the Cape Verde Islands reaches its strongest flow when approaching the Caribbean at the latitude of the island of Dominica. As a result, explorer after explorer down the centuries – Columbus on his second voyage, the Spanish explorers Rodrigo de Bastida and Juan de la Cosa in the early years of the sixteenth century, the French and English fleets during the Napoleonic Wars – has entered the Caribbean through the passage between Dominica and Guadeloupe. I would put the likelihood as high as 80 per cent that if, having replenished with fruit and fresh water, the Chinese had sailed from the Cape Verde Islands in October they would have been entering the Caribbean by early November.
The track of the junks of Admiral Zhou Wen’s fleet through the Caribbean should logically have been the same as that of Columbus, for the winds and tides have remained unaltered from that day to this. Whatever the Chinese discovered should have been rediscovered by Columbus seventy years later. By examining Columbus’s diaries of his second voyage, I should be able to reconstruct the most likely track. If the Chinese had found any islands or land on their voyage across the North Atlantic, I could expect those discoveries to be recorded on charts drawn after they returned to China in 1423. Just as I had done for South America and Australia, I now began to search for a chart that, like the Piri Reis and Jean Rotz maps, appeared to depict lands Europeans had yet to discover.
Zhou Wen’s journey through the Caribbean.
In that era, Venice, the base of Fra Mauro, the Venetian cartographer working for the Portuguese government, led the West in mapmaking. As I expected, Venetian and Catalan charts (Catalonia was then part of the Kingdom of Aragon; the Catalans were redoubtable seafarers) drawn before 1423 disclosed nothing new in the western Atlantic, but a chart dated 1424 and signed by the Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano was an entirely different matter. The Pizzigano chart was rediscovered some seventy years ago and in the early 1950s it was sold to the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. Its authenticity and provenance have never been questioned and several books have been written about it by distinguished historians.
[The 1424 chart] is a document of capital importance to the history of geography. From the historical point of view, it is undoubtedly one of the most, if not the most, precious jewel yielded by the disclosure of the almost unknown treasures contained in the unique collection of early manuscripts assembled by Sir Thomas Phillips during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The great importance of this chart lies in the fact that it is the first to represent a group of four islands in the western Atlantic, called Saya, Satanazes, Antilia and Ymana … there are many and good reasons for concluding that the Antilia group of four islands shown for the first time in the 1424 chart should be regarded as the earliest cartographic representation of any American lands.2
This was high praise indeed. I made a close study of the chart (see Introduction). It is markedly different from its contemporaries. It is not centred on the Mediterranean, as earlier charts were, but looks westwards across the Atlantic, where two large islands, Antilia and Satanazes, hitherto unknown to Europeans, are depicted. Two smaller islands are also shown: Saya, a parabolic island to the south of Satanazes, and the box-shaped island of
Ymana to the north of Antilia.
Other accounts of the era put the islands ‘700 large leagues’3 west of the Canaries, which would put them near the Bahamas, but no large islands are located there. Were the islands imaginary? Other chartmakers clearly believed they were genuine, for the group was subsequently represented on at least nineteen fifteenth-century maps and two globes, all of them drawn before Columbus set sail (see chapter 17). But as time went by, successive cartographers relocated the islands further and further to the south-west, until they ended up in the Netherlands Antilles.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 21
