1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  The storm-damaged Chinese fleet had completed its survey of Puerto Rico, and I could imagine the junks unfurling their great sails at the tail end of the hurricane and setting sail for the north from Puerto Rico towards the latitude of Beijing. If that theory was correct, there should have been evidence of their voyage at that latitude. I was confident that the Chinese had sailed to the North Atlantic, for the stone erected by Zheng He at Liu-Chia-Chang in south China after this epic sixth voyage states ‘the countries beyond the horizon and at the ends of the earth have all become subjects and the most western of the western or the most northern of the northern countries, however far away they may be’.15 From a Chinese perspective, the most northern of the northern countries and the most western of the western could only be referring to the Atlantic coasts of North America, but as ever, my problem was that the mandarins had destroyed all records of the treasure fleets. Once again, I had to look for clues in maps and charts of the northern hemisphere drawn before the first Europeans reached the Americas. I had to find a counterpart to the Pizzigano chart.

  The bays and inlets of Puerto Rico, depicted with extraordinary precision on the Pizzigano map.

  A world map popularly known as the Cantino came to my rescue. I had unearthed this extraordinary chart in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, Italy, during my investigation into Zhou Man’s visit to the Americas. It was drawn by an anonymous Portuguese cartographer and surreptitiously obtained by Alberto Cantino, the agent of the Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara. The Cantino’s provenance and credibility have never been questioned, and there is firm evidence for dating its acquisition to October 1502. The Chinese fleet had to sail before the wind and current; after leaving Puerto Rico, it would have been blown north-west towards Hispaniola and Cuba, and then through the Caribbean to the coast of Florida. The Cantino indeed reflects this, for it shows Hispaniola, Cuba and many other islands in the Caribbean and off Florida, but though it portrays the coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean and its archipelagos of islands with extraordinary accuracy, at first glance its depiction of the Caribbean appears woefully inadequate. Many of the islands seem to bear little relation to their present sizes and shapes, and I was baffled as to why it was so much in error.

  I struggled to make sense of this for some considerable time; then, all at once, the answer came to me. Sea levels in 1421 were lower than they are today. Global warming has caused the south polar ice to melt, causing sea levels to rise slowly but inexorably. The best estimate of the Proudman Oceanic Laboratory of Birkenhead in England is that they have risen over the past centuries by about one to two millimetres a year. Other reputable oceanographers put the rise a little higher, at an average of four millimetres a year. In the almost six centuries since 1421 it is safe to say that sea levels have risen between just under four and just under eight feet. For simplicity, I assumed that the overall rise had been one fathom, or six feet, roughly the midpoint of the range of estimates.

  The British Admiralty charts of the Caribbean16 enabled me to visualize a completely new picture of the region. In 1421, vast areas that today are submerged would have been either above water or with rocks and reefs showing as breaking water and shoals. The banks and reefs of the Great Bahama Bank, stretching south of Andros Island towards Cuba, would in 1421 have been above water down to the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer, and the numerous sand ridges today marked as ‘almost uncovered’ on the modern chart17 would also have been above water. To the Chinese cartographers, everything from Cayo Guajava in the middle of Cuba’s north coast as far as the latitude of Miami would have appeared as one large low-lying island, an extension of Cuba.

  The prevailing wind and current would have driven the fleet along the north-east coast of Cuba, then due north to the east of Andros, up towards Grand Bahama. (Andros Island is a favourite submarine haunt, for there is a deep-water trench well to the east of the coast along which thousands of tons of nuclear submarine can hurtle at forty miles an hour in order to test its silence at depth and speed. Afterwards we would surface and relax under the palms on Andros beach, drinking Bacardi and Coke.) If the Chinese fleet had made the passage at night, they would never have seen any openings to the west and could only have drawn what appears on the Cantino. When I adjusted the modern chart to show everything to a depth of one fathom, many of the shallow lagoons between the Caribbean islands became dry land, and when I superimposed these adjustments onto the Cantino it was clear the Caribbean had been drawn with incredible accuracy, just as it would have appeared to mariners sailing through it on a following wind six centuries ago. Once again, it was extraordinarily good cartography.

  The question I now had to face head on was whether this mapping could have been carried out by Columbus, who had reached the Caribbean in 1492, ten years before the Cantino was acquired. A number of learned professors have slightly different interpretations on the location of his first landfall in the Caribbean, varying between Samana Cay and Cat Island, and on where he first landed on the coast of Cuba. Columbus was a poor cartographer. On his first voyage his calculations of latitude were twenty degrees out – he believed he was somewhere in Nova Scotia – and his longitude was a thousand miles in error. Even if Columbus had a secret, and rather better, cartographer aboard who could have accurately drawn the Caribbean islands shown on the Cantino during all four of Columbus’s voyages, that still left hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean and islands shown on the Cantino that neither Columbus nor any other European explorer reached until twenty years after the chart was drawn. I concluded that the chart could not have been the product of any voyage by Columbus.

  Could it have been drawn by an unknown Portuguese or Spanish expedition? One has to look at the overall picture of the lands covered by the Piri Reis and the Cantino together. By 1501, when the source chart was obtained from Columbus’s sailor, the maker of the Piri Reis map could accurately depict South America and Antarctica. By the next year, 1502, the Cantino was showing Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. To achieve the remarkable precision and wealth of detail of the Cantino and Piri Reis charts would have required at least thirty ships just to survey the Indian Ocean, let alone South America, Antarctica and Africa. Neither Portugal nor Spain could have sent so many huge fleets simultaneously to different quarters of the world. Only China had the ships, the resources and the expertise to have done so. Cartographers aboard the Chinese treasure fleets had to be the originators of these remarkable charts.

  The Cantino map showing the Caribbean and Florida, compared with a modern map.

  By looking at the Caribbean islands charted on the Cantino, I could reconstruct the passage of the cartographers who had drawn them. To chart the islands, they had to see both coasts, and sailing always before the wind and current, square-rigged sailing ships had no opportunity of turning back for a second pass. To survey both coasts of an island required at least two ships, one either side of it. The way the charts are drawn, coupled with the prevailing winds and currents, leads me to believe that at least five squadrons of ships would have been needed to chart the Caribbean. By my best estimate, at least ten to twenty ships would have had to sail through the Caribbean to collect this mass of information in one pass. Assuming they were within sight of one another, working for ten hours a day, and travelling at an average speed of 4.8 knots, they would have charted fifteen thousand square miles per day and could have obtained the information in four to six weeks.

  Many of the islands are very low-lying, and to survey them with the accuracy shown the junks must have been within ten miles of each one, exposing themselves to horrific risks. To cross the Great Bahama Bank from Cuba to the east of Andros Island and inside the Berry Islands (all shown on the Cantino), the ships must have passed, frequently and at night, what the British Admiralty charts call ‘numerous sand ridges almost uncovered’, and ‘numerous rocky heads’. In one small stretch of forty nautical miles,18 there are literally hundreds of rocks and reefs capable of ripping wooden hulls apart. That short d
istance must have been achieved at a terrible cost. I cannot conceive how they could have made that passage without losing ships. By the time the junks had crossed the Great Bahama Bank and reached the Berry Islands they would surely have been in desperate trouble, the internal compartments of many ships flooded. The calm, moonlit seas might well have been echoing with the cries of dying seamen.

  It was a sombre thought, but it also highlighted the fact that I was closing on my quarry. The charts told me exactly where to look. I had to search for traces of the wrecks of treasure ships within a few miles of the Berry Islands in the Florida Strait.

  12

  THE TREASURE FLEET RUNS AGROUND

  AS YOU PASS from shallow water into the deeper waters of the open ocean, the pattern and length of the waves change and they have a different colour and smell. It is a phenomenon familiar to all blue-water sailors, and as his fleet passed the Berry Islands, Admiral Zhou Wen would have known at once that his fleet had entered deep water – the Northwest Providence Channel leading into the Florida Strait. I made the assumption that several of his junks had been damaged in crossing the reefs, and he would have had to find somewhere to beach his fleet before it sank in deep water. The search for a suitable island would have been a matter of desperate urgency, for many of the junks must have been in a critical condition, unable to survive in the open ocean.

  My detailed research of the area surrounding the Berry Islands now began in earnest. Large-scale British Admiralty charts1 and Coffman’s treasure atlas2 show wrecks strewn along the Chinese track. These wrecks have been classified by Coffman as Spanish galleons, later ships and earlier, unidentified ones. I focused my attention on the latter class of wrecks, and compared them with the Admiralty chart. It was a dramatic moment, for eight unidentified wrecks were disclosed within six hours’ or forty miles’ sailing from the point where the Chinese would have entered the Florida Strait. Four wrecks3 are shown on the Little Bahama reef and the Florida coast; another four4 are due south. When I examined a large-scale chart, it revealed that the track of these four southern wrecks was pointing towards a group of small islands, North and South Bimini, Gun and Ocean Cay, fifteen miles away. The position of the wrecks was consistent with four junks making a desperate but doomed bid to reach the islands; the last wreck is within a mile of North Bimini. All are in shallow water; if the sharks did not get them first, the crew could have swum ashore. I felt sure that there should be evidence of other wrecks – ships that had managed to struggle to land – on Bimini itself.

  Locations of unidentified wrecks on the route to Bimini.

  Before I flew there to begin a detailed search of the island, it seemed sensible to see if the first European to reach Bimini had found anything, such as wrecks or porcelain, left behind by the Chinese. The first European on Bimini was Juan Ponce de León (c. 1460–1521), a Spanish conquistador and governor of Puerto Rico from 1510 to 1511. On 23 February 1512, he was given a commission by the King of Spain:

  The King

  To the officials of the island of Española upon the agreement which they have made with Juan Ponce de León upon that and the said island of Biminy which he has to go to discover.5

  The king’s eagerness to locate the mystical island of Bimini was based on the legend that its waters conferred perpetual youth on those who drank them: ‘There is an island about three hundred and twenty-five leagues from Española in which there is a continual spring of running water of such marvellous virtue that, the water thereof being drunk, perhaps with some diet, maketh old men young again … bathing in it, or in the fountain, old men were turned into youths.’6 This legend was widespread before Columbus set sail. The waters have subsequently been identified as a foul-smelling sulphurous spring on the east side of North Bimini island. It can be reached via a shallow creek infested with caymans – members of the alligator family. Few kings could have resisted the allure of immortality, however remote the possibility, and such a discovery would have been of incalculable commercial value. There was not a rich man living who would not have exchanged the greater part of his wealth for the promise of eternal youth, as is the case to this day.

  The bays to the north and south of Bimini are clearly marked on the Cantino chart, drawn twelve years before Ponce de León set sail. Someone must have been there before him, not only to draw the island that appears on the Cantino but to convey descriptions of its magical spring. Bimini is only a few feet high and can be circumnavigated in a day. It was uninhabited for centuries save for wreckers, who based themselves there for salvage during the hurricane seasons. In the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway took a liking to the island and drank the night away in local bars while writing The Old Man and the Sea. Today, thousands of trippers come by seaplane and yacht from Florida to see Hemingway’s haunts, oblivious of the history that surrounds them.

  In September 1968, Dr J. Manson Valentine, a zoologist and underwater archaeologist, was swimming off North Bimini. He was in ten feet of water about a thousand yards from the shore when he spotted hundreds of flat rocks, eight to ten feet square, arranged in regular patterns. His discovery, named the ‘Bimini Road’, comprises two parallel lines of stones on the sand dunes of Bimini Bay running south-west towards the deep ocean. The western section starts at an angle of 160° to the beach and curves round to run directly to the shore. The curved part, some 330 feet long, is composed of large, well-laid stones. The straight, shoreward section is 1,200 feet long by 200 feet wide and has a trench in the middle where there are no slabs. (The website has further details.)

  In 1974, an American scientist, Dr David Zink, led an expedition (the first of nine) to survey these mysterious stones. He produced overwhelming evidence that the road was man-made. Small stones are placed underneath large ones, apparently to make the sea-bed level, and the larger of the two structures contains arrow-shaped ‘pointers’ that can only have been man-made. Parts of the road contain stones cut to the same size and laid in rows, and some small square stones have tongued and grooved joints. They have been submerged over a long span of time, for the edges of some have become rounded by wave action, giving them something of the appearance of huge loaves of bread. Some of them were not of Caribbean origin. The road is clearly visible from the air through the azure water. It runs straight as a die down into the depths, a broad band of beige stone. After Dr Zink’s expeditions, Jacques Cousteau surveyed the ‘road’ in detail for a television programme,7 and National Geographic has published several features. The ‘road’ has been surveyed by a number of different experts, and there is almost universal agreement that the structure is man-made.

  Dr Zink later reached the bizarre conclusion that the stones of the Bimini road were part of the fallen pillars of a sacred temple built about 28,000 BC by a long-lost civilization, the Atlanteans, who employed aliens from the star cluster Pleiades to build a megalithic temple complex similar to Stonehenge.8 Although I disagree with the strange conclusions Dr Zink reached, they do not detract from the value of his basic observations, measurements and surveys, which were meticulous.

  As Admiral Zhou Wen’s fleet made for Bimini, many of his ships must have been holed below the waterline, with one or more flooded compartments. The captains of the crippled junks desperately needed to beach them before they sank so that they could carry out repairs to the hulls and pump out the sea-water before it reached the rice that was their principal food supply. The standard practice with crippled ships, established over centuries and used extensively during the Second World War, is for damaged ones to be lashed alongside seaworthy ones to keep them afloat and offer all possible assistance. It is likely that some flooded horse and grain ships were tied to capital ships limping towards the shore. One can imagine the relief of the seamen and concubines as they saw the sandy spit of land fringed by palm trees.

  As soon as they saw North Bimini, the ships’ captains would have made straight for it. Since the water levels in 1421 were approximately one fathom lower than today, and the junks drew an avera
ge of two fathoms (twelve feet), depending on the cargo or ballast they were carrying, I calculated that the junks would have grounded where today there is eighteen feet of water – the depth of the seaward end of the Bimini Road. The inverted ‘J’ section at that end is in the exact position a junk rounding the Great Bahama Bank and then turning directly towards North Bimini would have beached.

  This supposition enabled me to look at the Bimini Road with fresh eyes. As I studied it, I hit upon a possible solution to the mystery of the road’s purpose. Could the road have been a slipway made of smooth stone to prevent further damage to the hulls of ships being beached and refloated? The curved section of the road could have acted as a turntable. When one of the treasure ships beached, its keel and rudder would have prevented it from being dragged sideways to the shore. The great ship’s stern would have had to be swivelled to face the beach before it could be hauled ashore backwards. When I drew a treasure ship and a grain ship on the same scale as the road, and then rotated their sterns, the treasure ship ended up on the larger stretch of road and the grain ship on the smaller. Both roads had grooves for the ships’ keels and rudders, enabling them to be dragged stern first to the beach.