Obtaining stones and rocks of the required size for the Bimini slipway would have been a simple exercise. The junks would have contained thousands of tons of stone ballast. Zhou Wen’s fleet carried gunpowder that could be used to blow up rocks, and Chinese stone masons were aboard the ships. They had built thousands of miles of Great Wall between 1403 and 1421 using a wide variety of percussion hammers, drills, awls, saws and sledgehammers. Assuming, for reasons I shall explain later, that fifteen treasure ships had reached Bimini, about six thousand sailors and concubines would have been available as labourers. At first sight, laying the stones on the sea-bed appears problematic, but the Chinese also had more than six centuries’ experience of building coffer-dams, watertight enclosures pumped dry using ‘Archimedes’ screw-pumps to permit work below the waterline. By the early Ming period they even had diving equipment with breathing tubes and face masks.9 Laying stonework under water was a problem they were well equipped to overcome.
The junks’ approach to Bimini and the Bimini Road.
When the slipway had been completed, each huge ship would have had to be hauled ashore in turn, keeping the rudder and keel in the groove. Again, this appears to be a tremendous engineering challenge, but although the treasure ships displaced thousands of tons, Chinese engineers had developed a wide variety of capstans using wire or hemp ropes in order to haul ships. The capstans had geared ratchet-wheels and differential drives, and were designed to be powered by men or horses. The Chinese would have expected their square-rigged junks with shallow draughts and flat bottoms to run aground occasionally, and it is probable that the crew’s training included practising hauling flooded ships ashore for repairs. It was reasonable to suppose that the necessary equipment would have been aboard each ship to enable them to do so.
There remained several unsolved puzzles that did not yet fit my scenario. Many of the big rectangular stones were not made from rock found at Bimini. The bedrock there was softer, and laid in a far more disordered pattern than the ‘imported’ slabs.10 The ‘cement’ which appeared to bond the sections also differed. Dr Zink found one sample to be dominated by aragonite crystals, another by spalling calcite, implying that adjacent stones had different physical properties and hence had been formed in different locations. But why would it be necessary to transport huge stones and those square ‘building blocks’ to Bimini when there was plenty of usable rock there – unless they were part of the ballast carried by the Chinese junks?
Dr Zink sent a sample to the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. As it had never been fired in a kiln, they were unable to carbon-date the blocks but the head chemist, Dr Edward V. Sayre, confirmed that some of the smaller square blocks were made with a sandstone-limestone mixture and suggested that they ‘might have been created by an ancient technique of mass production’. Moreover, each ‘building block’ was tongued and grooved to slot into its neighbour, and although they had square sides, they tapered in thickness. There appeared to be no need for the tongue and groove on the sea-bed, for the stones were not joined together with them. The solution could be that the building blocks were tongued and grooved so that they could be joined together around ballast in the bottom of a junk, preventing the large stones from moving in a heavy sea and damaging the hull.
A junk’s beam was very wide in comparison to its length, and because it was flat-bottomed, substantial ballast was required. The displacement of the capital ships was around 3,400 tons; according to standard nautical engineering I would expect each of them to have carried between five and six hundred tons of ballast – around thirty tons in each of the eighteen watertight compartments. The slipway is composed of a mixture of local rock, building blocks and large ‘imported’ stones. Some 450 of the latter are still in place on the slipway, but in recent years dredgers have removed part of it to build a seawall in Miami. I calculated that originally there were about six hundred stones on the slipway, each weighing about ten tons, the equivalent of the ballast carried by a dozen junks.
I could now reconstruct a plausible scenario for what had happened. A junk hit the shore, its hull fractured, and some stones or building blocks spilled out onto the sea-bed – the first part of the ‘road’. To increase buoyancy, other large stones might have been lowered through the ruptured hulls using long stones as ‘straps’ beneath them, held by ropes at either end. The ‘support’ stones on the sea-bed might have been the straps left when the stone reached the sea-bed.
Although the ‘imported’ large stones11 are commonplace (save in the Caribbean) throughout the world, they are found in the Yangtze area and could have been mined and cut to size in the Ming quarries in the eastern suburbs of Nanjing, where the treasure ships were built. The building blocks on the sea-bed are one chi (thirty-two centimetres) square, and the sandstone-limestone mixture used to make them was widely available in the Yangtze area.
Once the junks had been hauled onto the beach, the sea-water could be pumped out and the urgent task of drying the rice stores could begin. The Chinese crewmen would have been able to supplement their basic diet with the abundant conches, turtles and gamefish around Bimini. Water could be obtained from the celebrated spring, the bubbling pool of sulphurous water later described to Ponce de León as a fountain of life. But however skilful the Chinese carpenters, some junks would have been damaged beyond repair. They would have been cannibalized, their holds emptied of stores, their hull planking used for the repair of potentially seaworthy junks and for firewood. The remainder of the hulls would have been left as giant wooden skeletons on the beach beyond the slipway. If this had happened, some evidence might remain.
In 1989, Raymond E. Leigh, a land surveyor attached to Dr Zink’s expedition, flew across North Bimini and took measurements with infra-red equipment of the north-eastern end of the island, opposite the place where the slipway comes ashore. He discovered four rectangular sand mounds, the largest 500 feet long and 300 feet wide. Their size and shape suggest that they may be the sand-covered hulls of treasure ships, and they are just where I would expect to find the skeletons of junks swept ashore by a hurricane. Another mound was found by Dr Zink on the beach near the slipway. As Chinese warships, the remains of the junks may technically still be the property of the Chinese government. Negotiations are in hand between the Bahamian authorities and myself to resolve the issue of ownership of any artefacts that may be found. When these protracted negotiations are complete, archaeologists may be allowed to excavate the mounds. Their contents may yield detailed knowledge of Zhou Wen’s fleet, and perhaps some of the treasure it carried. It could be a priceless discovery in every sense: each junk could carry two thousand tons of cargo, and a single early Ming plate was recently auctioned for £89,500.12
I concluded that four junks had sunk just short of North Bimini, another five had been abandoned on East Bimini and the remainder had been repaired and refloated. The lost ships would have carried several thousand sailors and concubines, and Bimini could probably not have supported more than a hundred. A large number would have been taken aboard the surviving junks, but it is inconceivable that room could have been found to carry all of them back to China. Some must have been left on Bimini, others put ashore wherever conditions seemed to offer better hope of survival. As Admiral Zhou Wen’s shrunken fleet continued its voyage, its upper decks crowded with crew and passengers from the abandoned junks, many others must have been left to their fate, as happened to sailors from Columbus’s ships seventy years later: one of his ships and crew were left behind on Hispaniola. Once the available food on Bimini was exhausted, the abandoned Chinese would have had to attempt the crossing to Cuba, the nearest large island, some 180 miles to the south, or to Florida. Had they managed to do so, some of their descendants should have been alive when Columbus arrived.
In the summer of 1494, on Columbus’ second voyage, he anchored his ships off Cuba near a beautiful palm grove to get fresh water and wood.
As the landing party cut wood and filled their water casks, an arch
er strayed into the forest in search of game, only to return a few minutes later to relate a baffling and frightening experience … He had come across a band of about thirty well-armed Indians … three white men were in the company of the natives.
The white men, who wore white tunics which reached to their knees, immediately spotted the intruder … one of them stepped towards the hunter and started to speak.13
The hunter then fled. Upon hearing his story, Columbus despatched another party who failed to find the men. White men with ‘white tunics which reached to their knees’ is the description local people in Mexico (Jucutácato) and Australia (Arnhem Land) gave to the strangers landing on their shores. Not without reason did Columbus conclude that the men were people of Mangon (China) and that he had reached the shores of Asia.14
In isolation, the description of the men in white tunics who greeted Columbus’s men could be taken with a pinch of salt, but explorer after explorer in continent after continent reported the same story, all along the Chinese track I had reconstructed from the charts published before the first Europeans reached those continents. In South America, the Spanish envoy, Don Luis Arias, recounted tales in the sixteenth century of light-coloured people who wore white woven garments and crossed the Pacific after leaving what is now Chile. Father Monclaro, a Jesuit priest who accompanied a Portuguese expedition to East Africa in 1569, described the inhabitants of Pate whose claim to be descendants of shipwrecked Chinese sailors was reinforced by their story of the giraffe, the ‘quilin’ presented to Emperor Zhu Di. Indian sailors reported a Chinese expedition to Antarctica following the Southern Cross constellation. In southern Australia, the Yangery tribe, living beside the wreck of a ‘mahogany’ ship, claimed that ‘yellow men’ had settled among them; and in northern Australia the Aborigines said that a honey-coloured people, the men wearing long robes and the women pantaloons, had settled in north-east Arnhem Land. The Maoris made a similar claim, and the French explorer Bougainville reported meeting Chinese people in the Pacific in 1769. It is scarcely credible that all these accounts are imaginary or fabricated.
The Bimini Road has, of course, excited great controversy and interest. All sorts of exotic ideas and theories have been put forward; mine is but the latest. I fully accept that it requires some leaps of the imagination that are not, as yet, backed up by hard evidence. Only when the Bahamian authorities grant permission for the archaeological excavation of the sand mounds on the beach will we be able to determine whether or not my theory is correct. For the time being, frustrating though it was, I had to leave the mounds undisturbed and depart from Bimini, following in the wake of Admiral Zhou Wen as he assembled the remnants of his fleet and sailed northwards.
13
SETTLEMENT IN NORTH AMERICA
IN SOLVING THE immediate problem of his damaged and destroyed ships, Admiral Zhou Wen had fallen foul of another. Some of his ships were again seaworthy and some of the rice had been salvaged, but he now had to make provision for the crews and concubines from the wrecks that had been left on the beach at Bimini. There would have been several thousand additional sailors and several hundred concubines to be accommodated and fed from a much-reduced food supply. The rulers of many Arabian, African and Indian states had been served by the concubines. Many must have been pregnant when the fleet left India, and some would already have given birth. The only way to cope with the chronic overcrowding in the surviving junks would have been to create settlements ashore where some of the crewmen, concubines and their children at least had a chance of survival. A later voyage would have to return for them.
If such Chinese settlements had been made in North America – and the results of recent tests on the Moskoke people of south-eastern United States show that they do have Chinese DNA – my problem, as ever, was to locate the physical evidence. Along the Florida coast marked on the Cantino map, the cartographer drew the Florida Keys, Port Sewall, Cape Canaveral and the Savannah estuary. I know Cape Canaveral well. I was operations officer on HMS Resolution when we fired Britain’s first Polaris missile there in February 1968. It splashed down 2,800 miles away off South America, just fifteen feet shy of the target buoy – the splash as the warhead hit the water temporarily blinded the reading apparatus. As we surfaced back in Florida, we found sea snakes nestling in the conning tower, attracted by the submarine’s warmth. The cape itself is a bleak place, renowned for its manatees, the strange sea mammals that gave birth to the legend of the mermaids. Both Cape Canaveral and St Augustine are littered with wrecks, some of them ancient and unidentified, but the fierce current has carried away the timbers to such an extent that identification is very difficult. Nonetheless, the attempt is in hand.
Zhou Wen’s journey up the east coast of Florida.
The Cantino ends abruptly at the estuary of the Savannah River, at Point Tybee. This suggested that, having reached this point, the junks had then been carried away from land towards the north-east, exactly the direction in which the prevailing winds and the Gulf Stream run there. These would have carried the junks up to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. Off Cape Hatteras, the Gulf Stream divides in two, one branch flowing north-east towards the Azores. Those islands appear on the Kangnido, drawn before the first Portuguese reached the islands, and I was certain that the Chinese had reached them. The other, westerly branch of the current off Cape Hatteras flows at first due north, then slowly rotates to the north-east past Philadelphia. At latitude 40°N, the current flows inshore towards Long Island, Rhode Island and Cape Cod.
Once again, this part of the coast is littered with unidentified wrecks, many of them ancient, and a sensible point to begin a detailed search for traces of the Chinese was at the latitude of Beijing – 39°53′N. On the course the junks were taking, they would have reached this point off the coast of modern New Jersey. I have taken my submarine up that coast and can confirm that a huge volume of water flows north-east and the wind and current push ships directly towards Cape Cod. I began the search around Narragansett Bay and Buzzards Bay, and on the Cape Cod peninsula, making sure first of all to consult the accounts of the first Europeans to reach this part of the coast.
The renowned Venetian explorer Giovanni de Verrazzano (c. 1480–c. 1527) arrived there in 1524, twenty-two years after the Cantino was produced. Francis I of France had retained him to explore the North American coast with the aim of finding a seaway to the Pacific and the Spice Islands – ‘the happy shores of Cathay’.1 Verrazzano’s voyage was carried out at the same time as the Spanish sent Magellan around South America and the Portuguese despatched a series of expeditions around the Cape of Good Hope. All three countries were in a race to find the most cost-effective and secure means of reaching the Spice Islands of Ternate and Tidore now that the overland route to the East, the Silk Road, had been severed.
The journey to Rhode Island.
In 1524, Verrazzano with his small squadron sailed northwards up the coast from Virginia to the eastern tip of Nova Scotia, describing the pleasant land and its savage people as he went. When at the parallel of Rome, ‘41 degrees and 2 terstices north’, he entered a large bay, corresponding with Narragansett Bay off Rhode Island, where he spent fifteen days. The local people were:
the colour of brass, some of them incline more to whiteness: others are of yellow colour, of comely visage, with long and black hair, which they are very careful to trim and deck up; they are black and quick eyed, and of sweet and pleasant countenance …
The women are of the like conformity and beauty; very handsome and well favoured, of pleasant countenance and comely to behold; they are as well-mannered and continent as any woman, and of good education … [women] use other kinds of dressing themselves like unto the women of Egypt and Syria; these are of the elder sort: and when they are married, they wear divers toys [jewellery] according to the usage of the people of the East, as well men as women.2
This is a very significant passage. Verrazzano was comparing elegant people with brass-coloured skin to the much darker and more un
couth people he had met further south. He referred twice to the women’s connection with the East and their clothes – dresses rather than the furs and animal skins worn by the people he had encountered previously. Most important of all, Verrazzano was not describing local women married to foreigners, but women resembling those from the East who had somehow ended up in North America. Clearly they were from a different civilization and were not natives of North America, nor of Europe.
Verrazzano’s description suggests that the younger girls were not following their grandmothers’ traditions; the original customs they had brought were dying out, indicating that they had been there a few generations. The description would indeed have fitted Syrian or Egyptian women just as much as it would Chinese. All of these women would have worn long dresses and jewellery and had their black hair decked up, but Egyptian and Syrian seafarers never reached the Atlantic; in any case, their women were not taken on long voyages. The description would fit the descendants of the Chinese concubines pregnant by Middle Eastern rulers and ambassadors. It could have been they who greeted Verrazzano.
There is another clue in Verrazzano’s account of leaving Narragansett Bay: ‘In the midst of this entrance [to the harbour] there is a rock of stone produced by nature apt to build any castle or fortress there, for the keeping of the haven … which we call La Petra Viva [the living rock].’3 Verrazzano’s description fits the rock on which the Round Tower still stands, in a park in Newport, Rhode Island, on a promontory overlooking the harbour. The tower is a mystery; visitors muse over whether or not it was built by strange people who arrived before Columbus. To me it is a curiosity, quite unlike any other colonial building in America, placed in isolation, in a commanding position but not a fortress, and out of the wind, so unlikely to be a mill. Historians have furiously debated its origins. One school claims it was a sixteenth-century flour mill, another that it served as a lighthouse and was built around the end of the fourteenth century. Both theories could be correct; an earlier building could have been modified to serve as a flour repository, if not a mill. Historians in the flour-mill camp rely for their evidence on the first Rhode Island governor, Benedict Arnold, a prosperous merchant whose will referred to ‘my stone builte tower’.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 24
