A detailed survey of the tower by the respected Danish Committee for Research on Norse Activities in North America AD 1000–1500 took place in the early 1990s. The publication in 1992 of the results of investigations and analyses seemed to confirm the flour-mill thesis. The report, prepared by Johannes Hertz of the National Museum in Copenhagen, concluded that Arnold was the builder in 1667, but an American architect, Suzanne O. Carlson, who has made a meticulous examination of the tower, recently challenged these findings.4 She argued that closer study of the report revealed the tower could not have been built by Arnold at that date, and she cited four specific pieces of scientific evidence in support of her argument.
The Rhode Island Tower.
Firstly, she contended that every seventeenth-century colonial structure in New England was built using English measurements – yards, feet and inches – yet not a single dimension of the Newport Round Tower conforms. Secondly, she claimed that the seventeenth-century trench surrounding the tower, which the flour-mill camp says supports their argument, could only have been built to stabilize an earlier building. Thirdly, she argued that the Danish committee’s carbon-dating was based on a new and experimental technique that measured the carbon 14 in carbon dioxide bubbles in the mortar. The actual range of dates measured was between 1410 and 1970, and while the Danish committee attributed it to the late 1600s, the analysis could equally well apply to any date after 1409. Lastly, the tower was built using an unusual type of mortar made from crushed shells, rather than the standard lime mortar habitually used by colonial builders.
However, the details of the tower’s construction do not reveal its purpose, which has been described as follows:
The first storey of the tower served as a lighthouse. The larger windows of the first storey were so placed in relation to the fireplace that the light from the fire at night seen through the south window would be a guide to a ship approaching the entrance to Narragansett Bay … fireplace light through the two-foot opening of the west window would guide a ship to the harbour landing at the bottom of Tower Hill … The ingenious builder of the tower had obviously had considerable experience … in designing lighthouses.5
The Norse were present in Greenland from the end of the tenth to the early fifteenth century. Greenland had no wood, so each summer they set sail to Vinland – North America – to gather wood, returning each autumn. At first sight the narrow windows and rounded arches of the Rhode Island tower appeared Romanesque, and my initial reaction was that it was a lighthouse built by the Norsemen. It could have been; they had penetrated nearly as far south as Newport. However, the Norse had little experience of lighthouse design and are not known to have built one overseas; and in my view the design and position of the windows closely resembled those on the Song dynasty (960–1279) lighthouse that guided Chinese and Arab trading fleets into the port of Zaiton (Quanzhou) in Fujian province in southern China. A number of the crewmen aboard the Chinese fleet would certainly have known Zaiton and its lighthouse, for at the time of the Chinese treasure fleets Zaiton was probably the largest commercial port in the world. Marco Polo described it as ‘a great resort of ships and merchandise … for one spice ship that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere to pick up pepper for export to Christendom, Zaiton is visited by a hundred. For you must know that it is one of the two ports in the world with the biggest flow of merchandise.’6
The Zaiton lighthouse is twice the size of the Newport Round Tower and is five storeys high rather than three, but the windows are notably similar, as is the design of the central fireplace. Like Zaiton, too, the tower at Newport was once covered in smooth plaster. There are several other striking resemblances. The Rhode Island tower is a grey shell of stones rising above arches that span eight columns set on an octagonal base, just as at Zaiton. The masonry consists of stones of various shapes held together by a powerful and long-lasting mortar; neither the stones at Newport nor those at Zaiton have moved since the wall was built. Furthermore, the dimensions of the tower show that it conforms to the standard Chinese units of measurement used in the fifteenth century: the external diameter is 2 chang 40 chi and the internal 1 chang 80 chi (1 chang = 10.167 feet; 1 chi = 32 centimetres).
Professor William Penhallow, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rhode Island, offered an alternative explanation for the purpose of the Round Tower. He made a study of astronomical alignments and discovered that the seemingly random openings and asymmetrical, splayed window-jambs framed specific astronomical events, notably lunar eclipses and the rising and setting of the sun at its solstices and equinox.7 This accords precisely with the design of Ming observatories and observation platforms. The length of the sun’s shadow at solstice and equinox at any particular latitude gives the precise time, and viewing a lunar eclipse gave the Chinese the opportunity to observe the leading star on the zenith and so determine the longitude of the Newport Round Tower when they returned to Beijing,8 just as they did with observation platforms around the world.
The tower could thus have served two vital purposes. It could have been used to determine the exact location of the settlement set up by the Chinese crewmen and concubines left behind, so that they could be found and rescued on a subsequent voyage of the treasure fleets. It could also have been a lighthouse to guide the rescuers safely into Narragansett Bay. Although now obscured by encroaching woods, the tower was sited in a prominent position and was once a distinctive landmark clearly visible from the sea. Like the Zaiton lighthouse, it was angled so that the light burning from its fire could warn of danger through one set of windows, but also act as a guide through another set to bring mariners to a safe anchorage.
An analysis of the mortar used in the Newport Round Tower would settle the matter once and for all, for Chinese mortar had a very distinctive property – it contained gypsum as a hardening and rice as a bonding agent. It can also be dated; from analysis of the mortar on the Great Wall, it has been possible to determine the different rice and gypsum contents used in the Tang and Ming eras, and therefore when each section of the wall was built. I have asked the authorities at Newport for permission to arrange an analysis, but this has been denied. The first duty of the authorities is of course to preserve the fabric of the monuments in their care, not to make them available for experiments, but I hope they can be persuaded to change their minds. It would then be possible not only to determine the nature of the mortar but also to date it, and early Ming is particularly easy to date.
There is a substantial body of evidence that the Chinese landed at Newport. They had reached Bimini and later the Azores, and a detailed cartographic survey of the coast of Florida had been carried out before the first European reached North America. The route from Bimini to New England and then the Azores is precisely the one a square-rigged sailing ship would have followed, before the wind and current all the way. And the first Europeans to reach New England described – there exist six separate accounts – civilized white- or bronze-skinned women living around Newport who wore clothes of the East and dressed their hair in buns, as Chinese women did.
In view of all this evidence, it is more likely that the tower was erected by the Chinese, who had centuries of experience of lighthouse and observatory building, than by Norsemen, who had virtually no experience of either. The Newport Round Tower faces south, the direction from which the Chinese would have arrived, sailing with wind and current. It would have been useless to Norsemen approaching from Greenland to the north, sailing against the prevailing winds and currents.
I contend that the people Verrazzano met at what is now Newport, Rhode Island, can only have been Chinese men and women, the descendants of sailors and concubines from Zhou Wen’s great fleet. Knowing the longitude of the tower, the junks of the next treasure fleet would have been able to sail directly to Newport, and it would have been natural for those stranded there to have built a lighthouse to guide their rescuers safely into harbour, protecting them from the tragedy that had overtaken Zhou Wen’s fleet in the Ca
ribbean. If my surmise was correct that Zhou Wen had several thousand men and concubines to land around Narragansett Bay, a substantial amount of evidence should remain in the countryside surrounding the Newport tower. I would expect at least to find stones similar to those the Chinese erected elsewhere on their journey.
I began my search on the internet to see if there were any carved stones in eastern Massachusetts. My search produced immediate and dramatic results. Thirty miles upriver from the tower is the celebrated Dighton Rock. It is a free-standing, easily identifiable rock of a distinctive reddish-brown colour with an exposed face measuring approximately five feet high by eleven feet wide. It stands on the banks of the Taunton River and is covered with ancient carvings, on top of which is a Portuguese cross and graffiti. In that respect, Dighton Rock strongly resembles examples in the Cape Verde Islands and at the Matadi Falls. I felt that another link in the ever-lengthening chain of evidence had fallen into place.
Dighton Rock would have been the logical place for any explorer of the Taunton River to stop to leave a mark. It is the largest rock in the bay on the south side of what is now Perry Point, the northernmost point any large vessel can reach along the Taunton River. Above Perry Point, the river narrows to under two hundred feet and the depth falls to a few feet. It is the reason why the Taunton Yacht Club is located there rather than further north.
The rock was first drawn in 1680 by a local clergyman, Mr Danforth, who also related the legend associated with the rock that had passed into the folklore of the local Indians: ‘Then there came a wooden house (and men of another country in it) swimming up the River Asooner [as the River Taunton was then called] who fought the Indians with some mighty success.’9 The Chinese themselves described their junks as ‘wooden houses’, as did other observers such as Niccolò da Conti and Pedro Tafur, a Spanish traveller to whom da Conti related his story (see chapter 4). In 1421, the sea level was some six feet lower than today, and the rock, now covered at high water, would have been above the waterline in all but the highest spring tide. It was certainly respected and deemed old by local native Americans:
This monument was esteemed by the oldest Indians not only very antique but a work of a different nature from any of theirs … some reckon the figures here to be hieroglyphicall [sic] the first figure representing a ship without masts, and a mere wrack [wreck] cast upon the shoals. The second representing an head of land, possibly a cape with a peninsula. Hence a gulf.10
This description accords with the dreadful experiences a few weeks earlier of Zhou Wen’s fleet.
After Mr Danforth’s drawing of 1680, at least six more were made before 1830. I have received accounts of an artist and another clergyman who visited Dighton Rock after Mr Danforth; they met Mongolian people there and stated that the carving on the rock was Mongolian. However, it was the practice of local boatmen to take tourists to the rock and scrub off the algae to reveal the hieroglyphics underneath, and as time went by fewer and fewer of the hieroglyphics remained legible and the drawings grew more and more extravagant and fanciful, bearing little relation to Mr Danforth’s sketch. Whatever message the stone carried can no longer be read, and sadly all I or anyone else can conclude is that the rock was carved in a non-European language by foreign mariners sailing upriver in a ship like a house, that the inscription described a shipwreck and that the Portuguese later found the rock and inscribed a cross upon it.
I next searched the work of local historians for further evidence. Narragansett Bay is open to the North Atlantic and experiences brutal winter weather. Snowstorms lash the coast, and the native Americans who inhabited this bleak region, even the wild animals, sought refuge inland, away from the worst of the weather. It would have been natural for the Chinese also to seek shelter up one of the arms of the bay, and the Taunton River was the most obvious route. It was the native Americans’ highway to the interior, and it would have been logical for the Chinese to sail upriver to the highest navigable point, beside Dighton Rock, to escape the sudden squalls that might have caused the ships to drag their anchors and run aground.
In the 1950s, just before a housing development started at Perry Point, a cluster of very old stone buildings was found. They were all the same size, arranged in a cruciform pattern and held together by mortar. Hops and wild rice, not indigenous to the area, grew nearby. No-one at the time thought the matter sufficiently important to attempt to stop the housing development or to arrange an extensive excavation.11 Could this have been a settlement established by the Chinese? Sadly we will never know as all traces of these buildings have been destroyed.
Professor Delabarre, a distinguished North American historian,12 contended that there were noticeable differences in physiology and colouration between the ‘pure blood Wampanoag Indians’ living near Dighton Rock and adjacent tribes in Massachusetts. Based upon this, he postulated that while exploring what is now Narragansett Bay, the ship of the Portuguese explorer Miguel Cortreal was wrecked in 1510.13 He and his crew were accepted by the Wampanoag and intermarried within the tribe. Professor Delabarre’s theory could, of course, also apply to the bronze-skinned people Verrazzano met. The Wampanoag later proved hospitable to the first pilgrims, contrary to experiences elsewhere: male pilgrims were frequently killed by other tribes and women and possessions taken. One can speculate that the Wampanoag might earlier have been fairly treated by shipwrecked Chinese.
I began to search for more corroborative evidence such as other carved stones, without any great hope of finding any. After discovering the Cape Verde stone, I had spent considerable time searching for inscribed rocks around each Chinese landfall and had very rarely found more than one, at most two, in any one area. To my amazement, I discovered no fewer than twelve curious stones in one small area of eastern Massachusetts.14 The size, position and aspect of these rocks was strikingly similar to those I located on the Cape Verde Islands, at the Matadi Falls on the Congo River and at Ruapuke beach in New Zealand. Many were propped up with round stones at one corner in precisely the same way as the Cape Verde stone. Someone must have pushed the rocks into this odd position, recalling the description given by the Aborigines of foreign visitors to Australia ‘pushing the rocks in long lines’.
I decided to plot these stones on a map of eastern Massachusetts and immediately saw that they were either beside the Taunton River in the south, the Merrimack River in the north or around Massachusetts Bay. What appears highly likely is that the people who hauled the huge stones into position had sailed upriver, one ‘great house’ sailing up the Taunton River, another up the Merrimack.
One of these stones, the ‘Shutesbury’, appears to have carved upon it a figure of a seated Buddha in the classic position, ‘contemplating ageing’. If the carving could be dated to the pre-Columbus period this would be highly significant but unfortunately the museums I have approached so far have been unable to give a final opinion of the date. Curiously, at North Salem, a hundred miles south of Shutesbury, there is an instantly recognizable carving of a horse – pre-Columbus. If the people who raised the stones had used horses the likelihood would be that they came with horse-ships, for the rocks were found in place by the first European settlers and horses died out in North America round 10,000 BC. At this stage all one can say is that it is possible the huge stones were hauled into position by people using horses. The investigations continue and the results will be posted on the 1421 website.
It could be argued that the similarities of site, size, shape and method of support among the twelve large stones found in eastern Massachusetts and those in the Cape Verde Islands, at the Matadi Falls and at Ruapuke beach are coincidental, and that the inscriptions on the Dighton Rock represented shipwrecked mariners other than the Chinese, but I was sure the Chinese fleet had reached the Caribbean, and later the Azores. In between these two landfalls, the winds and currents would have taken them to exactly the place where the rocks have been found. The most plausible explanation is that the rocks were erected by the Chinese and that the wom
en Verrazzano met were the descendants of Chinese concubines. I suggest that the first settlers of North America came not with Columbus nor any other European pioneer, but in the junks of Admiral Zhou Wen’s fleet, landing around Christmas 1421, and there is now ample DNA evidence to back up this assertion. Perhaps New England should now be renamed New China.
The locations of standing stones in Massachusetts.
After establishing the settlements, the junks would have set sail. How desolate the crew and concubines left ashore must have felt, watching the great red sails unfurl and fill with wind, carrying the junks away. Those lining the beach would have strained their eyes until the ships were no larger than specks on the horizon, and as they turned away at last, their hearts must have been full of foreboding. No doubt promises were made that the next great treasure fleet would return for them, bringing fresh supplies and more people and carrying those who so wished back to their homeland. As the years passed, amid the daily struggle to survive – building shelters, catching fish, tilling the soil and foraging inland for food – they must have paused often to cast their eyes out to sea, raking the horizon for the first smudge of red that might signal the arrival of a rescue fleet. But as the years went by, hope must have faded, as must talk of their homeland, constant in the conversation of the old but dimming to a half-remembered tale and then forgotten altogether by succeeding generations. Not one single Chinese ship ever returned to collect them.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 25
