1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  14

  EXPEDITION TO THE NORTH POLE

  ADMIRAL ZHOU WEN’S already depleted fleet was to be further reduced in strength on the next stage of its epic voyage, for the surviving medieval maps suggest that as the Chinese fleet crossed the icy waters of the North Atlantic, it was divided into two squadrons. One set sail even further to the north; the other carried on eastwards and, swept before the winds and currents, it would have been approaching the Azores from the north-west within a month of leaving New England. The Azores chain stretches four hundred miles from north-west to south-east, and the first island the Chinese would have sighted approaching from the Americas is the most north-westerly of the Azores, the small but dramatic island of Corvo on the same latitude as Beijing.

  Like Santo Antão in the Cape Verde Islands and Guadeloupe, Corvo is dominated by a huge volcano, the long-extinct Caldeirão, usually capped by a large white cloud. Streams tumble down the sides of the volcano, visible from miles out into the Atlantic. Only five miles long, the island looks verdant green, rising above a sea of the deepest blue, but the living is hard, for there is only a narrow strip of fertile land on the south shore around what is now the capital, Vila Nova, between the foothills of the volcano and the sea. All the houses huddle together as if begrudging even a single lost yard of the precious soil.

  Here I began to look for a lighthouse, or a carved stone like the ones I had already located along the routes the Chinese had sailed. If it existed, it would have been placed in a prominent site and would have been noted by the Portuguese when they first discovered the island. The earliest account of the Portuguese arrival in the 1430s has this to say:

  On the summit of a mountain on an island they call The Raven [Corvo] … a statue of a man seated upon a horse; his head is uncovered and he is bald; his left hand rests upon his horse, his right hand points towards the west. The statue is set firmly upon a stone base carved out of rock. At the bottom are inscriptions in a writing which we could not understand.

  This statement is significant on several counts. The people who carved the horse and the writing were clearly not European, and the horseman is not only hatless but bald. Some of the terracotta army guarding the Emperor Quin’s tomb were depicted with shaven heads covered by a close-fitting stocking, like a tight hairnet. They do, indeed, look bare-headed and bald. The Corvo horseman is pointing to the west, to New England, the direction from which the Chinese would have arrived. The Azores are easy for a junk to reach from the Americas, but very difficult to reach from Portugal because from there ships would be sailing into the wind. That is why the Portuguese discovered them long after the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands, despite the Azores being nearer to Portugal.

  The voyage to the Azores and Cape Verde Islands.

  For me, the final confirmation that the Corvo horseman was indeed a Chinese statue, perhaps even of ‘The Emperor on Horseback’ Zhu Di, is that the Azores appear on the Chinese/Korean Kangnido chart, produced before the Portuguese discovered the islands. They had never appeared on any Arab maps, not even those of the famous historians Al Idrisi (1099–1166) and Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). If the Azores were not discovered by the Chinese, who could have discovered the islands before the Portuguese, and why should they have informed the cartographer in distant China?

  Surprisingly, corroborative evidence that the Chinese may have inhabited the Azores comes from Christopher Columbus, who reported a local story of non-European bodies washed onto the beach at Flores, some twenty miles south of Corvo. This report came before Columbus set sail for the Americas and Ferdinand Columbus indicates that his father believed these bodies, together with ‘artistically carved pieces of wood’, were evidence of contact between Cathay and the West.1

  While one squadron of Admiral Zhou Wen’s fleet set sail for home from the Azores via the Indian Ocean, the early maps show that the other squadron had taken a different route. South of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland,2 the Gulf Stream separates. While the main body flows clockwise, carrying ships to the Azores and then via the Canaries to the Cape Verde Islands, a second, smaller part of the stream, the Irminger current, carries on to the east. Due south of Iceland, it veers counter-clockwise, first to the north, then the north-west and then north again, carrying a ship into the Davis Strait separating Greenland from northern Canada. There it becomes the West Greenland current, which flows up the west coast of Greenland, circles around the north coast and then comes back down the east coast as the East Greenland current, leading back into the Atlantic. Any ship circumnavigating Greenland in this way would never have to sail into an opposing wind or current at any stage.

  The journey around Greenland.

  I was faced with two questions: why would the Chinese have wanted to circumnavigate such a barren, frozen land, and even if they had good reason to do so, was it actually possible? The answer to the first was easier to find than the second. The symbolic and practical significance of Polaris to the Chinese made fixing the absolute position of the North Pole of great importance. Not without reason had the emperor ordered them to reach ‘the most northern of the northern … countries’, and to explore the nethermost parts of the earth – as their compatriots were doing in the far south, locating the South Pole.

  I found the first circumstantial evidence that their thrilling gamble might have succeeded in two charts. The first was the Cantino, the remarkable medieval map that had already led me to so many discoveries about the Chinese voyages. The second chart was far more controversial: the Vinland map, dated to between 1420 and 1440. The Vinland map shows Newfoundland, Labrador and the whole of Greenland with great accuracy and in considerable detail. If it is genuine, it is proof that someone – perhaps the Chinese – had penetrated to within 250 miles of the North Pole four centuries before the first recorded European exploration of the High Arctic.

  By using information from the Vinland map, I knew I would be opening a Pandora’s box of controversy. The map’s credibility has been attacked on many grounds. Its extraordinary provenance – it first appeared in 1965 from the back of a small Fiat car owned by a map-dealer – has made it suspect in many expert eyes. There is no shortage of historians who believe its cartography just too good to be true; Greenland is so accurately drawn that it simply must be a modern fake. Walter McCrone of McCrone Associates, a respected Chicago firm expert in chemical analysis, claimed in 1972 that the ink’s composition, in particular its anatase content (a form of titanium that first appeared in inks in the 1920s) made impossible the purported date of the map’s creation. However, in 1992, Dr Thomas Cahill of UC Davis found anatase in a variety of medieval manuscripts, reopening the question of the Vinland map’s authenticity.

  Greenland shown on the Vinland map, compared to a modern map.

  The other grounds for attacking the map’s credibility are that the Norsemen who first settled Greenland had no cartographic knowledge, only an oral tradition that substituted for map making, and the map could not conceivably have been drawn from an oral description. Furthermore, it was believed that Greenland could not have been circumnavigated, and that the names on the Vinland map supposedly placed there by Claudius Clavius, an eminent Danish cartographer who is believed to have drawn the map in about 1424, are fairytale names; surely the Norsemen would have told him what they had called places in the north. However, if the original cartographers had been Chinese, Clavius would probably not have been able to translate the names marked on the chart, which might explain why he felt the need to invent them. The ink remains the one controversial issue that has not yet been resolved. Several books have been written about it. No less an authority than the then Keeper of Maps of the British Library, Mr R.A. Skelton, considers it genuine; in this he has been supported by several learned professors corroborating Dr Cahill’s discovery that anatase was in fact contained in some medieval inks, particularly those used in Alpine monasteries early in the fifteenth century.

  Those claiming the Vinland map is a forgery have not remotely sati
sfied the burden of proof, and it is my belief that it is genuine and that the original cartographers who produced the information on which it was based were aboard several Chinese junks, at least one of which circumnavigated Greenland on a quest to reach the North Pole. To justify that belief, I had to answer the question of whether Greenland really could have been circumnavigated. It is completely impossible today, even in a nuclear-powered icebreaker, for the seas surrounding the far north are frozen solid all year round. However, there is direct evidence that conditions in the early fifteenth century were markedly different from those ruling today.

  Contemporary accounts of the wedding of Sigrid Bjornsdottir in 1408, preserved in the state archives in Oslo, paint a very different picture of the land we know as Greenland. Sigrid was a widow; her father and sisters had died and she had inherited the family land, becoming the wealthiest landowner in Greenland. She possessed substantial flocks of sheep and cattle that fed on lush Greenland pastures, a scene quite unrecognizable from today’s barren, ice-bound land. The church in which Sigrid was married still stands in bleak and splendid isolation above the dark fjord. We can imagine her that September Sunday as the service ended, hurrying from the church into the dark warmth of her house to begin her wedding celebrations.

  Excavations of the floors of the houses in which she, her family and her retainers and servants lived show that the climate in Greenland was far warmer before the onset of a miniature Ice Age in the 1430s. The evidence is supplied by a change in the type of flies found during the excavations. Those that inhabit warm houses disappeared and were replaced by flies that can live in cold, empty houses off the rotting flesh of the dead. Evidence of an abrupt change in climate came from the skeleton of an elkhound whose throat had been slit – perhaps a last meal for the dying inhabitants. A valuable hunting dog would only have been slaughtered like this in the most dire circumstances, for without it a family’s chances of killing enough game to survive the winter would be drastically reduced. I am now in receipt of expert corroberative evidence that the summers of 1422 to 1428 were exceptionally warm (see postscript).

  I found further corroboration that Greenland can periodically be navigated in the accounts of Captain George Nares’s voyage to the Arctic in 1875–6.3 One of his ships reached 83°20′ North, just nineteen miles from the northern tip of Greenland. An officer, Lieutenant Lockwood, marched the nineteen miles to the northernmost tip, Lockwood Island, later named after him. And this at a time when the climate was much colder than in 1422.

  It is safe to conclude, therefore, that Greenland was circum-navigable in 1421–2, for the climate of Greenland was far warmer than it is today. In 1421 it would have been a country of green pastures where cattle grazed in the open from Pentecost (fifty days after Easter) to Cross Sunday (the second Sunday in September). The rivers were full of salmon, the coasts rich in walrus.

  Additional corroboration that the Chinese did reach Greenland comes from a most curious letter written in 1448 by Pope Nicholas V to the bishops of Skalholt and Holar in Iceland, setting out the background to his desire to appoint a new bishop to Greenland: ‘[Thirty years ago,] the barbarians came from the nearby coast of the heathens, and attacked the inhabitants of Greenland most cruelly and so devastated the mother country and the holy buildings with fire and sword that there remained no more than nine parish churches … The pitiable inhabitants of both sexes they carried away … the greater number have since returned from captivity to their own houses.’4 The Pope referred to ‘barbarians’ who came from ‘the nearby coast of the heathens’. In other letters, he referred to the Inuit tribes of the Canadian Arctic as ‘the heathen’, so ‘the nearby coast’ can reasonably be assumed to refer to the Canadian Arctic. Addressing a Christian audience, the Pope distinguished between heathens and barbarians – they were not interchangeable terms. He cannot be referring to Norsemen – Greenland was a Norse colony – nor to any other Christian invader; they might have been heretics in the Pope’s eyes, but they would not have been barbarians. In those days, as is commonly accepted, barbarians were people who invaded Europe from the East; the Pope was almost certainly referring to a Mongolian or Chinese invader of Greenland. The Pope would not have been referring to North American Indians as the barbarians, for these people had no ‘swords’ or ‘fire’ with which to fight. They used bows and arrows. I believe the only rational view to take is that this letter is describing a Chinese fleet arriving from North America and attacking the local people, perhaps with cannon (Hvalsey, Sigrid Bjornsdottir’s home town and the main settlement of Greenland, was within cannon range from the sea). They took them away in their great ships then returned them. But why the Chinese should have acted in this uncharacteristic way is inexplicable. Perhaps they were attacked first.

  Assuming that the Chinese did indeed reach the settlement at Hvalsey – and DNA analysis has again shown that the native people around Hvalsey possess Chinese DNA – the Vinland map should show where they had most accurately surveyed the coast, and therefore the sites where further direct evidence of settlements, wrecks and artefacts might be found. Peter Schlederman and Farley Mowat, two well-known authors and explorers, have carried out years of painstaking research in the High Arctic at the extraordinary villages of stone houses centred on the Bache Peninsula of Ellesmere Island, to the west of Greenland on the west shore of the Kane Basin, and made some remarkable discoveries.5

  The colony on the Bache Peninsula is of particular interest. There are about twenty-five houses and a similar number of beacons on the peninsula, and some of the houses are immense – nearly 150 feet (45 metres) long and over 5 metres wide. The houses are so large and the stonework so well constructed that it is unlikely they were built by Inuit peoples. They have other notable characteristics too. Stone beacons resembling small lighthouses were built alongside the houses, and there is one very curious omission: none of the houses has a roof. The Norse settlers of Greenland almost invariably roofed their houses with sod, but there is not a trace of such roofing on any of the houses on the Bache Peninsula. That there are no roofs at all is astounding. The buildings are large enough to have accommodated as many as three thousand people, but without a roof over their heads they would have been lucky to survive a single Arctic night. The ruined walls of the buildings can be seen today. Outside the houses, row upon row of hearths had been constructed, 142 in all, each separated from its neighbour by a stone wall. This multiple arrangement of outdoor hearths is again quite unique; nothing like it has ever been identified among prehistoric sites in the Canadian Arctic.

  In trying to solve the mystery of these curious buildings, my first clue came from the local geography. The settlement at Ellesmere Island was built on a spit near a large polynya – a stretch of open water, a curious phenomenon found all the way to the North Pole. As I can vouch from navigating submarines under the ice in this part of the world, polynyas remain ice-free in both summer and winter. The reason for this is still not fully understood, but because they are permanently free of ice, they are extraordinarily attractive not only to submariners in search of fresh air but as breathing-holes for mammals. There, mammals can also seek their prey. The polynya off the Bache Peninsula is particularly rich in fish and attracts large numbers of walrus. Walrus were very greatly valued in the Middle Ages for their meat, their magnificent ivory tusks and their hides, which could be boiled to make blubber oil for heating and lighting and distilled to make pitch to seal the hulls of ships. That the villagers on the Bache Peninsula in the High Arctic were there for the walrus is confirmed by the superb artefacts of exquisite workmanship that have been found nearby, such as fish hooks made from walrus ivory.

  Ellesmere Island also has another very valuable commodity: copper. Evidence of ancient mining and processing of copper has recently come to light on nearby Devon Island;6 of course, the Chinese were adept at surveying for, mining and refining metals. Coal originating from Newport, Rhode Island, has also been found in Greenland. Someone must have carried it there. />
  All of this was reasonably logical, but it begged the question of why the Chinese, with their magnificent ships, should have bothered to build stone houses at all. Why not simply anchor off the polynya to hunt the walrus and prospect for copper? But if one or more of the great ships had been holed by ice and forced to beach, they would then have found themselves on land with thousands of tons of teak near a rich fishing ground that would keep them alive if only they could withstand the cold. In such circumstances they would probably have done what Shackleton was to do centuries later: they built houses of the local material – stone – and roofed them using the timbers of their ships. By my calculations, one three-thousand-ton junk could have roofed all twenty-five houses of the settlement on the Bache peninsula.

  I next turned to the stone hearths. If they had been designed for cooking, they would have been inside the houses: sited outside, they must have been built for industrial purposes. The sheer number of them – 142 in total – supports this thesis. One explanation would be that the hearths were used to boil blubber, both to make pitch for sealing the wooden roofs of the houses and to provide heating and lighting oil for winter. They could also have been used for desalinating sea-water or melting snow for drinking water, but so many hearths would scarcely have been required for these purposes. I believe that the Chinese were also smelting copper.

  Part of the Chinese fleet must have remained at the settlement for some time, but at least one ship must have gone on to circumnavigate Greenland because the northern and eastern coasts of Greenland appear on the Vinland map. The south-western and south-eastern coasts are very accurately drawn with correct latitudes, but the north-west coast has a substantial ‘bulge’ in the area from Cape York through the Kane Basin to Petermann Fjord and Peary Land. To work out how this might have happened, I studied modern ice maps of the region7 and concluded that the bulge shown on the Vinland map is in fact ice protruding into the sea from the huge glaciers of Mylius Erichsen’s Land and Kronprins Christian’s Land. Superimposing the shape of the glaciers onto a modern map of Greenland reconciles the disparity on the Vinland map.