Excepting this one error, the coastline is well drawn. Once again, it is a staggering cartographic achievement. The cumulative evidence – the Chinese reaching the Caribbean, the currents and winds that could have carried them from there around Greenland, the Pope’s letter and the stone village – is suggestive of a Chinese attempt to reach the North Pole. By reaching Greenland they failed only by four hundred nautical miles … or did they? The most exquisite artefacts – snow geese, polar bears, seals and walruses of sumptuous workmanship carved from walrus ivory – have been found in the High Arctic even further north than Greenland, within 250 miles of the North Pole. They were designed by artists of genius. Could the Inuit have made them, or were they the art of a civilization almost as old as time?
After setting sail from Greenland, the currents and prevailing winds would have driven the Chinese fleet on towards Iceland. Confirmation that this was feasible came from Christopher Columbus: ‘In the month of February 1477, I sailed 100 leagues [approximately 470 nautical miles] beyond the island of Tile [Iceland], whose southern part is in latitude 73 degrees north … and at the time when I was there, the sea was not frozen, but there were vast tides, so great that they rose and fell as much as 26 braccia [about 50 feet] twice a day.’8 Professor Mike Baillie of Queen’s University, Belfast, a world expert on dendrochronology – the analysis of tree rings to establish dates – has shown that 1477 was indeed an unusually warm year, hence Columbus’s claim is perfectly acceptable. Such a voyage would have taken him to the coast of Greenland. Then came the bombshell. Columbus summarized his voyage in his own handwriting in the margins of his copy of Pope Pius II’s book History of Remarkable Things that Happened in my Time. He wrote: ‘Men have come hither [to Iceland] from Cathay in the Orient.’9
I now had separate testimony from a pope and from Columbus that the Chinese had reached Greenland and Iceland, documentary evidence corroborated by the Vinland map of c. 1424 that shows the south coast of Greenland with stunning precision. In addition, the great expert on Ming China, Professor Needham, says that there exist more than twenty separate Chinese claims that they actually reached the North Pole.10
When they rounded Greenland’s North Cape, the Chinese would have been just 180 miles south of the North Pole, for its position in 1422, as determined by Polaris at 90° altitude (Wu Pei Chi), was well to the south of where it is today. To reach the pole, the Chinese had only to travel a further 180 miles to the north – less than two days’ sailing. Could the Arctic waters have been ice-free over those last 180 miles? A current (2000) temperature chart for the Arctic in July shows a tongue of relatively warm water off the North Cape of Greenland – perhaps the last feeble remnant of a branch of the Gulf Stream – extending northwards beyond the North Cape towards the North Pole. It is entirely possible that the Chinese claims are true, that they had indeed reached the North Pole five centuries before Europeans did. Having been in a submarine on patrol near the North Pole using a series of polynyas, I can only marvel at the Chinese achievement. They could now eat the last of the dogs and drain the remaining bottles of rice wine in celebration before at last setting sail for their homeland.
Their route home from these far northern latitudes may solve yet another mystery, for the Waldseemüller map, published in 1507, shows the north coast of Siberia from the White Sea in the west to the Chukchi Peninsula and the Bering Strait in the east. The whole coast, with its rivers and islands, is clearly identifiable. If not the Chinese, who could have surveyed that enormous coastline? How was this chart drawn, showing lands that were not ‘officially’ discovered by Europeans for another three centuries, unless the Chinese had also travelled there? The first Russian surveys of Siberia did not take place for another two centuries, and the first Russian map did not appear until the nineteenth century.
The only logical explanation, and the DNA evidence backs it up, is that it was surveyed by Zhou Wen’s fleet as it made its way back to China through the Bering Strait. As discussed previously, The Illustrated Record of Strange Countries features drawings of Cossack dancers and Eskimos hunting. The Eskimos could have been those of the Aleutian Islands, known to the Chinese, but the drawings of Cossacks cannot be explained in this way. There are no records of any Chinese visits to Muscovy in the first half of the fifteenth century. How could the drawings have been made without a visit to the Arctic?
Another Chinese admiral, Zhou Wen, had now completed an epic voyage of discovery, equalling if not surpassing the extraordinary voyages of Hong Bao and Zhou Man. Yang Qing had also been at sea with a great fleet in the missing years of 1421 to 1423, and I now turned my attention to him. He may not have travelled as far as the others, remaining for the most part in waters already familiar to the Chinese, but his achievements during the voyage he made lose nothing in comparison to the successes of the other great admirals.
VI
The Voyage of Yang Qing
15
SOLVING THE RIDDLE
WHILE HIS PEERS had been locating canopus and the Southern Cross, penetrating the polar regions and discovering new lands and continents across the globe, Grand Eunuch Yang Qing’s fleet, having left Beijing a month before the rest, spent the entire voyage in the waters of the Indian Ocean. Nowhere was more familiar to Chinese seamen, for trade with the states of the Indian Ocean, particularly the vastly lucrative spice trade, was the source of much of the Chinese national wealth. Trade was carried on not just with the Spice Islands, the countries of south-east Asia, India and the Arab states of the Gulf, but with ports and states the length of the East African seaboard.
By the early fifteenth century, Arab ports along that coast traded directly with China, exporting gold, ivory and rhino horn. Rulers of East African states habitually travelled aboard the junks of Zheng He’s fleets to the Forbidden City. Many were returned to their home states as the fleets made their outward voyages in 1421, and more were collected and taken to China by two of the fleets limping homeward at the end of their remarkable voyages: Yang Qing himself returned from the Indian Ocean in September 1422 bearing the envoys of seventeen states from the East African and Indian coasts, and Hong Bao sailed home in October 1423 with the ambassador of Calicut. Once again, the emperor’s foreign policy had succeeded brilliantly. The Indian Ocean had become a Chinese lake.
As most of the Chinese records had been destroyed, I had as usual to look elsewhere for evidence of the route Yang Qing’s fleet had taken around the Indian Ocean. I found it in a familiar source: the Cantino map of 1502. My belief that it was based on information obtained from the Chinese voyages of 1421–3 arose from Portuguese historian Antonio Galvão’s comment about a map (the 1428 World Map) that ‘set forth all the navigation of the East Indies, with the Cape of Boa Esperança’ (see chapter 4).1 In those days, the ‘East Indies’ meant India, the Indian Ocean, Malaysia and Indonesia. It was an unequivocal declaration that the Cape of Good Hope, the Indian Ocean and the East had been set out on a map drawn early in the fifteenth century. Further corroboration that the Portuguese had a map showing the Cape of Good Hope before Dias or da Gama set sail came from the instructions of King João II of Portugal to the explorer Pêro da Covilha (c. 1450–c. 1520) in May 1487, when he sent him on a voyage to search for a sea route to India:
He recommended him very much to enquire whether beyond the Cape of Good Hope it was possible to navigate to India … Then the King sent two of his trustworthy men who could speak Arabic well and were experienced travellers, Pero de Covilha, a knight of his household, and Alfonso de Paiva … [the future] King Dom Manuel gave them a chart (Carta de Marear) taken from the Map of the World [1428 chart] … all these showed as well as they could how they would have set about going and finding the countries the spices came from [the Moluccas].2
Significantly, Dias had not ‘discovered’ the Cape of Good Hope in May 1487, when these instructions were issued.
By the fifteenth century, the Chinese had hundreds of years’ experience of navigating the Indian Ocean and th
e east coast of Africa; they had been visiting Africa since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907). The chronicles of Ma Huan and Fei Xin, who sailed on five voyages prior to 1421, the detailed sailing directions in the Wu Pei Chi, listing the courses to reach East Africa, and the accounts of medieval travellers recording the wealth of early Ming blue and white porcelain in merchants’ palaces along the East African coast as far south as Sofala, all show the extent of Chinese trade and influence.
When serving in HMS Newfoundland, I travelled thousands of miles along the East African coast from Kenya to South Africa. In 1958 it was largely unspoilt, lined by the remains of old Arab and Portuguese slave towns and the occasional musty British club, the last remnants of empire. One incident remains vivid in my memory. People on safari in Africa in those days carried guns, not cameras, as their essential equipment. We decided to go on a crocodile shoot in the estuary of the Limpopo, and duly borrowed the ship’s motor boat, several rifles and a crate of rum. We arrived in the glassy, greasy estuary under a leaden sky, a scene Kipling would have recognized. There were no crocodiles but plenty of hippos with their ugly snouts and big ears showing above the muddy water. This was sport! We soon discovered two things: hippos’ hides are tough (the bullets bounced off) and hippos do not enjoy being peppered with shot. One charged us; I can see the boat now, flying through the air upside down, its propellers whirring away as it passed overhead. Both we and the hippo retired bruised but otherwise undamaged. From then on I found my entertainment in more environmentally sensitive ways, by exploring some of the old Arab and Portuguese trading and slaving towns along the coast.
When the Portuguese first arrived in East Africa, they found that the kings and queens of Zanzibar and Pemba (in modern Tanzania)3 were dressed in fine Chinese silk and lived in stone houses decorated with Chinese porcelain. Further evidence of the Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean comes from the Lamu archipelago or Bajun Islands, five hundred miles north-east of Zanzibar, off the northern coast of modern Kenya. The Bajun capital, Pate, was habitually used by Zheng He’s fleets, and when the Portuguese arrived they found ‘Bajuni’, honey-skinned people with fine features. A Jesuit priest, Father Monclaro, wrote in 1569: ‘[They produced] very rich silk cloths, from which the Portuguese derive great profit in other Moorish cities where they are not to be had, because they are only manufactured on Pate, and are sent to the others from that place.’4 Craftsmen from Pate also specialized in lacquerwork, another craft unknown to medieval Africa, and wove baskets using the same technique as in southern China.
An Italian anthropologist, Signor N. Puccioni, made an expedition to the Juba River in Africa in 1935 and concluded that the Bajuni at Pate were of ‘a physical type absolutely different from other people in the region. The skin is rather light, in some lightly olive, and in the men you can spot flowing beards, and the women part their hair in the middle and then braid it into two side braids.’5 One of the clans on the island, the Washanga, claimed that their forebears were Chinese sailors wrecked off the island, and their folklore relates that the King of Malindi, the most powerful local potentate, presented two giraffes to the Emperor of China.6 This indeed happened in 1416.
Pate has changed little since the fifteenth century, save that for a while after the 1960s the island became a haunt of hippies. The people are Islamic, the men still wear the full-length white robes known as Khanzus with Kofia caps, and the women are shrouded in black capes known as Bui Bui. Dhows still ply the coast, their design unaltered for centuries – a triangular lateen sail and a broad, roughly planed hull sturdy enough to beach on the rocky shores. Most have coconut matting tied to their sides and a wooden ‘eye’ painted on their bow. Those of the Lamu archipelago are distinctive through having perpendicular bows. Dhows are remarkably fast and particularly good at tacking into the wind. Because of the stinking fish bait they carry, dhows can frequently be smelt before they are seen. I used to surface my submarine alongside to load up with flying fish, which made a very welcome variation from the standard Navy diet.
The remains of the former Arab trading town of Shanga, supposedly named after Shanghai, lie at the eastern edge of Pate Island. Today, the town is almost deserted save for mangrove pole cutters. Two centuries ago, large quantities of Chinese ceramics of the Song (960–1280) to early Ming (1368–1430) era were found there, together with the statuette of a Song lion, buried as a votive offering. Even the name for these settlers, Bajuni, may be of Chinese origin: bjun is Chinese patois for ‘long-robed’. Native people on the East African coast wore loin cloths. Long, silken robes would have been striking and unusual enough for the name to be bestowed upon the settlers.
A bronze Song lion statuette found off the Kenya coast.
The Chinese were already sailing those waters and they certainly had the capacity in terms of both ships and scientific knowledge to make an accurate survey of the Indian Ocean. They could measure time accurately, plot the course of the stars in the heavens, and determine accurate latitudes in both hemispheres. But could they also determine longitude? East Africa on the Cantino bears an astonishing likeness to a modern chart; the latitudes of inlets, bays and rivers are correct from the Cape of Good Hope in the south to Djibouti at the mouth of the Red Sea in the north, a straight-line distance of seven thousand kilometres. Even more startling, the longitudes on the Cantino are correct to within thirty nautical miles – a mere thirty seconds of time. How had the cartographers achieved this incredible feat?
To date there is no connection between the Chinese and the calculation of longitude. All we can say is that an accurate calculation of longitude had been achieved before 1502 when the Cantino arrived in Italy.
Finding longitude without clocks has a long history. The key is to mark the precise moment when a heavenly event occurs, one which may be seen simultaneously across the globe. One of the oldest and best-tried methods was by observing lunar eclipses and elapsed time. Ptolemy in his Geographia in the first century AD records Hipparchos (c. 190–120 BC) advocating this method and giving an example of its use in 330 BC. However, Hipparchos does not explain how local time was to be found, a problem because the sun must be below the horizon during a lunar eclipse.7 It is quite possible that a few Europeans knew of Hipparchos’ method by 1415, when Ptolemy’s Geographia was brought to Venice by two Byzantines escaping the Ottomans, who were by then threatening Byzantium. The Arabs certainly knew of Hipparchos’ theory.
The observatories the Chinese built and the written records they kept show that they measured the passage of time by the length of the sun’s shadow. The most famous observatory, the Zhou Gong Tower fifty miles south-east of Luoyang, still stands. Built seven centuries ago, it is a truncated pyramid with stairways leading from ground level to a 25-foot-square platform. A small building in the centre of the platform houses a thin vertical rod for observation of the stars on the local meridian, and a clepsydra, a large water clock. A gnomon – a 40-foot metal measuring pole – was set in a bed of stones extending for 120 feet to the north of the tower, between two parallel troughs of water. The stones were laid perfectly flat, parallel with the water surface. The Chinese measured the sun’s noon shadow cast by the gnomon on to the stones. At the equinox on the equator, the sun rises due east and sets due west. At midday it is directly above the observer and casts no shadow at all. The longest shadows are cast at sunrise and sunset, and the length of the shadows between those points determines the precise time at that particular location.
As far back as AD 721, the Chinese had realized that the length of the sun’s shadow varies not only with the time of day but with the day of the year and the latitude of the observation points. Using a smaller, standard 8-foot gnomon, they made simultaneous measurements of the lengths of shadows during the summer and winter solstices at several different locations from the latitude of modern Hue in Vietnam due north to Beijing. They calculated that the shadow lengths varied by just over 3.56 inches for every 400 miles of latitude, allowing them to make corrections for the
ir position anywhere on earth on one particular day.
However, the shadow length also varied day by day throughout the year. In one remarkable measurement they calculated that the length of the shadow was 12.3695 feet at the summer solstice and 76.7400 feet at the winter solstice. By extrapolating from the two experiments described above, the Chinese were able to make corrections for each day of the year as well as for different latitudes on the earth’s surface. Furthermore, by the length of the noon shadow they could establish which day of the year it was. At this time, Europeans’ only means of measuring time was hour-glasses, which could not give them either the date or any more than a rough estimate of time on any particular day.
A third adjustment was necessary to correct for the irregular motion of the earth around the sun, occasioned by the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit and the difference between the equator and the ecliptic (the great circle of the celestial sphere representing the sun’s apparent path through the sky during a year). This causes differences between absolute time and the apparent time obtained from the sun which reach a maximum positive difference of 14 minutes 30 seconds in February and a maximum negative difference of 16 minutes 30 seconds in November. The Chinese determined this with such accuracy that ‘observations made from 1277 to 1280 are valuable for their great precision and prove incontestably the diminution of the obliquity of the ecliptic and the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit between then and now’.8 In layman’s language, the earth’s orbit around the sun has changed in the past seven centuries.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 27
