A second lead comes from a legend shown on the east coast of Africa which reads ‘Ultima navigatio Portuga A.D., 1489’. On the face of it, seeing the Martellus map extending down to 45°S, this inscription would appear to assert that Dias had proceeded north along the east coast of South Africa to beyond Natal. This he did not do on that voyage. The legend is shown between 33° and 34°S, which exactly accords with where Dias got to – the Rio de Infante, the Great Fish River at 34°S. It appears to be north of Natal only because Africa is shown as extending to 45°S. When Bartholomew altered the prototype map to 45°S, he was unable to remove the legend.
The three forgeries combined appeared to all but rule out the possibility of reaching China eastabout from Portugal. The purpose of the Martellus maps clearly was not to influence the Portuguese, who knew the true situation for they had the 1428 World Map; it was to influence the Catholic sovereigns who were completely in the dark. At that time, one degree of latitude was thought to be fifty nautical miles (ninety kilometres), according to Toscanelli’s letter. To reach India round Africa, according to the forged Martellus maps, would involve sailing from 39°N to 45°S, and then north to India, another 45° + 15° – all told, the voyage to India would be some fifteen thousand miles. Moreover, and perhaps this was the decisive factor, ships would have had to sail below 45° South in order to round Africa through seas Dias had already described as the roughest he had encountered anywhere in the world.
In several ways, the forged Martellus maps depicted a monumental eastward journey, whereas by sailing westwards for Antilia to China, Spanish ships could pass through the Strait of Magellan and beat the Portuguese to it. This is the reason, I submit, why the Portuguese concentrated on the eastern route to China and the Spanish tried to reach the same destination via South America. Bartholomew Columbus stole the intellectual property of the Portuguese government. He then forged a chart he and Christopher knew was bogus, and both of them used that chart to extract money and backing under false pretences from the Bank of Genoa and the Catholic monarchs of Spain. Columbus’s true legacy to posterity is not the discovery of the Americas, but of the circulatory wind systems of the Atlantic he so brilliantly analysed and exploited on his later voyages. Knowledge of these wind and current patterns proved invaluable in the preparation and execution of the voyages that led to the colonization of the Americas in the following centuries.
Finally, to that brilliant seaman, Captain James Cook, ‘the ablest and most renowned navigator this or any country hath ever produced. He possessed all the qualities necessary for his profession and great undertakings.’16 Cook made the first of his three great voyages in 1768, sailing to the Pacific to observe the transit of Venus. He then continued across the Pacific and ‘discovered’ New Zealand, finding it a suitable country for settlement ‘should this ever be thought an object worthy of the attention of Englishmen’. He explored Australia’s east coast, claimed the whole country in the name of the king, and sailed for home via New Guinea and the Cape.
On his second voyage, in 1772, ‘to complete the discovery of the southern hemisphere’, Cook put in at New Zealand and landed animals and planted vegetables to provide food supplies for future explorers and settlers. He then sailed south to the edge of the Antarctic continent. Cook’s mission on his third voyage to the Pacific was to find a northern passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic. He again visited New Zealand and Australia, then sailed for North America, exploring the coast from Oregon northwards. He entered the Bering Strait, could find no ice-free route through and began the journey home. He was killed in Hawaii on 14 February 1779 after a dispute with the natives.
Cook was a great man, and the greatest navigator of all time, but he discovered neither New Zealand nor Australia. More than two centuries before he embarked on his voyages, a cluster of maps from the Dieppe School showed Australia with remarkable clarity. The Jean Rotz map was in the possession of the British government when Cook set sail, and Joseph Banks, who sailed with Cook, had acquired another of the finest, the Harleian (Dauphin), showing Australia with the same precision as the Rotz map. The Desliens and Desceliers charts from the Dieppe School were also known to the Admiralty. The Endeavour Reef, on which Cook later ran aground, is clearly shown on these earlier maps, together with what later became known as Cooktown Harbour. When Cook had extricated himself from the reef, he sailed directly for Cooktown. ‘This harbour will do excellently for our purposes, although it is not as large as I had been told.’17
When Cook returned, claiming to have discovered Australia, the head of the Map Department at the British Admiralty, Commander Dalrymple, wrote a furious protest. Captain James Cook had enormous courage, determination and integrity, but he had not discovered the continent. The Admiralty had maps showing Australia drawn 250 years earlier.
Brave and determined though they were, Columbus, Dias, da Gama, Magellan, Cook and the rest of the European explorers set sail with maps showing the way to their destinations. They owed everything to the first explorers, the Chinese on their epic voyages of 1421–3. How lucky Europe was, and how unfortunate China, that fire had ravaged the Forbidden City on 9 May 1421. Europeans had now rediscovered almost the entire world, known at first hand until then only by the Chinese and Niccolò da Conti. The charts, ships and systems of ocean navigation used by the great European explorers owed much to Henry the Navigator and his brother, Dom Pedro, but more to the Chinese emperor, Zhu Di, and his brave and skilful eunuch admirals, Zheng He, Zhou Man, Hong Bao, Zhou Wen and Yang Qing.
Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, sketched by Sydney Parkinson in June 1770.
The revelation that Vasco da Gama was not the first to sail to India round the Cape of Good Hope, that Christopher Columbus did not discover America, that Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the world, and that Australia was surveyed three centuries before Captain Cook and Antarctica four centuries before the first European attempt may come as a disappointment, even a shock, to the champions of those brave and skilful explorers, but the Kangnido, Pizzigano, Piri Reis, Jean Rotz, Cantino and Waldseemüller charts are indisputably genuine. They contain information that can only have come from cartographers aboard the pioneering Chinese fleets. Niccolò da Conti was aboard the junks that reached Australia from India; Dom Pedro obtained this information from da Conti himself, and had it incorporated in the map that showed the whole world. Toscanelli persuaded Columbus that China could be reached by sailing west, and Magellan spoke no less than the truth when he told his near mutinous crew that he had seen the ‘Strait of Magellan’ on a map in the Portuguese treasury before he set sail. Truth, after all, is stranger than fiction.
And what epitaph is there at Sagres to commemorate the lifetime of sacrifice and achievement of Prince Henry the Navigator, the man who began this wave of European exploration that was to conquer the world? Nothing but a rundown sundial where the weeds grow among the stones. Zheng He’s tomb on Bull’s Head Hill in the west of Jiangsu province is also neglected and weed-choked. These great men must have their reward in heaven.
EPILOGUE: THE CHINESE LEGACY
THE LEGACY OF those golden years when China’s power and influence extended from Japan to Africa and beyond to encompass the whole world remains. Chinese Buddhist architecture graces the Asian skyline from Malacca to Kobe. Chinese silk of the Ming dynasty is found from Africa to Japan, glorious blue and white ceramics from Australia to Manchuria, and graves in many places across the globe bear witness to Chinese jade jewellery of that era. Even the most blasé traveller to south-east Asia must be struck by the pervasiveness of China’s legacy. From Sumatra to Timor to Japan, communities are still united by trade, religion and a written language inherited from China. For four thousand kilometres west to east and an equal distance from north to south, China’s imperial footprint remains, the imprint of a colossus.
The depth of Chinese culture is as awesome as its width. Three thousand years ago the Chinese had mastered bronze moulding and casting with simple yet stunning d
esigns. By the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC), pottery was being cast as sublime as anything our planet has seen, epitomized by the graceful horses and fluid soldiers of Emperor Qin’s terracotta army. By the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907), at a time when our European ancestors were clothed in rags, rich Chinese were dining off gold plates adorned with phoenixes and dragons and drinking their wine from silver chalices engraved with dancing horses. Fruit was displayed in white jade bowls. Merchants’ wives, sheathed in fine embroidered silk, wore subtle Persian scents. Exquisite jade and gold jewellery adorned their ears, throats and wrists.
The Chinese had millennia of experience and expertise in every sphere of human activity. By 305 BC conservation of land and rotation of crops had been the subject of letters to the emperor. Zhu Di’s huge ships and incredible expeditions were the culmination of eight hundred years of voyages of discovery – Song dynasty (960–1279) ships had reached Australia. Chinese trade with India was six hundred years old when Admiral Zheng He set sail, and even his vast fleet was dwarfed by that of Kublai Khan two centuries earlier. Chinese science and technology were centuries ahead of the rest of the world, their military and civil engineering know-how epitomized by the Great Wall. The stability and protection that wall provided ensured that, of all the great civilizations of antiquity, China alone survived. Its most striking national symbol is a monument to the history, resilience and enduring power of China and its people.
Although much evidence of the Chinese voyages of discovery has been lost or destroyed over the centuries, one very tangible kind is visible everywhere today: the plants and animals the Chinese fleets carried with them to new lands, and those they brought back to China and south-east Asia. China’s greatest contribution to civilization may well be the cultivation and propagation of plants.
For centuries it was believed that the global propagation of the world’s plants began after Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas in 1492, and accelerated when the British founded their great maritime empire after the Battle of Trafalgar. In fact, although the Victorians were certainly great plant collectors, almost all of the important agricultural plants had been spread across the world before Columbus set sail on his first voyage. Europeans not only had charts showing them the way to the New World, they found the most important crops already flourishing when they arrived there. No fewer than twenty-seven important cash crops are known to have been brought to the islands of Hawaii from India, Asia, Indonesia, the Americas and even Africa. The sweet potato, sugar cane, bamboo, coconut palm, arrowroot, yam, banana, turmeric, ginger, kava, breadfruit, mulberry, bottle gourd, hibiscus and candlenut tree were all growing in Hawaii when the first Europeans arrived; none of them is indigenous to the islands.
This pattern was repeated throughout Polynesia and halfway across the world to Easter Island. There the first Europeans found totora reeds from Lake Titicaca, tomatoes, wild pineapples and sweet potatoes from South America, tobacco from Central and North America, gourds from Africa, papayas from Central America, yams from south-east Asia and coconuts from the South Pacific. The first Europeans to reach the Caribbean also found coconuts; Magellan loaded maize in the Philippines that had originated in Central America; California was graced with Chinese roses; South America had Asiatic chickens. No fewer than ninety-four genera of plants were found to be common only to South America and Australasia;1 another seventy-four genera, including 108 distinct species, are common only to tropical West Africa and tropical America.
It has been argued that this mass of plants could have been propagated naturally, by seeds carried by ocean current and wind, or by birds. Coconuts will float, and in theory they could have found their own way from the South Pacific across the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic and the North Atlantic to end up in the Caribbean. Some certainly did float from island to island, and some seeds and spores were undoubtedly carried on the wind, but to suggest that all plants were propagated in this way is preposterous. The argument collapses with maize and sweet potatoes; they do not float, and sweet potatoes are far too heavy for birds to carry from country to country. In the last three decades, a number of distinguished botanists have carried out research into the places of origin of cultivated plants. Improved understanding of the classification of plants has radically altered views on their wild relatives and hence place of origin. An example is the coconut, which early European explorers found on Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Central America.
The coconut (Cocos nucifera) was once thought to have originated in the New World because this is where the other species of Cocos occurred. Now, however, Cocos is treated as a monotypic genus whose closest living relative is African. This, together with the fossil records of the coconut and its variability and range of uses in south-east Asia, suggests that the coconut originated in the western Pacific and spread west to east, not east to west, across the ocean.2
An analysis of the plants common to Africa and South America and of those common to South America and Australasia discloses that they were all carried in the direction of the prevailing winds and currents – in short, by ships crewed by men. No Polynesian ships are known to have left the Pacific to enter the South Atlantic ocean, and propagation predates the European voyages of discovery. Only one nation could have transported this array of plants and animals around the globe. The Chinese ships certainly carried plants and seeds and they not only circumnavigated the world but did so in precisely the direction propagation has been found to have occurred, from China through south-east Asia to India, thence to Africa, from there across the South Atlantic to South America, and finally on to Australasia.
Rice was by far the most important Chinese crop, perhaps the most diverse and adaptable crop on our planet. The Chinese developed varieties that could flourish on dry mountain slopes, while others needed to be submerged. Some species took months to ripen, others only two. Some were sensitive to temperature, others to sunlight. Some crossbred species became so tolerant of salt that they could be used to reclaim marshes along the sea shores. Rice is an ideal food crop – it tastes good and, flavoured with soy products, has high nutritious value. It stores well, and is easy and economical to cook. Until the twentieth century, rice produced seven times as many calories per hectare of land as any other grain,3 and China was the most efficient agricultural country in the world.
The entire way of life of over a billion people revolves around rice, the ideal crop for sustaining the dense populations of Asia, where it has even higher status than bread in Western societies. In China, a man who has lost his job has ‘broken his rice bowl’. Marriages and business deals are sealed over cups of sake – rice wine. In the West, we throw confetti as a symbol of rice, to bring good luck at weddings. When Japanese children look at the night sky, rather than the man in the moon, they see a rabbit making rice cakes.
In the Ming era, China exported rice to the Pacific, principally through Makassar (Selat in modern Indonesia). Rice ships accompanied the treasure fleets, and rice was found in the hold of the Sacramento junk.4 But the Chinese were also importers of plants, and they showed their inventive genius by utilizing the crops they found in distant lands. The south-east Asian climatic zone, stretching from China to Indonesia, was an important source of crop plants. A case can be made that the domestication of such crucial crops as millet, rice and yams originated in this zone. Later introductions to China included sugar cane, bananas, ginger and some species of citrus fruits, and cotton was imported from India, but perhaps the most spectacular example was the maize brought back by Zheng He’s fleets from the Americas.
After rice, maize is the world’s most prolific crop; compared to wheat, at least three times as much can be harvested from the same area. Furthermore, it can grow in arid deserts or in humid jungles, at sea level or up to 12,000 feet (3,600 metres). Maize originated in Central America, yet it was loaded in the Philippines by Magellan, the first European to reach there, and surviving Chinese records tell of ‘extraordinarily large ears of grain’ being carried back by Zheng He’s
fleets to China. Maize was ideal for China’s mountain dwellers for it had deep roots, preventing the plant being washed away by heavy rain, and cultivation on the mountain slopes minimized the danger of frost damage. To the Miao people of southern China, the introduction of maize with its extremely high yield was an enormous benefit. Today, maize, the third most important crop in the world, has spread across Asia and is the staple food in many African countries.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 33
