Perhaps the most striking recent discovery has been the wreck of a very old and large ship or junk found near Fraser Island, off Queensland in Australia. It was unearthed as a result of research by a local historian, Brett Green, followed by a sonar search of the sands of the eastern part of the island. On 5 October 2002, during the period of the lowest tides of the year, a private firm of salvage experts deployed huge sand pumps over the area where metal traces had been detected by the sonar scan. They unearthed three cast-iron cannon in a remarkable state of preservation, as well as the huge wooden ribs of the wreck. The provisional analysis was that the wreck was around six hundred years old and the cannon of hitherto unknown origin. However, on 8 November, before the cannon or other artefacts could be raised from the sea-bed, the local authorities reclassified the area as a heritage site. Only government-appointed archaeologists are now allowed to continue investigations there, and I await their findings with great interest. The wreck is almost certainly of Portuguese or Chinese origin, and in either case it should provide definitive proof that Captain Cook was not the first to discover the eastern coast of Australia.
The great majority of the other new evidence I have received relates to the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North and South America. I have been notified of countless new discoveries from Vancouver Island in the north to Chile in the south, and the evidence takes many different forms. Dr Annabel Arends and her colleagues are continuing the pioneering work begun by her father, Dr Tulio Arends, and Dr Gallengo into the DNA (transferrins) of the Indians of northern Brazil, Venezuela, Surinam and Guyana, proving that these transferrins are otherwise unique to natives of Kwantung province in China. Diseases previously unknown in South America but common in south-east Asia – hookworm, roundworm, lice and nits – were also found among the indigenous population of Mexico, where Chinese methods of extracting dyes from roots, insects, tubers and leaves were commonplace, as were complex, time-consuming and highly individualistic methods of lacquer technology.
In addition to that discussed in the book, there is other evidence that a wide variety of animals and birds were carried to and from the Americas in pre-Columbian times. Wild pigs (babiroussa) were brought from Sulawesi in Indonesia to British Columbia; horses – extinct in the Americas by around 10,000 BC – were found by the first Europeans in Peru; the almost flightless fulvous (tawny) tree duck is found only in pockets in India and on the Caribbean coast of South America; turkeys – a type of large Central American pheasant – reached Turkey via the Silk Road before Columbus set sail; and camels indigenous to the Mahgreb area of Morocco and the Canary Islands were found in South America by the first European explorers.
Plants provide still more evidence: the Europeans found fields of rice – a crop foreign to the Americas – in Mexico and Brazil; cotton with chromosomes otherwise unique to North America were found in the Cape Verde Islands by the first Europeans to arrive there, long before Columbus set sail; and coconuts brought from the South Pacific grew in Puerto Rico and right across the isthmus of Darién to the Pacific coast, sugar cane in plantations besides the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers, and bananas beside tributaries of the Amazon, where there were also Chinese root crops. Tobacco, sweet potatoes and maize from the same area were exported to south-east Asia and the Pacific. All of these animals and plants confirm that there were seaborne voyages to and from the Americas prior to Columbus.
Linguistics provide further evidence. The people of the Eten and Monsefu villages in the Lambayeque province of Peru can understand Chinese but not each other’s patois, despite living only three miles apart. Stephen Powers, a nineteenth-century inspector employed by the government of California to survey the native population, found linguistic evidence of a Chinese-speaking colony in the state,1 and research among the Othomis people of Mexico also suggests a Chinese connection.
In Mexico, a Nayarit legend tells of ‘ships like houses’ arriving off the coast. At the nearby beach of Playa la Ropa, on the seaward end of the Rio Balsas, is a Chinese wreck that even now disgorges Chinese cloth after storms at sea. There are also many other Chinese artefacts: a statue unearthed at Huehuetla, a vase at Azcapotzalco, ceramic horses on the coast, lions and horses on medallions at Palenque, amulets and earplugs found at Teotihuacan (Mexico City) and numerous carvings of horses on the Yucatán peninsula and at Teotihuacan.
There is strong evidence of a Chinese presence in the old Mexican capital at Teotihuacan, and another beside the River Balsas leading from Uruapan to the coast. A further search for records of finds, focused in Teotihuacan, produced Chinese jade earplugs, jade medallions and, most fascinating of all, a tomb at the base of the Pyramid of the Sun which housed a Mongolian or Chinese body of an important person, for the tomb bore a small statue that was clearly a portrait of the buried individual2 and the body itself was adorned with jade jewellery.3 Professor William Niven ‘found slabs at Teotihuacan containing Chinese characters that were easily read by the secretary of the Chinese legation, as well as a tomb and statue said to be “wholly Chinese” in design. The “Mongol-type” skeleton in the tomb was said to have borne a necklace of green jade,’4 which was unknown in Mexico. The new information – presented in the synopsis that follows – together with the material I have already assembled, produces an overwhelming impression of a widespread and long-standing Chinese presence in the New World that was later ‘discovered’ by Columbus and other European explorers.
Emboldened by the new evidence of Chinese colonies in Mexico, I next turned my attention to Queen Charlotte Island, off British Columbia in Canada. The Waldseemüller map clearly depicts the island, and the Kurashio current off the coast of north-west Canada could have carried Zhou Man’s junks there. If they did make landfall, there should be evidence of the Chinese presence. Like the Waldseemüller chart, another map of Queen Charlotte Island, called ‘colonia dei Chinesi’ by its Venetian cartographer Antonio Zatta, was published before Vancouver or Cook ‘discovered’ the island. The Squamish Indians there have more than forty words in common with Chinese, including tsil (wet), also tsil in Chinese; chi (wood), which is chin in Chinese; and tsu (grandmother), which is etsu in Chinese.
Grant Keddie, curator of archaeology at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, has analysed the evidence that the Native American cultures of the north Pacific coast may have been influenced by contact with ancient Chinese culture.5 Thousands of Chinese coins have been found in the area, but Keddie considers that most were probably brought by later Chinese traders, and none provides direct evidence of pre-Columbian voyages by the Chinese. However, the discovery of a Taoist talisman and a Chinese stone lamp were far more significant. The talisman may be identified ‘with Shou Lau’,6 whose talismans I have seen in many locations around the world.
In 1747, a boy from Attu in the Aleutians spoke of a legend in which ‘men dressed in long, many-coloured silk and cotton clothing came to the island in small ships with one sail, their heads were shaved to the crown and the hair on the back was plaited into tresses’.7 Scholars have been discussing the parallels between the culture of ancient China and the advanced societies of the New World ever since the Dutch jurist and politician Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) wrote of the accounts of Spaniards who observed ‘Asiatic’ shipwrecks on the Pacific coast of Mexico.8 The Portuguese sailor Antonio Galvão was told about early Chinese voyages to the New World when he visited China in 1555, and he noted that ‘the people of China were sometimes lords of the most parts of Syria and sailed ordinarily the coast which seemeth to reach unto seventy degrees towards the north’9 – the latitude of Baffin Island in Canada and the north coasts of Alaska and Siberia.
The advance royalties from my book enabled me to set up a small team of researchers who could read medieval Spanish and Portuguese, including Brazilian Portuguese. I put them to work on the first-hand accounts of the early Spanish and Portuguese explorers to the New World, many of which had never before been translated. I decided to concentrate on areas where the accumulation
of evidence of Chinese influence was strongest: California, around San Francisco; the Mississippi River west of Kansas City; Florida; Mexico between the Pacific coast and Mexico City; the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, Colombia and Guyana; the Amazon, particularly around Santarém, where the Tapajos River branches south from the main Amazon stream; and the far south of Brazil near Cuiabá, where the Paraná River of Paraguay and the São Francisco branch of the Amazon both rise.
At first sight it appeared unlikely that the Chinese would have voyaged so far inland – nearly three thousand miles in the case of the Amazon – but there was compelling evidence in a series of charts clearly showing the course of North and South American rivers before Europeans had reached and ‘discovered’ them. Just as the Toscanelli chart (1474) shows the Murray, Darling, Cooper, Diamantina and Flinders Rivers of Australia, so the Martellus map (1489) depicts the Magdalena in Colombia, the Orinoco in Venezuela, the Amazon and its tributary the São Francisco, the Paraná and Paraguay Rivers in Paraguay, the Colorado and Negro in Argentina, and the Chubut in Patagonia. The Magdalena River also appears on the Cantino (1502), as does the Cavra branch of the Orinoco, while the Waldseemüller (1507) shows nearly a thousand miles of the Mississippi as well as the Brazos, Alabama, Roanoke, Delaware and Hudson Rivers of North America.
The rivers of Colombia and Venezuela are also linked to the Chinese voyages by the DNA (transferrins) of the people who lived beside them. Surinam, Guyana and the Orinoco delta also have a similar ‘Chinese’ connection; as in parts of China, the native tribes of the Mato Grosso in Brazil have an absence of Duffy blood groups (a system of classifying blood used in tracing and predicting the spread of certain sorts of malaria). There are also skin diseases in the flood plains of the São Francisco and Xingu Rivers and the Mato Grosso of southern Brazil that can only have been transmitted by seaborne voyages from south-east Asia.
Ancient stone carvings from the floodplains of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers also yield fascinating evidence. There are clear depictions of horses in the Oklahoma Panhandle; near Springfield, Colorado; in Hickling Springs, Colorado; and in Le Flore County on the borders of Arkansas and Oklahoma. Somebody must have brought horses to the area, for how else could the unknown artists have drawn them? There are also many petroglyphs of ships, most in the same areas: Picture Canyon, Colorado, near the Oklahoma border; Le Flore County, Oklahoma; the Oklahoma Panhandle; Baca County, Colorado; and beside the Arkansas River in Colorado. In total there are more than fifty carvings of ships and forty of horses, strongly suggesting that the horses were brought by ship.
These findings prompted me to devote some effort to researching the diaries of the first European explorers to reach the Mississippi and its tributaries, especially the Missouri. In 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado (c.1510–54), the Spanish governor of an important Mexican province, led an enormous expedition through what is now the American West, searching for the fabled ‘seven cities of Cibola’, first described to an earlier Spanish conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca, on his expedition from Florida to the Pacific coast of Mexico in 1528–36. These lost cities were supposedly built on land rich in gold somewhere on the alluvial plains between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande. The historian Pedro de Castaneda recorded Coronado searching first for the lost city of Quivira, which he believed to be ‘not far from the great bend in the Arkansas River whose course they had followed from the neighbourhood of [Dodge City]’.10 Coronado described encounters with Indian hunters, and then an entirely different people:
These people, since they are few, and their manners, government and habits so different from all the nations [peoples] that have been seen and discovered in these western regions, must come from that part of Greater India, the coast of which lies to the West of this country [i.e. China], crossing the mountain chains and following down the river, settling in what seemed to be the best place. The settlements and people already named were all that were seen 70 leagues wide and 130 long in the settled country along the river Tiguex [Missouri] … Silver metals were found in many of their villages, which they use for glazing and painting their earthenware. 11
Even more fascinating, ‘vessels were found of which the sterns were gilded, and Pedro Menendez, in Acosta, speaks of the wrecks of Chinese vessels seen upon the coast. It is also an unquestionable fact that foreign merchants clothed in silk formerly came among the Catualcans. All of these accounts, added to those which we have adduced, became so many proofs that the Chinese traded at the north of California, near the county of Quivira.’12
The story is the same further east. Acosta, the great sixteenth-century historian, described meeting Chinese people in Mexico, and wrote of
the Strait which some hold to be in Florida … Even as Magellan found out this strait from the south [the Straits of Magellan], so some have pretended to discover another strait, which they say is in the north, and suppose it to be in Florida … Pedro Menendez, the Adelantado, a man very expert at sea, affirmeth for certaine that there is a strait and that the king had commanded him to discover it, wherein he showed a great desire; he propounded his reasons to prove his opinion, saying that they have seene some remainders of shippes in the North Sea [Atlantic] like unto those which the Chinois use, which had become impossible if there were no passage from one sea into another.13
The Caribbean, too, and the areas bordering it, are full of legacies of Chinese voyages, but the evidence strewn along the banks of the Amazon is perhaps the most compelling of all. The earliest maps of these regions show that seafarers had travelled far down the Amazon towards Cuiabá, and when I began research into the Tapajos tributary that joins the Amazon by the modern town of Santarém, I learned that a mass of jade and other Asian artefacts had been found there. Senhor João Barbosa Rodrigues, a Brazilian botanist and anthropologist, argued that the jade amulets he named Muyrakyta had come from China.14 The written opinions of several professors supported his contention that at least some of the jade found by the first Europeans in Central and South America was ‘unquestionably Chinese’ in origin, and a jade duck found in a hoard near Santarém was strikingly similar to a duck found in New Zealand. I now had evidence of jade talismans the length of Central and South America. Some of this may eventually prove to be Guatemalan, but the bulk of it is undoubtedly of Chinese origin. Moreover, much of the jade, especially that found in Brazil and Venezuela, was discovered in the places where the native people have DNA or intestinal afflictions otherwise unique to China and south-east Asia. As this book goes to press, it appears that yet another hoard of jade has been unearthed at Maracay in Venezuela.
The jade artefacts were found where today there is only jungle, but I was certain that the Chinese would only have traded these exquisite pieces if they stood to gain something of real value in return. I returned to the diaries of the first Europeans to sail down the Amazon to Peru, notably the conquistador Francisco de Orellana (1511–46), second in command of Pizarro’s 1542 expedition to the east of the Andes; the Portuguese explorer Gabriel Soares de Sousa (1558); and the Spanish friar Gaspar de Carvajal (1539–96). Carvajal’s accounts are particularly riveting. At the confluence of the Amazon and the Tapajos, he discovered ‘a vast city’ of splendid buildings, filled with beautiful, multicoloured ceramics of very fine quality.
There may now be much more recent confirmation of his discovery. On 7 September 2002, Dr Denise Gomes of São Paulo University described a lost city amid a ‘green hell entirely peopled by Indians’15 in the jungle near Santarém, but was it built by the indigenous people or by the Chinese eunuch admirals as the range of Chinese artefacts discovered there might suggest? The nephrite amulets are similar in origin, form, colour, density and chemical composition to Chinese jade amulets, as are items found in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. All are ‘unquestionably Chinese jade’.16 Terracotta amulets have also been found inscribed with the Chinese yin-yang symbol, and terracotta urns were found near Santarém. They were painted in the traditional symbolic colours of Asia – red, yellow, bl
ack and white. Why were these four ‘Chinese’ mineral colours used, given the local availability of vegetable dyes? The mountain range near the site of the Muyrakyta find is named Serra da Chinella; chinella means ‘sandal/slipper’ in Brazilian Portuguese, an item of Chinese origin and possibly an early variation of the Portuguese word for the Chinese, chinês.
These finds, together with mortuary customs, folklore very similar to that of China, and the divination processes using chickens and chicken blood on paper, all signify indoctrination over an extended period. The substantial evidence of a Chinese presence, coupled with the vast wealth that could have been extracted from the Brazilian diamond mines and the silver mines of the Chapada Range, make it quite conceivable that the Chinese set up a network of trading posts and settlements along the Amazon and its tributaries. Several expeditions have been mounted in search of these lost cities, yet the majority of explorers have returned empty-handed, or indeed – like Colonel Percy Fawcett, who set off into the jungle in search of fabled riches but disappeared soon afterwards – never returned at all.
Over the years of researching and writing this book, I have been struck again and again by the truth and accuracy of the descriptions recorded by the early explorers. Far from being fanciful or bizarre exaggerations, almost everything I have investigated as a result of reading their accounts has turned out to be true. For example, the ‘Island of the Seven Cities’ was Antilia, and the Portuguese did travel to and from it long before Columbus. Hence, there seems good reason to believe that many of the early European accounts of lost cities in North and South America will also turn out to be correct. Friar Gaspar de Carvajal recorded these impressions as he travelled down the Amazon in the 1540s:
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 35
