Ancient Treasures

by Brian Haughton

  But what exactly had been stolen from the mineshaft? Reported missing were a fantastic collection of art treasures and religious manuscripts, including three reliquaries of Saint Servatius, Saint Katharine, and Heinrich, all dating from c1200–1230. These reliquaries are rectangular boxes covered in gold with filigree work and are decorated with reliefs along the sides. The Servatius reliquary is also enhanced with a large amethyst. Also missing was a spectacular ninth-century illuminated manuscript gospel book, known as the “Samuhel Gospel.” This manuscript of the four gospels, estimated to be worth up to $30 million today, is written in gold ink and encased in a jewel-encrusted gold and silver binding. It was donated to Quedlinburg Abbey by King Heinrich I. Other looted valuables included an ivory liturgical comb decorated with precious stones, dated to the seventh or eighth century; a large first-century AD alabaster jar, said to have been used at the wedding at Cana; a 10th-century crystal reliquary with gilded and jeweled mounts originating from Egypt or Syria, and donated by Emperor Otto III (AD 980–1002); a printed silver and jewel-covered evangeliary (book of gospel readings for services) dating to 1513; and gold and silver crucifixes. The art world and the church officials from Quedlinburg were convinced that this extraordinary medieval treasure had disappeared for good.

  However, beginning in the late 1980s, there were signs that this was not so when the Samuhel Gospel appeared on the market in Europe, sparking a worldwide hunt for the remainder of the treasure. In 1989, William H. Honan, a senior reporter at the New York Times, together with German researcher Willi Korte, set out to discover the whereabouts of the treasure and the identity of the person who had stolen it. However, the pair initially met with a series of dead ends, and it seemed that after four decades the discovery of any new information about the hoard was extremely unlikely. But the investigators persevered, and, after combing through thousands of pages of old U.S. Army records and carrying out countless interviews and detailed investigations into the often shady dealings of the art world, they gathered enough information to relate an amazing tale of deception, daring, and intrigue. Indeed, the story they told the world was more akin to adventure fiction than truth.

  In April 1945, Joe T. Meador was a 29-year-old lieutenant with the 87th when they occupied Quedlinburg. Meador had received a bachelor’s degree in art from North Texas State University in 1938, so he would have had some knowledge of the value of the items secreted in the mineshaft that he and his colleagues had been ordered to guard. A number of soldiers from the 87th reported that they had seen Meador enter the mine shaft and leave carrying packages under his coat, though why no one seems to have reported this remains a mystery. Having stolen the treasures, Meador was said by witnesses to have put them in cardboard boxes (others said he wrapped them in brown paper) and sent them home to Whitewright, Texas, using military mail. Absurdly simple, yet obviously effective.

  Meador was discharged from the Army in 1946 and returned home to Texas, where he taught art at a school in New London. But after his father became ill, Meador returned to his family home in Whitewright, where he helped his brother, Jack, run Meador Inc., the family hardware and farm equipment business. The only indication that Meador still had the treasure came one day in the hardware store when he showed employees two ancient richly bound gold and silver manuscripts as well as a number of other unusual art objects. Nothing else was heard of his incredible collection, and when Meador died in February 1980, his will listed real estate valued at $24,331 and stocks worth $81,225.57, but there was no mention of the Quedlinburg Hoard. Meador’s will passed these assets on to his sister, Jane Meador Cook, who served as executor of his estate, and their brother, Jack. Whether Meador’s brother and sister knew of the treasure is uncertain, but they soon realized that they had inherited something extraordinary and began arranging to sell the objects.

  In 1983 Meador’s brother-in-law, Dr. Don H. Cook, a dentist practicing in Mesquite, Texas, asked Dallas estate appraiser John Carroll Collins to evaluate “two old books.”1 Collins had studied medieval manuscripts for two years as a graduate student at North Texas State University and immediately recognized that the “old books” were actually rare medieval manuscripts in jeweled bindings. Collins also noted the date on the back of one of the manuscripts (1513), the date of the more recent of the Quedlinburg manuscripts. Collins was not allowed to examine the manuscripts closely or to take any photographs, and after the meeting heard nothing more until March 1986, when his expertise was called upon again. At this meeting members of Meador’s family were present and Collins was allowed to arrange to have the manuscripts photographed. But this appointment was canceled, and Collins never heard from the Meadors again.

  Toward the end of 1985, Jack Meador, along with his son, Jeff, approached Decherd H. Turner, director of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin, and showed him slides of two medieval manuscripts that they were trying to sell. The astonished Turner asked the pair where they had obtained such rare manuscripts, and Jack replied that his brother had found them in the gutter in Germany at the end of the War. Jack arranged for Turner to fly to Dallas to examine the manuscripts and possibly make an offer on them, but Jeff Meador canceled the trip at the last moment without saying why. Convinced that what he had seen were the Quedlinburg manuscripts, Turner phoned Jeff Meador at his home, only to be told that the manuscripts had already been sold and that he should speak to Jack Meador’s lawyer, John S. Torigian. Turner subsequently met Torigian privately and offered to raise $1 million to buy back the manuscripts but was refused point blank.

  Torigian had previously attempted to sell the manuscripts to Paul-Louis Couailhac, a rare book dealer in Paris. Couailhac said that he would try to sell the older of the two manuscripts for a staggering $9 million but afterward heard nothing from Torigian. He later found out that Torigian had actually sold the manuscript to West Germany’s Cultural Foundation of the States, an organization established to repatriate lost German art, for a mere $3 million (which they referred to as a “finder’s fee”), through a Bavarian art dealer named Heribert Tenschert. This transaction was finalized in May 1990, but news of the sale had drawn the attention not only of the West German government but also agencies of the U.S. government, including the IRS and the FBI. One of the results of subsequent investigations into the sale was that on June 18, 1990, the Lutheran church in Quedlinburg filed a lawsuit in Texas in an attempt to recover the artifacts it believed to have been stolen by Joe T. Meador in 1945.

  Despite the evidence against their brother, Joe Meador’s heirs contested ownership of the valuable artifacts and months of legal wrangling followed, during which time the treasure was moved from the First National Bank of Whitewright, where the Meadors had deposited it, to a neutral location at the Dallas Museum of Art. Fortunately for the Meadors, the statute of limitations in Texas is only two years, so a negotiated settlement was agreed upon. On January 7, 1991, both parties announced that they had reached an agreement (though this was not finally signed until February 26, 1992) that the Meador family would be paid $1 million for the return of all the artifacts to Germany. The Quedlinburg Treasure subsequently went on public display at the Dallas Museum of Art from March 7, 1992, to April 26, 1992, before being returned to Germany, where it was exhibited in Munich and Berlin, and eventually returned home to Quedlinburg in 1993. Since that time, artifacts from the Quedlinburg Treasure have been on display in the collegiate church St. Servatius.

  The U.S. government was not finished with the Meador family, and, in January 1996, they and their former attorney, John Torigian, were indicted on charges of conspiring to sell the Samuhel Gospel and the Evangelistar. If found guilty, the defendants could have faced maximum prison sentences of 10 years and a fine of up to $250,000. But luck was on their side, and two years later a federal judge dismissed the indictments on a technicality. However, shortly after the federal case was dismissed, the IRS made a claim for more than $50 million in taxes, penalties, and interest from the family. A
gain the Meadors got lucky, and in April 2000, they escaped with only having to pay the IRS $135,000. In May 2003, Jack Meador died at the age of 83, followed in July of the same year by his sister, Jane, at the age of 71.

  This incredible story does not quite end there. Representatives of the Church Quedlinburg have stated that some objects from the treasure remain unaccounted for. Thomas R. Kline, now a litigation partner with law firm Andrews Kurth, represented the Quedlinburg church in the federal case of 1990 and believes that two pieces from the hoard (a crystal reliquary shaped like a bishop’s hat and a hollow gold cross) are still in the Dallas area. Indeed, attorney Alan Harris, who also represented the Quedlinburg church in the case, once received a phone call from a woman whom he is convinced was in possession of the hollow gold cross. There is also the tantalizing possibility that Joe T. Meador was not the only one taking pieces of the Quedlinburg Treasure out of the mineshaft in 1945; other U.S. soldiers or even Soviet or German troops may also have looted some of the objects. Perhaps one day somewhere in the dark world of illegal antiquities other pieces from this exquisite medieval collection will surface and hopefully find their way back home to the Church of St. Servatius.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Search for the Ancient Chinese Treasure Ships

  Traditional and popular accounts of the incredible early-15th-century voyages of Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He describe fleets of vast nine-masted wooden vessels journeying to Arabia, Brunei, the Horn of Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Thailand. On these expeditions the Chinese traded gold, silver, porcelain, and silk, and in return received ostriches, zebras, camels, ivory, and even a giraffe from Swahili. During this period the Chinese were also looking to expand their influence beyond India and Africa, and if the Ming emperors had continued their investment in the treasure fleets, there may have been Chinese colonies springing up throughout the world, rather than Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British. But this never happened, the priorities of the Chinese court changed, the treasure junks were decommissioned, and maritime trade was eventually banned. What happened to cause this change in attitude, and what might world history have been like if the voyages of the Chinese treasure ships had continued? And what of the treasure ships themselves? If descriptions of these huge vessels are accurate, they would have been the largest wooden ships ever constructed; indeed Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, would only have been one-fifth the size of the largest treasure ship. However, some researchers disagree as to the accuracy and interpretation of the medieval Chinese sources, and consider the descriptions and dimensions of the treasure ships greatly exaggerated. How big were these treasure ships, and what happened to them?

  14.1. A full-size model of a middle-sized treasure boat of the Zheng He fleet at the Treasure Boat Shipyard site in Nanjing. Photo by Vmenkov. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license on Wikipedia.

  The main sources for Zheng He’s extraordinary voyages are the imperial annals of the Ming dynasty emperors (1368–1644), collectively known as the Ming Shilu (Veritable Records of the Ming); the Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan (Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores), written in 1433 by Ma Huan, a Muslim traveler and translator who accompanied Admiral Zheng He on three of his seven expeditions; and the Xin Cha Shen Lan (Description of the Starry Raft), written in 1436 by Fei Xin, a Chinese Muslim and Arabic scholar who had participated in the third, fifth, and seventh expeditions. Further information about Zheng He’s maritime expeditions can be gleaned from his inscriptions on stone monuments, such as that carved in 1431 at a temple to a Taoist goddess called the Celestial Spouse at Changle in Fujian Province, which records his veneration for the goddess and gives details of his voyages.

  Although Zheng He’s fleet and voyages were indeed extraordinary, they were not without precedent. The Chinese had a long history of maritime trade and were building oceangoing trade ships as far back as the Song Dynasty (AD 960–1270). The succeeding Mongol emperors of the Yuan Dynasty (c AD 1271–AD 1368) constructed larger seagoing trading vessels and founded trading posts in Sumatra, Ceylon, and southern India. Venetian merchant Marco Polo (c AD 1254–AD 1324) stayed at the Mongol court from 1275 to 1292, and described four-masted, seagoing merchant vessels with watertight bulkheads, 60 individual cabins for merchants, and crews of up to 300. In the second half of the 14th century, the Han Chinese overthrew the Mongols and founded the Ming Dynasty (AD 1368–1644), taking over the fleet and a long-established, well-mapped trade network.

  In 1402, Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, usurped the Chinese throne and became known to history as the Yongle emperor (posthumously titled Emperor Ming Chengzu). An eager supporter of maritime commerce, the Yongle emperor ordered all coastal shipyards to begin the construction of vessels to be part of a vast treasure fleet, the commander of which was to be a Muslim eunuch named Zheng He (AD 1371–1433), given the title “Admiral of the Western Seas” by the emperor. By 1405 around 1,180 ships of various types had been built. In the winter of that same year, the first fleet, one of the greatest ever assembled, comprising of more than 60 large “treasure” vessels and 255 smaller vessels, and with a total crew of more than 27,800 men, sailed from the Yangtze estuary in eastern China (modern Shanghai).

  In organizing and sponsoring this huge naval expedition the Ming government was attempting to establish a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean basin and impose imperial control over trade, partly by acquiring imperial vassals among the rulers of the area. Just as importantly, however, the huge flotilla of ships was showing “the barbarians” that Ming China was a force to be reckoned with in both commercial and military terms. It was also rumored that another purpose of the voyage was to locate Zhu Yunwen (the previous emperor, whom the Yongle emperor had usurped) and who was said to have fled into exile abroad. The theory was that if the Yongle emperor’s potential rival to the throne was removed, then his position would be secure. However, to organize such a vast fleet of ships, containing huge quantities of trade goods, men, and supplies merely in order to seek out one man seems unlikely.

  On this first voyage Zheng He led the ships southward to the rich kingdom of Champa (central Vietnam), on to Thailand, and then through the Strait of Malacca, a narrow, 500-mile stretch of water between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, then and now an important passageway between China and India. In these treacherous waters Zheng He’s fleet was attacked by an infamous Chinese pirate called Chen Zuyi and allegedly lost 5,000 men before finally overcoming him and taking him prisoner. Even today the Strait of Malacca has a high rate of piracy; in 2004, for example, the area accounted for 40 percent of piracy worldwide, though since that date an increase in sea and air patrols has decreased the problem.1

  After the battle with Chen Zuyi, Zheng He sailed into the Indian Ocean, where the ships encountered a hurricane that almost destroyed the fleet. According to records, the sailors believed all was lost and began praying to the Celestial Spouse. Suddenly a “divine light” appeared at the tips of the mast and the danger subsided. This strange light was probably St. Elmo’s fire, a weather phenomenon caused by static electricity, which sometimes appears on the masts of ships and the wings of airplanes. The fleet then went on to India and Sri Lanka before returning to China in 1407. The first of what would become collectively known as the Voyages of Zheng He or Voyages of Cheng Ho had been a success, with control of the Straits of Malacca now in Chinese hands (Chen Zuyi was executed after the fleet returned to China) and the Ming government in possession of a far greater knowledge of the outside world.

  Between 1407 and 1433 there were six more voyages, the earliest of which visited ports around the Indian Ocean where Chinese silk, porcelain, and lacquer ware were traded for medicinal herbs, spices, ivory, rare woods, and pearls to bring back to the imperial court. Zheng He’s fourth voyage (1414–1415) was far more ambitious than the previous expeditions, reaching as far as the Persian Gulf and Arabia. In Hormuz, on the Persi
an Gulf, Zheng obtained precious stones and metals, while other ships from the fleet sailed to the kingdom of Bengal in present-day Bangladesh. Here the Chinese procured a giraffe, which had been sent as a gift to India from a ruler in Swahili, east Africa. When the fleet returned home in 1415 the giraffe was presented at court in Nanjing where the emperor’s advisors identified it as the Qilin, a fabled unicorn-like creature associated with an age of peace and prosperity. So auspicious was the arrival of this strange magical creature that Zheng He arranged for another giraffe to be sent from Africa.

  The final three voyages, which took place between 1416 and 1433, explored the east African coast, reaching Malindi in Kenya and possibly even Madagascar. While in eastern Africa the Chinese obtained more exotic animals for the emperor, including lions, leopards, “camel-birds” (ostriches), and “celestial horses” (zebras), and learned more details about Europe from Arab traders. But could Zheng He and his fleet have traveled even farther than Africa? In his 2002 bestseller 1421: The Year China Discovered America, Gavin Menzies, a retired British submarine lieutenant-commander, put forward the extravagant theory that, unknown to the rest of the world, the Chinese had also rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached as far as America more than 70 years before Columbus. According to Menzies, the fleet then circumnavigated the globe before landing in Australia. Although Menzies’s theory was popular for a while, after examining Menzies’s case closely, a number of scholars and navigators, such as historian Robert Finlay and master mariner Captain Philip J. Rivers, concluded that there was not a single artifact or document to support such a voyage by the Ming fleets.