Kashgar is close to the international border with Kyrgyzstan and marks the end of the Chinese railway system that served us so well along the journey. From there we traveled by truck, or by minibus when there were decent roads. Carol Mellor, Marcella, and I continued ahead, and the rest of our Cantravel friends bade us farewell. I awoke with a moderate hangover—a result of celebrating Marcella’s birthday and Frank and Gill Hopkins’s forty-fifth wedding anniversary. I distributed Diamox tablets and aspirins from our stores, because these would help to battle altitude sickness. We were about to cross the mountains into Kyrgyzstan.
We saw marmots sunning themselves as the road reached the tree line. They screeched with anger at having to move out of our path. Officials checked our passports and visas no fewer than twelve times before we were allowed into Kyrgyzstan. The customs officers clearly disliked foreigners. They ostentatiously made us wait two hours while they enjoyed their lunch. There were no toilets; a spade was produced to dig a trench. Ladies first!
As we left the mountain border to descend to the steppe it began snowing, which served to dampen the dust underfoot. The snow fell for three hours, until on the steppe the sky cleared to reveal a glorious early summer evening. The beauty of the steppe leaves one speechless. Stretching around us to the horizon was a sea of flowers—purple vetch, bluebells, lady’s mantle, brilliant dandelions, yellow ragwort, white mushrooms, campanulas the color of the sky, cornflowers, and swaths of brilliant purple poppies stretch to eternity. Flocks of wheatears and meadowlarks flit across the tall grass, alighting now and then on the tumuli of Mongols who died in the saddle.
By nightfall the Tian Shan mountains were behind us, five fingers high on the horizon. Rather than traveling by truck overnight, we were to take a local flight from Bishkek to Samarkand. The pilot, a fat Russian, was so drunk he had to be carried aboard. He began to shout obscenities and was strapped into his cockpit seat and was hit on the head until he finally shut up. We were relieved when we reached Samarkand, and to our surprise the pilot made a perfect landing.
SAMARKAND
Samarkand is the epitome of central Asia—the imagination is seared by James Elroy Flecker in his 1913 poem “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” and in his play Hassan:
We travel not for trafficking alone,
by hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned
for lust of knowing what should not be known
we take the golden road to Samarkand.
Samarkand is a city of 370,000, the second largest in Uzbekistan. It pretty much lives up to its reputation as a center for trade over the centuries. Our luxurious hotel was built on the site of Tamerlane’s former palace and the bar is said to be made of marble from his palace.
We found the mausoleums of Tamerlane (also known as Timur) and his grandson, Ulugh Begh, located in the center of the city, to be sublime. They are built around Registan Square, as are the mosque of Bibi Khanum (Tamerlane’s wife), the Shah-i-Zinda burial complex, and Ulugh Begh’s masterpiece, the Guri Amir mausoleum. Our visit coincided with festivities to celebrate Samarkand’s birth 2,500 years ago. It claims to be the world’s oldest city, though Damascus and Cairo make the same claim.
Registan Square is an architectural masterpiece—well-proportioned, elegant buildings tiled in fabulous painted ceramics—majolica, azure, and peacock blue for the most part.
To the great disappointment of anyone hoping to link Samarkand with the Silk Road is the lack of a substantial international market and the absence of historical evidence in the museum—which does have a yurt, old carpets, stuffed animals of the steppe, and a section upstairs linking the city with Stevenage, England. While I was attempting to puzzle out Stevenage’s importance, an elegant Frenchwoman, a diplomat, came over to talk to me. She had never heard of Stevenage. She was lonely, bored, and depressed with her diplomatic life in such a far-off post. I couldn’t blame her. She invited me back to her home for drinks, which I thought was rather inappropriate!
Samarkand was the end of our journey, a Silk Road expedition that had been of huge interest. The great surprise to me was Jiayuguan, close to the beginning of our journey and some 1,650 miles east of its end.
Chinese protection to Silk Road travelers was limited. The traveler was safe upon entering China at Jiayuguan from the desert by the Gate of Reconciliation. Chinese customs officials there registered the merchant and his goods. He could deposit heavy articles and collect them on his return. Eastward from Jiayuguan, Chinese soldiers protected travelers within the safety of the Great Wall. The Silk Road thus stretched across half of China, from Jiayuguan to Xian.
West of Jiayuguan there was no protection. The traveling merchant would have been at the mercy of robbers. To the Chinese, Jiayuguan was not only the terminus of the wall, but the end of the empire and the end of the Silk Road. Only the barbarians lived beyond to the west.
Sad though it is to relate, the story of the Silk Road as a continuous conduit from China to the West, along which the fabulous Chinese ceramics and silk reached Persia and Venice, is a myth. The Silk Road was a vibrant commercial highway, but the land route ended at Jiayuguan. Goods bound for the West must have come by ship, not over land. And if they came by ship, the sailors needed charts to guide their journey. Once again, all signs pointed to the seamanship of the Chinese, and specifically to Admiral Zheng He and his map.
CHAPTER 3
Plants Between Continents
So much of the evidence about Chinese arrival in the New World depends on Zheng He’s 1418 map. The support for the map and its reliability as an authentic document continues to grow. I have lectured about the subject around the world, in each case providing background and describing the latest evidence. As I explain, the map, first of all, is drawn in the shape of a globe and the vantage point is above China. Within ten years, by 1428, European mapmakers were using the document when producing their own maps, which usually had a different perspective: for example, looking down upon Egypt, the Pacific, the Atlantic, or even Greenland. These maps are often outright copies of the 1418 map.
On a beautiful summer’s evening, on June 13, 2006, to be exact, I gave just such a talk about the map, in Xian, the old capital of China, titled “Why the 1418 Map Is Genuine.” I had been invited by Xian International Studies University and California’s Humboldt State University to address their international and interdisciplinary conference “Alexander von Humboldt and Zheng He, 2006.” I was honored to be invited but not sure until the last moment whether my presentation would take place. We had placed the content of my talk on our website and critics, notably at the National University of Singapore and the University of Hong Kong, had mounted a virulent attack in an attempt to prevent me from speaking. They had contacted the chancellors of both universities and many other people of influence who they thought would be of assistance in having my talk scrapped, but to no avail. So it was really a relief that the event went forward.
It turned out that this particular discussion at Xian would lead to a further understanding of the map’s importance and its use in Chinese explorations. After the question period, a tall, imposing man approached to introduce himself. It was Carl L. Johannessen, emeritus professor of geography at the University of Oregon. Carl and his coauthor, John L. Sorenson, emeritus professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University, are recognized as leading authorities on the transmission of plants, animals, artifacts, diseases, and much else between continents before Christopher Columbus set sail.
Sorenson’s book with Martin H. Raish, Pre-Columbian Contact with the Americas Across the Oceans: An Annotated Bibliography, was my “bible” while writing 1421. Their book lists some six thousand instances of plants and animals indigenous to one continent being found on another—in other words, they must have been brought by ship before Columbus.
Johannessen’s presence at the conference meant that we could now establish that the map had in fact been used—there was evidence. Once the map was available in 1418, Zheng He’s fleet set sai
l. Johannessen showed how the outcome of the voyage could be described in terms of what was left behind in America. He and Sorenson had collaborated on a new book, Biology Verifies Ancient Voyages, and offered to share information from it with me. The prospect was so exciting that I canceled my proposed visit to the terra-cotta warriors at Xian the next day. Some may say that shows a curious sense of priorities, but such was my enthusiasm.
We met the next morning and Johannessen brought along the preface to the volume. To me, it was like gold. Sorenson’s new study offered a chance to expand details about plants and animals that I had summarized in 1421. Some readers had, quite correctly, criticized me for lumping together plants and animals that in some instances, although transferred from one continent to another before Columbus, could not possibly have been transmitted in Zheng He’s era. They were carried much earlier. For example, the skeletons of melanotic chickens indigenous to Southeast Asia had been found by the first conquistadors to reach Peru—but they had also turned up in tombs or burial grounds dated long before the conquistadors arrived. So I was anxious to see if there was any way to narrow the eras in which the plants and animals mentioned by Sorenson and Johannessen had reached one continent from another. In this work the pair do in fact expand on the matter, citing new discoveries and analysis.1 They describe the presence of about one hundred plant species, citing archaeological studies, writings, art, and similarities in language that existed before Columbus’s first voyage in 1492. Most of these plants were not only present, but were cultivated by the local population. Along with the plants, they identify organisms and fauna that are present both in Eurasia and the Americas. Some critics might immediately say that this does not preclude the possibility of either arrival via the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska or of some other natural propagation. But as Johannessen and Sorenson report:
This distribution could not have been due merely to natural transfer mechanisms, nor can it be explained by early human migrations to the New World via the Bering Strait route. Over half of the plant transfers consisted of flora of American origin that spread to Eurasia or Oceania, some at surprisingly early dates.
Their conclusion goes a long way to confirm my thesis in 1421 and today: The Chinese, in sea voyages that took place over some five thousand years, until the European explorations of the fifteenth century, brought exotic forms of flora and fauna to the New World. It is, Johannessen and Sorenson say, “the only plausible explanation” for their findings.
They further confirmed my analysis of Chinese nautical abilities, both in terms of seaworthy vessels and the skills needed—navigation and of course the availability over time of increasingly accurate charts for worldwide exploration. Sorenson and Johannessen believe there were a great many such Chinese voyages over a period of millennia. “These voyages,” they say, “put a new complexion on the extensive Old World/New World cultural parallels that have long been considered controversial.”
More than merely controversial, Sorenson and Johannessen’s work does no less than upend existing research on the subject. Traditional scholars too often dismiss the analysis of such men, brilliant though it is; such people snobbishly turn away from the evidence and rarely even entertain the possibility of imported plants and fauna and human and cultural traits being present in the New World as a result of Chinese voyages far earlier than Columbus.
Sorenson and Johannessen analyzed and listed ninety-nine plant species in the Americas for which “there is what we consider decisive evidence that the organism was present in both eastern and western hemispheres before Columbus’s first voyage.
They clarify that the “decisive evidence” is a result of analysis of plant biology—including pollen testing and DNA analysis. They also examine the same types of evidence I have also focused on in my travels—linguistics, culture, and historical documents of all kinds—to prove that these plants are not native to the Americas and were transported there from another hemisphere before Columbus and the journey of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María in 1492. It is not reasonable to think that the pre-Columbian transference of plants and fauna could have taken place any other way than by sea.
What other explanation could be given? Sorenson and Johannessen agree with me that there is none. “One might hurriedly conclude that certain seeds moved intercontinentally by the action of winds or waves; however, few seeds are equipped to survive long while floating or moving great distances via wind, and no disease organism spreads in such a way.” Highly unlikely, I say, and leaning toward the impossible.
In the case of each of the ninety-nine plants mentioned, Johannessen lists “plants with decisive evidence for transoceanic movement.” He gives the species’ Latin names, their common names, their origin, where they moved to, and when they moved. This was of the most fascinating interest to me because Johannessen separates out transoceanic movement into different eras from 2800 B.C. up until 1492 A.D. From this I was able to separate transfers that occurred before the reign of Emperor Qin (China’s first), that is, several millennia B.C.; those transferred in the first millennium B.C.; and those in the epoch of Kublai Khan and Zheng He.
Beyond the question of flora, there are a number of organisms that need to be considered and evaluated; many of these, we will show, would not have survived centuries of an arctic passage. I have selected one of these connections out of the thousands given in Sorenson and Johannessen’s books—that is, the presence of the hookworm, the parasitic nematode that has plagued humanity for millennia and continues to be a problem today, especially for people in poor countries.
The presence and study of the hookworm species Ancylostoma duodenale in the Americas involves one of the more traceable migrations from Asia. Hookworm infestation has long been traced to Asia, and later to Africa. The parasite had been thought to have been introduced to the Americas via slave trade from Africa beginning in the sixteenth century. That long-established assumption of a logical source could be abandoned following studies I have cited previously, and which Johannessen refers to again. Work by Samuel Taylor Darling in 1920 and Olympio da Fonseca (a fully published version in 1970) showed that hookworm had infested Amazon Indian populations prior to the arrival of Columbus in the New World in 1492.
“If a date for the parasite in the Americas before European discovery could be proven,” Johannessen writes, “then the only explanation for the parasite in the New World would be that it had arrived anciently via infected humans who have crossed the ocean.”
The argument that Europeans brought this disease to the Americas was further weakened in 1973, Johannessen tells us. These studies found the presence of hookworm in a Peruvian mummy dating to 900 A.D. Other studies of mummies and fossilized human excrement also indicate this to be the case. One study by Brazilian scientists, in fact, traced hookworm to remains found in Brazil and dated to before 5000 B.C.
This alone does not eliminate the possibility favored by many scientists that the parasite could just as easily have been introduced to the Americas via slow migrations of Asiatic people crossing east Asia, then the Bering Strait, and moving down over generations to populate the Americas. The biology of Ancylostoma duodenale, specifically its life cycle, does not allow for this possibility, however. “Immigrants who came to the New World in slow stages via Beringia would have arrived hookworm-free because the cold ambient conditions would have killed the parasite in the soil,” Johannessen tells us. At an early stage of the worm’s life, it requires a temperate climate to burrow into the soil, and subsequently the larvae enter the digestive tract of the human host.
Science then leads one to conclude categorically that the parasite must have arrived in a rather direct way, by ocean voyage from Australia, the Pacific Islands, or the Asian continent itself. As Johannessen tells us:
Ferreira, Araújo, and Confalonieri (1982) say, “Transpacific migrants from Asia by sea must be one component of the ancient American population.” Fonseca (1970) asserts, “shared species of parasite . . . make it inescapable
that voyagers reached South America directly from Oceania or Southeast Asia.” Ferreira and colleagues (1988) agree: “We must suppose that [the human hosts for the parasite] arrived by sea.” Araújo (1988) confirms, “The evidence points only to maritime contacts.”
This conclusion is profound in and of itself. If the hookworm infection arrived with Asian seafarers at some moment prior to the arrival of the European explorers, it follows that physical presence includes the transmission of culture, plants, other fauna, miscegenation, and all that follows from the mingling of groups and their habits.
But the presence of this particular vector is not the only categorical biological evidence of Chinese travel to the New World. For example, Johannessen tells us another hookworm-type creature—Necator americanus, similar to Ancylostoma duodenale—has also been identified by scientists in Brazil. For the same reasons of incubation and propagation, ocean travelers must have delivered it to American shores.
Johannessen also lists several dozen other organisms that either could not have been the product of migrations across the Bering Strait, or are suspicious and uncertain enough in kind to require further examination.
Another nail in the coffin comes from the theory of evolution propounded by Charles Darwin and his successors. Here Johannessen refers us to the esteemed late American biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who, steeped in Darwin’s theory, wrote in 1994: “I regard each species as a contingent item of history. . . . [A] species will arise in a single place [and time].”
In my opinion anyone who has read Johannessen’s and Sorenson’s books, yet still believes Columbus discovered America, is in need of psychiatric help. But that is much the same feeling I have when I consider the evidence surrounding other ancient civilizations and their maritime exploits, so often minimized by historians and scientists.
CHAPTER 4
European Seafaring, 100,000 B.C.
Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas (9780062236777) Page 3
