If Polo had been in the Beaufort Sea, skirting to the south of the permanent pack ice in, say, the McClure Strait at about 75 degrees north and 122 degrees west, as he believed, steering north by his magnetic compass, his true course would have been southeast. This is because the Magnetic North Pole, which is composed of molten iron, wanders about underneath the Earth’s crust. Today it is leaving Canadian territory for Siberia. In 1569, when Mercator issued his chart, the reading would have been farther south, at the southern part of Melville Island, approximately 75 degrees north, 110 degrees west.
During Marco Polo’s travels in the late thirteenth century, Polaris’s apparent position would have been about 4 degrees offset from today’s true north, at about 86 degrees north, due to the Earth’s precession. So to Marco Polo, steering southeast but thinking he was traveling north, Polaris would have appeared behind his left shoulder. This is such an extraordinary phenomenon that Marco Polo must surely have been speaking the truth—he was approaching Hudson Bay.
Mercator’s map of 1569 also shows the route eastward from Hudson Bay to the Atlantic—notably Baffin Island, the Davis Strait, Greenland, and the Labrador Sea. The first accepted European explorer to have reached those parts, Martin Frobisher, sailed there in 1576, though he did not enter Hudson Bay. So someone else appears to have provided the information to Mercator. Perhaps it was Kublai Khan’s fleet continuing their voyage. Once in the Labrador Sea, the cold Labrador Current would have carried them southeast to the Grand Banks. There the Gulf Stream would have taken over and taken them northeast, in an arc across the North Atlantic. Had it been a calm summer it is entirely possible they would have reached the Azores.
It seems Professor Bruges-Armas and his team who carried out the DNA study of the Azores people were correct. They postulated that the Mongolians came to the Azores. Kublai Khan’s fleet also reached the deep Antarctic, on a separate voyage penetrating far into the Weddell Sea, as his charts show. We can see from Zheng He’s charts of the Antarctic that he built on Kublai Khan’s, and discovered even more Antarctic islands and circumnavigated the entire continent. Kublai Khan’s charts, warships, armaments, and experience provided an invaluable foundation for Zheng He’s voyages.
We can, I think, be quite confident that Kublai Khan’s fleets reached the Azores—from the Kangnido map (based on Chu Ssu-Pen’s map of 1320), the description of the islands on that map, and the Mongolian DNA. Where else would Kublai Khan have visited after the Azores? The Kangnido shows the Mongolians knew of the Mediterranean and that it could be entered by the Straits of Gibraltar.
We can be sure Kublai Khan’s ships reached Spain. A thirteenth-century account describes King James of Aragon receiving an emissary from the “Great Khan” in 1267.5 An excerpt from chapter 457:
And, when we were come from Montpelier we went to Perpignan and arrived in this same day a message from the King of the Tartars. And we say that about this we were very honored because in that day had come a letter of the highest king of the world with a lot of love.
This information is confirmed in several documents and chronicles. Jerónimo Zurita, in his Anales de Aragon, wrote:
In the history of King (James I) it seems that several times he received embassies of the Tartars; and in the year 1260 he has wanted to pass with his navy to that part against the people of the Tartars, when I conjecture, because the wars that were within this nation and his king [Kublai Khan’s invasion of China against the Song dynasty] had been requested for the great Khan.6
Certainly by this time sea trade between China and Mediterranean countries was commonplace. Ibn Battuta (1325–54) describes trade between Morocco and China. He sailed in huge Chinese ships manned by one thousand men, capable of staying at sea for months on end. In 1330–34, China’s Wang Dayuan sailed along the same route but in the opposite direction of Ibn Battuta, from Quanzhon in China to Morocco and back again. He also traveled to northern Australia from China and chronicled his journeys in Dao Yi Zhi (“Descriptions of Barbarians and the Islands”). In this book Wang Dayuan describes an eruption of Mount Etna that did in fact occur.
Marco Polo’s account of voyages in Kublai Khan’s ships to North America also correlates with the map in the Doge’s Palace in Venice that includes details of the Pacific coast from Alaska down to Mexico. Roundels on the map state it was drawn from information provided by Marco Polo and Nicolo da Conti (see second color insert in this book).
In summary, the evidence on these maps for Kublai Khan’s voyage to Pacific America, on the Kangnido map for his voyages to the Atlantic, Africa, and the Antarctic, and the accounts of King James I of Aragon show Kublai Khan’s fleets sailed the world and provided the world maps that Zheng He later greatly improved upon.
CHAPTER 12
The 1418 Chinese Map of the World
I have been studying the story of the great Chinese admiral and explorer Zheng He since a visit to Beijing in 1990. In 1418, Zheng He had produced a world map with features instantly recognizable then as they are today. Three years later, on New Year’s Day, 1421, Zheng He helped bring foreign leaders to the inauguration of the Forbidden City, demonstrating his worldwide reach. My own research has taken me to every continent.
There has been a constant accumulation of evidence about Zheng He’s role as an explorer, often accompanied by controversy about the 1418 map and the 1763 copy that we have available to us. However, nothing has shaken my clear view of the map’s authenticity.
Just before publication of my first book, I reviewed Zuane Pizzigano’s 1424 chart, which was uncovered in 1953 and is held at the James Ford Bell Library in Minneapolis. After analysis, the museum curator, Emeritus Professor Carol Urness, agreed with me that the islands shown on the Pizzigano chart were Puerto Rico and Guadalupe. Hence somebody must have been in the Caribbean seventy years before Columbus, to have so accurately drawn the islands.
In October 2001, I visited the Portuguese archive, the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, established in the fourteenth century, to research the possibility of a secret Portuguese voyage to the New World. I was confident of finding evidence of the secret voyages carried out by Prince Henry the Navigator’s caravels, but to my astonishment found that the Portuguese in 1424, when the map was published, had known nothing of the islands in the Caribbean. However, seven years later, Henry sent caravels to find them. In other words, the great navigator obviously knew they were there. How?
Research also shows the Portuguese claim that Don Pedro, Prince Henry’s older brother, had visited Venice in 1428 and brought back a map of the whole world. To the east, it showed the way to China, and to the west, South America, with what we now call the Strait of Magellan, called in those days the Dragon’s Tail. In short, the Portuguese were claiming that they had maps of the whole world in 1428, before the first European voyages of exploration started. Logs and records of the famous explorers Columbus, Magellan, da Gama, Cabral, and Dias all showed they had extensive charts of the world before they set sail.
I quickly found that the Portuguese claim was true. The Map Library of the British Library houses copies of maps of different parts of the world, showing the world before Europeans reached those parts. Australia, for example, appears on maps of the Dieppe School more than two hundred years before Captain Cook reached there; South America and the Pacific appear on the Piri Reis and Waldseemüller maps, published before Magellan set sail. So, although I could not at that time say that there was a map of the whole world, I could show that the whole world was charted before European voyages of exploration started, and that the leading European explorers had maps. Nobody could explain this.
The next major milestone came from Gunnar Thompson, who in 2004 was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii. He was studying a map published by Albertin di Virga between 1410 and 1419. (The final figure in the date of the map is obliterated.) Nobody has ever doubted the authenticity of this map. I reviewed the map with him in April 2004 in the United States and was convinced that Di Virga’s map w
as genuine. (You can view the map in the second color insert of this book.)
The map shows the whole of the Eastern Hemisphere—just as the Portuguese claimed—from the northwest Atlantic, right through to northern Australia. The shape of Africa is shown long before European voyages of exploration started; Indian Ocean islands appear eighty years before Da Gama entered that ocean; Japan is depicted more than a century before Europeans reached there. The north coast of Siberia is accurately drawn with its rivers one hundred and fifty years before the Russians reached them. The northern coast of Australia is in its correct position relative to Asia and Africa more than three hundred years before Captain Cook charted it.
Di Virga’s map was discovered in a secondhand book shop in 1911 in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The collector who purchased the map, Albert Figdor, took it to the Austrian State University in Vienna, where it was examined by the leading cartographer, Professor Franz von Wieser. Von Wieser authenticated the map the following year in his thesis Die Weltkarte des Albertin di Virga (The World Map of Albertin di Virga). The map was then photographed; authenticated photos were acquired for the collections of the Egyptian prince Yousuf Kamal and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. In 1932, Figdor decided to auction the map, but it was stolen and the original has never reappeared. The map was brought to public attention by Leo Bagrow in his History of Cartography in 1959 and again in 1992 in Cartographica, then, finally in 1996 by Thompson, the first modern scholar to appreciate its immense significance.
The Di Virga map is detailed and accurate. The rivers Ob and Lena in Siberia, the Niger, Volta, and Orange rivers in Africa, the islands of São Tomé and Principe in the Gulf of Guinea, the Japanese islands are all shown with their correct shape and position. The position of Spain is accurate relative to Australia, of Siberia to South Africa, and West Africa to Japan. The map must have been a copy of a non-European map, because in 1419 (the map’s latest possible date), European voyages of exploration had not started and the Portuguese had not yet traveled along the Atlantic coast to describe the contour of the shape of West Africa down to the “bulge.” The only people who could possibly have produced the original map were the Chinese. To reach and map that area required a massive fleet and such a fleet must have been coordinated to sail the world at the same time.
It was evident that the Di Virga map would bolster my thesis on Chinese explorations and that one day the original Chinese map of the Eastern Hemisphere from which Di Virga had copied his map would be found. I based several talks about Chinese explorations I gave in 2004 and 2005 in Southeast Asia and China on the Di Virga map and outlined my arguments as to how, one day, the original Chinese map would be found.
The Portuguese claim that in 1428 they had a map of the Eastern Hemisphere that showed the way to the Indies was demonstrably true. But what of their additional claim, that in 1428 they also had a map showing the Western Hemisphere and what we now call the Strait of Magellan?
I turn next to the map published by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in April 1507, whose credentials are impeccable and have not been challenged.1 I reviewed the map, which was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2003, in the summer of 2004. The significance of the map is clear. It shows the Pacific, the Andes, and South America before Magellan had set sail in 1519. It therefore is evident that someone had been in the Pacific before Magellan and had mapped twenty-three thousand miles of the American coastline. The immediate problem I saw was that the map did not make sense: North and South America looked nothing like the continents as they are. They resembled an elongated snake. Waldseemüller had used the most extraordinary methods of projecting his map. It was projected from a globe onto a flat piece of paper in a heart shape. The consequences of this were that a degree of longitude near the equator was some ten times what it was near the poles and, conversely, a degree of latitude near the poles was some ten times what it was near the equator. Even more curiously, longitude and latitude scales varied from one part of the map to the other and South Africa poked out the bottom for no apparent reason at all. (You can view a photograph of the map in the second color insert.)
For several months I wrestled with how to make sense of this—how could I convert what Waldseemüller had drawn into a map that we would all understand? Then one lovely summer’s day, as I was working at dawn in our garden gazebo, a heron arrived in the New River for his breakfast and perched just a few feet away. I watched the heron, admired its patience as it craned its neck over the river that runs at the back of our garden. Suddenly its neck pounced and then swelled. It dawned on me that if I reversed Waldseemüller’s process and put back onto a globe what he had on a flat piece of paper and then photographed the globe, I would have a map in the form we would understand today.
So I immediately went to our basement office and photocopied Waldseemüller’s map into black-and-white. Then I went down the photocopy of the Atlantic coast of South America and marked points every six hundred miles—a, b, c, d, and so on—and wrote down on a separate piece of paper the latitudes and longitudes of each point. I repeated the process for the Pacific coast of South America and then of North America, finishing with the Atlantic coast of North America. I then transposed these points onto a globe and connected points a, b, and c. Suddenly there sprang out of the globe what Waldseemüller had originally copied from. An extraordinary likeness of North and South America to what we would recognize today, with its correct landmass, shape, and position relative to Africa. Before Magellan set sail, Waldseemüller had drawn a wonderful map of the Americas from a globe. I was certain that one day we would find the Chinese map of the Western Hemisphere that Waldseemüller had used.
With that knowledge I informed the Library of Congress, the owners of the map, and arranged to give a number of talks about my findings. The library invited me and supporters of the 1421 theory to speak at a symposium they were arranging in May 2005. I am most grateful to the Library of Congress for their courage.
The advance text of my talk, together with the supporting maps, was posted on our website in early 2005. The critics knew what was coming.
A group led by the National University of Singapore protested my appearance at the Library of Congress. The director of the library’s Asian Division, Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee (now retired), succinctly replied in an email to the critics: “It is none of your business to tell the Library of Congress whom we should or should not invite to participate in our international symposium on Zheng He.”2
After the Library of Congress’s symposium in May I traveled to Asia and gave a number of talks in Singapore, Hong Kong, and mainland China in which I set out my reasons for believing that one day a Chinese map would be found whose Eastern Hemisphere is the same as Di Virga’s and the Western Hemisphere the same as Waldseemüller’s.
Again the fact that my journeys were promoted in advance, with details placed on our website, led to a barrage of abuse directed at anyone who invited me to give a talk. The invective was concentrated on the organizers of an exhibition in Singapore that was to be mounted from June to September 2005, titled “1421: The Year China Sailed the World.” Our intention was to place the sequence of maps ending with Di Virga and Waldseemüller in this exhibition and also copies of even earlier Chinese maps of the Americas.
We highlighted Gunnar Thompson’s findings concerning Kublai Khan’s maps of the Americas, found at the Library of Congress, and Charlotte Harris Rees’s collection of even older Chinese maps of the Americas, which she had inherited from her father, Dr. Hendon Harris. All of these were to be exhibited in Singapore. Despite protests—even a letter to the prime minister of Singapore—the exhibition attracted huge publicity in Southeast Asia and mainland China.
Harris Rees, in her book Secret Maps of the Ancient World, tells of the enormous fleets available to Chinese rulers since the time of Emperor Qin (210 B.C.), who sent a fleet to search for immortality. Tai Peng Wang has similarly researched the size of fleets during th
e Song dynasty, which ruled in China from 960 to 1279, as Thompson has done with those of Kublai Khan, who established the Yuan dynasty after that. The combination of these experts’ views tells us that thousands of ships had been available to Chinese emperors for the past two millennia with which to sail to and from the Americas.
Chinese knowledge of the Americas is shown in ancient maps, not least the Shan Hai Jing, which Harris Rees describes so well.3 In the millennia before Christ, Chinese maps show thin strips of land at the western and eastern edges of the world, with China in the center. (You can view a copy of one of the Harris maps in the second color insert of this book.)
The early Chinese explorers thus knew the latitude and positions of the Americas but they had no method of determining longitude, so they could only hazard a guess at their widths. This was corrected by Kublai Khan, who instructed Guo Shoujing to devise a method of determining longitude so the true size of the khan’s empire could be known.
My prediction that a map would be found that showed the entire world, Western as well as Eastern Hemisphere, came true quicker than I imagined. A prominent Chinese attorney and art and antique map collector, Liu Gang, contacted our office to inform me that he thought he had an actual 1763 copy of Admiral Zheng He’s 1418 map (see second color insert).
Liu Gang, a founding partner of the major Beijing law firm, Commerce and Law, had come across the map at a small secondhand book shop in Shanghai in 2001. At the time, he hadn’t heard about the 1421 theory, and the claims that Zheng He had traveled to America. Without context, Liu instead was simply impressed with the map because it was so beautifully drawn and obviously very old. His own judgment, based on years of collecting, was that the map was genuine. He purchased it for five hundred dollars as a curiosity, then filed it away with his collection of other early Ming maps. He did take it out from time to time to examine it, and showed it to an appraiser at Christie’s who agreed that it was very old and not a newer fake.
Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas (9780062236777) Page 14
