The area around the Roanoke River system is replete with evidence of the Chinese fleet’s visit. However, we were not the first to come to the conclusion that on crossing the Atlantic via the equatorial current, the fleets would sail through the Caribbean and then northward up the coastline of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.
I described earlier how Jerry Warsing used evidence about Machado-Joseph disease to analyze the presence of Chinese mariners in North America decades before the arrival of Columbus. In about 2000, Warsing came to the conclusion that a huge fleet under the command of Zheng He had met a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, which swept them north and then northwest before dumping them on the coast of Virginia, around what is now Southport.
Warsing’s research, as I noted, began when he was contacted by a leader of a local Indian people, the Melungeons, to research into why the Melungeons of West Virginia have such a high incidence of Machado-Joseph disease.
Warsing’s research, confirmed by scientific studies, showed that the disease was prevalent in Yunnan province, China, before the Portuguese got there; it also occurred among the aborigines of Australia (in Arnhem Land) and in Yemen. Thus the Portuguese could not have spread the disease to China—it must have been the other way around. This line of evidence led Warsing to Zheng He’s voyages. By 2002 Jerry had come to the conclusion that a huge Chinese fleet had spread the disease around the world in the 1430s. He was considering writing a book about the subject in January 2003 when he heard me on the radio, being interviewed on The Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio. He contacted me and invited me to Virginia.
The basis for Warsing’s argument was that sailors aboard Zheng He’s fleets were suffering from the disease and passed it on to people they met while ashore in foreign lands. With limited funds, he was able to carry out a little DNA research and found that some Mingo people had a high admixture of East Asian genes. Although the samples were too small to be statistically significant, Warsing considered the possibility that there might be some truth in the Mingo claim that they were not Indian people, but the descendants of shipwrecked sailors.
Concurrently, our research into the DNA of Native American peoples turned up some fascinating data. A pattern was developing—in every country that Machado-Joseph disease has been found, there is corroborative evidence of “Chinese DNA” among the native peoples. Gabriel Novick’s report has shown that a significant quantity of coastal-dwelling Native American peoples have high levels of East Asian admixture that seemingly did not result from migration routes over the Bering Strait, but from sea voyages. In addition to DNA evidence, in all of the places where Machado-Joseph disease was found we had other corroborative evidence of the Chinese fleet having visited there.
Warsing’s research into the Melungeons, coupled with ours and that of so many distinguished geneticists, produced quite a story. Further investigations led Warsing to the eventual conclusion that a fleet of some two hundred ships under the command of Zheng He had been wrecked in about 1432 on the coast between modern Southport, North Carolina, and Norfolk, Virginia. Confronted with the marshy inhospitable coast, they marched inland up the Cape Fear and Roanoke rivers and settled in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains between Salem and Asheville, North Carolina. Some of them also settled en route in West Virginia, where they left a proliferation of stone buildings—two-story stone houses, barns, and mills—as well as weirs, fish ponds, reservoirs, and the like. Warsing believed that they had also left a selection of Chinese plants, pallowaddy and rice, along the way. He believes their survivors are among the tribes of the Ming Ho (Mingo), Wyo Ming, Lyco Ming, Shawnee (name corrupted from Oceanye Ho), and Melungeons.
There were several ways of verifying Warsing’s and our research. In my view, one of the key elements in piecing together the story of the Chinese visit to North Carolina and Virginia is the accounts of European explorers. If, as so many of them do, they describe meeting Chinese people on their travels in the New World, then surely this is the proof needed. The full results of our research are published on our website, but in short, in almost every place where we claim the Chinese settled, the first Europeans came across Chinese settlements. To us, this was incredible. How had historians managed to ignore Coronado’s accounts of finding Chinese junks with gilded sterns? How could they explain away Columbus’s secret records of his meeting with Chinese miners in “bird” ships, or the accounts of so many other historians who noted a Chinese presence in the Americas on their arrival there?
Warsing had come across similarly tantalizing accounts. He details the Oceanye Ho, whose name was later corrupted to Shawnee, a group defeated by a colonial army in 1794 at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, in Ohio. On their capture they vehemently protested that they were not “American Indians” but foreigners.
The Shawnee were also described in detail by Captain John Smith, the colonial leader in Virginia famed for his dalliance with Pocahontas, in the diary he kept while held a prisoner by Powhatan.
James Mooney (1861–1921), an early America anthropologist, lived among the Cherokee for a time and collected oral history accounts of Native Americans. In one account, Mooney tells of a visit to the Cherokee by very tall people from the west:
James Wafford, of the western Cherokee, who was born in Georgia in 1806, says that his grandmother, who must have been born about the middle of the last century, told him that she had heard from the old people that long before her time a party of giants had once come to visit the Cherokee. They were nearly twice as tall as common men, and had their eyes set slanting in their heads, so that the Cherokee called them Tsunil’ Kalu’, “the slant-eyed people,” because they looked like the giant hunter Tsul’ Kalu. They said that these giants lived far away in the direction in which the sun goes down. The Cherokee received them as friends, and they stayed some time, and then returned to their home in the west. . . .1
This account tallies extraordinarily closely with the travelogue that a reader of our website referred us to by George William Featherstonhaugh. In his travelogue,2 Featherstonhaugh discusses the topography and geology of the area as well as the flora, fauna, and the customs of the local native peoples, and their treatment by the settlers.
In particular, he described a visit to what he could see was an ancient mining site.
Numerous heaps of the ore were lying about, with mica slate containing garnets. . . . Several smaller excavations had been made not far from this long one, and the rock at each place was in the same state, bearing evidence of having lain a very long period of time exposed to the action of the atmosphere.
A local man who accompanied him to the site said that old Cherokee chiefs had told him they knew nothing about such mining activity, and “that the Indians had never attempted any thing of the kind, nor had any white men made them in the memory of the oldest amongst them.”
But the man also told Featherstonhaugh that the Indians spoke about the excavations in traditional stories, and that there were strangers
who came into the country they did not know where from, with yellow countenances and of short stature. That they behaved very civilly, and after staying awhile and traveling about the country, they went away and returned with eight or ten more, and resumed their diggings. After remaining some time, they again left the district and returned a second time with about sixty of their companions, bringing presents with them of cloth, silk, yellow money, and other things, and began to establish themselves in the country by building huts, and digging amongst the rocks.
The Cherokees, perceiving they always returned with increased numbers, held a council, and deeming it unsafe to have so many strangers in their country, surprised and massacred them all. . . .
This is merely scratching the surface. We have collected countless legends of Native Americans describing how their “ancestors came by sea from the east,” how Chinese naval landing parties were wiped out by Native American war parties, and huge ships that sailed up rivers to
explore these beautiful lands.
To sum up this part of our discussion, it’s clear that a civilized and sophisticated group of Chinese were living in the New World by the time the Europeans arrived there. For further backup to our studies, Ian was in charge of further investigations along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, this time ranging southward from Virginia to the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
CHAPTER 14
The Eastern Seaboard
The Outer Banks are a string of coastal islands that form a protective barrier along North Carolina, separating the Atlantic Ocean from the inland waterways of Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. We had seen these on the 1418 map and this is where our research was centered.
Near the coast of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina lies the Great Dismal Swamp, behind which lies the sprawling Atlantic coast and miles of sandy white beaches. The Outer Banks are of particular historical interest in that pioneering aviators the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, experimented with their crafts on the sand dunes, and this is where their first manned flight took place at Kill Devil Hills, just outside the town of Kitty Hawk.
As one drives south the peninsula becomes increasingly narrow, jutting out farther into the Atlantic until it comes back on itself, stopping at Hatteras Bight. There stands the 210-foot Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the largest brick lighthouse in the United States, which has guided and warned mariners about the treacherous shoals since 1802. Just offshore two sea currents collide—the Labrador Current, which brings cold water south, and the Gulf Stream, which carries warm waters north. Sandbars extend fourteen miles offshore, creating dangerous and narrow but navigable waters, and impassable shoals. Hundreds of ships have grounded or been torn apart in the turbulent waters over time, their hulks still resting in the sand. Not surprisingly, these waters have acquired a chilling nickname: the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
After arriving at the Outer Banks, Ian drove to the farthest point of Highway 12, which runs along the spine of the barrier islands, and then took a ferry to Ocracoke Island. People were preparing for Fourth of July celebrations and there was a weekend buzz in the charming tourist town center.
Ocracoke, part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, is a long, narrow island with miles of sandy beaches. It was known to be a favorite anchorage for Edward Teach, otherwise known as the pirate Blackbeard, in the eighteenth century. It is also home to great biodiversity, not least the famed Ocracoke ponies. Legend has it that they were brought to Ocracoke and to the other outlying islands of Assateague and Chincoteague from European shipwrecks, but we had heard rumors of their Mongolian heritage.
Since 1421 was first published we have been inundated with information about horses and their presence in the New World. Horses were once believed to have been extinct in the Americas for more than ten thousand years, until they were supposedly reintroduced by Columbus and those who followed him. But early Europeans described horses being present and already in common use by many of the Native American peoples they encountered. This is noted on the 1418 map, where it is stated “most of the people here have learned equitation and toxophily.”
The evidence is extensive. In the journal Ancient American, James P. Scherz interviewed a Menominee Indian named Pamita. When asked, “Did you get the little horses from the Vikings?” she responded, “No, from the Chinese. . . . People from across the seas came to visit and we went there to visit. . . .”
In his book The Horse in America, Robert West Howard describes Native Americans in South Carolina and Georgia mounted on Chickasaw horses when European explorers first encountered them. These were small, hardy horses, different from European horses, but similar to the Tajikistan blood ponies used by the Chinese cavalry.
Howard mentions that in the early years of the colonies, wild ponies (small, like Chinese ponies) only 13 to 13½ hands high and 600 to 700 pounds roamed the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In 1670, tobacco planters near Williamsburg, Virginia, complained about the bands of wild horses. It is thought that these wild bands were ancestors of those now on Chincoteague Island.
We are also interested in the wild ponies found on Assateague Island, close to the Great Dismal Swamp. A wrecked Chinese junk was discovered in the swamp in the mid-eighteenth century, as we will later describe. There are many opinions as to the history and origins of the Assateague ponies, but none are conclusive. We think it more than possible that they are remnants of the great Chinese fleet, which had boats big enough to carry large quantities of horses for successful breeding.
James Bowles’s findings on this matter are both concise and logical.
The fact is that the Columbian and pre-Columbian caravels from Europe were far too small for horses. Horses can weigh 1000 lbs apiece and more, and they eat, drink, and go constantly. . . . As for breeding stock, no one in their right mind would stable a stallion near a mare on a small ship. And no one capable of tying their own shoes would allow their breeding stock to escape them once the ship landed [as we’re told happened]. Horses are far too expensive, and good breeding stock is far too valuable, to allow that to happen. On the other hand, both the Chinese junks and the pre-Columbian Arab rigs were each of a style large enough for horses. . . .1
It is not a surprise that Chinese ships would have come to these waters and that some met with disaster. Seafarers to this part of the coast, renowned for its savage hurricane season and treacherous shoals, would have been relieved to enter the relative calm of Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. Here they could rest in the lee-side shelter provided by the Outer Banks and plan at what point to proceed to the mainland. Ancient mariners would have found abundant food and water along the North Carolina coastline.
As with their previous voyages, we are certain that the Chinese fleet would have left behind a cornucopia of flora and fauna. The Virginias and North Carolina were no exception to this rule.
Along with the ubiquitous Chinese chickens encountered all along the American coast by the Europeans who arrived in the fifteenth century, there was a trove of other fauna that really should not have been there. We have read European accounts of unusual parrot species on the coast; Jerry Warsing’s research includes information about interesting varieties of monkeys.
With regard to birds, we know that the turkey—a type of large Central American pheasant—had reached the New World before Columbus set sail. We have read records of turkey being eaten at the feast celebrating the marriage of Philip II, Duke of Burgundy, to King John of Portugal’s daughter in the fourteenth century. Turkeys are not known as long-distance flyers and must surely have traveled there with human assistance.
ANOMALOUS DISTRIBUTION OF PLANTS
Various strangely anomalous plants and trees of Chinese origin were found in Virginia and North Carolina before they could have been propagated by the first settlers.
The legend of the Cherokee rose, Rosa laevigata, is a poignant story:
When the Trail of Tears started in 1838, the mothers of the Cherokee were grieving and crying so much, they were unable to help their children survive the journey. The elders prayed for a sign that would lift the mother’s spirits to give them strength. The next day a beautiful rose began to grow where each of the mother’s tears fell. The rose is white for their tears; a gold center represents the gold taken from Cherokee lands, and seven leaves on each stem for the seven Cherokee clans. The wild Cherokee Rose grows along the route of the Trail of Tears into eastern Oklahoma today. . . .2
However, there is evidence suggesting that the rose, which is native to Taiwan and southern China, appeared in the Americas before the Europeans came and expelled the Cherokee from their lands.
The incidence of rice paddies in the local environs was of interest. As was the wealth of mulberry trees, honeywort root, Yellow Delicious apples, and not least the empress tree, Paulownia tomentosa. The empress is plentiful, grows wild in the Virginias, and is considered an invasive nuisance in America. Empress wood, howe
ver, is highly valued in the Orient.
Giovanni da Verrazano, the Florentine explorer, reported finding orange and almond orchards growing in the Carolinas. Both Asian plants are the kind of produce that Zheng He developed for maritime supply.
Like Featherstonhaugh’s account of the Chinese mining party massacred by the Cherokee, there are similar stories that reflect on the sophisticated technology that the Chinese brought with them.
Jerry Warsing has come across numerous unidentified stone buildings, although indigenous groups were not known to have built in stone. The first European settlers to arrive found the buildings already constructed when they arrived there. Warsing also has seen curiously anomalous stone structures at Walnut Gap Trail, near Asheville, North Carolina; walls in Fayette County, North Carolina; structures in Fort Branch, Pineville, Glenfork Junction, and Orton Rice Plantation, in Brunswick County, all in North Carolina; and another near Berkley Springs, West Virginia. The writings of the colonist William Strachey seem to corroborate Jerry’s research.
Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas (9780062236777) Page 16
