Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas (9780062236777)

by Menzies, Gavin; Hudson, Ian

  By controlling the six fine harbors in the immediate vicinity of the site with an interlocking defensive system, the Chinese would have gained not only a protected anchorage where ships could be repaired and careened but also fresh water from nine local streams, an array of wood of different types, geese and seals, and the bounty the Bras d’Or Lake provided, not least coal, gypsum and copper mines, furs, freshwater oysters, and fish.

  In May 2005 after talks at the Library of Congress’s Zheng He Symposium, I went to Canada, accompanied by Paul Chiasson and Cedric and Patricia Bell, and visited Nova Cataia to see it all in person. Cedric and his wife spent fifteen days at the site. That gave Cedric enough time to conduct a survey with great intuition and at an astonishing speed, using magnetic anomaly analysis. (This method is described in more detail on our website.)

  Cedric’s research at Nova Cataia showed that Chiasson’s historic discovery so far has only uncovered a small part of the Chinese base. It is vastly bigger in both scale and scope and probably would have required the work of tens of thousands of men to build it. This can be vividly illustrated by the roads that lead up to the site from both sides—from St. Ann’s and from the Bras d’Or Channel. There must be more than ten miles of well-paved dual carriageway stone roads, protected along their length by stone walls, some of enormous cut stones. Cedric Bell’s research detected the remains of stone gatehouses built into the walls about every hundred yards. From St. Ann’s Bay around the north coast to St. Andrews Channel at New Campbellton, stone walls protect the site, punctuated now and then by gatehouses and canals. The scale of the whole endeavor is mind-blowing.

  The scope of the site is as ambitious as its scale. From the ore crushers with water-powered turbines, as well as the grave sites and storehouses that Cedric Bell has located, it is obvious the Chinese came to mine and refine metal, not least gold—hence the obsession with protected stone-walled roads. They brilliantly exploited the character of the site, not only to provide food and water but also to use water power for a host of activities. An endless supply of fresh water on the plateau was channeled through aqueducts to wells to provide drinking water on the plateau as well as in the harbors below. The streams were damned by a series of locks to bring supplies up from the harbors to the plateau—coal and fish up, refined metal down—much as the Panama Canal uses variation to hoist cruise ships and tankers from Pacific sea level across the mountains to the Caribbean.

  Other streams were used to provide washing facilities and toilets for the religious city and the many barracks found within the twenty square miles of the whole settlement.

  WHY THE SITE HAS REMAINED HIDDEN

  Due to the steepness of the escarpment on the east and west side of the site, the site can only be seen from the north, that is, from the sea. Here the Chinese were most ingenious in aligning the long axis of the site with the Ciboux Islands, which are about five miles away from the site and appear to be an extension of it. Mariners would be foolhardy to attempt to approach the site between the Ciboux Islands and the northern extremity of the cape on which the site is situated. In practice they would approach St. Ann’s Harbor from seaward of the Ciboux Islands. Nearer the islands, the site is obscured by them; farther away it is too distant to make out detail. This, in our opinion, accounts for the Portuguese describing the site merely as “many fires burning” or “cape of smoke”—they could not discern what caused the fire and smoke. It also explains the source of the smoke. It also explains why St. Ann’s Bay is described thus—“in a beautiful bay [were] many people and goods of much value”—without any description of how the people and goods got there before the Europeans arrived. As Chiasson repeatedly points out, no European ever saw the city, which has not appeared on any European map to this day.

  Besides conducting a thorough survey of the area, Cedric also found what he believes to be concrete evidence of Chinese occupation of the site in the form of carved stone animal heads. Cedric has found these in other sites around the world and is sure that they are indicative of a Chinese presence. We have been requested not to show photos of the heads or give their precise location, because Cedric is worried about possible looting.

  At the northern edge of the site, Cedric detected round Buddhist-like graves. The discovery is based on the magnetic anomaly survey—we have not disturbed the graves. The ideal Chinese location for graves is where there is a backdrop of distinctive mountains, and the graves face the sea or a river.

  The graves are within seventy feet of a position predicted by a Buddhist priest to whom we were introduced in Hong Kong, after he had studied a topographical map of the site. We understand that the particular sect of Buddhists who we believed died there left nail clippings and pieces of clothing in the graves, but not the actual bodies.

  THE MI’KMAQ

  Mi’kmaq legend gives hints at the arrival of unknown beings. A version of the legend describes the dream of a woman long ago, when only Indians lived on the land.

  “A small island came floating in towards the land, with tall trees on it, and living beings. ​. . . ​The next day an event occurred that explained all. Getting up in the morning, what should they see but a singular little island, as they supposed, which had drifted near to the land and become stationary there. There were trees on it, and branches to the trees, on which a number of bears ​. . . ​were crawling about ​. . . ​what was their surprise to find these supposed bears were men.” Josiah Jeremy to Silas Rand in Legends of the Mi’kmaq.

  To me, this describes men manning the rigging and sails of a huge junk, hove to offshore. The Museum of Natural History in Halifax exhibits Mi’kmaq rock carvings, in particular one of a large ship with junk rigging and a high, square bow—in short, a junk. Mi’kmaq rock art also depicts men wearing long robes—not a European mariner’s dress but clothes that the Chinese admirals wore.

  Chiasson has studied Mi’kmaq history and culture in detail. The first Jesuit priest found that the Mi’kmaq had a written language, the only Native American people on the continent to be able to read and write, so we can assume foreign visitors had taught them. These foreign visitors were led by a venerable chief named Kluscap, who, according to the Mi’kmaq, lived on the promontory that Paul Chiasson discovered. Kluscap also taught them a civil way of life, including how to live in peace under good governance, and practical skills such as how to fish with nets and how to navigate by the stars.

  Kluscap and his followers left at some point, legend also says, to return to “their homes at the far side of the north pole.” They traveled once more on great ships “with trees” on their decks.

  Chiasson’s book describes the indigenous local people, the Mi’kmaq, as having a written language, and exhibits copies of this language modified by the Jesuits. Mi’kmaq history says the language was taught them by visitors who settled long before Europeans arrived on the site; that is, it was taught to them by the Chinese. Chiasson believes the Mi’kmaq were already Christians when the first Europeans arrived. They acquired Christianity from the Chinese.

  COMPARISON BETWEEN THE MI’KMAQ PEOPLE OF NOVA SCOTIA AND THE YI PEOPLE OF YUNNAN

  Yunnan province in China has twenty-six minority peoples, of which the Yi are far and away the most numerous. Kunming hosts a Yi village for tourists. The Yunnan Museum for Minority Nationalities is replete with artifacts, clothes, domestic utensils, and implements of the Yi people. We have found a number of striking similarities with the Mi’kmaq.

  Mi’kmaqs and Yis delight in woven clothes featuring bold colors, notably red and blue. Both peoples wear long dresses and embroidered shoes—so similar are their dresses that if two mannequins were clothed side by side, one in Mi’kmaq and the other in Yi clothes, an observer could not tell the difference. Both Yi and Mi’kmaq girls are entitled to wear conical black hats on reaching puberty—as far as we are aware, they are the only Chinese people and the only Native American people to follow this unusual custom.

  The similarities go further
than hats, dresses, sashes, and shoes, extending to braided satchels, decorated baskets (colored with black ash), earrings, and necklaces. Both people make use of medicinal herbs and had sophisticated methods of catching and breeding fish—in stone fish ponds, and at sea using harpoons and nets, methods the Mi’kmaq say they were taught by the visitors who settled among them.

  Both cultures play dice, love gambling and drinking, and played a basic form of hockey. Both have an extraordinary fairy story of a “Rabbit in the Moon.” Mi’kmaq and Yis have similar methods of burying their dead and honoring their ancestors. Each one of these customs and ways of life could be a coincidence, but taken together, coincidence seems highly improbable.

  After reviewing the breadth and detail of information, it is clear that Paul Chiasson’s discovery is by far the largest settlement yet found. Nova Cataia appears to have been the capital city for Chinese settlement in North America. We really hope more of a concerted effort will be made to investigate the site in the future, and much look forward to reading the latest fruits of Chiasson’s research.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Pacific Coast of North America

  In 1421, we discussed important evidence about Chinese explorations of the coasts of North, Central, and South America, including the discovery of a junk in the Sacramento River, and legends, artifacts, and linguistic similarities in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru. But new information and discoveries continue to surface and Nova Cataia is but one of them. There are still two others to discuss now: one off the Pacific coast of the United States, the other in Florida.

  The amount of new material since publication in 2002 has done much to strengthen our understanding of the role of China in Pacific exploration, all the way from Alaska down through Central and South America. Although the Chinese journey across the northern Pacific was assisted greatly by the Black Current, it was still a long and arduous voyage.

  The Aleutian Islands are a cluster of volcanic islands that arc around the curvature of the Earth, on the fault line between the North American and Pacific plates. They would have been an obvious port of call on the sea route to the Americas. There are hundreds of the islands and they would have been very hard to miss.

  As with several coastal communities dotting the rim of the Pacific, the indigenous people of the Aleutians have Chinese DNA, as evidenced by the studies of Gabriel Novick and his colleagues. There is in fact an astonishingly close similarity between the Alaskan (Aleut) and Chinese DNA—their genes are closer to each other than North American Indian DNA is to Aleut.

  The DNA of the native people of Vancouver Island tells a similar story. We were made aware of the pioneering work of Professor Mariana Fernandez-Cobo in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 2002. Fernandez-Cobo studied the DNA of the Salish people, who populated areas of the Pacific Northwest and the northwestern United States, inland as far as Montana.

  Fernandez-Cobo and her colleagues analyzed urine of the Salish, the Navajo, the Guarani of the Amazon, and people of mainland Japan. The DNA of all four—the entire sequence, CAGTTAGA—is identical. The odds of this happening are 65,536 to one. In our view, the Salish, Navajo, and Guarani DNA can only have come from the Japanese sailors who accompanied the Chinese fleets.

  There are a series of maps supporting the theory that the area had been comprehensively mapped before the arrival of the first European explorers. The Queen Charlotte and Vancouver islands all appear on the Waldseemüller map of 1507, and also on the Zatta map, drawn before Europeans reached British Columbia.

  Furthermore the Zatta map of 1776 actually goes as far as to describe Vancouver Island as “Colonia dei Chinesi”—a de facto Chinese colony. Antonio Zatta was a Venetian explorer and cartographer who traveled with one of the first Russian exploratory missions to the area. His chart was published before George Vancouver or James Cook sighted the islands in the eighteenth century. Zatta’s explanation for “Colonia dei Chinesi” was that the information came from Russian explorers: “La parte del Nord-Ouest Dell’America e descritta secondo le recenti scoperti de Russi. . . .” (The area of Northwest America is described by the recent Russian discoveries. . . . )

  Delving into Zatta’s research, it appears the recent discoveries were by Aleksei I. Chirikov, a colleague of Vitus Bering. As far as we know, the accounts of Chirikov’s discoveries have not been translated into English. However, we have been told that Chirikov mentions Chinese maps and giving local people in the Aleutians Chinese presents, in which they showed no interest.

  A map drawn by Antonio Zatta in 1776 describes Vancouver Island as “Colonia dei Chinesi”—a de facto Chinese colony.

  We are particularly interested in finding other records of Russian explorers who reached the Pacific coast of North America before other European explorers did so. We have also seen two maps drawn by the sixteenth-century Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius (c. 1569), one from Hebei University, Baoding, and one from the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Virginia. Both of these were published before the first Russians reached the Bering Strait.

  On his second map, Ortelius shows the Bering Strait, although he lived two centuries before Bering and Captain Cook reached Alaska. Furthermore, Ortelius’s rendering of China is drawn with great accuracy, including hundreds of names and features.

  There are numerous accounts in which the peoples along the coast, from Alaska and down all the way to southern Chile, describe pre-Columbian contact with visitors from across the Pacific Ocean. Critics have derided these stories as optimistic legends, but when taken together—hundreds of accounts we have received over the years—they are impossible to ignore. History is said to be written by the victors. However, many of these peoples simply did not have written languages and have relied on song and dance to re-create their stories, passing down their valuable history to future generations. These folkloric tales tell of visitors arriving, some by mistake, in shipwrecks blown in from the ocean, and people looking for land for mining, logging, and agriculture.

  Recently, a reader brought to our attention a very interesting article with accompanying illustrated plate, from the Smithsonian Institution in 1892.1 This article, “Chinese Relics in Alaska,” by Lieutenant T. Dix Bolles of the U.S. Navy, describes a wooden mask that was donated to the institution in the 1880s. It was taken from a grave located near Chilcat Village, on the border of Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory. The mask includes two large bronze Chinese temple coins that were used to portray the eyes. The age of the mask was estimated by discussions with the local Chilcats, who indicated that the grave was that of a medicine man who had died two hundred years earlier. This would date the mask to the late 1600s, therefore preceding Bering and his fellow European explorers. Bolles wrote:

  I am free to confess that I see no other possible conclusion to draw than that these coins were obtained two hundred years ago, and the natural surmise is that they came from a junk driven on the coast, Chinese most likely. ​. . . ​To those who doubt the advent of junks on the West Coast at this early date, these facts will probably not be satisfactory, but it will be necessary for them to break down by direct evidence such a strong plea. ​. . .2

  Other instances of Oriental artifacts appearing on the Pacific coast include hundreds of pieces of ceramics unearthed in the narrow valley between Washington State’s Vancouver Lake and the Columbia River. These artifacts include figurines, pipes, pendants, small sculpted heads, and decorated bowls. The Institute for Archaeological Studies, based in nearby Portland, Oregon, concluded that they were Asian in form, but it didn’t take the matter further.

  An article in the Daily Colonist of Victoria, British Columbia, on August 31, 1933, describes a Buddhist relic found in the northern part of the province, which was eventually in the possession of John Forsythe. The Chinese talisman dating back to 200 B.C. was found in an Oriental jar with other early Buddhist relics, entwined in the roots of an uprooted tree several centuries old.

  The native tribes in
the area appear to have similar cultural traits to their Oriental counterparts across the Pacific. For example, we can see striking parallels between totem poles in Seattle, British Columbia, and up the coast to Alaska, when compared with a Chinese mythical symbol—Tao-tie (To-tin), one of a Dragon’s nine sons. To-tin (or To-tim) pronounced in the more ancient Cantonese dialect is almost exactly the same as totem. Pronounced “Tao-tie” in modern Chinese (Mandarin), the association would have been less obvious. In North America, totem has evolved to a multi-animal symbol, including bears, birds, and people. The cultural connection between the Totim on Shang dynasty utensils and the totem poles of North America is strikingly similar.

  Professor Siu-Leung Lee, the prominent calligrapher and ethnologist, also refers to a birdman display of the Haida nation at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, in Vancouver. Haida Native American legends say that all people are derived from this birdman. The bird is a tribal symbol of the people in eastern China six thousand to seven thousand years ago, Lee says.

  SHIPWRECKS

  The culmination of our research would be to find a shipwreck in the Americas that can be dated to pre-Columbian times.

  In our book 1434, we provide a detailed account of the enormous tsunami that resulted from a comet impact in the Pacific Ocean.3 Researchers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in Palisades, New York, focused in on the comet, estimated to have impacted Earth some time between 1430 and 1455. The resulting tsunami was more than 700 feet high when it touched islands such as Stewart Island in New Zealand, 400 feet at the Australian coast, and would have been devastating along the North and South American coasts. Besides the group of forty or so shells of wrecked junks that Dave Cotner has located on the Oregon coast (described in 1434), which slammed onto the shore, rumors abound of plenty of other Chinese wrecks scattered along the dramatic coastline.