How the Ming fleets missed Manhattan

Jonathan Mirsky

1421: THE YEAR THAT CHINA DISCOVERED THE WORLD by Gavin Menzies Bantam, £20, pp. 389, ISBN 0593050789 Gavin Menzies declares, he does not claim, that between 1421 and 1423 the Chinese discovered Australia, South and North America, and nearly reached the North Pole — in short, the world. He is 'certain' that if there hadn't been a disastrous fire in Peking's Forbidden City, killing the favourite imperial concubine and causing the emperor to lose interest in long-range exploration, 'China, not Europe, would have become the mistress of the world'. Furthermore, Mr Menzies suggests, had there been no fire New York might now be called New Beijing, and Buddhism not Christianity might 'have become the religion of the New World'. The great seafarers you learned about in school, Vasco da Gama, Magellan and Columbus, Menzies writes, used maps which showed places the Chinese had long since reached; far from intrepidly sailing into the unknown, the European pioneer mariners knew where they were going and were confident they would not fall off the edge of the world.

Menzies doesn't allow his certainty to unfold: he seizes our mental lapels. In his first sentence he tells us, 'Over ten years ago I stumbled on an incredible discovery, which suggested that the history of the world as it has been known and handed down for centuries would have to be radically altered.' He describes other 'bombshells', which meant he was 'looking at a series of the most incredible journeys in the history of mankind, but one that had been completely expunged from human memory'.

The words 'expunged from memory' set off an alarm bell in my mind and three pages later I reread several times these words: 'My research confirmed that several Chinese fleets had indeed made voyages of exploration in the early years of the 15th century.'

His research confirmed? In fact the Ming voyages, in the biggest ships the world had ever seen, almost 400 feet long, carrying thousands of crew, animals, concubines and ambassadors from much of the known world, and commanded by ambitious and capable eunuch admirals, have for decades been well known, in English, to first-year students of Chinese history. It's an exciting, romantic and very odd story, none the less fascinating for being familiar. The Ming armadas were among the most amazing in all naval history. Emperor Zhu Di dispatched his admirals, under the command of the most brilliant ever eunuch, Zheng He, to explore strange places, exhibit China's might, and bring back, as they did, curious creatures like giraffes and oddlooking people. Zheng's fleets sailed through the Indian Ocean as far as the east coast of Africa, and there are plenty of recorded sightings in India and heaps of Ming blue-and-white shards along beaches near Zanzibar to prove it all happened. But in 1421, a few months after Zheng He set sail, the great palace fire broke out and the emperor abdicated in favour of his grandson. He stopped the voyages. The vast shipyards were abandoned, and as soon as the fleets returned the unique records painstakingly compiled by their admirals were destroyed. China turned its back on the sea and there was no New Beijing on Manhattan.

Nonetheless, Chinese feats of navigation, as this often vividly written book reminds but does not tell us, were tremendous: long before the Ming, sailors had the Chinese-invented compass, ways of keeping time, and long experience of stars, currents and landmarks. The predecessors of the Ming navy had been sailing to Borneo, Java, Sumatra and beyond for centuries. Not only Chinese predecessors of the Ming admirals, but Indian, Arab and Malayan vessels and rafts had coasted over vast distances, carrying each other's goods and people, and exchanging charts, maps, stories and rumours. There is also a lot of Chinese-influenced culture — burial customs, architecture, plants and vegetables — as far west as South America. Archaeologists, anthropologists, cartographers and historians, together with explorers from many countries, have investigated Chinese voyages for centuries.

But Menzies has taken a vast series of leaps, bringing the Ming fleets down to Australia and the Antarctic, around the tip of Africa and on to South America, both coasts of North America, and up to very near the North Pole.

He refers often to 'evidence', presenting it in a way which invites a bit of teasing out. An ex-submarine captain, Menzies impresses us with his own cruises and an accumulation of sea-lore which he insists only a sailor, if not a submariner, could acquire, of currents, winds, distant views and even smells. He livens this up by telling us of putting his men ashore on lovely beaches where they drank rum and roasted lobsters, or on the African coast where they shot hippos which proved to be bulletproof. Then he piles on incontrovertible evidence of the transmission of Chinese goods and customs over great distances and stretches of time, almost none of it the result of the Ming voyages. He examines several fascinating 15thand 16th-century European maps which suggest, but do not prove, as he insists they do, that the Ming navy had reached places for which the Portuguese and the Spanish undeservedly, as he frequently says, get the credit. Now and again he imagines the emotions of Ming sailors and concubines (he likes a bit of sexual lore, including Indian glass beads embedded in the penis which jingle when you walk) abandoned on foreign shores when their ships were wrecked.

He is a master of the subjunctive; the Ming ships might have, would have, could have. These cautious grammatical usages soon give way to what the voyagers did, saw and encountered; supposition becomes fact. He does the same thing with material evidence. Two examples out of dozens will do. In a chapter confidently titled 'Settlement in North America', Menzies describes a tower in Rhode Island. It is, he says enticingly, 'a mystery'. 'In my view,' he adds, it resembles a Sung dynasty (9601279) lighthouse. Crewmen on the Ming ships 'would have known' of such a Chinese structure which 'could have' been used to guide rescue ships to find the Ming sailors left behind, who 'may' have been the paleskinned people seen among certain Indian tribes. Menzies has asked the local authorities to chip off a few bits of the tower for analysis but has been refused. He hopes this will eventually he permitted because 'early Ming is particularly easy to date'.

Then there is the California shipwreck. Menzies was 'certain' that 'a great treasure fleet had discovered the Pacific coasts of North and South America'. To prove this, he needed the wreck of a junk. One appeared near San Francisco; 20 years ago a 'local expert' was 'said to have identified the wreck] as of mediaeval Chinese origin'. The expert had died, and the possibly Ming armour in the ship has disappeared. But although a Chinese 'former professor' had 'provisionally identified' seeds in the wreck as Chinese, nothing written from China, Menzies concedes, has confirmed this evidence 'to date'. Almost 200 pages later, he firmly asserts that this same junk had confirmed the Chinese circumnavigation of the globe because of the seeds it carried — for which he had earlier stated there is no confirmation, Like unidentified barrows, underwater stones and other bits of shipwreck, it is transmuted into proof. enabling Menzies to say without a quiver of qualification that the Ming commanders

created permanent colonies along the Pacific coast of North and South America, from California to Peru. Settlements were also initiated in Australia, and throughout the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa.

Those two sentences, like his account of the totally unidentified Rhode Island tower, are emblematic of the Menzies technique: stir together some facts and supposition and present the mixture as a big fact.

Menzies' publishers are presenting this book with plenty of fanfare. It is big, beautifully illustrated with pictures which almost never holster his big claims, and is cheap at £20. In his final paragraphs he describes his lecture to the Royal Geographical Society at Christmas last year, 'broadcast around the world to 36 countries populated by two billion people'.

Menzies refers often. with great and deserved respect, to Joseph Needham of Cambridge, wrongly identified as a professor and a Ming historian, when he was neither, although he was certainly the greatest ever historian of Chinese science as well as being a top-class embryologist. In one of Needham's many volumes, employed vigorously by Menzies, there are several hundred pages on Chinese naval matters. The Zheng He voyages are thoroughly investigated and hailed as mighty nautical achievements. Needham says nothing of their rounding Africa; instead he mentions the undoubted 'visits of Asian people to the Americas' (Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol, 4: 3: 545) over many centuries. Menzies ignores this sentence:

We have to visualise the arrival in the New World] from time to time of small groups of men (and doubtless of women also) with a background of high culture, never a massive invasion like that of the Europeans in the 16th century.

Joseph Needham suggested that far from being grand voyagers like the eunuch admi

rals of the Ming, those (not necessarily Chinese mariners) who brought East and South-east Asian ballgames, musical pipes, maize and artistic designs to Mexico. South and Central America and the California coast may have used rafts from South China and Annam; even without the marvellous Ming nautical knowledge they drifted and sailed along the currents and down the winds which Captain Menzies observed from his submarine.