March 15, 2002, was not a good day for some of the world's most famous dead white males. That's when Gavin Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine commanding officer and amateur historian, made a presentation at London's Royal Geographical Society in which he declared that the Chinese—traveling on a fleet of ships commanded by eunuch admiral Zheng He—reached America 70 years before Columbus. The Chinese had also seen Australia 350 years before Captain Cook and explored the Magellan Straits 60 years before Magellan was born, Menzies claimed.
After ABC's World News Tonight, the New York Times and a host of international media scrambled to cover his theory, Menzies accepted a £500,000 advance from U.K. publisher Bantam/Transworld for his book manuscript, which had been rejected by major publishers in England when Menzies submitted it without an agent. Publication rights were then sold to William Morrow in the U.S., as well as to publishers in Taiwan, Italy, Portugal and seven other countries. Meanwhile, Pearson Broadband beat out 46 other production companies for the TV rights.
Although Morrow initially scheduled the U.S. edition for May 2003, the house has pushed up the on-sale date for its 100,000 first printing to January 7, to capitalize on the tide of publicity unleashed by Menzie's speech and the U.K. publication of his book on November 4. Two weeks later, the book had reached #24 on the Amazon.co.uk bestseller list.
Bold Claims, Ambiguous Proof
While the voyages of the Chinese "treasure fleet" to South Asia and East Africa are well documented, Menzies parts ways with previous historians in claiming that Chinese explorers reached Australia as well as North and South America, and established colonies on Vancouver Island and in California, among other places. Further, Menzies posits that the Chinese relied on celestial navigation, estimating latitude and longitude 300 years before the Europeans. To support these theories, Menzies cites existing cartographic evidence that Magellan, Columbus and Cook set sail with maps of the New World in hand. However, his claim that their maps were derived from information that came from the Chinese voyages is a key area of controversy.
As for physical evidence of Chinese exploration, Menzies points to Chinese shipwrecks in the Caribbean and other artifacts. The book's U.S. edition will include a postscript with additional supportive evidence, mostly gathered from strangers who contacted Menzies at his home, north of London, in response to his claims. "A walnut farmer north of Sacramento called up and said, 'We've always known there's a [Chinese] junk underneath our land,' " recalled Menzies. "I thought, 'this chap's clearly a nutter,' but now it looks as if it's true."
The book's commercial success in England has not assuaged concerns among historians about Menzies's scholarship. Carol Urness, curator emeritus of the James Ford Bell Library in Minneapolis, who performed some research at Menzies's request, said, "The book is thought-provoking, stimulating, interesting, even fascinating. Whether it's going to turn out to be historically correct—that's another issue. It's fine to say that the Chinese sailed all over and did all this mapping, but we have no extant copy of [their original maps]."
"Menzies has not, unfortunately, discovered anything new," said Louise Levathes, author of When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405—1433 (S&S, 1994; Oxford Univ. Press paper, 1996). Levathes, a former visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Chinese and American Studies in China, also faulted Menzies, who does not read Chinese, for ignoring original sources that detail the voyages of the treasure fleet, but make no mention of the Americas.
Patricia Seed is a Rice University history professor specializing in the history of navigation and cartography of the 15th century and the author most recently of American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Univ. of Minnesota, 2001). Having read sections of Menzies's book and viewed a lengthy proposal for a documentary based on it, she dismissed Menzies's premise that ships nearly 500 feet long passed through the Mozambique Channel, with its difficult Aghulas current, as "meteorologically impossible."
Menzies, who has never billed himself as a scholar, responded to these criticisms by saying, simply, "The evidence is just so overwhelming that it's impossible to argue against." For her part, executive editor Claire Wachtel, who edited the U.S. edition of the book, deflected skepticism, saying, "people don't like the basis of their fundamental knowledge to be challenged, and we all know that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue."
Another missing piece is the exact whereabouts of the remains of Chinese junks reputedly located in the Caribbean, not to mention the one under that Sacramento walnut farm. But Menzies says he can't comment about them because his agreement with Pearson Broadband prohibits it. "Pearson Broadband has spent quite a bit of money assembling experts to survey the junk in Sacramento. They understandably want to keep control of publicity surrounding it," he said.
According to Pearson Broadband executive producer John Steele, the four-part documentary will rely on the contents of 1421 but will remain independent of it. Although plans have not been finalized, Steele expected the documentary to air on a U.S. network, a U.K. network and a Japanese network in spring 2004. "The first two parts deal with the well-documented exploits of the Ming fleet in India, Africa, etc. In parts three and four, we're going to put the viewer on a boat and take it through Gavin's theory. We're saying, 'Gavin has opened an incredible door that could rewrite history. Let's go through it,' " he explained.
Should Menzies's theories turn out to be unfounded, it won't be the first time the publishing industry will have been caught with its historical pants down. Take the case of The City of Light, the diary of Jacob d'Ancona, a Jewish merchant who was purported to have reached China in 1271, four years before Marco Polo. In 1997, shortly after the book was published in U.K. and just before Little, Brown was scheduled to publish it here, David Selbourne, the Englishman residing in Italy who translated the diary, refused to make the original manuscript public. After Yale's distinguished China scholar Jonathan Spence questioned the book's provenance in the New York Times Book Review, Little, Brown opted not to publish it in the U.S. Still, that didn't spell the end of its commercial prospects: Citadel/Kensington picked it up three years later, despite its unverified origins.
