1421: The Year China Discovered the World Read online

  After the American edition was published in January 2003, the following (in no particular order) very kindly provided new evidence: Adela Lee, Professor Fayuan Gao, Admiral Zheng Ming, Lt Lee Juntao, Katherine Zhou, Al Cornett, Albert Yuen, Fran Chunge, Ma Yinghui, Alice Mong, Alphonse Vinh, Elizabeth Flower Miller, Bob Hassell, Brett Green, Bruce Tickell Taylor, Dr Edgardo Caceres, Joel Fressa, Anthony Moya, A. Armstrong, Duncan Craig, Bruno and Chiara Condi, Dr Catherine Skinner, David and Cedric Bell, J. D. Van Horn, Edwin Davey, E. O. Jeago, Charlie and Dottie Marshner, Charlotte Rees, Chung Chee Kit, Greg Jefferies, Bill Ward, Vaughan Cullen, David Crockett, David Borden, Ger Nijman, David Sims, Larry D. Clark, Commodore Bill Swinley, Charles Huegy, Guy Dru Drury, Hector Williams, B. Morelan, Ken Holmes, Howard Smith, Jerry Warsing, Jim Mullins, Shaun Griffin, Paul Yia, Romeo Hristov, Joan Butcher, John Braine Hartnell, Barbara and John McEwan, R. V. Remsen, A. D. Palmer, Steve Haynes, Steve Elkins, John Robinson, Dr John Marr, Kerson Huang, Jake Smothers, Thad Daly, Margo Donovan, Key Sun, Linden Chubin, Mark Zhang, Ms Fan, Mike Armstrong, Jean Elder, Martin Tai, Mary Doerflein, Tony Brooks, R. Wertz, Meg Stocker, Dean Dey, Miranda Mraekts, Scott McClean, Gary Jennings, Michael Osinski, Ambassador Nicolas Platt, Paolo Costa, Peter Robinson, Howard Smith, Sandy Lydon, Durdock Riley, R. Dick Reed, Rene Kollmyer, Professor Bryan Sykes, William Goggins, Richard F. Chauvet, Robert A. Hefner III, Katrina Van Tassel, Gerald Thompson, Robin J. Watt, Philip Mulholland, Greg Autry, Rodney Gordon, Bernard Chang, Holly Midgley, Professor Gary Tee, Roger L. Olesen, Sun Shuyun, Jonathan F. Ormes, Christopher Spedding, Professor Gabriel Novick and colleagues, T. Lang, Dr Gregory Chambers, Dr Winston Peters, Tan Ta Sen, Dr Wang Tao, Dr Shong, L.A.R. Clark, Brent Kennedy, Jack Pizzey, Judge William Hupy, Bruce Trinque, Marti Brodel, William McVicar, D. D. Jevans, Baxter Smith, B. S. Cullins, Professor Yao Jide, Professor Yingsheng Liu, Ken Welch, W. Feickert, Dutch Meteorological Institute KNMR, Delft Technical University, C. G. Hunt, F. Hochstetter, E. Alan Aubin, Bill Ward, Norm Fuller, A. D. Fletcher, E. N. R. Fletcher, John Grubber, Jeff McCabe, Terry Glavin, Paul Wagner, G. Berteig, Dom Mollick, Ken Holmes, Susan Crockford, Steve Hayes, Jim Tanner, John Ting, F. Lizuka, Dr Theodore Bainbridge, Barbara Vibert, R. Wertz, R. Banzo, B. Remsen, Clay Ranger, Mrazert, Dr Annabel Arends, Zerallos Palmer, Craig Hill Handy, Dr Felipe Vilchis and colleagues, Valary Porter, Glenn R. Whitley, Xiao-Qing Li, Armando Rozari, Stevie Tan, Tan Ing Soon, Regina Faresin, H. C. Hartman, Willard S. Bacon, Richard Zimmerman, National Park Service (United States Department of the Interior), Edwin H. Spencer, Ralph McGeeham, Alan McGillivray III, Peter Sommer, Anthony Fletcher, Tom Bender, Patrick Donohue, Jo Ann Alkamraikhi, Greg Coelho, T. Michael Stanley, Capt. Roddy Innes, Mathias Hartmann, Robert Gariup, Frank Wells, Professor Liu Kan, Professor Quin, David Knight, Rodney Gordon, Professor Edward Bryant, Drs Greg and Laura Little, Michael Ferrero, Cheuk Kwan, Siew Hong Wong, Francis Pickett, An Ping, Ric Baez, Frank Fitch, William Vigil, Alan Moks, J. Peter Thurmond, Heindri Bailey, Lynda Nutter, David Borden, Rewi Kemp, Professor John Oliver, Enrique Garcia Barthe, Charles N. Rudkin, Lindsay Peet, John Weyrich, Tony Abramson, Brian Darcey, Ian McDonald, Aytac Tekin, Steven Lutz, Anthony Fletcher, Greg Jeffer, Annette Brown, Jessica Hanson-Hall, Lindsey Sayvin, Philip Hahl, Vanessa Collingridge, Merle O’Doherty, John and Erica Parker, Darril Fosty, T. Michael Stanley, Dom Kropfer, Robert Chase, Kurt Cox, Tom Felion, Lanton Roberts, Andy Asp, Susie Brumfitt, Andrew D. Basiago, P. J. Evans, Raphael Banzo, Bob Ward, Sydney Stout, Philip Bramble, Bob Shipp, Dom Raab, Orlando J. Martinez, Carlos Quirino, Celia Heil, Jack Andrews, Ciro Matuck, Joy Mertz, Ray Howgego, Adam Dunn, Don Hughes, David Sims, Jim Jackson, Alan Armstrong, Ronald Monroe, Ginni MacRobert, Jack Nixon, Lennart Siltberg, Roy Sandor, Shizhang Ling, Errol Kirk, Steve Mumme, Nico Boon, Professor David Price, Robert N. Heath, Dr M. E. Phipps, Dr K. K. Tan, Tin Lam and colleagues at Netism Solutions, Dr Alan Leibowitz, B. S. McElney, Perry Debell and Dr John S. Marr.

  I must also express my gratitude to Voyages Jules Verne, which provides wonderful tours with extremely knowledgeable guides; Anthony Simonds-Gooding; Wendi and Mike Watson and their team; Steven Williams and Sophie Ransom of Midas Public Relations; Jack Pizzey; Pearson Broadband and Paladin Invision and their teams. I’m also grateful to Dr Joseph McDermott, Elizabeth Hay, Dr Hubert Lal, Dr Taylor Terlecki, Dr Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, Ian Hudson, Amy Crocker, my wife Marcella Menzies and our elder daughter, Vanessa Gilodi-Johnson, all of whom have provided translations from a variety of foreign languages.

  Luigi Bonomi of Sheil Land Associates has been a wonderful literary agent, and at my publishers, Transworld, my heartfelt thanks go to Larry Finlay, Sally Gaminara, publishing director of Bantam Press, Simon Thorogood, Deborah Adams, Julia Lloyd, Alison Martin, Rebecca Winfield, Helen Edwards, Sheila Lee, Neil Hanson, Garry Prior, John Blake, Ed Christie and their teams. I’m also grateful to Gillian Bromley, Daniel Balado, Elizabeth Dobson, Joanne Hill and Sarah Ereira for their work on the text.

  Finally, my appreciation to those who have stood by me and the book for fourteen long years. My special thanks to Frank Hopkins, an old friend and an Oxford history scholar, and to Laura Tatham – no writer could have had a more skilful, loyal and dedicated assistant. Last of all, Marcella, my wife, has provided enduring love and support and the finances to pay for my researches. I and this book owe everything to her.

  Gavin Menzies

  London

  May 2003

  The countries beyond the horizon and at the ends of the earth have all become subjects and to the most western of the western or the most northern of the northern countries, however far away they may be.

  – part of an inscription on a memorial stone erected by Admiral Zheng He at Ch’ang Lo on the banks of the Yangtze estuary in 1431

  INTRODUCTION

  OVER TEN YEARS ago I stumbled upon an incredible discovery, a clue hidden in an ancient map which, though it did not lead to buried treasure, suggested that the history of the world as it has been known and handed down for centuries would have to be radically revised.

  I was pursuing an interest that had become a consuming passion for me: medieval history, and in particular the maps and charts of early explorers. I loved to examine these old charts, tracing contours, coastlines, the shifting shapes of shoals and sandbars, the menace of rocks and reefs. I followed the ebb and flow of tides, the pull of unseen currents and the track of prevailing winds, peeling back the layers of meaning contained within the charts.

  The wintry plains of Minnesota started me on my research. It was not necessarily the first place you would think of to discover a document with such profound implications, but the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota has a remarkable collection of early maps and charts, and one in particular had attracted my attention. It had been in the collection of Sir Thomas Phillips, a wealthy British collector born in the late eighteenth century, but its existence had remained virtually unknown until the collection was rediscovered half a century ago.

  The chart was dated 1424 and signed by a Venetian cartographer by the name of Zuane Pizzigano. It showed Europe and parts of Africa, and as I compared it with a modern map, I realized that the cartographer had drawn the coastlines of Europe accurately. It was an extraordinary cartographic achievement for that era, but not one of earth-shattering significance in itself. However, my eye was then drawn to the most curious feature of the map. The cartographer had also drawn a group of four islands far out in the western Atlantic. The names he gave them – Satanazes, Antilia, Saya and Ymana – did not correspond to any modern place-names and there are no large islands in the area where he had positioned them. That could have been a simple error in calculating longitude, for Europeans did not master that difficult art until well into the eighteenth century, but my first, troubling thought was that the islands were imaginary and had existed only in the mind of the man who drew the chart.

  I looked again. The two biggest islands were painted in bold colours, Antilia in dark blue, Satanazes in pillar-box red.
The rest of the chart was uncoloured, and it seemed certain that Pizzigano wished to emphasize that these were important, recently discovered islands. All the names marked on the chart appeared to be in medieval Portuguese. Antilia – anti ‘on the opposite side of’ and ilha ‘island’ – meant an island on the opposite side of the Atlantic to Portugal; other than that, there was nothing in the name to help me identify it. Satanazes, ‘Satan’s or Devil’s Island’, was a very distinctive name. A greater number of towns were marked on the largest island, Antilia, indicating that it was better known. Satanazes had only five names, and featured the enigmatic words con and ymana.

  My interest was now thoroughly aroused. What were these islands? Did they really exist? The date of the map, its provenance and authenticity were unimpeachable, yet if it was genuine, it marked lands in places where, according to the accepted history, no Europeans had ventured for another seven decades. After several months of examining charts and documents in map rooms and archives, I became convinced that Antilia and Satanazes were actually the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. There were far too many points of similarity between them for it to be a coincidence, but that meant that somebody had accurately surveyed the islands some seventy years before Columbus reached the Caribbean. This seemed an incredible revelation – Columbus had not discovered the New World, yet his voyage had always been regarded as an absolutely defining moment. It marked the point when, led by the Portuguese, Europeans had begun to embark on the great voyages of discovery, the long, restless expansion over the face of the globe that was to characterize the next five hundred years.

  I needed further evidence to support my discovery and I sought the help of an expert in medieval Portuguese, Professor João Camilo dos Santos, who was then at the Portuguese Embassy in London. He examined the Pizzigano chart and corrected my translation of con/ymana to ‘volcano erupts there’. The words had been placed in the southern part of Satanazes, just where there are three volcanoes on Guadeloupe today. Did they erupt before 1424? In high excitement I rang the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. The volcanoes had erupted twice between 1400 and 1440 but had otherwise been dormant during the previous hundred years and the succeeding two and a half centuries. Moreover, there were no other volcanic eruptions in the Caribbean at that time. I felt I was home and dry; I believed I had found solid evidence that someone had reached the Caribbean and established a secret colony there sixty-eight years before Columbus.

  Professor Camilo dos Santos gave me an introduction to the curator of the State Archives in the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, and on a beautiful early autumn afternoon I began further research there, hoping for corroboration of my hunch about Portuguese landings in the Caribbean. To my astonishment, I came across something entirely different: far from the Portuguese having discovered those Caribbean islands, they were completely unknown to them at the time Pizzigano was drawing his chart. They were, however, shown on another, slightly later chart – drawn by some other, unknown cartographer – that had not come into Portuguese hands until 1428. In addition, I found a command issued by the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator to his sea-captains in 1431, ordering them to go and find the islands of Antilia shown on the 1428 chart; had the Portuguese discovered them, Henry’s edict would scarcely have been necessary. But if the Portuguese had not discovered and surveyed Antilia and Satanazes, who on earth had? Who had provided Pizzigano and the other cartographers with their information?

  I began more research, tracing the rise and fall of medieval civilizations that had long since crumbled into dust. In turn, I eliminated virtually every navy in the world that could feasibly have undertaken such an ambitious voyage in the early decades of the fifteenth century. Venice, the oldest and most powerful naval power in Europe, was in disarray. The old Doge was ill, his powers waning, and his successor was waiting in the wings, determined that Venice should abandon its maritime tradition and become a land power. Northern European powers barely had the ships to cross the English Channel, let alone explore new worlds. The Egyptian rulers were mired in civil wars – there were no fewer than five sultans in 1421 alone. The Islamic world was also disintegrating: the Portuguese had invaded its North African heartlands and the once-mighty Asian empire of the Mongol emperor Tamerlane was in pieces.

  Who else could have explored the Caribbean? I decided to see if there were other charts like the 1424 map, showing continents that had been surveyed before the European voyages of discovery. The deeper I dug, the more bombshells I uncovered. I was astonished to find that Patagonia and the Andes had been mapped a century before the first European sighted them, and Antarctica had been accurately drawn some four centuries before Europeans reached the continent. The east coast of Africa was shown on another chart, with longitudes that were perfectly correct – something Europeans did not manage to achieve for another three centuries. Australia appeared on another map, three centuries before Cook, and other charts showed the Caribbean, Greenland, the Arctic and the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of both North and South America long before Europeans arrived.

  To have drawn maps of the entire world with such accuracy, these explorers, whoever they were, must have circumnavigated the globe. They must have been skilled in astro-navigation and must have found a method of determining longitude to draw maps with negligible longitude errors. To cover the enormous distances involved, they must have been able to sail the oceans for months at a time and that would have meant desalinating sea-water. As I was later to discover, they also prospected and mined for metals, and they were skilled horticulturalists, transplanting animals and plants right across the globe. In short, they had changed the face of the medieval world. I seemed to be 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 majority of records destroyed, the achievements ignored and finally forgotten.

  These revelations were both astounding and horrifying. If I was to pursue them I would be challenging some of the most basic assumptions about the history of the exploration of the world. Every schoolchild knows the names of the great European explorers and navigators whose exploits have resounded down the ages. Bartolomeu Dias (c. 1450–1500) left Portugal in 1487 and became the first man to round the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa. He was driven to the south of the Cape by a storm and when he found no land he turned north, rounding the Cape and making landfall on the east coast of Africa. Vasco da Gama (c. 1469–1525) followed in Dias’s wake ten years later. He sailed up the east coast of Africa and crossed the Indian Ocean to India, opening up the first sea route for the spice trade. On 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) sighted land in the modern Bahamas. He has gone down in history as the first European to glimpse the New World, though Columbus himself never appreciated this, believing that he had actually reached Asia. He made three further voyages, discovering many of the Caribbean islands and the mainland of Central America. Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480–1521) followed Columbus and is credited with the discovery of the strait between the Atlantic and the Pacific that bears his name to this day. His ship continued west to complete the first circumnavigation of the world, though Magellan did not survive to see the expedition’s triumphant return to Spain, having been killed in the Philippines on 27 April 1521.

  All these men owed a huge debt to the great figure of Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), the Portuguese prince whose base in south-west Portugal became an academy for explorers, cartographers, shipwrights and instrument makers. There, the design of European ships was revolutionized, navigational instruments and techniques developed and improved, and impetus given to the great voyages of exploration and colonization.

  As I ended my researches in the Torre do Tombo, a mood of utter confusion engulfed me. I spent a misty evening sitting in a bar on Lisbon’s waterfront, looking out at Henry the Navigator’s statue. His enigmatic smile was one I now understood. We both shared a secret: he had followed others to the New World. The mor
e I brooded, the more intrigued I became. Who were these master mariners who had discovered and charted these new lands and oceans without leaving any trace of having done so, other than these enigmatic maps?

  The identity of the master hand was revealed in a curious way. The coasts of Patagonia, the Andes mountains, the Antarctic mainland and the South Shetland Islands had all been drawn with remarkable accuracy on one chart. The distances covered, from Ecuador in the north to the Antarctic peninsula in the south, were immense; a huge fleet must have been required. There was only one nation at that time with the material resources, the scientific knowledge, the ships and the seafaring experience to mount such an epic voyage of discovery. That nation was China, but the thought of searching for incontestable proof that a Chinese fleet had explored the world long before the Europeans filled me with dread. An attempt to uncover the details of any event from nearly six centuries ago would have been daunting enough, but this one was made even more difficult by one massive, perhaps insurmountable, obstacle. In the mid-fifteenth century almost every Chinese map and document of the period was deliberately destroyed by officials of the Chinese court, following an abrupt reversal of its foreign policy. Far from embracing the outside world, after these momentous discoveries China turned in on itself. Anything commemorating its expansionist past was expunged from the record.