Columbus Day is already held in low regard, if not contempt, by many in the United States. Back in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the “new world” prompted much discussion about the meaning of the European eras of discovery and colonization and their impact on the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Those towing the traditional line cast Columbus in a heroic light, while his detractors portrayed him as a villain who initiated an age of genocide. Both sides, however, concurred on at least one simple fact that every schoolboy thinks he knows: Columbus discovered the Americas. But did he?
According to British author Gavin Menzies, he most definitely did not. Instead, Menzies asserts, the Chinese, some seventy before Columbus, set out on grand voyages of discovery from 1421 through 1423 and became the first to visit and chart on maps not only North and South America but Antarctica, New Zealand, and Australia as well. If Menzies is right, we should wipe Columbus Day from the calendar and begin celebrating the Day of the Eunuchs instead. This new holiday would belatedly honor the eunuch admirals who commanded nearly all of the ships of the treasure fleets of Zhu Di, the third Ming emperor whose desire to bring unknown lands into the Chinese system of tribute was purportedly the driving force behind the discovery voyages that Menzies describes.
Menzies develops his stunning thesis in great detail in the book
1421: The Year China Discovered the World. Not surprisingly, the book has aroused some strong opposition, as might be expected from a text that aspires to topple more than half a millennium of received wisdom. In his postscript, Menzies equates any criticism of his thesis with a knee-jerk defense of tradition, but that is not necessarily so. For this reader, the ideas presented in
1421 are fascinating to contemplate but never convincing. Instead, reading
1421 has taken me on my voyage of intellectual discovery that includes an exploration of historical epistemology and of the sometimes-nebulous divide between believing and knowing.
The most serious obstacle to accepting Menzies’s claims as historical truth is the lack of documentary evidence. History is, to a large extent, inter-textual; it is built on a foundation of words. The validity of a secondary text depends on the strength of its primary sources. In this sense,
1421 is a structure of epic proportions build on a foundation of emptiness. Simply put, Menzies provides no primary source evidence because such sources do not exist, or at least have not been found to date. European explorers like Columbus left a wealth of first-hand accounts charting the course of their journeys and describing their experiences. We know that the European voyages of discovery took place because their existence is sealed in words. Menzies offers nothing comparable, and for this reason his narrative falls short of the standards of history. Words are like watchers in the forest when the proverbial tree falls. The dearth of primary-source evidence doesn’t disprove Menzies’s account, but without such evidence, his narrative is at best something less than history, something akin to a tree falling in an un-peopled forest.
Menzies does provide an explanation for the lack of primary source evidence. In 1421, shortly after lead admiral Zheng He and the other eunuch commanders set sail, a terrible fire destroyed much of the Forbidden City that Zhu Di had built when he moved the Chinese capital from Nanjing to Beijing. The Chinese viewed such a catastrophe as an omen, a sign of divine disapproval for an emperor whose ambitions had over-reached into hubris. In response, Zhu Di withdrew his support for the discovery voyages and suspended all foreign travel after the close of the present mission. Zheng He returned to China more than two years later to find himself at the head of a fleet without purpose. The following year, Zhu Di died, and his successors only extended the insular and isolationist policies that characterized the last years of Zhu Di’s reign. For the succeeding emperors, however, it was not enough to lock China in time and place for the present and future; any attempts to reach out to the world in the past had to be expunged from the record as well. In this manner, Menzies accounts for how the world’s greatest voyages of discovery could have vanished without documentary trace. Notwithstanding the unlikelihood that the emperors’ long reach could have extended to every public and private account of the voyages, offering a plausible explanation for why there are no primary sources is quite distinct from having them in hand.
Lacking the primary sources that are generally the foundation of history, Menzies turns to other kinds of evidence. Most extensively he relies upon maps. Menzies asserts that the European explorers, no matter how daring and brave, were neither sailing into uncharted waters nor discovering anything new. Instead, they were following in the wake of their Chinese predecessors. To support this claim, Menzies presents a series of 15th century world maps that appear to chart landmasses prior to the dates of their discovery by Europeans. In addition, he cites passages from explorers’ journals that suggest they sailed with cartographical guides to the places they were later credited with discovering. In the Internet discussions of
1421, some of Menzies’s critics argue that the cartographic evidence is the product of either forgeries or Menzies’s misreading of genuine maps.
Due to my own cartographical ignorance, I am not equipped to enter this debate. Even so, I do recognize a logical problem in the way that Menzies uses maps in
1421. The basic argument is this: 1) Europeans relied upon preexisting maps in their voyages of “discovery”; 2) someone must have preceded the Europeans to create the maps; 3) the Chinese had the resources and technological expertise required to embark on such voyages in the first half of the 15th century; 4) therefore, the Chinese must have discovered the world. There is a leap of logic between the argument’s third and forth steps, and this leap occurs precisely at the divide between believing and knowing. The conclusion is, in the end, a non-sequitur, for, without ample primary source evidence, it does not follow, no matter how tantalizing Menzies’s reading of the maps may be. This pattern repeats throughout
1421 and is what makes the book so exasperating to read. Its claims are often plausible enough that one can’t dismiss them as mere counterfactual or fantasy, but they are never grounded deeply enough in evidence to be acceptable as fact.
Beyond the cartographical, Menzies provides several other categories of support, all of which is interesting to ponder but none of which rises above reasonable doubt. The Chinese, Menzies claims, left physical traces of their presence in disparate parts of the world—from shipwrecks and stone observatory towers to shards of Ming-era pottery and pieces of jade jewelry. In addition, many plant and animal species native to one continent turn up in others, and Menzies attributes this, too, to the Chinese voyages of discovery. Finally, in perhaps the boldest claim of the book, Menzies asserts that the Chinese not only were the first to discover the Americas; they were the first to colonize it as well. He cites passages in European explorers’ journals that describe meetings with Asiatic people in the Americas quite distinct from their indigenous neighbors and insists that DNA testing is beginning to show unequivocally a Chinese presence in places like Mexico and Peru and the Great Plains and American Southwest.
Menzies does cite studies to support the DNA claims, but I am ill-equipped to judge the validity of the studies. For other claims, he relies on either antiquated sources or none at all. For example, in the postscript, Menzies alludes to three jade pieces found in Central America that have been determined to be “unquestionably” of Chinese origin. However, anyone who follows the endnote will discover that this claim is based on a chemical evaluation conducted in 1886. I know nothing about the nature of chemical evaluation processes used in 1886 beyond the fact that no one but Menzies has likely relied upon them for anything in more than a hundred years. Then, in one of the most bizarre assertions of
1421, Menzies states that Navajo elders “to this day understand Chinese.” Having visited the Navajo reservation and heard the language spoken and knowing that Chinese dialects display such regional variation that a person from Suzhou sometimes can’t understand someone from Nanjing (two cites in the same province), I find it laughable to imagine that a Chinese speaker could show up in Gallop, New Mexico, and find a single receptive ear. Most alarmingly, Menzies cites no source for the claim. Such shoddy documentation alone would be enough to sink
1421 deep in the mire of doubt. As it stands, it only pulls the book a little deeper down.
Lacking adequate support, Menzies is left with gaps that he fills with conjecture. Early in my reading of the book, I began to underline the past conditional verb phrases that appear with great frequency: might have been, must have been, would have been. Eventually, I gave up the effort, for such phrases recur so often that it was becoming exhausting to note them in every instance. More troublingly, they regularly appear in passages laced with descriptive language designed to leave the impression that the scene is something more than speculation. Here’s an example:
Seamen would have worked frozen and soaked to the skin and shouted themselves hoarse in a vain attempt to be heard amid the shrieking of the wind through the rigging, the creaks and groans of timbers as the hull flexed and twisted in a swell like none other on earth, and the roar and hiss of waves breaking over the bows and foaming away through the scuppers. The prow would have dragged itself free of one giant wave only to bury itself immediately in the next. There would have been little respite for the men below decks, their clothes permanently sodden and the pitching and heaving of the ship so severe that sleep would have been all but impossible. (183-184)
The combination of such concrete sensory details with such uncertain verb constructions strikes me as a sign of intellectual dishonesty and an attempt to seduce with words. The vivid descriptions invite us to experience a scene on a voyage that the verbs acknowledge may or may not have transpired. It seems that the seduction was quite successful, for, as the book cover proudly proclaims,
1421 became an international bestseller. However, I’m not sure where to file this book on my shelf. “Might have beens,” no matter how frequently or artfully employed, never add up to “was,” and history is a discipline that traffics in “was.”
In time, perhaps Menzies’s thesis will be proven true, and the history of the world will be revised accordingly. Based on
1421, however, the time for such a radical revision is not yet upon us. Menzies alludes often to the book’s companion web site where corroborating evidence will be presented and updated, but, as a book, it must stand or fall on its merits in the printed form. As history,
1421 falls short. Consequently, America still tilts toward Europe on its historical axis, and we need not sweep Columbus Day from our calendars but can continue to note its passage each October with a shrug, a sneer, or smile. And for now, at least, we can hold onto the view that, figuratively and literally, it took balls to discover the “new world.” The Day of the Eunuchs has not yet arrived.
