Menzies pieces together many types of evidence, but do they stand up to scrutiny? Let's examines some....

First, Menzies claims on page 103 that there are inscriptions on a large red sandstone rock some 3 meters high, standing on the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic, which he photographed. Interestingly enough he does not provide us with any copies of his photographs, or even line drawings of the inscriptions, which he claims are in the Malayalam language (a language spoken by millions of people in south India). Menzies then claims that the Chinese carved these Malayalam inscriptions, which he never translates for us. He simply mentions them and then moves on to ancient maps....

....Unfortunately, Menzies doesn't seem to have actually had a good look at the writing on the Piri Reis map, for the Turkish admiral clearly states on each part of his world map from where he obtained the information. In the corner of the map, near South America and Antarctica is the following inscription in Turkish (using the Arabic script):

This section shows in what way this map was drawn. In this century there is no map like this map in anyone's possession. The hand of this poor man has drawn it and now it is constructed. From about twenty charts and Mappae Mundi: these are charts drawn in the days of Alexander, Lord of the Two Horns, which show the inhabited quarter of the world; the Arabs name these charts Jaferiye-from eight Jaferiyes of that kind and one Arabic map of Hind, (India) and from the maps just drawn by four Portuguese ... and also from a map drawn by Colombo in the western region I have extracted it. By reducing all these maps to one scale this final form was arrived at. So that the present map is as correct and reliable for the Seven Seas as the map of these our countries is considered correct and reliable by seamen."

This part of the map was clearly drawn from several other earlier maps. The Caribbean section was taken from a map made by Columbus. The South America section was drawn from maps made during the time of Alexander the Great and his Generals who followed. It mentions Alexander, Lord of the Two Horns, (This could refer to Alexander the Great, or Ptolemy II, who collected maps at the Great Library in Alexandria.) It clearly mentions that Arabs created the original maps of this part of the world during the time of the Alexanders, not the Chinese less than a century earlier. Much of Menzies' arguments fail here.

What is puzzling about this is that Menzies lists a number of scholars in his footnotes that all clearly communicate what the notes on the side of the map state. Is Menzies deliberately trying to mislead us by failing to tell us about them or was his research so sloppy that he missed such an important point (which undermines every reference he makes to the Peri Reis Map. Perhaps Menzies was so intent in trying to find evidence for the Chinese that he simply missed such an important statement....

...A few pages later, Menzies claims that Megellan knew where to find the straight that separated South America from Antarctica, and that he sailed straight for it presumably because he had maps showing where the straight was. He then infers that the Portuguese gained this information from the Chinese, rather than informing us that Megallan had an Arab navigator on board who 'guided' him on his journey.

Menzies' chapter on the first colony in America proposes that a Chinese junk sank in the Sacramento River and that the survivors built a colony about seventy miles north-west of the wreck. Menzies quotes several studies, but does not provide us with the names of these studies, or indeed any footnotes that would help a researcher check out his claims. This lack of footnoting is very frustrating as the reader cannot check further into Menzies' sources. ...

....Menzies continues his errors into the next chapter, noting on page 243 "the Portuguese simply did not have the capacity to survey the islands with such accuracy - for the cartography of Antilia was amazingly good. I concluded that it could only have been the Chinese." This type of argument lacks credibility. Just because the Portuguese possessed maps of greater accuracy than their scientific ability could produce is not evidence that the Chinese made them. If it wasn't the Chinese, then it could have been anyone, including the Arabs who had long sailed the world and who may have been the first to develop the science of astronomy, giving us the names of 360 stars.

...The same goes for the following chapter where Menzies describes (pg 276) how explorer after explorer in the New World came across fair skinned people with white tunics. Were these Chinese as the book supposes or were these people of other races? This kind of speculation is interesting, but it is certainly not conclusive proof the Chinese ever arriving in the Caribbean.

...On page 285 Menzies protests that Syrian or Egyptian sailors would never have reached the Atlantic, and that their women would not have been taken on long voyages. If only Menzies had bothered to read the notes on the side of the Piri Reis map, where it boldly proclaims that Arab sailors visited the shores of North and South America during the time of the Ptolemy rulers.

Menzies has put together some interesting evidence, such as the carved stone on the island of Corvo off the coast of Portugal which displays a man seated upon a horse, his head uncovered and bald, his left hand on his horse and his right hand pointing towards the west. Below the rock is writing that has not been translated. Sorry, no pictures, no pen drawings, and no further mention of it, not even on the website.

...In chapter fifteen Menzies continues along the same logic. He mentions the Portuguese Cantino map of 1502 and then states …"My belief that it was based on information obtained form the Chinese voyages of 1421 -3 arose from Portuguese historian Antonio Galvao's comment about the map…." Which simply states that they had maps of the east. In the very next paragraph Menzies quotes from King Joao II of Portugal to his explorers "He recommended him very much to enquire whether beyond the Cape of Good Hope it was possible to navigate to India…. Then the king sent two of his trustworthy men who could speak Arabic well and were experienced travelers…."

No mention of speaking Chinese, just Arabic. At appears that Menzies has totally missed the fact that the Arabs were the sea merchants of the Indian Ocean (and beyond) from the time of Christ until the 1500's. He totally missed the fact that during the period before the Chinese fleet set sail there were over 100,000 Arab and Persian merchants living in Canton China! There were so many foreign merchants that strife had arisen between them and the Chinese. This is all well documented. It was Arabs who traded between Europe, India and China. It was Arabs who invented navigation and much of astronomy. It was Arabs who had mapped much of the globe. It was Arabs who brought merchant trade to China. And so the Portuguese King advised the explorers to take along Arabic speaking men not Chinese speaking men! But for some reason Menzies thinks this is somehow proof of a Chinese connection!

On page 332 Menzies claims to have examined a collection of old Arab maps and states, "the best Arabic medieval maps, such as those of Al Idrisi, bear no comparison in detail or accuracy to the Cantino of 1502. Although the Arabs understood how to calculate longitude by lunar eclipse, they never mastered how to measure time, with the necessary accuracy, something that the Chinese achieved, and hence the Arabs could not have produced the Cantino or the Waldseemuller chart." (See http://www.encyclopedia.mu/Nature/Geography/Maps/Arabic.htm for Al Idrisi's World Map)
And so in two sentences, Menzies dismissed an age old question of who developed these technologies first. Rather than researching the writings of various scholars on either side of this argument, Menzies looks at the Arab maps in the British Library and dismissed the Arabs. So, if it was not the Arabs, then it MUST have been the Chinese!

In Chapter 16 Menzies begins to describe to us the world from a 1470's Portuguese perspective, admitting that "Arabs had sailed over the whole known world for centuries." He admits that the Portuguese copied Arab ship designs in order to begin their sailing ventures. He admits that the Portuguese solved the problems of latitude with help from the Arabs, and that they used the Arab names for the star navigation, Arab charts and Arab navigators to guide them. He admits that the Portuguese learned from the Arabs that the Spice Islands could be reached by sailing west, rather than east. And then, much to our surprise, he insists that the maps that the Portuguese used were of Chinese origin. He states "One can only imagine the extraordinary impact these carts, based on the Chinese voyages of 1421 to 1423 must have had on the Europeans …" Excuse me, but I fail to catch the connection. After 14 pages of describing Arab accomplishments, the Chinese are suddenly credited with the production of the maps! Menzies' only connection with the Chinese is through Da Conti, who returned from the East by 1424, in disguise because he had converted to Islam. But Menzies is convinced that Da Conti sailed with the Chinese around Africa to the shores of Portugal. Interestingly enough, Da Conti's journals make no mention of this trip, neither the Chinese, nor Chinese navigators. Where did Menzies get his facts? He didn't. He simply implies that the Portuguese must have gotten their maps from the Chinese.

....In conclusion, let's ask another question. What nations of the world were very self focused, occupied by nomadic barbarians for great periods of time, and had periods of history where leaving their shores was forbidden? Ancient China comes immediately to mind. From 618 AD to 907 AD all foreign relations were banned in China. From 1264 AD - 1356 AD sea trade was slowly expanded so that Chinese junks began sailing to East China seas once again.

Then in 1421 China broke with their traditional history and launched a fleet of merchant ships. The huge fleet of Admiral Zheng He made at least one voyage around the Indian ocean before China again became self focused. In 1433 this exploration suddenly ceased. The emperor banned all merchants from going abroad. Sea travel was forbidden once again and all exploration suddenly ceased. Did China travel the world, carefully mapping out distant coasts along Antarctica and America? Menzies' book is the only one suggesting such an idea, and he does little to convince historians that he has uncovered any solid evidence to support his claims.

Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum's recent posts on talking parrots draw attention to the gullibility and ignorance of some journalists in matters linguistic. Sometimes it seems like there is no end to the linguistic claptrap that we must endure. Another example is the book 1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies. ...

...
The thesis of 1421 is that in the years 1421-1423 a Chinese fleet commanded by admiral Zheng He circumnavigated the globe, along the way visiting the Americas and Australia. That this expedition took place is a matter of record, well known to historians. You can read about it in Louise Levathes' book When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405-1433. It is undisputed that the Chinese reached as far as East Africa. What is new and controversial is whether they reached West Africa, the Americas, Antarctica, and Australia. Either way, it would make a great movie.

Reviews have been mixed. The New York Times was critical, as were The Asian Review of Books and Publisher's Weekly, but other publications, such as the Salt Lake Tribune, Science News, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Asian Reporter have been positive. Nonetheless, 1421 has been a major commercial success. Published in January, 2003 in hardcover by HarperCollins, a major publisher, it immediately reached the New York Times best-seller list. The paperback edition is currently number 23 in the paperback non-fiction category. It has been translated into a dozen languages. Menzies spoke at the National Press Club, the Asia Society, and Stanford University. A documentary is reported to be forthcoming. According to Library Journal, nearly 50 companies bid for the television rights.

{Note; A movie deal is said to have already been struck...refer to my earlier comments as Menzies as historical poison}

The first linguistic point raised in the book (p. 104) concerns an inscription found in the Cape Verde islands off the West coast of Africa, which Menzies attributes to Zheng He. Unable to identify the writing system, he wonders whether it is an Indian writing system and faxes a query to the Bank of India, which informs him that it is Malayalam. Unfamiliar with Malayalam, he asks where it was spoken and whether it was in use in the 15th century. According to Menzies, the Bank of India responded as follows:

Yes, it had been in common use since the ninth century. It has largely ceased to be spoken today, though it is still used in a few outlying coastal districts on the Malabar coast.
In fact, Malayalam is spoken by over 35 million people. It doesn't seem likely that the Bank of India was unaware of the principal language of Kerala State, one of the national languages specified in Schedule Eight of the Constitution of India. Maybe they were pulling Menzies' leg, or maybe he just can't get his facts straight. Whatever the problem may have been, this exemplifies his peculiar approach to research and the failure of his publisher to perform the most elementary fact checking. It's not like this is obscure information known only to specialists, available only at secret annual cabals. If you want basic information about a language, such as where it is spoken and by how many people, all you have to do is check the Ethnologue. If you don't know to do that, a Google search for "Malayalam language" produces 185,000 hits. For those without internet access, Malayalam will be found in any encyclopaedia.

Assuming that there is an inscription in Malayalam in the Cape Verde Islands, what does this tell us about Zheng He's voyage? Is there evidence that it dates to the 1420s? Whenever it was made, isn't the most likely hypothesis that an Indian made it? The content of the inscription might shed light on this, but although much is made of the writing system, we never find out what it says!

Moving on, at p. 226 we read:

Until the late nineteenth century, villagers in a mountain village of Peru spoke Chinese.
Even if this is true, this hardly demonstrates pre-Columbian contact between China and Peru. These Chinese-speakers could be the result of immigration to Peru in the nearly four-hundred years since the Spanish conquest.

Menzies continues:

There is also linguistic evidence of Chinese visits to South America. A sailing ship is chamban in Colombia, sampan in China; a raft, balsa in South America and palso in China; a log raft, jangada in Brazil, ziangada in Tamil.
We aren't told which of the 98 languages of Colombia, the 234 languages of Brazil, or the roughly 700 of South America as a whole, these words come from. In any case, isolated similarities like these are meaningless; it is easy to find a few words similar in sound and meaning in any two languages. At least two of the three examples here are wrong. You'd think that a Royal Navy man would know that a sampan is not a sailing ship; it is a small boat usually propelled by two oars. There is no Chinese word palso meaning "raft"; no Chinese syllable ends in /l/. And even if the pair of words for "log raft" are correct and their resemblance is not accidental, how would this prove contact between China and Brazil? Menzies is apparently assuming that the only way a Tamil word could get to Brazil is via Zheng He's fleet, and that it is likely that Brazilians would borrow a word for something with which they were no doubt already familiar from the tiny minority of Tamil speakers who might have accompanied the Chinese fleet.

[Update (2004/02/03): Kevin Ryan has pointed out that the Tamil form ziangada is also spurious. It is phonologically impossible since Tamil has no [z] sound and since the retroflex approximant sometimes romanized <z> (Tamil ழ) cannot appear in initial position. When I asked them about this form, Dravidianist Harold Schiffman agreed with Ryan, and Tamil scholar and native speaker Vasu Renganathan said that he knew no such word.]

Menzies gives further evidence of contact between China and the New World on p. 414:

Like the Waldseemüller chart, another map of Vancouver Island, called `colonie chinois' by its Venetian cartographer, Antonio Zatta, was published before Vancouver or Cook `discovered' the island. The Squamish Indians there have more than forty words in common with Chinese, including tsil (wet), also tsil in Chinese; chi (wood), which is chin in Chinese; and tsu (grandmother), which is etsu.
Menzies does not give the other 37 putatively similar words in Chinese and Squamish, nor does he cite sources for the Chinese and Squamish words. The fact that he is wrong about where the Squamish live (their territory is on the mainland of British Columbia, just north of the city of Vancouver, not on Vancouver Island) does not give confidence in his data. In any case, the examples that he does provide are dubious. Not one of the three words claimed to be Chinese is identifiable as Chinese.

The additional evidence to be found on the website isn't any better. Here's a doozy:

Linguistic groups - The Chinese, Basque and Navajo languages all belong to the Dene-Caucasian language group. Could this be coincidence, or could the fact that Zheng He's fleets visited all of these areas have resulted in such a linguistic distribution?
To begin with, the hypothesis that Basque, the North Caucasian languages, the Sino-Tibetan languages (which include Chinese), and the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit languages (which include Navajo), form a language family is not generally accepted by historical linguists. The evidence for it is very weak. But supposing they do, what could Menzies be arguing here? Does he think that Navajo and the other AET languages are the descendants of Chinese brought to North America in the 15th century? To anyone familiar with both Chinese and Athabskan, it is extremely implausible that Chinese could have been so transformed in only a few hundred years, or could have differentiated into more than forty diverse languages ranging from the Southwestern United States to Alaska. And where do Basque and North Caucasian fit in? Does he really think that Basque and the North Caucasian languages only reached their current locations in the 1420s?

Here's one more gem from the web site:

American Indian names which are Chinese (Martin Tai)
Columbus' arrival: met Indians = Yin dian (people from Yin [China])
Pizarro: Inca = Yin ka (people who live in Yin)
Vancouver: Inuit = Yin uit (people originating in Yin)
Here again it takes some effort to work out exactly what argument he intends to make. It seems to go like this:

/yin/ is a Chinese word meaning "China"
Several native American peoples call themselves by names containing /yin/
These peoples would have adopted as their own name the Chinese visitors' name for themselves
To begin with, I am unable to identify /yin/ as a Chinese word meaning "Chinese". The closest I can come is /yen/ 燕, the old name for the Beijing area. But surely people from all over China identified themselves as coming from China, not Beijing. Second, Menzies offers no account of the second part of each word, the residue after removing (y)in. None of the three make sense as Chinese. Third, it seems highly unlikely that people would adopt as their own ethnonym the name of foreign visitors. Finally, there are problems with each of the individual examples:

The word Indian is not the term by which the people first encountered by Columbus, the Taino, called themselves. It is a term that the Spanish applied to the inhabitants of the Americas, which they initially believed to be part of Asia.

The Inca did not call themselves Inka. In their language, Quechua, inka means "ruler, person of royal lineage".

As for Inuit, this is the plural of inuk. The /k/ is an inherent part of the word. Here is an extract from the entry in the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary With Aleut Cognates by Michael Fortescue, Steven Jacobson, and Larry Kaplan published in 1994 by the Alaska Native Language Center, p. 137:
PE [proto-Eskimoan] iŋuɣ or inuɣ `human being' ... this base, the orginal Eskimo ethnonym, is everywhere attested also in the senses `resident spirit', `core of boil' and `chick in egg'; cf. also perhaps Aleut iŋisxi-X `owner', ...
Menzies' decomposition into /yin/ and /uit/ is incorrect.

The linguistic "evidence" in 1421 is a joke.

It's sad that a major publisher obviously didn't do even the most elementary fact-checking or have the manuscript read by people competant to evaluate it, but it is worse that such nonsense has become a best-seller and is soon to be made into a documentary. What I want to know is, are the purveyors of this tripe incompetent? Or do they simply not care about the truth of their "non-fiction"?

[Update (2004/02/03): David Nash has brought two recent news items to my attention. There is a skeptical piece by Ken Ringle in the Washington Post of 12 January 2004 (p. C01). It reports that Menzies defended his work by pointing to the fact that:

...last October, Chinese President Hu Jintao told the Australian Parliament in Canberra that Ming Dynasty explorers had discovered Australia in the 1420s.
[update (2004/02/06): Courtesy of David Nash, here is the relevant passage from President Hu's address on Friday, 24 October 2003 to the Joint Meeting of the House and Senate of the Australian Parliament, as recorded in the Hansard at page 21,697, available here and here [PDF file].

Though located in different hemispheres and separated by high seas, the people of China and Australia enjoy a friendly exchange that dates back centuries. The Chinese people have all along cherished amicable feelings about the Australian people. Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China's Ming dynasty reached Australian shores. For centuries, the Chinese sailed across vast seas and settled down in what was called 'the southern land', or today's Australia.]

A politician's endorsement doesn't carry any weight in my book. Indeed, I think that this is rather disturbing. A Chinese invasion of Australia does not seem imminent, but this exemplifies the sort of real world trouble that claims like this can cause. It's best that they be based on real evidence. It is also worth pointing out that even if Zheng He visited Australia in the 1420s, he couldn't have "discovered" it; Australia had already been inhabited for at least forty thousand years.

The Contra Costa Times of 25 January 2004 reports that Menzies will not be going ahead with a dig to find a purported Chinese junk in Glenn County, California due to the insistence of one of the three landowners involved that he receive all television revenues that may result from the dig. The article contains a skeptical statement by Chico State University archaeologist Greg White.]

Most of his delusions arise from elementary methodological errors. Dearth of Chinese documents, he admits, drove him to scour European maps for support for his conclusions. Anyone familiar with medieval maps knows their data should never be accepted without corroboration, for no other type of document is so vulnerable to emendation and forgery. Moreover, it was the normal practice of cartographers of the day to fill their maps, beyond the limits of the known, with speculative lands and seas. Mr Menzies is indifferent to these reasons for caution. He repeatedly tells us that 'as soon as' he compared old maps with new ones he 'saw at once' resemblances which he seems to think eluded earlier scrutineers.

His conclusions become boringly predictable: a slip or squiggle on an old map means someone 'must have' seen and charted some real topographical feature. And who could the discoverer be but a member of the Chinese expeditions of the 1420s? According to a sample of the author's reasoning, 'their landfall [in South America] must have been around the Orinoco delta, for the Piri Reis map shows they had surveyed that small part of the coast with great accuracy.' But the Piri Reis map dates from 1513 and was compiled with access to the charts of European explorers who were well acquainted with that coast by then. Like all the weirdest theories, those of Mr Menzies also rely on flagrantly wishful readings of toponyms. The word 'con' on a speculative island on a fifteenth-century map is wrenched to mean 'volcano' and is instantly, bewilderingly transformed into 'solid evidence that someone had reached the Caribbean and established a secret colony there.'

To reckless reliance on misread maps, Mr Menzies adds childish misuse of objects of material culture. He infers 'early Chinese presence' in Mexico from items which are indeed old and Chinese but which were introduced to the country of their present location in recent times. Are there Chinese silks in the Philippines or pepper in Peking? They must have been brought by his pet explorers, rather than arriving as the documents say they arrived, by the normal processes of trade. Are there bananas in Hawaii or sweet potatoes in Polynesia? His Chinese must have taken them there. Is there an unusual ruin in Newport? Mr Menzies makes it out to be a Chinese astronomical observatory. Cynocephali – a decorative favourite with medieval mapmakers – are misrepresented as giant sloths trapped by the Chinese in Chile and transported to Peking. And 'how could drawings of cossacks have been made' in a Chinese book 'without a visit to the Arctic?' Instances of this breathtaking logic are legion. 'The Incas had a word for chicken at least forty years before the arrival of the conquerors' and so must have got it from the Chinese. Chickens, indeed, are a favourite preoccupation of our author. 'I had lived in Malaysia,' he enthuses in a characteristic passage, 'and remembered well how the morning call of Asiatic hens – kik-kiri-kee – was markedly different from the c**k-a-doodle-doo of their European counterparts;' so when he awakens in Peru to 'the familiar kik-kiri-kee' he leaps to a conclusion which will no longer surprise the reader.

The author's quest for the routes of the Chinese explorers follows not only chickens but also canards, wild geese and absolute turkeys. No doubt it will lead to big sales among readers of the Daily Star and Sunday Sport. It is the historical equivalent of stories about Elvis Presley in Tesco and close encounters with alien hamsters. It will mislead many and disillusion many more, setting back efforts to get western readers to acknowledge the real achievements of Chinese science and navigation of the middle ages. The publishers and PR types who have clustered round Mr Menzies with contracts for TV and syndication-rights are callous exploiters of vulgar sensationalism. Their protégé, however, seems honestly inebriated by those bar-room nights or enraptured by prayerful helpings of bacon sandwiches. Or maybe he is a devilishly clever ironist. One feature of the book suggests this: the alleged trail of the Chinese explorers from Mexico to Arnhem Land via Ruapuke {here he brings in NZ} is marked by what our author claims are documented sightings of 'men in white garments', who, he concludes, can only have been members of the Chinese expeditions. Perhaps, however, they were figments of a prophetic vision: the real men in white coats may yet be on their way.

Posted with the permission of the author, Dr. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Article to be in an upcoming issue of Literary Review (London, UK).

As a work of historical fiction, 1421: THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED THE WORLD would have been thought-provoking and a good yarn: intrepid Chinese admirals sailing the seven seas, meeting exotic alien peoples, boldly going where no civilized man had gone before in a sort of a 15th century Star Trek.

But, unfortunately, the book is presented as a collection of statements of fact.

According to author GAVIN MENZIES, 15th century Ming fleets sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, up the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, down the coast of South America, through the Magellan Straits, down to Antarctica, over to Australia, around to Massachusetts, up to Greenland (where for some reason they attacked the hapless Norse inhabitants), leaving colonies, inter-marriage and shipwrecks in their wake.

It would be nice if there were some evidence. I searched in vain for a potsherd, reliable carbon-14 date (these, Menzies tells us, are still being done), inscription, anything. Even when Menzies claims to have seen the evidence, he does not reproduce it. In one telling passage, he tells of his discovery of an inscription in Cape Verde in an unrecognizable script. Does he send it to the British Museum? A university? No. Noting that it looks like scripts on Indian banknotes, he sends it to the Bank of India, who pronounce that "it looks like Malayalam." Well, good: so it should be decipherable. Are we provided with a translation? No. Is the inscription reproduced in the book? No.

In short, Menzies seems to have considerable difficulty with what one would consider normal historical and archaeological investigation and evaluation. He seems to take every inscription and written report at face value, without regard for possible hyperbole, politics, propaganda, superstition or ignorance. If there is an inscription saying that Zheng He visited "3000 countries", then it must be true. If there is a report of a local myth about "yellow people" settling in the community or "boats like houses" sailing by, then this must have happened.

The book has a number of factual errors, which even I can identify, such as claiming that the Chinese picked up some mylodons (extinct giant sloths) when they stopped by Patagonia{These are the giant sloth they left to breed in NZ!} .

Menzies standard of proof typically runs as follows: identify some cultural feature (the evidence for which is usually far from solid), claim that the 1421 voyages are the "only" explanation, while at the same time ignoring (or being ignorant of) other similar cultural features that would tend to provide alternate explanations or contradict his. One distressing example: after quoting Verranzano's description of a visit up past what is now New England, Menzies says: "Verranzano was comparing elegant people with brass-coloured skin to the much darker and more uncouth people he had met farther south. He referred twice to "... their clothes -- dresses rather than the furs and animal skins worn by the people he had encountered previously". In other words, relatively civilized people with light skins could not possibly be indigenous.

This is at best intellectually sloppy. But large sections of the book are just whimsy: "When the Chinese met the people of Mexico it is highly probable that they would have been shown Palenque, the finest Mayan city." I admit, this is perhaps the worst example in the book, so it is slightly unfair to quote it, but nevertheless, it is hard to take the book seriously when Menzies has the Chinese inventing the group tour as well as paper money.

All of this is rather unfortunate, because Menzies is an engaging writer. He takes valid points which deserve elaboration -- e.g. that the study of history has for too long been Eurocentric and that there are undoubtedly many cross-cultural contacts that we do not yet know about -- and pushes them to make what I consider to be "political" points, e.g. that Columbus did not "discover" America and Cook did not "discover" Australia. But we already knew that.

He seems to have largely missed the point. There is considerable evidence of both trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic pre-Columbian contact in the Americas. However, while these incidences are fascinating, the historical question is, regardless of who got to point X first, what happened next? Now of course, it was not Columbus's voyage that started the development we now call the Age of Exploration which in turn lead to an era of global expansion and trade that ultimately ushered in the modern age. But his landfall in the New World in 1492 (even if, contrary to Menzies's assertions, he didn't know where he was) is a convenient and not entirely inaccurate place to put the main historical milestone.

And it was Captain Cook that started, for better or worse, the developments that led to the modern nations of Australia and New Zealand.

If Zheng He and Co. really did visit the Americas and Australia, it was a historical dead-end. Perhaps as a result, Menzies also seems to want to demonstrate that the only reason the latter-day Western explorers set out on their voyages was that they already had accurate charts based on the Chinese "discoveries" and so already knew where they were going, and that therefore the explorers were not as "great" as we thought they are, that they did not just set sail into the unknown. But we knew that already, too.

I need to say that the Chinese voyages Menzies posits are (probably) not impossible; after all, prehistoric Malay peoples sailed all the way to Madagascar and settled there; Polynesians found that speck of land we now call Easter Island, Thor Heyderdahl crossed oceans on bundles of reeds. In addition, it seems quite possible that Chinese geographical knowledge found its way into the maps or at least the thinking of 15th century European explorers, along with similar information from the Arabs, Phoenicians, etc. plus a certain amount of mythology, logic and guesswork.

However, Menzies's proofs have a circular quality to them. He first posits that the Chinese did sail to the Americas and charted them. These charts play an important part in the argument, since there is no direct evidence of Chinese landfall in any of the places he mentions. These charts, he claims (again without direct evidence) traveled to Europe where there were then used by Western mapmakers. To demonstrate this, he takes Western maps, which he claims show actual geographical elements (as opposed to conjecture) that the Europeans could not possibly have known about (he claims) from their own prior experience or any other source of information close to hand, leaving the Chinese charts as the only possible source. Thus the Western charts become the evidence for the Chinese charts which he first used to explain the Western charts.

As I say, this is all most unfortunate. As our knowledge expands, it seems clear that pre-modern peoples knew a lot more than we have generally given them credit for, and that there were many cross-cultural contacts that we do not yet know about.

While one can understand Menzies's enthusiasm for the big story, the truth is ultimately more interesting.

I don't know which is worse

Readers who read Menzies' 1421 and think it's factual ...

OR ...

Readers who read Brown's Da Vinci's Code and think it's factual ...

Review By Dan Gibson. http://nabataea.net/1421.html

....In conclusion, let's ask another question. What nations of the world were very self focused, occupied by nomadic barbarians for great periods of time, and had periods of history where leaving their shores was forbidden? Ancient China comes immediately to mind. From 618 AD to 907 AD all foreign relations were banned in China. From 1264 AD - 1356 AD sea trade was slowly expanded so that Chinese junks began sailing to East China seas once again.

"From 618 AD to 907 AD all foreign relations were banned in China"

I know people need to refute Menzies' theory, however, they still need to do so without contradicting historical facts themselves:

"From 618 AD to 907 AD all foreign relations were banned in China"

That is absolutely false. The early Tang dynasty was one of the most open eras in Chinese history. If all foreign relations were "banned", how did Nestorian Christianity arrive in China in 635 AD?

"From 1264 AD - 1356 AD sea trade was slowly expanded so that Chinese junks began sailing to East China seas once again."

That is not true either. Oceanic trade flourished during China's Song dynasty, it did not just begin to expand during the Mongol Yuan period. And Chinese sailors did sail in the Indian Ocean as well, Indian Ocean trade was not completely monopolised by the Arabs.

Menzies' theory is dubious, but this review is not of a high quality either. The reviewer simply has no basic knowledge of Chinese history. Does one really need to raise up the Arabs so high at the expense of the Chinese in order to refute Menzies? Better be careful or this reviewer might end up no better than Menzies himself.

Yes, that is odd. I don't know why they chose the Tang, which the most open of all the Chinese dynasties for foreign contact.
MY point in posting these, like I mentioned at the beginning, was because I was told that scholars generally accept Menzies theory...there is so much evidence that only fits Menzies theories provided on his website & book (of course!)...and that with the NZ errors aside there has not been much criticism of Menzies and his 'thesis stands'. This was sent to me by a Professor of History, Xinzheng, China. That is scary.
This post is to show that there is a mass of rebutal. It is freely availible.
When Hu Jintao tells Australians in their own country about 1420 arrivals then things are going too far.
If you dont like the Tang part then what about the comments on the maps coming from Arab sources and such. Each commentator has a niche of knowlege (linguistics for example) and based on this persons knowledge of Arab sea faring he actually refutes numerous claims of Menzies. Leave out a paragraph that is opinion of the author and check out the facts that he gives that can be confirmed. The idea that Chinese knowledge inspired these maps requires actually avoiding reading the footnootes by the maps creators!

Follows, the substance of a complaint from Dr. Geoff Wade, Singapore, October 2005 (lodged with this website on 12/13-10-2005 - Ed)
I [Geoff Wade]have purchased a copy of Gavin Menzies' book, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, published by Transworld on the basis that it was classified as "History" in their catalogue. A detailed reading of the text revealed that the work is a fairtytale and fiction of the worst kind. I detail some of the outrageous fiction perpetrated within the volume:
Claims by Mr. Menzies followed by facts...
1. Claim: Four eunuch admirals - Hong Bao, Zhou Man, Zhou Wen and Yang Qing - led fleets to the Americas, Australia, Greenland and the Antarctic during voyages between 1421 and 1423.
Fact: There are no Chinese or other texts which suggest in any way that these four eunuchs, or any other Ming commanders, traveled anywhere at all beyond Asia, the Middle East and the East coast of Africa. All other voyages derive solely from Mr. Menzies' imagination. Further, the currents, winds and dates Menzies cites in support would not have carried the ships anywhere near where he claims. In short, there is no archaeological, textual or archival material to support the Menzies thesis as set down in 1421. In this book Menzies intentionally distorts known materials and deliberately alters known facts in order to support his thesis.

.....It all makes for a gripping read, even if the sum doesn't quite add up to the whole. For all the detail, Menzies is some way off providing proof. None of the supposed 28,000 colonists has left any documentary evidence because all records, boats and shipyards associated with his voyage were burnt by imperial order in 1433. This surely begs the question--if we know so much of Zheng He's voyages around the Indian Ocean, how come we know nothing of his trips further east? Nor, conveniently for Menzies, did any of the colonists return home in triumph. They either died en route or skulked home to obscurity after they were disowned by the emperor.

Introduction;
''Despite the overwhelming destruction of Menzies' book by historians, captains of the sea from various nations, he continues to sell books and insists in giving lectures to fool and exploit many thousands of readers.
Here is a collection of desultory notes regarding 1421: the Year China Discovered America written by Bill Hartz, in which he analyzes, meticulously, various points and demonstrates that Gavin Menzies is absolutely WRONG in All of them. ''

Bill Hartz's article:
''Gavin Menzies wrote 1421:The Year China Discovered America and labeled it non-fiction. It purported to be a factual rewrite of history: the true story of the previously unknown exploration of the world by the fleet of Zheng He in 1421-23.
The Chinese admiral was indeed the premiere maritime figure of his era, and his exploits are impressive, well known and documented. During seven voyages, 1405 - 1433, the ships of Zheng He’s fleet visited as many as 37 countries of the South Asia Seas, Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. Gavin now proposes they also discovered the world during the sixth trip in 1421. He contends they sailed through the Arctic Ocean and around Russia and Greenland, visited the Caribbean, the east and west coasts of North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica and many islands in the Pacific Ocean.
At least superficially the book looks as if it might be a serious history; it has the form, quite a few endnotes with source citations, a long bibliography, etc. And it has some heft, 552 pages. But alas, in our opinion it’s not really a history, it’s a poser, and belongs on the fiction list. Gavin promised gravitas and delivered only avoirdupois. We speculate Gavin had the dream first, and then went looking for evidence to prove it real, couldn’t find any, so he just made it up.

How did I reach that view? Mainly by slogging through the author’s source citations. Gavin’s problem was that he had to include endnotes and source material. And if you can find the material he cites, much of it is rather obscure, the odds are you will find that the source doesn’t say what Gavin claims. But then Gavin was in a pickle. If he hadn’t put in source notes, no one would have taken him seriously from the beginning, no one would have believed his nonsense, he might not even have found a publisher, and few would have bought the book if it had made it into print. It seems his only hope was to misuse, manipulate and misstate some legitimate source material to support his dream, and pray few would take the time and trouble to check the source cited. And apparently that’s what has happened. I have even read reviews impressed with the number of notes - clearly they hadn’t taken the time to locate and read them.

My comments on a few of Gavin’s nonsensical claims, and the source materials he abused, follow. Hoping to save some prospective researchers the effort of plowing the same field yet once more, spending time tracking down often obscure references, we have included rather long quotes in some cases. Here are some of his tricky propositions, we contend more than sufficient to illustrate Gavin’s method, and his willingness to misrepresent the materials in an effort to sell his story.


--------------------------------------------------------------------

Zheng He inscriptions/China.
Gavin begins a discussion of the two carved stone tablets Zheng He erected in thanks to Tianfei, the “Celestial Spouse”. Gavin writes, “The first was in Chiang-Su, Fujian Province, and the second at Liu-Chia-Chang ...”
That is not correct. Gavin has them reversed. The first was erected March 14, 1431 at the Palace
of the Celestial Spouse at Liu-Chia-Chiang, near the mouth of the Yangtze River, Jiangsu (Chiangsu) Province. The second was erected between 5 Dec 1431 and 3 January 1432 at Ch’ang lo (now Changle) at the mouth of the Min River in Fujian Province.
Then comes a quote from the first tablet, at the temple now known as the Jinghai Temple at Nanjing, Jiangsu Province.
“From the time when we, Cheng Ho[Zheng He] and his companions at the beginning of the Yung Lo Period[or Youg Le - Zhu Di, 1404], received the imperial commission we have by way of the countries of Chan-Ch’eng (Champa), Hsien-Lo (Siam), Kua-Wu (Java), K’o Chih (Cochin) and Ku-Li (Calicut) reached Hu-Lu-Mo-Ssu [Hormuz , in the Gulf] and other countries of the western regions, more than three thousand countries in all ...”
The quote is from J.J.L. Duyvendak, “The True Dates of the Chinese Maritime Expeditions in the Early Fifteenth Century”, T’oung Pao, XXXIV, pp. 344-5.
If you look at the cited source you will see a footnote 2 follows “three thousand”, and in the footnote Duyvendak has written the Chinese characters for three thousand, and for thirty, illustrating the similarities; and his comment is - “Obvious copyist error for thirty.”
Note Duyvendak is not suggesting the stone carver made any error……. It is apparent Duyvendak believes the stone was correctly carved to read 30 and someone subsequently made the error copying the stone or transcribing a written record. Unfortunately, the stone is no longer extant. It is important to know what Duyvendak actually wrote, because at page 82 Gavin makes an unfounded claim, that Duyvendak and others thought the stone mason made the error. That’s Gavin’s mistake, or invention. Duyvendak thought and wrote that it was a “copyist error”.
{note; the 1st tablet is lost. The 3,000 countries figure was thought to be translators error even in 1935 since the second tablet has a rubbing which says 30 and names the many countries. The point here is being all that follows is based on ignoring the more secure example and ignoring the Duyvendaks’ own notation to the first}
Duyvendak includes the provenance of this first tablet’s language at pp. 341-2.
“The first inscription was published in an article, signed October 2nd 1935, by Cheng Hao-sheng on pp. 30-31 of the journal Kuo-feng Vol. VII, no 4, issued November 1st 1935. ……
… Gavin refers to a different source for {the second inscription}, but by the same J.J.L.Duyvendak, China’s Discovery of Africa, Probsthain, 1949, p. 29. It’s not clear just why Gavin picked this publication as it only contains parts, not the complete translation of the inscription. And, the entire translation is included in the Duyvendak source mentioned above, “The True Dates ...”, at pp. 349-355, as well as a photograph of a rubbing of the entire inscription.

Ahem. The entire translation of the Changle tablet is also available on line at http://www.umn.edu/hist1012/primarysource.htm. This was posted and is maintained by the University of Minnesota, Department of History. Take a look. As you will see, the first part of the tablet is a general review of his accomplishments, and in part Zheng He writes:
“... From the third year of the Yongle (1405) till now (1431) we have seven times received the commission of ambassadors to the western ocean. The barbarian countries which we have visited are: by way of Zhancheng (Champa), Zhaowa (Java), Sanfoqi (Palembang) and Xianlo (Siam) crossing straight over to Xilanshan (Ceylon) in South India, Guli (Calicut), and Kezhi (Cochin), we have gone to the western regions Hulumosi (Hormuz), Adan (Aden), Mugudushu (Mogadishu), altogether more than thirty countries large and small. We have traversed more than one hundred thousand li of immense water spaces ...”
……..As to the sixth voyage Zheng He wrote:
“In the nineteenth year of Yongle (1421) commanding the fleet we conducted ambassadors from Hulumosi (Ormuz) and the other countries who had been in attendance at the capital for a long time back to their countries. The kings of all the countries prepared even more tribute than previously.”

What is important is what Zheng He did not write - nothing about discovering new countries, new continents, new worlds. We are confident that if his fleet had made such discoveries they would have been mentioned. Though ostensibly the tablets were erected by Zheng He to recognize the miraculous and numerous interventions by Tianfei, Levathes notes the following:
“In addition, however, the tablets carefully documented the achievements of each voyage, no doubt as Zheng He surely wished them to be remembered. But familiar as he was by now with the court’s strong opposition to the voyages, he may have been unsure how the official chroniclers would record the expeditions.” ( Louise Levathes, When China ruled The Seas, The treasure fleet Of The Dragon Throne, 1405-1433, 1994, Oxford University Press, New York, p. 170.)
The tablets make it very clear that when Zheng He mentions he traveled more than 100,000 li, he is stating his cumulative total for his career of seven voyages. Note also in the second tablet, placed at Changle, Zheng He clearly states he visited “...altogether more than thirty countries large and small...” What does Gavin put in his page 82 quote regarding the second tablet? He skips the part altogether about “more than thirty countries”; he leaves it out. And, as you might guess, he doesn’t include any of the language that specifically related to voyage number six. Contrary to what the author claims, Zheng He’s tablets make it clear nothing remarkable, nothing unexpected happened on the sixth voyage……
… …And then at page 90 Gavin writes:
“From the inscriptions on the carved stone erected by Zheng He in the Palace of the Celestial Spouse at Lui-Chia-Chang, I knew they had sailed forty thousand miles
( 100,000 li ) on their sixth voyage-almost twice around the globe.” !

However, to repeat, as we know Zheng He claims he visited thirty some countries, total, and traveled more than 100,000 li, total, in all of his voyages. It was written in stone by the admiral himself. And this is in accord with the chronicle of Ma Huan, as well as the official Ming shih biography of Zheng He, and the sailing instructions known as the Mao K’un map. These basic source records, which are united in their opposition to his claims, present an insuperable problem for Gavin and his fantasy.
Cape Verde inscription

At pages 102-3 Gavin writes:
“It was highly probable that they [Chinese] had also left a stone on one of the Cape Verde Islands, carved with inscriptions in a language they thought people from the surrounding areas would understand ... found a large, free-standing stone near the coast at Janela. The stone still stands there today ... of red sandstone, some three metres high and covered with inscriptions from top to bottom….....” photos were taken and sent to “experts at the Forrest of Steles in Xian, China.” They couldn’t identify the language. The author then faxed a copy of his picture to The Bank of India, and they advised it was Malayalam. This was wonderful news for the author, so elated, “... I punched the air in my excitement.” Excited because he knew it must be another piece of the evidence puzzle needed to support his grand theory.

Does this make any sense at all, the Chinese would erect a stele on Cape Verde and carve the inscription in Malayalam? …..{M}aybe mariners from Kerala did call at Janela, Cape Verde, and they carved the stele in their own language. That’s the simplest, most straight forward explanation - Occam’s Razor…
{as others have noted Menzies’ claims the language is little used, but 35 million people use it and incredibly he neglects to even get it translated before further heading off course}


The Congo
At the bottom of Livingston Falls, near Matadi, The Congo, Gavin congers up another identical stone with the same sort of inscription, the same concentric designs, which he again attributes to the Chinese {as he decided that Maori curvilinear rock art in NZ were Chinese signatures also}, evidence they sailed 83 miles up the Congo River (page 105)…..

…And here we have an example of another facet of Gavin’s style: only mention the interesting finds, but hide the tangible evidence from the reader. These stones are important pieces in his evidence trail and he refuses to share with the reader the same pictures he sent to the “experts at the Forrest of Steles in Zian”, and to The Bank of India. And he refuses to share the translation of the Malayalam inscription with the reader. We have no doubt he would have, had it supported his fantasy. And perhaps those thirty million present day speakers of Malayalam on the southwest coast of India would also be interested to learn of his amazing find.

North Island, New Zealand
At page 173 Gavin writes:
“... On the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand...near the mouth of the Torei Palma River at Whaingaroa...a huge stone carved in what local experts say is Tamil calligraphy stands at the point where the river empties into a little harbor. In shape, size and location this stone corresponds with those set up by the Chinese mariners in the Yangtze estuary, at Dondra Head, at Cochin on the Malabar coast of India, at Janela in the Cape Verde Islands and by the Matadi Falls in the Congo delta. In addition to the calligraphy, the Ruapuke stone has the same patterns of concentric circles as the stone Janala”
Gavin accepts the “local experts” advice that the calligraphy is Tamil. And, with a straight face insists again the Chinese armada of 1421 carved it and placed it there. And, what did this one say? That might be interesting. I guess Gavin thought the inscription wasn’t very important. It probably just translated something like - Hello, all you folks from Tamilnadu. If you ever reach here, we were here first.

{here Menzies’ is using the ‘’tattooed rocks’’ to further his theory. These are about 2 hours driving from where I live and I have photographed and researched them for the NZ Archaeological Assoc. records. Needless to say there is no Tamil script visible even in photographs taken 100 years ago by A. Hamilton nor my pictures taken in recent times. Hence there is no translation by Menzies. See my thread on CHF for more information refuting Menzies NZ evidence. Pure fantasy.}

Inscriptions in Brazil
More carved stones are presented at page 173.

“I had already found a number of carved stones at sites visited by the Chinese fleets, so my next step was an obvious one. Sure enough, a search on the internet soon revealed several more on the route from the Cape Verde Islands down to Patagonia, at Santa Catarina, Coral Island, Campeche and Arrorado(sic) Island on the east coast of South America...each is also sited beside a watering place and overlooks the sea, and the concentric circles inscribed on them match those at Ruapuke...”

Gavin doesn’t include any pictures of his evidence, but you may inspect these carved stones. Just go to www.bradshawfoundation.com, scroll down and click on Campeche Island. In addition to Campeche you will find pictures of the geometric petroglyphs at Arvorado, Coral, Little Sister and Santa Catarina Islands, Santa Catarina State, Brazil. Carbon dating of middens (refuse mounds) at Santa Catarina shows people living in the area for about 5,000 years.

The petroglyphs have not been dated. However, note there are over 130 on Campeche alone. And, you can see the rocks show a variety of styles, designs and patterns that likely represent the output of a number of local prehistoric artists over many years. The technique is primitive and doesn’t reflect the level of skill attained by Chinese stone carvers in 1421. None of these were done by Gavin’s fantasy fleet. This is just more of his never ending nonsense…..
Hong Kong inscriptions
And then at Page 175 Gavin finds even more carved stones, more alleged evidence of Chinese presence.
“The proof would be all the more conclusive if I could find similar carved stones in China. Another long search produced three more, at Wong Chuk Ha, Chang Zhou and Po Ti in Hong Kong. Again, these stones had similar markings to the ones I had already found. I now believed that the concentric circles were a ‘signature” agreed upon before the armada set sail, denoting where each fleet had landed and watered ...”

Again Gavin refuses to provide the reader with any pictures of his “evidence”. But again, you may conger up the stones yourself. They are available at the web site of an official Hong Kong government agency, the Antiquities and Monuments Office, responsible for archaeology, historical buildings, education and publicity: http://www.amo.gov.hk/en/monuments.php. If you then click on ‘Hong Kong Island’ you will find Wong Chuk Hang. If you click ‘Outlying Islands’ you can see the carving at Cheung Chau and Po Toi. (Po Toi was the site of the denouement in The Honorable Schoolboy.)

Gavin neglected to mention this {information on the Hong Kong stone}. It includes the following note:
“Most of the ancient rock carvings in the territory overlook the sea, but this one is about 300 meters from the coastline. However, it is believed that in the past, the sea inlet might have extended up to this point. The design shows geometric patterns composed of spiral squares and circles which closely resemble those on Bronze Age artifacts. It is thus quite safe to deduce that they were carved by early inhabitants of this area in the local Bronze Age some 3000 years ago.”…..

…..And we speculate that’s the reason pictures were not provided by Gavin: it would have then been too easy to identify his claimed evidence as bronze age artifacts, and thus not helpful at all, as he is only interested in proving a Chinese visit in 1421 AD. It seems Gavin is willing to hide and misrepresent his “evidence” to accomplish that goal…...

Piri Reis
… At page 114 Gavin introduces the Piri Reis map of 1513 stating:
“... I had found an inscription on the southern part of the Piri Reis map stating: ‘ It is related by the Portuguese Infidel [Columbus] that in this place, night and day are, at their shortest period, of two hours duration, and at their longest phase of 22 hours.’ 2 For the winter daylight to have lasted only two hours, the man who originally drew the chart and made that note must have been in the deep southern tip at a latitude of about 60o s(outh), well to the south of the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego. The map also shows what appears to be ice connecting the tip of South America to Antarctica ...”

The Piri Reis map is available on line, it may be downloaded from http://www.prep.mcneese.edu/engr/engr/engr...is/piri_r~1.htm.
…{S}omehow ...{Menzies}happened to overlook and leave out part of the translation. The complete quote is:
“It is related by the Portuguese infidel that in this place night and day are, at their shortest period, of two hours duration, and at their longest phase, of twenty-two hours. The day is very warm and in the night there is much dew.”…
….Note VIII refers to a good anchorage yet further south, theoretically closer to Antarctica and colder, and in part states, “... They saw people walking, all of them naked. But they shot arrows, their tips made of fishbone. They stayed there eight days. They traded with the people by signs. That bark [boat] saw these lands and wrote about them which [illegible]. The said bark, without going to Hinde, returned to Portugal and gave the news. They send eight caravels. They described these coasts in detail and from these it is copied.”..
…..Note X states, “This country is a waste. Everything is in ruin and it is said that large snakes are found here. For this reason the Portuguese infidels did not land on these shores and these shores are also said to be very hot.” This inscription is next to the image of a snake.
So Gavin uses part of Note VII to launch a riff on how the Piri Reis shows Antarctica. However, the complete note and four following clearly contradict this hypothesis since it was warm and getting warmer. As the notes progress southward on the map the people went around naked, spices were plentiful and then, there were lots of snakes, which don’t do well in the cold. This doesn’t support the “drift ice” and freezing Antarctica claim Gavin congers up from his fertile imagination. McIntosh …..{Menzies own source} concludes, “... As with many depiction’s on fifteenth and sixteenth-century maps, such as cities, peoples, animals, rivers, mountains, or geography, a coastline does not necessarily guarantee reality.”

Mythical creatures
{here follows an exposure of Menzies fallacies of mythical animals on ancient maps he misrepresents as to show real animals encountered by Chinese fleets....nevermind if they were extinct for thousands of years.}.
At page 116 Gavin names the first of “five creatures depicted on the map.” You can see these clearly, just to the right of note V. He first identifies one of them as a, “... deer with prominent horns ... clearly a huemil, an Andean deer, with the head and antlers accurately depicted ...”
The truth is this is a drawing of a well known mythical creature, a yale. A drawing is available at http://www.eaudry.com.myth.yale.htm..... on the Piri Reis this is the one with the antlers which look like a very early model table top TV antenna. According to the web site,“... the horns can move at will, to face different directions ...” …..
Second, Gavin mentions the creature just above the yale, but he incorrectly claims it is:
“... a guanaco. Guanacos are members of the camel family. They have curious, floppy ears which are bent forwards when they are excited or anxious. Andean people decorate guanacos’ ears with red tassels in the same way we would plait a horse’s mane. From a side view, the bent ears resemble forward-pointing horns. Clearly, the cartographer who copied the original chart mistook the bent ears for horns ...”

Another charming riff that sounds informed and authoritative, but in truth is just a lot of nonsense. The cartographer drew exactly what he intended, a bonnacon, another mythical creature. ….. See www.eaudry.com/myth/bonnacon.htm, ….{the website explains it}.. has curled horns that cannot hurt anyone.” Also if you look carefully at the creature on the map it has ears in addition to at least one curled horn on top of its head. This is obviously not a guanaco….
The third monster, he claims, is a mountain lion. ……McIntosh, op.cit., page 43, includes a translation of the nearby inscription, “They call this beast Sami”, but offers no further identification. We speculate it is another mythical creature..
The fourth creature is the naked, bearded man. Gavin takes another wrong turn and explains:
“At first glance he appears to have his head in the middle of his body, but on closer examination it seems perfectly possible that he had been drawn in a crouching position, allowing his thick beard to cover his genitals. I surmised the Turkish cartographer who copied the captured Portuguese chart onto the Piri Reis was almost certainly a Muslim. Muslims are very conservative about exposing their bodies; if the cartographer had indeed been of that faith, he would not have been comfortable depicting naked men.”
The truth is the little fellow isn’t crouching down to cover his privates with his beard. He just doesn’t have a head. He doesn’t have a neck either. His face is on his chest. He’s another one of those mythical characters, a blemyae. If you go to http://www.diegocuoghi.it/Piri_Reis /PiriR_eng.htm there is a picture on the first page, of a blemyae, a skiapod (one leg with a big foot) and a one-eyed giant. This site contains as well a discussion of the Piri Reis map….{T}hat’s not Antarctica across the bottom of the map, but Argentina.
{This type of creature I have heard of before, blemyae. It was believed real at the time}

…..The fifth creature, Gavin correctly surmises, is the well-known, but mythical, dog-headed man, the cynocephali. These were favored by cartographers to decorate maps. You can see two other dog headed creatures on the map, a little north west of the sitting cynocephali, dancing hand in hand. But, then the author sails off the chart again and decides, again, the cartographer didn’t know what he was doing, that the dog-headed man was really a mylodon.

Mylodons
Armed with this information Gavin calls several museums, with a query, “I’m looking for a monster twice the size of a human,” and he learns of the mylodon. But why ask for a creature twice the size when his selected evidence suggests it was no larger than a human? Because he needs a larger creature to fit a legend that appears later on in his book, in New Zealand.
He called four museums before he found a stuffed mylodon.
{This was amongst the most fanciful and ludicrous of Menzies’ NZ digressions. I have already given my own and Michael Kings’ scornful commentary on the idea of the introduction of an extinct giant sloth to NZ by Chinese treasure fleets. Laughable.}

His riff on the mylodon goes on for pages, even suggesting:
“... in recent years, well preserved pieces of this creature, apparently butchered by the local people, have been found in a cave, leading to the speculation that it may still exist in the wilds of Patagonia (p. 120).”
You may check it out. See the article at http://www.unmuseum.org.sloth.htm.

Remember the author wrote, ‘in recent years’. Truth is the remains found in Eberhardt’s cave in 1895 have since been carbon dated. “Dung found in the cave was more than 10,000 years old. The skin was estimated to be 5,000 years old. …… No additional evidence has turned up that the giant sloth survives today ...”

Why would the author even include such transparent nonsense, resurrecting an extinct mylodon?
We suggest Gavin doesn’t have any real evidence and he’s desperate. He’s setting up his “evidence” for a Chinese visit to New Zealand later, where a pair of the these long extinct animals allegedly escape from the Chinese, and later on, he maintains, were the basis for a local legend. So therefore the Chinese must have picked up the mylodons first, as they passed by South America, so they could escape later in New Zealand. See the following at page 172:
“The Chinese would have had to claw their way back against the current; as they did so, at least two of the great treasure ships were lost. The wreck of an old wooden ship was found two centuries ago at Dusky Sound in Fjordland at the south-west tip of New Zealand’s South Island. It was said to be very old and of Chinese build and ‘to have been there before Cook’, according to the local people.10...”

The source cited in endnote 10 is Robyn Gossett, New Zealand Mysteries, Auckland, 1996, p. 31. In the U.S. this book is a rare item, but I eventually was able to track it down. Gossett explains it was not “local people” but the Maori who were keeper of the legend. Gossett devoted three pages to her detailed exploration of the legend, which included access to the log of Captain Robert Murry (sic), who had been fourth officer on the ship. The wreck was not Chinese at all, rather, an English ship, the Endeavour, that went down in 1795.
{My hat goes off to the author of this article for detective work. He is entirely correct, since the late NZ historian Michael King had announced this also in his scornful review of Menzies work}

“By the time the ship reached Dusky Sound the Endeavour was in a bad way, and after a thorough inspection the officers and crew came to the only possible conclusion: the Endeavour would have to be abandoned ......just another wreck until imagination and rumor made her one of the mystery ships of the New Zealand coast.”

So when Gavin suggests it was an old Chinese wreck, he’s just pulling your leg. He knows better, since he obviously read Gossett, he quoted her [in part], and cited her. Also at page 172 see the following:
“A Sydney packet visited Dusky Sound in 1831 and two sailors from the crew ‘saw a strange animal perching at the edge of the bush and nibbling the foliage. It stood on its hind legs, the lower part of its body curving to a thick pointed tail and when they took note of the height it reached against the trees allowing a metre and a half for the tail, they estimated it stood nearly nine metres in height. The men were windward of the animal and were able to watch it feeding for some time before it spotted them. They watched it pull down a heavy branch with comparative ease, turn it over and tilt it up to reach the leaves it wanted’11... The animal described corresponds in size, posture and eating habits with the mylodons the Chinese could have taken aboard in Patagonia ...”

….Or, is Gavin once more fiddling with his source material{?}…..
….Gossett debunks a lot of weird New Zealand legends. See above where Gavin writes, “A Sydney packet visited Dusky sound in 1831 and two sailors from the crew ‘saw a strange animal ...’ ” Just preceding that Gossett writes:
“Even more bizarre was a story, also reported to the Collector of Customs in Sydney when the Sydney Packet returned home in 1831. One of the ship’s gangs which had beenstationed in Dusky Sound told of the discovery of an enormous animal of the kangaroo species.”
And continuing the quote above by Gavin, Gossett wrote:
“When it finally saw them, the animal stood watching the men for a short time, then made one almighty leap from the edge of the bush towards the water’s edge. There it landed on all fours but immediately stood erect before making another great leap into the water. The men were able to measure the first jump and found it had covered twenty yards. They watched the animal plough its way down the Sound at tremendous speed, its wake extending from one side of the Sound to the other ...”
“Here again one is tempted to think the rum was talking, and for an Australian going away from home for months on end, what other animal would stir the imagination but a kangaroo?...”
So Gavin was indeed diddling his source material again. The mysterious animal was named a kangaroo and jumped like a kangaroo in Gavin’s source, but he just left that part out since it wasn’t congruent with his mylodons across the ocean fable.

The author is a marvelous magician. In addition to transforming a number of well known mythical creatures into present day fauna; and a blemyae into an embarrassed Muslim; he changed a mythical, dog-headed man into a nine foot tall, long extinct mylodon and transported a pair of them, in 1421, from Argentina to New Zealand, where at least one issue grew to nine meters by the time he claims it was last observed in 1831.
Should the writer of such amazing nonsense be taken seriously by anyone?

Waldseemuller Map
{Menzies claims here that only Chinese knowledge could have created this maps West coast since they mapped the pacific coast in their travels and nobody had charted it before….yet again Menzies is misrepresenting and neglecting information from his own sources. His claims of the map are refuted here;}

… Amerigo Vespucci {hence ‘America’}with his pamphlet Mundus Novus (The New World) convinced many geographers, including Waldseemuller, that the previous discoveries to the west were not the West Indies, nor part of eastern Asia, nor just islands, but a separate continent. That shift in thinking required adjustments by the geographers. A new continent required a coast on the west side separated from Asia by an ocean. And that is what Waldseemuller believed, and what he drew - a conjecture, a hypothetical “Pacific coast”, due to his new set of beliefs, based on Mundus Novus; as yet not proven by anyone’s sighting of that west coast. And that is why it is labeled “unknown land” and doesn’t contain any detail, in contrast to the east coast.

Gavin has provided a picture of the Waldseemuller map in the third group of photos…….. However, it is so small that any detail is difficult to see.

Ahem. Fortunately, the map is now available on the internet. You may go to the Library of Congress site at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/lewisandclark/images/ree0001/jpg,
Waldseemuller wrote a short book to accompany the 1507 map….
“Now, these parts of the earth have been more extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci ( as will be set forth in what follows ). Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why any one should justly object to calling this part Amerige, i.e., the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability. ….”
Also in the lower left hand corner of the Waldseemuller map is a box which contains the following text, further recognition of Vespucci’s travels, and his influence on Waldseemuller.
“A general delineation of the various lands and islands, including some of which the ancients make no mention, discovered lately between 1497 and 1504 in four voyages over the seas, two by Fernando of Castile, and two by Manuel of Portugal, most serene monarchs, with Amerigo Vespucci as one of the navigators and officers of the fleet; and especially a delineation of many places hitherto unknown….”

Still at page 200 Gavin continues:
“... The west coast of North America from modern Canada to the equator is drawn boldly and clearly on the map ... (p 201) The Pacific coast of America is strikingly drawn on the Waldseemuller chart and the latitudes correspond to those of Vancouver Island in Canada right down to Ecuador in the south ... Oregon is clearly identifiable ... (p 414) The Waldseemuller map clearly depicts the island [Vancouver Island].”

Take another look at those nice large copies of the map you printed out, see if you can recognize any of those landmarks - Vancouver Island, Oregon, Ecuador. These are the landmarks that Gavin claims Waldseemuller copied from hypothetical, unnamed Chinese source maps. Nothing there, right?
Gavin must have thought you wouldn’t take the time to look, that you would have been carried along on the tide of his reassuring, confident, boldly written words.

The fact is none of it is discernible on the Waldseemuller map.
Gavin is pulling your leg. The fact is Waldseemuller didn’t have any data on that coast, from the Chinese, nor from anyone else, and what he drew was a nondescript, generic line, and marked it, both North and South, “TERRA ULTRA INCOGNITO” - unknown land…..

{Menzies stunning fantasy that follows is;}…..“The Waldseemuller map shows the coast with reasonable accuracy, charted just as one would expect from a ship passing by, but there is a gap in the latitude of the Gulf of Tehuantepec in Guatemala ... ”
At page 209 Gavin recognizes on the map ''300 miles of coastline between Manzanillo and Acapulco, “.…..clearly shown on the Waldseemuller map.”

Do you see it? Of course not. Does anyone? No.
How about Gavin, does he see it? No, he doesn’t see anything either, he’s just pulling your leg again, making up more of his “overwhelming evidence”.

Oregon junk
Gavin writes at page 201:
“... Oregon is clearly identifiable, and several very old wrecks have been discovered there on the beach at Neahkahnie. One was of teak with a pulley for hoisting sails made of caeophyllum, a wood unique to south-east Asia. The wood has yet to be carbon dated {is Menzies simply being dishonest here?}, but if it proves to be from the early fifteenth century it will provide strong circumstantial evidence that one of Zhou Man’s junks was wrecked in Neahkahnie Bay. Some examiners of the wreckage there claim to have found paraffin wax, which was used by Zheng He’s fleet to desalinate sea-water for the horses....”

When I read this I was intrigued.

The site is only about sixty miles south of me. {Menzies’ must have counted on people never checking his ‘facts’} I called, made an appointment, drove down and spoke with Wayne Jensen, the curator of the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. There are artifacts from two shipwrecks, beeswax from one and a pulley from the other. Mr. Jensen remembered having received a call from Gavin in 2002, and in addition they exchanged e-mail.

Wayne told Gavin the pulley had already been carbon dated (in 1993) to 1595. Various pieces of the beeswax dated from 1500 to 1650.
Oregon was not on the intended route of the Spanish trade galleons that traveled between the Philippines and Acapulco during the period 1565 - 1815, but storms and error sometimes forced them off their chosen path. Thirty three galleons were lost over the years. {The author provide sources for this based on Menzies own bibliography!}
…… Mr. Jensen is confident the pulley is from one of these Spanish trade galleons, and the missing San Augustin is his choice for the assignment. In 1895 the remains of a wreck at Nehalem spit were exposed, men were down in the hull digging out beeswax and found the pulley. They had been scavenging and taking off boards for years.…..Subsequent wave and surf action covered the remains until they briefly “came to light” again in 1929.
A great deal of beeswax has been recovered from the nearby coast over many years…… A pollen study done by the University of Oregon revealed the source of the beeswax, northern Luzon in the Philippines……Large chunks of the beeswax, one with 1679 carved in it, and candles are on permanent display at the Museum.
…
..Sometimes Gavin’s writing is awkward and confusing. For example, although “The wood has yet to be carbon dated” follows directly after and seems to relate to “sails made of caeophyllum(sic), a wood unique to south-east Asia.”, that could not be correct since no calophyllum has ever been found there. What he must be referring to is the pulley block, even though, as noted above, that has been carbon dated to 1595, and is not of calophyllum…..
……
Though only a few brief sentences, Gavin’s treatment of the fantasy junk at the Oregon coast fits the pattern. He lists source materials that have nothing to do with the issue at hand, and the ones that do pertain to the issue but don’t support his dream, he ignores. And he writes as if he is just waiting for the lab to confirm the finding of some real Chinese evidence that dates to 1421.
But that’s not possible.
As Gavin well knows, the lab work has long since been done, the report available since 1993, and it does not fit his time frame. The “Oregon junk” never was.''

Sacramento junk
At page 203 Gavin writes:

“... drawing my attention to the wreck of a medieval Chinese junk buried under a sandbank in the Sacramento River......the site was more than a hundred miles from open sea and the discovery seemed too good to be true ... As soon as I had carried out some preliminary research, I discovered that the prevailing north-easterly winds on this coast could have blown a junk straight across the bay and into the Sacramento River .....”

….This hypothetical junk is not the “Sacramento junk”, but is widely known as the “Glenn junk.” And though it’s true it is “more than a hundred miles from the open sea,” as the author states, that is only half right, as it is over 200 miles from the open sea, twice as far as he writes.

…….And, as we progress up the river, we run into reality. I spoke with Dr. Gregg White, Director of the Archaeological Research Program at California State University......there is a geological sill that begins at about the point of the town of Colusa, which is 30 miles south of Glenn. North of that are a lot of Pleistocene gravel deposits, shallow depths, and the river crashes over those gravels. From Colusa south it’s a deeper clay profile and the river is more entrenched. So the head of navigation traditionally was Colusa. In about the 1860’s large dredges were hauled up and cleared a path.....which is significantly farther north. But, the river had to be cleared each and every year because new gravel bars and new tree falls would clutter up the river. So from that relatively recent history we know it was improbable for a boat with much of a draft to have progressed…..it {is} too shallow and too uneven…..

…….As legends go, the “Sacramento junk” story is a youngster, dating back only to the mid 1930’s, when two farmers, drilling for water in an orange grove near Glenn, California, struck something hard and pulled up a chunk of grayish metal, the color of lead though much harder. John Birch, principal of the Willows grammar school, took a piece to an unnamed expert at Red Bluff, California, “... who came back with the surprising conclusion that the metal might be from a piece of Chinese armor.” ( Walt Wiley, “Sir Francis Wong? Mystery Of An Ancient Chinese Explorer”, Sacramento Bee, Sunday, November 30, 1975, Section B, page 1, [replate] ). Gavin changes this to “of medieval Chinese origin (p. 204)”, but that is his spin, an attempt to place it in the fifteenth century. And see page 227: Gavin transforms the “Chinese armor” into “iron woks”!


…..Gavin first claimed (p. 204) that the metal “had been found in its hold”, which is not true. However, in the next paragraph he changed his story and correctly wrote, “The site was covered with a 40-foot layer of the accumulated sand and silt of centuries ...”

The fact is no one has ever claimed to have seen the boat, not the original drillers, nor anyone since. And now there is no one alive who ever saw the mysterious grayish metal which has long since gone missing. Wiley, ibid., quotes Nonie, the wife of Bennie St. Louis, then owner of the property, “ It was a chunk about the size of my fist, the color of lead, and heavy, but much harder than lead.” All this is unsatisfactory to those who would like to solve the puzzle of the legend, but gives the mythmakers plenty of room to wiggle and spin their fantasies.

….There was only talk but no action taken for many years……. However, it was a letter to the editor in July 1979 by Marge Pattison that appeared in the Willows Journal that presented a challenge and piqued the interest of one local farmer, Dave Stewart. In 1980 he spent a lot of time, energy and money on a determined quest for the treasure….{details of excavation removed}….All efforts were to no avail. Money and enthusiasm depleted, he walked away from it.

In 1999 Dr. Furry encouraged Stewart {and t}hey were able to arrange a drill rig to auger down through their chosen site. Some small pieces of soft decomposed wood were recovered that were carbon dated. However, the results are not clear. If you go to www.dstc.edu.au/ListArchive/eclectika/archive/2002/03 /msg00047.html, you will find information provided by John Furry that states the samples were sent to Beta Analytic Lab in Miami, Fla., who returned a date range of 1250-1425 AD…..

….The Jan 26, 2001 article related that in addition to the bits of wood, strange pieces of pottery, perhaps from a jar, millions of black seeds, and a few grains of rice were brought up by the auger. Furry was quoted:

“When the drill hit the seeds, the water turned black as oil. There were seeds everywhere. I think we got into a pottery jar of them - maybe a bushel or more ... There’s no doubt in my mind we have a ship. We traced its shape with a magnetometer, and now to bring up this new material means to me that there’s a lot more than just wishful thinking here….”

Dr. Gregg White recalled Dr. Furry brought the claimed pottery pieces by his office. White concluded they were rocks that the drill auger had cut through and left scared in a cylindrical shape. As to the seeds, White explained they were modern agricultural seeds, the auger having cut through a cache of seeds collected by a squirrel or some other small wild animal, a not uncommon occurrence. Regarding the small pieces of burnt looking wood that had been recovered and carbon dated by Stewart and Furry, White suggested they were likely from a native tree that had simply fallen in the river long ago and been covered by the current moving sand, silt and gravel over it, a natural and common process in that area.…

Although the Denver archaeologist, Dr. Lawrence B. Conyers, found the ancient oxbow in the riverbed, under 35 - 45 feet of sand, silt, loam and gravel, just where it was supposed to be, he did not find any evidence of boat remains. The drilling was canceled; and Gavin called off any further excavation….

Perhaps this then constitutes the final rites for “Sir Frances Wong” and the end of a local legend, the mythical treasure boat of Glenn, California. Another of Gavin’s imaginary junks that never was.

Pandanan Wreck: a mid 15th Century Vessel

At page 226 Gavin claims:

“There is one further incontrovertible proof that the Chinese reached Mexico ... the wreck of a Chinese junk [at Pandanan, a small island to the south-west of the Philippines] ... a vivid illustration of trade between China, south-east Asia and the Americas.”

In the text there are no footnotes for this remarkable find. In the hardback issue of 1421, at page 520, in the section titled “Select Bibliography”, four sources are mentioned: Dizon, E. Z., Underwater Archaeology of the Pandanan Wreck: a mid 15th Century Vessel, paper to South East Asia Archaeology Conference, Berlin, 1998; Green, J. and Harper, R., ‘The Excavation of the Pattaya Wrecksite and Survey of three other Thailand sites, Thailand 1982....{etc. bibliography edited}.

.......you may go to www.mm.wa.gov.au/Museum/march/department/oseas.html. This is an article titled Maritime Archaeology in Southeast and East Asia by Jeremy Green, Head of the Department of Maritime Archaeology, ........This is the J. Green mentioned in Gavin’s two citations.......

.....There is no suggestion that these Thai wrecks were part of Zheng He’s fleet. Even if any were suspected to be, it would not be news as Thailand was within the well known parameters of the fleet’s routine area of operation. Because of the dates of manufacture of certain ceramics the Ko Kradat vessel could not have sunk before 1522. The Pattaya wreck was made with boards from a tree felled in 1370, plus or minus 50 years. And the other three Thailand sites yielded C14 dates of 1570+/-90; 1290 +/-60; and, 1440 +/-60, 1540 +/-120 (two samples, same wreck). .....

......If you go to www.maritimeasia.ws/Turniang/ship.html, you will find a brief statement regarding the Pandanan wreck.

“The Pandanan wreck lost in the mid 15th century in the Philippines represents a relatively pure Southeast Asian vessel......she was joined with wooden dowels, with no iron nails of any kind. Like most Southeast Asian and Hybrid vessels, she was built of tropical hardwood.”

The Pearl Road (Loviny, p.23) also notes the hull was divided into seven compartments, but they were not made to be watertight, in contrast to the ships of the Zheng He fleet, another interesting difference in design. Openings were made in the bottom of each bulkhead, so the bilge water could drain from one to the next and collect in the deepest part of the hull. These holes are clearly seen in the large two-page, color photograph along with ballast rocks and the floor planks (Loviny, pp.106-7).

Gavin states at page 227: “ The wood of the hull had been carbon dated to 1410, the same date as that of the Sacramento Junk ...”

Dr. Dizon told me they had done C-14 analysis, but preferred to rely on the copper coin, which was from the Yong Le period, 1403-1424 AD, as it was felt to be more reliable than carbon dating. ......
Remember, Gavin claims it as part of the 1421-23 armada which discovered the world; and he suggests it sank, “... at about early September 1423, towards the end of the southwest monsoon, a time when there are unpredictable squalls (p. 228).”

Because of the dates when various ceramics in the cargo were first made, which are well known and dated, it is clear the date of the wreck can be no earlier than their earliest date of manufacture, which for the bulk of them was mid-15th century, that is 1450, mas o menos. And, of course, it could have gone down well after 1450. ...
.... “The bulk of the cargo, however, extends the period to the middle of the 15th century A.D., resulting in almost a 200-year range for the archaeological materials found in a single shipwreck site - an astounding discovery, indeed! With the boat being contemporary to the latest pieces on the ship, the vessel itself may be dated to as early as the mid-15th century (Loviny, p.72).”

At page 227, referring to this wreck and the mythical “Sacramento junk”, Gavin writes, “... both apparently carried iron woks in their holds.”

No one else has ever claimed the “Sacramento junk” contained an iron wok, that is Gavin’s invention.....

....And the Pearl Road describes the iron pots in the Pandanan boat as “cauldrons”, much larger and shaped differently than woks. Over 60 were found, but they were too fragile to recover (Loviny, p 68.). They can be seen in the large, double-page, color photograph at pp.74-75. So this is more invention by Gavin. He changed the alleged “Chinese metal armor” from the mythical “Sacramento junk” into a wok; and then he changed the 60 real cauldrons from the real Pandanan boat into woks, so he could then claim the two boats carried similar goods. What amazing nonsense. .....

Still on page 227 Gavin claims:
“The Pandanan junk also carried metates - pestles for grinding maize - which were unique to South America, and what appears to be Cholula ware, the eggshell-thin ceramics made in Mexico ...”

That is not correct. Metates are not pestles, as he writes. And pestles are not used with metates. Manos are used with metates, and pestles with mortars. Metates were not unique to South America, nor were pestles.

Ahem. If you go to www.carleton.ca/~bgordon/Rice/papers/sung_nd.htm you will find Prehistoric Food Processing Techniques-Discussion on the Origin of Grinding Tools, Mortar and Pestle , Sung, Zhao-Lin, Chinese Historical Museum Agricultural Archaeology, Vol.3, No. 47, 1997. (Translated by Elaine Wong; edited by Bryan Gordon). This paper states in part:

“... New Chinese finds show 3 main food processing tools; metate and mano, mortar and pestle, and grinder, with another tool for processing tree bark. METATE People usually think the metate was invented by agricultural tribes, but it actually appeared in the Late Palaeolithic, when it was used for grinding wild food; e.g., Shahxi’s Xiachuan site (1)…..”

Although Gavin claims the metates were unique to South America, they were in use in China for thousands of years before 1421. ....

Dr. Dizon confirms the metate was in use throughout Southeast Asia. Also there were no egg-shell thin ceramics .....at the Pandanan wreck.

At page 228 Gavin claims:
“... about a thousand (items) currently remain to be identified. When they have been it should be possible to reconstruct the junk’s route. On the evidence already available, it appears to have returned from Central America with the north equatorial current ...”

All of the 4,722 items from the Pandanan junk have been identified. And as Gavin must have been aware, Dr. Dizon had already reconstructed the route of this Southeast Asia trading vessel.

“ ... A possible scenario of the route of this vessel may be reconstructed. The main cargo, tradeware ceramics from central Vietnam….Lesser cargo from northern Vietnam, including those pieces which may have come from China such as the blue and white porcelain wares, celedons and the iron cauldrons and gongs, …. [More than 70% of the cargo was from Viet Nam.] The boat may then have sailed to the southern peninsula of mainland Southeast Asia to pick up the goods from Thailand - as these also comprise a significant portion of the cargo. .....”

At page 401 Gavin repeats the nonsense that the Pandanan wreck proves Chinese contact with the Americas.

In summary, the Pandanan wreck went down no earlier than about 1450, not September 1423 as Gavin claims; it was not a “Chinese junk" rather of a different design and construction, most likely of Southeast Asia origin; it did not contain any goods unique to South America nor to Mexico - all the cargo has been long since inventoried and identified; and we don’t have to wait to reconstruct it’s route, Dr. Dizon included that in the 1996 book, The Pearl Road, along with a map of routes.

How is it possible Gavin could have read The Pearl Road and his other cited sources and still got it all so wrong?

“Bimini Road”

At page 265 Gavin presents his hypothesis that 20 ships of the fleet sailed into shallow water in the Bahamas, hit rocks and reefs, which ripped open their wooden hulls, so they put in at Bimini Island. There they built “Bimini road” with their ballast stones, some weighing fifteen tons, to facilitate pulling the ships up, out of the water for repairs.

At page 268 Gavin writes of Dr. Mason Balantyne[sic]. “His discovery, named the ‘Bimini Road’, comprises two parallel lines of stones on the sand dunes of Bimini Bay running south-west towards the deep ocean ...”

That is not correct. No part of the Bimini road is “on the sand dunes”. The entire “road” is under approximately 15 feet of water. It is not located at “Bimini Bay”, where ever that may be, rather, about a half mile off Paradise Point, North Bimini Island. It does run south-west, but not “towards the deep ocean”. It is more or less level and parallel to the beach, which also runs south-west.

At page 268 Gavin continues:

“In 1974, an American scientist, Dr. David Zink, led an expedition (the first of nine) to survey these mysterious stones. He produced overwhelming evidence the road was man-made {see below for psychic readings}... The road is clearly visible from the air through the azure water. It runs straight as a die down into the depths a broad band of beige stone. After Dr. Zink’s expeditions, Jacques Cousteau surveyed the “road” in detail for a television programme, and National Geographic has published several features. The road has been surveyed by a number of experts, and there is almost universal agreement that the structure is man-made.”

That statement certainly sounds authoritative and final. Experts are mentioned: Dr. Zink, Jacques Cousteau, and National Geographic. For Zink and Cousteau the author even provides source citations. Let’s take a look at the sources cited.

Dr. David D. Zink was not a scientist, rather a former English teacher, a Cayce fan, intrigued with megalithic [big rock] structures and with the origins of myths. He had a psychic named Carol Huffstickler do a reading of the site, and she determined the rocks were pillars of an ancient sacred temple, probably erected about 28,000 BC, by Atlanteans…….

…..Zink made detailed, stone by stone drawings of the road, including size, distances and angles, to locate all the stones, and, several of these drawings are included. He also mentions enlisting the help of Carol Huffstickler in 1974. At page 114 he writes:
“Carol’s first {psychic} reading dated the Bimini site prior to Stonehenge, stating that Bimini was contemporary with the Atlantean culture and that it had been destroyed basically for the same reasons that Atlantis had perished: misuse of sexual energy and black magic...I began to look for a common denominator between the stories of Atlantis (and souls descending into matter only to be trapped) and extraterrestrial visits. Could these ultimately be reduced to different facets of now-forgotten ancient events on the planet?...”

…..See page 269 and endnote 7 which refers to The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and the TV series In Search of...Atlantis ... At our neighborhood library we found The Cousteau Odyssey: Calypso’s Search for Atlantis , Copyright 1978 by The Cousteau Society…..{this is simply an interview of Dr. Zink without endorsement of his Atlantis idea}

…..Gavin mentions National Geographic as a source, but neglects the citation. We found only one such source, an exploration supported by a grant made by the National Geographic Society in 1971. Mahlon M. Ball and John A. Gifford, “ Investigation of Submerged Beachrock Deposits off Bimini, Bahamas” National Geographic Research Reports vol.12 (1980): 21-38.

As Gavin claims, Valentine and Zink did believe the “Bimini Road” was man made. Well, not exactly man made, but made for the Atlanteans, perhaps by visitors from another galaxy, Pleions from Pleiades.

Costueau doesn’t take a position in his Search for Atlantis, rather just gives Zink the opportunity to state his best case.

The National Geographic Research Report makes it clear the “road” is the result of a natural geologic process. And this report was done by real scientists, working within their area of competency.

This is Gavin’s “... overwhelming evidence the road was man-made (p. 268).”

Gavin also wrote, “The road has been surveyed by a number of different experts, and there is almost universal agreement that the structure is man-made (p. 269)”. However, he failed to list who else he might have had in mind, and he neglected to mentioned a number of real experts who have surveyed the site.

W. Harrison, “ Atlantis Undiscovered-Bimini, Bahamas.” Nature. vol.230 [April 2, 1971]: 287-289 . A Virginia Beach based geologist…..He concludes:
“... The rock was thus almost certainly lithified during the lower relative sea level of the Pleistocene ... The overall result is a field of blocks that at first sight appear to have been fitted together, and this has led to statements such as , ‘[some] human agency must have been involved.’ The blocky remains of the limestone outcrops are, however, no more enigmatic than other subaerial or subaqueous outcrop of jointed limestone found in various stages of fracture and decay in the north-western Bahamas.”

E. A. Shinn. “Atlantis: Bimini Hoax.” Sea Frontiers 24 ( June 1978 ): 130-141. Eugene A. Shinn, Ph.D., is a geologist with the US Geological Survey at St. Petersburg, Florida.

Shinn briefly discusses the modern Atlantis cult that devolved from Plato’s mention of an ancient myth……and the true believers suspension of critical thinking in their embrace of the Bimini beach rock, believing it a man made artifact and evidence of Atlantis, in spite of scientific evidence to the contrary. He continues:

“... In the winter of 1976 (Peter) Tomkins, J. Harold Hudson, the author, and several Florida Institute of Technology students drilled through two 2 1/2 foot-thick blocks into the underlying bedrock and concluded that the blocks were composed of beach rock ...

“... The basic mechanism of beach-rock formation has been known since the days of Darwin ...

“... Because this form of cementation is restricted to the beach, it tends to produce ribbons or roadlike belts of rock parallel to the shore ...

“... It is not uncommon for exposed beach rock to fracture and break as it lies in the sun ... Such rock can be found on the beach throughout the Bahamas, Caribbean, and Pacific, and often has a fitted-together appearance similar to the underwater rocks off Bimini ......

“ “... In the summer of 1977, on another trip to Bimini with Peter Tomkins, 17 4-inch-diameter cores were taken from adjacent blocks…. The cores were returned to Miami, where they were cut along the orientation lines and x-radiographed to make bedding visible ... The gradual decrease in pebble size from block to block, however, indicates that the blocks were once joined as a single ribbon of beach rock. If the blocks had been transported, one would expect abrupt changes in composition from block to block…..

“... The blocks were in place and had not been transported ....

“... What can now be said is that the supposedly man-made rocks are of natural origin; that they are more or less in their natural position relative to each other and to the shoreline; that the process that gave them their shape is natural; and that they formed about 2,200 years ago and are thus too young to be attributed to Atlanteans ...”

Marshall McKusick. “The Bimini Underwater Discoveries.” Explorers Journal (March 1980): 40-43. McKusick has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale, was state archaeologist for Iowa from 1960 to 1975, and more recently associate professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa. He writes:

“There is a moral to the story of my dive to see the ‘Phoenician’ ship off Bimini: archeological evidence is not often what it appears to be at first glance. Enthusiastic laymen are not trained to evaluate evidence and assess the crucial facts that a professional would observe ...

“The so-called underwater ‘pavement’ at Bimini Island was a disappointment...The ‘pavement’ is a long section of semi-rectangular fractures in what I supposed to be bedrock lying in shallow water. However, these regular fractures intergraded with more irregular sections which terminated in rubble. My own impression was that a long section gave the appearance of a pavement, but that the gradations to random and irregular cracks showed its origin ...

“The so-called ‘paved road’ stretches 1,800 feet offshore from nowhere and leads to nothing. It does not connect a former seaport with a harbor, or in any way have an observable purpose ...

“Despite all evidence to the contrary, enthusiastic amateurs are writing books claiming all sorts of mysterious ancient contacts with prehistoric America.” [And they still are.]

Marshall McKusick and Eugene A. Shinn. “Bahamian Atlantis reconsidered.” Nature 287
(4 September 1980): 11-12.

“Nevertheless many amateur explorers have ignored the scientific explanation and books and articles that perpetuate this Atlantis myth continue to appear. It is our contention that the persistence of the Bimini Island hoax must be explained in sociological rather than geological terms. There is in the US a vigorous cult dedicated to the mystic revelations of native American prophet, Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), who wrote that lost Atlantis was the center of all ancient civilization 10,000 years ago and that Bimini was part of that continent. Thus the Bimini affair has become a clash between scientific interpretation and religious dogma ...
“... During the 1970’s an enormous number of books describing ancient Atlantean, Phoenician, Egyptian, Viking, and other mysterious visitors to prehistoric America have been published by both the major and minor New York commercial presses. This science fiction disguised as historical explanation is popular with the reading public and is part of a contemporary fad ...” [And it still is.]


Gavin packs a lot of nonsense into one short chapter attempting to support his fantasy the Chinese visited the Bahamas before they took a sharp right turn and sailed up the east coast of North America. His problem once again is the evidence does not support his dream. He is so desperate he attempts to shanghai the “Bimini road” from the Cayce devotees, who know it is part of Atlantis, and won’t let go. Gavin swears it belongs to the Chinese, they built it to facilitate pulling their damaged ships up, out of the water for repairs.

Never mind that it is more or less level, and parallel to the beach, just as we would expect for naturally formed beach rock; does not run “down into the depths” as Gavin claims, and thus never would have accomplished its stated mission.

Never mind that Gavin’s chosen “experts” undermine his claim.

Never mind that all the real experts say the road unquestionably is beach rock, formed by a well known, well documented geologic process.

Gavin reminds me more and more of the Queen in Through the Looking Glass.

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When

I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes

I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast...”

Hi Kenneth,
There was another article out recently (which I'll try to find) that says '1421' is whats known in the trade as a 'Publishers Assembly' and that Menzies is the front man for a work from many sources. It does have that 'throw it against the wall and see what sticks' quality to it. There are mistakes of longitude and latitude that are not typos and no sailor would make. I also noticed that some glaring errors were corrected from the hard cover edition to the paperback. For instance, (you'd enjoy this) the book stated that Chinese jade was found all over the Americas and before their arrival, jade was unknown. In this circular reasoning, Palenque nobles and Yucatec rulers were draped in exquisite pieces of Chinese jade, and the Teotihuacan ruler was obviously Mongoloid, hence, Chinese.
I must admit to a perverse satisfaction that the research I contributed to '1421' is in the small minority that remains unassailed by critics.
It is also striking that the qualities and aspects of the Americas that have been cited by many scholars as being the possible result of diffusion (including by Menzies) from Asia, were present in the New World long before Zheng He was born.

Newport Tower
At page 286 Gavin introduces the stone tower at Newport, Rhode Island as a piece of evidence of Chinese presence on the coast of North America..... He states they had several reasons for building the tower: It would mark the exact site where they had left Chinese seamen and concubines to establish a settlement; it was another in their worldwide scheme of observation platforms from which they would take lunar and celestial readings; and it would act as a lighthouse, a beacon to guide the returning Chinese.

The prime suspect for the stone tower...has always been ...Governor Arnold (born 21 Dec 1615 Llichester, Somerset, England - died 20 June 1678, Newport, Rhode Island) owned the mill, and a great deal of other real property in Newport, and when he died mentioned it twice in his will, “... my stone built wind mill ...” (A copy can be found at http://www.bighertis.com/mill/wilofgov.htm.)

Gavin discusses (p. 287) a report by an architect, Suzanne O. Carlson, who reviewed much of the literature and many of the claims, decided Arnold only modified an existing structure to function as a mill, and concluded, “... The question remains - who built the Newport tower, when and why? ...”

...Since Gavin introduced Carlson in the service of part of his hypothesis, it seems fair to note the comments NEARA ( New England Antiquities Research Association) has posted regarding 1421: The Year China ... In part they write:
“... In his exuberant tale of Oriental luxury and Zheng He’s mission of discovery, trade, and tribute, Menzies cites all of the authors just mentioned. Yet he seem not to have read their work ... The evidence that Menzies presents for pre-Columbian American contact, however enticing it may appear, is loaded with extraneous detail and presented with scant relevant documentation. Stoneworks, inscriptions, and architectural features are described without drawings or photos to help the reader evaluate the similarities or permit scholars to analyze meanings. Maps are not shown in sufficient detail to enable the reader to have confidence in the veracity of the interpretations. In his discussions of discoveries around the North Atlantic rim, Menzies’ assertions and fuzzy adaptations of the work of Bill Penhallow and Sue Carlson - to convert the Newport Tower into a Chinese structure - are completely unconvincing and at odds with the research findings of these and other NEARA members ... (http://www.neara.org/Misc/Reports/1421.htm).”

Gavin’s dilemma is that he just doesn’t have any real evidence that connects his hypothetical fleet of 1421 in any way with the tower. The only thing he can offer is - This is the way the Chinese built them back home. At page 288 he writes,

“... and in my view the design and position of the windows closely resemble those on the Song dynasty (960-1279) lighthouse that guided Chinese and Arab trading fleets into the port of Zaiton (Quanzhou) in Fujian province in southern China ... The Zaiton lighthouse is twice the size of the Newport Round Tower and five stories high rather than three, but the windows are notably similar, as is the design of the central fireplace. There are several other striking resemblances. The Rhode Island tower is a shell of stones rising above arches that span eight columns set on an octagonal base, just as at Zaiton ... Like the Zaiton lighthouse, it was angled so that the light burning from its fire could warn of danger ...”

This is a strong, confident sounding opinion, apparently based on first hand observation, Gavin’s statement that the Newport tower, though smaller, otherwise appears to be a duplicate of an ancient stone Chinese lighthouse located at Zaiton, Fujian province. A drawing of the Newport tower is provided, but, unfortunately, the author has not included any drawing or photo of the Zaiton lighthouse which we might use for comparison.

Ahem. There are pictures of the Zaiton lighthouse available, on the internet. However, you may be disappointed. The tower at Quanzhou was not primarily a lighthouse, rather a Buddhist pagoda. That “lighthouse” addendum was Gavin’s invention. The stone Buddhist pagodas built in the area had an incidental, beneficial function as navigational landmarks, which included lamps in the windows at night to aid travelers, but, that is not the reason they were built. They were constructed to serve the Buddhist religion.

You may take a look for yourself. There are a number of web sites on Quanzhou (aka Tsinkiang, Zaiton, Zayton, Zaitun), Fujian province. For example, see http://www.china.org.cn/english /TR-e/43370.htm for a picture….

....It seems clear there isn’t any “Zaiton lighthouse”, as Gavin claims: there are only these stone made Buddhist pagodas, that incidentally had a use as navigational aids. And not one of them looks anything like the Newport Tower.

This probably explains why Gavin failed to provide any picture or drawing of his “Zaiton lighthouse”. There was plenty of room in the book....
....Yet once more it appears Gavin is hiding his claimed source material and fabricating evidence, in a desperate attempt to convince the reader there is some merit to his fantasy.

Chinese stone lamp
At page 414 Gavin writes:

“... However, the discovery of a Taoist talisman and a Chinese lamp were far more significant. The talisman may be identified with Shou Lau, 6 whose talismans I have seen in many locations around the world ...”
Endnote 6 states, “ Letter from Professor Hummel (an expert on medieval Chinese art), 29 August 1927, quoted in Keddie, op.cit.”

But see Grant Keddie, “The Question of Asiatic Objects on the North Pacific Coast of America: Historic or Prehistoric?”, Contributions to Human History, published by the Royal British Columbia Museum, No 3, March 19, 1990, Victoria, B.C., Canada, pp. 1-26.

Keddie writes at page13:
“... Another letter of August 29, 1927 addressed to a Mr. Bishop is from Benjamin March of New York who also passes on comments by Professor Arthur W. Hummel. March indicates that he: ‘... submitted a tracing of the characters to a Chinese student of calligraphy, who gave his opinion that...The figure on the left seems to be a sage or Taoist teacher, and may be identified with Shou Lao, the old figure of longevity ...

‘Hummel believes that the coin is very recent.’

“He is quoted as saying that it : ‘... is the duplicate in every detail, size, composition, and all, of at least a score of amulets I picked up in Shansi ...’ ”

Gavin misread and confused the quote in the article by Keddie. The letter of August 29, 1927 was not from Hummel, rather written by Benjamin March of New York, addressed to a Mr. Bishop, and as to Hummel, only included the brief opinion above, that the coin was very recent, as well as Hummel’s comment that he had twenty just like it.

As for the so called “Chinese stone lamp” that Gavin claimed was significant, see Keddie, also page 13:

“Keithahn seemed to be unaware that Alden Mason (1928) had already published an extensive commentary on the Knik bowl and others in the area. These lamps are shown and discussed by de Laguna as products of Pacific Eskimo culture (1975:177-180: Plates 28,69, 70-1,70-2,71)...

“Stone lamps have over a 4,000 year history in the Pacific Eskimo area. The large, stone lamps with human and animal figures date to the late Kachemak III period between about 100 BC and 1000 AD. The Knik bowl style [uncovered June 15, 1913] would fit the earlier part of this period ...”

At pages 414-5 Gavin writes:

“... In 1747, an Aleut boy from Attu ... spoke of a legend in which ‘men dressed in long many colored silk and cotton clothing came to the island Attu in small ships with one sail, their heads were shaved to the crown and the hair on the back was plaited into tresses’...”

In his endnote 7 Gavin incorrectly cites “Professor Hummel” as the source of this statement. However, see Keddie, page 18, the source is shown as Jochelson (1933:15). (Jochelson, Waldmar, 1933, “History, Ethnology and Anthropology of the Aleut”, Publication 432. Carnegie Institute of Washington DC )

Further, Gavin neglected to include the entire story provided by the Aleut boy. The men “gave them iron, needles and leaf-tobacco (which they did not want) in exchange for sea-otter skins.” Keddie states the gift of tobacco suggests a post 1600 AD date for the visit. And also that head-shaving and hair-braiding was practiced by the Nanays of the Amur River region from the mid 17th century, the possible visitors/traders.

In just a few sentences Gavin confused and got his source citations wrong, and left out the part that did not fit his agenda. The stone lamp was from era 100 B.C.; the coin was recent and common; and the “men dressed in long many colored silk” dated to 1600 AD, or possibly later. None of this “evidence” is congruent with a visit by a fleet of junks in 1421. But this is not news, nor surprising, we’ve seen this sort of nonsense before.

I could go on and on, open the book to almost any page and you are likely to find more examples of incredible nonsense. But, enough is enough. And don’t we know enough now to conclude that 1421 is just another hoax, a lengthy and continuing exercise in flimflammery that belongs on the fiction list?

“The evidence is just overwhelming.”

I have had to dispel other myths on NZ history in the past when talking to people but Gavin Menzies' has an aura of respectibility which must be stripped.

In 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2002), aspires to rewrite world history on a grand scale. {Gavin Menzies'} maintains that four Chinese fleets, comprising twenty-five to thirty ships and at least 7,000 persons each, visited every part of the world except Europe between 1421 and 1423.....

{note;Menzies' has since made the incredible claim on his website that the Ming fleets did reach Europe;
quote; "Zheng He’s representatives also visited Florence in 1432 (Tai Peng Wang) where they briefed the famous Italian mathematician Paolo Toscanelli. Toscanelli learned form Zheng He the secrets of declination of the Sun and how to determine latitude – invaluable to late Portuguese navigators (Regiomontanus); he acquired Torqueta from Zheng He which he passed on to Vespucci which enabled him to calculate longitude; and maps of the Americas which Toscanelli passed on to Christopher Columbus. Zheng He’s fleets sailed on to North Europe (‘Franca’ in Ming Shi) and in my opinion berthed at The Hague where they passed on the secrets of moveable block printing to Laurens Zanzoon Coster and perspective to Jan Van Eyck. (!!!) }... 1

.....Menzies claims that Chinese mariners explored the islands of Cape Verde, the Azores, the Bahamas, and the Falklands; they established colonies in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, California, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island; they introduced horses to the Americas, rice to California, chickens to South America, coffee to Puerto Rico, South American sloths & sea otters to New Zealand, and maize to the Philippines. In addition, Chinese seamen toured the temples and palaces of the Maya center of Palenque in Mexico, hunted walruses and smelted copper in Greenland, mined for lead and saltpeter in northern Australia, and established trading posts for diamonds along the Amazon and its tributaries. 2

Inasmuch as Menzies believes that he has collected a veritable mountain of evidence, he is not disheartened by skepticism about some of his astonishing assertions. As he told People Magazine (24 February 2003) after 1421 hit the New York Times bestseller list, "[t]here's not one chance in a hundred million that I'm wrong!" He regards his investigation as an ongoing project: a website (www.1421.tv) provides yet more evidence.... 3

.... Menzies is contemptuous of professional historians .......He explains that he has uncovered information that has eluded many eminent historians of China, even though it was right before their eyes, "only because I knew how to interpret the extraordinary maps and charts that reveal the course and the extent of the voyages of the great Chinese fleets between 1421 and 1423" (pp. 11–12).

.....The good news conveyed by 1421 is that there are big bucks in world history: Menzies received an advance of £500,000 ($825,000) from his British publisher, whose initial printing runs to 100,000 copies. The bad news is that reaping such largesse evidently requires producing a book as outrageous as 1421. Menzies flouts the basic rules of both historical study and elementary logic. He misrepresents the scholarship of others, and he frequently fails to cite those from whom he borrows.1 He misconstrues Chinese imperial policy, especially as seen in the expeditions of Zheng He, and his extensive discussion of Western cartography reads like a parody of scholarship. His allegations regarding Nicolò di Conti (c. 1385–1469), the only figure in 1421 who links the Ming voyages with European events, are the stuff of historical fiction, the product of an obstinate misrepresentation of sources. The author's misunderstanding of the technology of Zheng He's ships impels him to depict voyages no captain would attempt and no mariner could survive, including a 4,000-mile excursion along the Arctic circle and circumnavigation of the Pacific after having already sailed more than 42,000 miles from China to West Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines (pp. 199–209, 311).2 6

Portraying himself as an innocent abroad, forthrightly seeking truths the academic establishment has disregarded or suppressed, Menzies in fact is less an "unlettered Ishmael" than a Captain Ahab, gripped by a mania to bend everything to his purposes....

.....Menzies is not interested in the well-known, much-studied voyages of Zheng He, and he ignores the extensive literature on them He dispenses with six of the seven expeditions (between 1405 and 1433) in one page (pp. 54–55). He singles out the sixth voyage because it was the only one in which Zheng He returned to China early, leaving his subordinate eunuch-captains to carry out their mission of returning tribute envoys to their kingdoms. This circumstance offers Menzies a window of opportunity to imagine that the armada left the Indian Ocean to seek new lands in the Atlantic and Pacific. Since he claims that the mariners sailed about 40,000 miles in their world-girdling odysseys, two and a half years is just barely enough time for them to journey such a vast distance while also charting coasts, mining ore, meeting alien peoples, and founding colonies. 9
In addition, Menzies feels free to speculate about "missing years" because of a presumed dearth of sources. He casually dismisses the principal source of information on Zheng He's voyages, Ma Huan's Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan .....by declaring that its author, an official translator on the staff of Zheng He in 1421, "left the treasure fleets at Calicut" ......hence he did not take part in the global exploration (p. 87). ...{Ma Huan}... sailed on three of the Ming expeditions, and his book is a protoethnographic survey of the places visited by the fleets over several decades...... {Ma Huan} incorporated information on countries he did not visit, and he apparently continued making revisions to his book until it was published about thirty years after the last expedition. Menzies does not address the awkward question of why Ma......never mentions the wondrous excursion of his comrades to the Americas and Australia.
Throughout 1421, Menzies places great emphasis on imperial officials in 1477 destroying many of the documents regarding the Ming expeditions in order to prevent a renewal of the project. In a manner of speaking, the author sails the ships of Zheng He through that supposed evidentiary void. There are plentiful surviving documents on the expeditions, however, that prove there were no "missing years." The sources indicate that an imperial order for the sixth voyage was issued in March 1421, although the flotilla did not leave China until the turn of the year. It reached Sumatra around July 1422, after many stops in Southeast Asia; Zheng He returned home to Nanjing by September 1422, leaving his subordinates to sail on to thirty-six ports in Ceylon, India (both Bengal and the Malabar coast), the Persian Gulf, and East Africa. The last of the squadrons returned to China on 8 October 1423, having completed their journey of some 11,000 miles in the expected time, about one year and three months after departing Sumatra. Thus there are no "missing years" for the Ming fleets, no time for even a portion of the extraordinary exploits narrated in 1421.

...Menzies claims that the average speed of Zheng He's vessels over their seven voyages in the Indian Ocean was 4.8 knots (or 132 miles per day) (p. 100). Menzies has no basis for this estimate since an average speed can be calculated only for the 1431–1433 expedition, for which a detailed itinerary survives. Naturally, speeds differed considerably, depending on the time of year and the passage being traversed. In the seventh voyage, distances covered varied from a high of 106 miles per day (3.8 knots) to a low of 37.5 miles per day (1.4 knots), with an average of 69 miles per day (or 2.5 knots).7 Menzies assumes, however, that his undocumented estimate of 4.8 knots for the Indian Ocean voyages holds as well for the global cruises of the Ming fleets. His calculation helps him narrowly fit the agenda of the fleets into the alleged "missing years": having doubled the time the junks actually were away from China (from fifteen months to thirty), he also hurries the ships along by granting them an average speed 52 percent higher than what they generally achieved in the steady, familiar monsoon winds of the southern seas. On its own terms, then, Menzies's scenario is highly implausible. Taking into account the surviving evidence for the timetable of the sixth expedition, it is impossible.
Menzies's evidence for the role of Conti in transmitting Chinese geographical knowledge to European cartographers is even flimsier than his argument for "missing years." ...... 14
.....Conti is essential to Menzies's argument since he represents the sole vehicle by which Chinese geographical knowledge reached the West. Much of 1421 is devoted to interpreting European maps in the light of that knowledge, and without Conti as "the crucial link" in the chain of evidence, the central thesis of the book collapses (p. 93). 15
To establish the relevance of Conti, Menzies splices into one quotation a passage from Poggio and another from Pero Tafur (c. 1410–c. 1484), a Spaniard who met Conti at Mt. Sinai (Egypt) in 1437... Poggio refers to large Indian ships, with five sails, many masts, and hull compartments. Since only Chinese ships possessed the latter, it is generally assumed that Conti actually described Chinese vessels, evidently without knowing their origins......ships "like very large houses" [como casas muy grandes], with ten or more sails and large cisterns of water inside, that delivered cargo to Mecca.12 .....Menzies takes for granted that Conti was in Calicut in 1421 when the Ming armada anchored there...... 16
.....Based on these presumptions, Menzies creates an incredible scenario: he declares that Conti boarded Zheng He's junks for their voyages to the Cape Verde Islands, Brazil, Patagonia, Australia, New Zealand, North America, and Mexico. Moreover, after the fleet returned to Southeast Asia and China in late 1423, Conti dashed home to Venice, where in 1424 he was "debriefed" by the Infante Dom Pedro of Portugal (d. 1449), older brother of Prince Henry (1394–1460), the so-called "Navigator," and where Conti handed over copies of Chinese charts produced during the great voyage (pp. 351–354, 435).13 Those charts, Menzies asserts, formed the basis for all subsequent European maps that showed lands across the Atlantic, including, inter alia, the Pizzigano map (1424), the (disputed) Vinland map (1420–1440?), the Cantino planisphere (1502), and the Waldseemüller maps (1507, 1513). Furthermore, Conti's information prompted Prince Henry to secretly dispatch settlers to Puerto Rico in 1431, where (Menzies suggests) they perhaps found evidence of a previous Chinese colony (p. 359). European copies of Ming charts also explain Columbus's ambition to voyage across the Ocean Sea, Magellan's conviction that he could sail around South America, and Cook's alleged "discovery" of Australia. 17
...... Thus with no more warrant than a passing mention by Poggio and Tafur of large ships in the Indian Ocean, Menzies concocts a scenario in which Conti tours the world on Zheng He's junks, collecting information that transforms European cartography and inspires European overseas expansion. In a book bloated with extravagant arguments, Menzies's assertions regarding Poggio's well-known text stand out for their obdurate distortion of evidence. 18
Menzies's claims regarding the fleet's "missing years" and Conti's global cruise clearly cannot be sustained. The author's proof for the presence of the Ming argosy in new lands also lacks substance. In his first two chapters (pp. 19–75), he lays the groundwork for his claims when describing Zheng He's fleet before its departure from Nanjing. Although the portrait lacks any documentation, it provides the foundation for virtually all the evidence Menzies later cites for Chinese exploration......
....Thus while no evidence survives of the garb worn by Zheng He's sailors, Menzies describes them as wearing long white robes because legends and folklore from Australia and the New World speak of visits from white-robed aliens.16 Although sources are silent on the presence of women in the fleet, Menzies assumes that many prostitutes were aboard because the colonies supposedly founded during the voyages required Chinese mates for the men.17 In like fashion, he infers that many coops of Asiatic chickens were loaded on the junks (as "valuable presents for foreign dignitaries," p. 42) because the presence of chickens in the New World is a central part of his proof of the passage of the Ming fleets...... 20
....There is no evidence for masons and stone carvers in Zheng He's flotilla, but Menzies believes they were aboard because no one else could have carved the numerous stone markers supposedly left behind by the fleets in the Cape Verde Islands and other landing spots, and they must have built the "pyramids" and astronomical "observation platforms" found just about everywhere else.19 The latter, Menzies claims, were needed by Chinese astronomers, indispensable passengers in the fleet since they had to carry out the (undocumented) imperial command to detect "guiding stars" in order to "correctly locate the new territories" (pp. 28–29).

Teak was not used in building Zheng He's fleets, as sources supposedly consulted by Menzies make clear, yet he regards any appearance of teak in marine excavations as marking the presence of the Ming vessels.20 It is highly unlikely that the Chinese junks (or any ships at any time) carried specially carved stones for ballast, as Menzies imagines, yet he elaborately describes how the mariners built a slipway to refloat grounded junks at Bimini in the Bahamas, the evidence for which is "tongued and grooved" rectangular rocks found underwater there—ballast, the author declares, from the Ming ships (pp. 63, 265–277).21{The ''Bimini rd'', which is a nutural formation}
Zheng He's armada almost certainly included some horses used by the admiral and other high commanders. Menzies claims, however, that thousands of horses were transported, many being used to stock the Americas and to explore the interior of Australia. At sea for months at a time, the mariners allegedly nourished the horses with boiled, mashed rice and with water distilled from seawater, "using paraffin wax or seal blubber for fuel" (p. 67). Although Needham states that there is no evidence that the Chinese knew how to desalinate seawater, Menzies asserts that a ship wrecked off the Oregon coast is reported to have carried paraffin wax, hence he regards the rumor as implicit verification of his contentions about both desalination and hordes of junk-journeying steeds.
{note; this was beeswax from a Oregon wrecked vessel whose timber was C14 dated after the era of the Ming fleets, as Gavin was told.}
The seamen, prostitutes, and eunuchs were kept in fresh fish at sea by "trained otters, working in pairs to herd shoals into the nets ..." (p. 39). These marvelous creatures, alas, remain unheralded in any document, but since some wild ones "have been seen swimming in the fjords of South Island" (New Zealand), Menzies infers that their forbears must have jumped Zheng He's ships there (pp. 173, 185). Chinese sharpeis must have sailed with the Ming flotilla because an animal resembling the dog appears in a Mexican painting discovered in the nineteenth century (pp. 42, 223). One audacious sharpei, Menzies proposes, absconded from the junks in the Falklands and mated with an indigenous fox, giving birth to a now-extinct animal called a war-rah—DNA results, the author promises, will be posted on the website (p. 135).
Menzies also goes beyond his portrait of Zheng He's armada in Nanjing to point to evidence deriving from its global adventures. He suggests that the Chinese captured a few giant South American sloths (or mylodons) in Patagonia. This deduction arises from the author's notion that a "dog-headed man" depicted on the Piri Reis map of 1513 —which, of course, Menzies regards as based upon a copy of a Chinese map from Conti's collection—is in fact a mylodon, an animal (he assumes) that Zheng He's captains desired for the emperor's zoo (pp. 118–119). He further supposes that one of the sloths aroused itself enough to escape Chinese incarceration in Australia because a stone carving near Brisbane (he thinks) looks something like the Patagonian beast (p. 185). 24

It is impossible to keep track of how many self-confirming assumptions are at work in such citations of alleged evidence. Piling supposition upon supposition, Menzies never considers a question that he does not beg: every argument in 1421 springs from the fallacy of petitio principii{as well as the mis-use of the Zheng He inscriptions in China}. The author's "trail of evidence" is actually a feedback loop that makes no distinction between premise and proof, conjecture and confirmation, bizarre guess and proven fact. 25
Thus just as Menzies describes the junks as supplied with all the paraphernalia that will prove they sailed where he contends, he also reconstructs the routes of the voyages by treating European maps, supposedly based on Conti's cache, as the by-product of those very voyages. This inevitably leads to some curious conclusions. Since the Waldseemüller map of 1507 seems to show an open sea passage between the Arctic Circle and Eurasia from the Barents Sea to the Bering Straits, a distance of more than 4,000 miles, Menzies concludes that the route was surveyed by a Ming fleet taking a shortcut home after its exploration of Greenland, boldly going where no eunuch had gone before (p. 311).
The author, however, does not discuss this epic voyage except to observe that the Waldseemüller map proves it took place..... 26
27
.....Unfortunately, this reckless manner of dealing with evidence is typical of 1421, vitiating all its extraordinary claims: the voyages it describes never took place, Chinese information never reached Prince Henry and Columbus, and there is no evidence of the Ming fleets in newly discovered lands. The fundamental assumption of the book—that Zhu Di dispatched the Ming fleets because he had a "grand plan," a vision of charting the world and creating a maritime empire spanning the oceans (pp. 19–43)—is simply asserted by Menzies without a shred of proof. It represents the author's own grandiosity projected back onto the emperor, providing the latter with an ambition commensurate with the global events that Menzies presumes 1421 uniquely has revealed, an account that provides evidence "to overturn the longaccepted history of the Western world" (p. 400). It is clear, however, that textbooks on that history need not be rewritten. The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous.....

I am in contact with one of Menzies' own PR team and it would be more correct to say he entertains the whims of any person who brings another piece of fanciful evidence his way and he helps to get them published. There are spin off books coming out soon by other Menzies' team mates. It was suggested that I could help him find Chinese sites in NZ and point him in the right direction and he would help me publish. The suggestion in itself shows nievity. Cedric Bell was here for one month and found 40 Chinese junks...I have been doing fieldwork & finding real unrecorded pre-European occupation sites on the coastline for seven years. I think only the truly imaginative have the power to find Chinese junks and lost cities in a flying visit...but there is money to be made in books about them!
There are plenty of other names on the website of people contributing ''information'', as well as reference to teams of paid researchers working with him. From my contact I know he has a large number of people who form part of his research and promotion. They are a very peculiar bunch.
Whatever can be said about cultural diffusion it is true that Menzies' is not interested in the dating of the cultural contact or actually examining it. If an item from 3,000 years ago can be left by the Ming fleet in Gavins' mind then it becomes evidence of the Ming fleet. He even claimed the rubbish piles (middens) of shell in NZ are Chinese because' Chinese are a very tidy people' so then it becomes evidence of a fleet visit.
The comment you made about ''throw it on the wall'' has a mental image there that just justice to this sham of a book.
If Gavin got 0.5% of the details in '1421' right then it will be despite his best efforts to manipulate them.
The question of motifs and the working of Jade in a Chinese connection to America has nothing to do with Ming fleets to say the least....by 1421 the sun was setting on their cultures with the immenent arrival of the Spanish and jade had been worked since Olmec times, i.e centuries before Christ.

I have a lot more evidence on Menzies' shoddy deductions and research to come yet.
I think the lengths to which he went in twisting & inventing facts make at least as interesting reading as '1421'.

Hi Craig,
I am aware of your interests since we discussed them before. IMO There is no evidence yet provided that is truly compelling in terms of strictly Chinese technology so most evidence is related to comparing surface motifs between cultures (and of course not including all the cultural features missing). That is a whole different subject of debate however, as you point out.
PS; Note the 'Longshan' oracle bones are not written records. I have seen the 'writting' you mean and it is not the beginning of Chinese written history. They are more like scratches in comparison to neolithic characters found elsehwere. They show the origins of scapulmancy and a pre-cursor to inscribed characters as well as confirm a link to Shang (also in the early pottery styles Shang adopted) but they should not be confused with the historical documentation on the Shang oracle bones. It is not a way of pushing back written records.
I also dont see how a record from Shu Hai Ching (circa 2200 bc) but written during Han (2,000 years later)can be taken literaly for American expeditions when Ma Huan is treated as not reliable and compared to 'postcards from the Titanic' since the final version of his records are compiled after his death. That seems a paradox when Ma Huan is of course much less guilty of anything we might accuse the Han account of.
I am not sure if that is what you were saying, but it seems that the post was a discussion between yourself and another person.
If you wish to try and show me something in the way of a conclusive (ancient) record or securely provenanced artefact for such contact then I would be happy to see it/them.
It really is a topic in itself. If you want to start a thread then I invite you to post evidence for ancient Chinese contact with the Americas, I mean as a seperate thread since I gather you date the contact (as do most diffusionists) to a much much earlier period than Ming, and that the anomalies that Gavin mentions are not linked specifically to a fleet in 1421 since they existed in ancient pre-Colombian cultures long before the Ming dynasty.
Gavin happily borrows wrecks from Phonenicans, stone structures from Atlanteans and of course any oddity he can find as 'proof' of a fleet. This is why a lot of the evidence is shoddy to begin with.
If you would like to present your assembled evidence which shows contact in, say, before Han times, with America then post them under this archaeology forum.
Given the concepts of 'the known world' and broad allegory such as 'where the sun rises' I feel it takes more than poetic & contemporary concepts on the size of the world to prove journies to the extent of reaching America or NZ.
I would be inclined to expect to find evidence in all the places in between these far flung points also....but given that the earliest Chinese artefacts even in Taiwan date to the Three Kingdoms period I see no reason at present to revise my understanding of the extent of truly ancient Chinese sea-forays.
I would enjoy a thread on this in truth...if you can explain the type of vessel used in those ancient periods, and what drove them to travel so far. etc. Gavins' 'mining' of NZ seems a fanciful explanation and I would first suggest a search for the land of immortals that Han era Chinese believed in, if I had to engage in pure speculation.

I would prefer to keep this thread on the Menzies' thesis but if you start a broadly related 'contact' thread you could post a link here also to direct interested readers onto the continued discussion.
I look forward to testing the hypothesis & I promise to play nice.

I purchased a copy of Gavin Menzies' '1421: The Year China Discovered the World', published by Transworld, on the basis that it was classified as 'History' in their catalogue. A detailed reading of the text revealed that the work is a fairtytale and fiction of the worst kind. I detail some of the outrageous fiction perpetrated within the volume:
Claims by Mr. Menzies followed by facts
1. Claim: Four eunuch admirals ­ Hong Bao, Zhou Man, Zhou Wen and Yang Qing - led fleets to the Americas, Australia, Greenland and the Antarctic during voyages between 1421 and 1423.

Fact: There are no Chinese or other texts which suggest in any way that these four eunuchs, or any other Ming commanders, traveled anywhere at all beyond Asia, the Middle East and the East coast of Africa. All other voyages derive solely from Mr. Menzies' imagination. Further, the currents, winds and dates Menzies cites in support would not have carried the ships anywhere near where he claims. In short, there is no archaeological, textual or archival material to support the Menzies thesis as set down in '1421'. In this book Menzies intentionally distorts known materials and deliberately alters known facts in order to support his thesis.

2. Claim: Sailors and concubines from these fleets settled in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and islands across the Pacific. In evidence, he cites studies of "recent" inflow of "Chinese genes" and "East Asian DNA" into the Americas.

Fact: There is no evidence of Ming settlement sites in, or even Ming knowledge, of these places until the arrival of the Jesuits in China in the 16th century. The genetic evidence on which Menzies relies is provided by a company whose genetic tests have been labelled a 'scam' by Stephen O'Brien, the US National Cancer Institute's laboratory chief.

3. Claim: There exists a range of wrecks of the ships from these voyages spread around the world, and these are proof of the voyages claimed by Menzies.

Fact: Not one wreck which can be linked with the eunuch voyages in the first 30 years of the 15th century (or indeed any Chinese wreck) has been identified outside of the Asian region.

4. Claim: The Ming voyagers built celestial observation platforms at 24 places across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Menzies names and provides coordinates for these platforms. ('1421', pp. 416/17, 457).

Fact: There is no textual or archaeological evidence to even begin to suggest that the Ming voyagers built observation platforms anywhere in the world. Again, their existence derives only from the fertile imagination of Mr. Menzies.

5. Claim: The Ming armadas left a range of other built structures around the world, particularly in Australasia and the Americas, including the Newport Round Tower, the Gympie pyramid and other structures and mines. They also left a ship's slipway made of stones on the Bimini islands in the Caribbean.

Fact: Not one of the structures Mr. Menzies cites has been shown to have any links with China. The Bimini 'slipway', which is in any case parallel to the shore, has been shown to be a completely natural formation.

6. Claim: The Chinese "were aware that the earth was a globe and had divided it into 365 and a quarter degrees (the number of days in the year) of latitude and longitude". ('1421', p. 449)

Fact: There is no evidence that during the early Ming, the Chinese had any knowledge of the earth as a globe and certainly none that they were aware of latitude and longitude.

7. Claim: The Ming voyagers surveyed South America, Antarctica, North America and the Atlantic as well as Australasia. "The whole world was accurately charted by 1428." ('1421', p. 411).

Fact: There is no text or other evidence which suggests that the Ming voyagers went anywhere near these places and no Chinese maps which indicate any surveying of these places. Further, there are no contemporary Ming artifacts found in any of these regions.

8. Claim: A range of European maps show anomalies which can only be explained by accepting the Chinese voyages proposed by Mr. Menzies as having taken place.

Fact: The cartographic anomalies which Mr. Menzies points to, real or imagined, can be explained through many avenues, the most likely being that Arab navigators, who had been traveling these waters for 600 years before the Chinese, had produced maps of areas they traveled to.

9. Claim: Mr. Menzies noted that the Venetian Niccolo da Conti was the crucial and only link between Chinese and European cartographers. Menzies claims that he participated in the voyages over several years and carried Chinese maps back to Europe. He notes that Da Conti "had spent years aboard a junk of the treasure fleet" and that "Chinese maps passed from Da Conti to Fra Mauro, and from him to Dom Pedro of Portugal and Prince Henry the Navigator." ('1421', pp. 369, 84-87, 92-93).

Fact: Da Conti, who left us detailed accounts of his travels, recounts neither meeting any Ming envoy in Calicut, nor traveling on any Chinese ship for even a day, nor seeing or receiving any Chinese maps showing a new world. The utter and complete contempt for truth with which Menzies depicts these events is disheartening.

10. Claim: Mr. Menzies claims that a number of mylodons (a type of giant sloth) had been taken from South America to New Zealand and China by the Ming ships.

Fact: All available evidence suggests that the Mylodon has been extinct for several thousand years, which militates somewhat against the likely veracity of Mr. Menzies' claims in this respect. But such sloppy research is found throughout the volume. He notes, for example, rubber trees in Malacca 450 years before they had been introduced from South America by the British, etc., etc. ad nauseam

Claim
The Chinese "were aware that the earth was a globe and had divided it into 365 and a quarter degrees (the number of days in the year) of latitude and longitude." (1421, p. 449)

Fact
There is no evidence that during the early Ming, the Chinese had any knowledge of the earth as a globe and certainly none that they were aware of latitude and longitude.

http://www.1421exposed.com/html/most_outrageous_claims.html

Contributors

Michael Ross
President, Australian Map Circle
michael.ross@1421exposed.com

Geoff Wade
Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
arigpw@nus.edu.sg

Kirsten A. Seaver
Independant Historical Researcher
seaver@stanford.edu

Captain Phil Rivers
Retired, author "1421:FACT AND FANTASY"
kaptphil@yahoo.co.uk

Dr. Stephen Davies
Museum Director, Hong Kong Maritime Museum
stephendavies@hkmaritimemuseum.org

I have incorporated, along with my own thoughts, some comments and observations from Jin Guo-ping, Zhou Zhen-he, Gong Ying-yan, and Hou Yang-fang in the following critique.

A. There are a number of issues about this map which need to be noted: {again edited for brevity}

1. It is a dual-hemisphere map, a cartographic tradition exclusively European. California is represented as an island, copied straight from European maps of the 17th century. China is placed at the centre of the map as it was in early Jesuit maps of the world produced in China. It is based on a rough copy of a Jesuit map of the world.

2. It copies some parts of the text from early Jesuit maps.

3. Creating such a map is conditional upon recognition that world is a sphere. No indigenous Ming maps show that there was a belief that the world was a sphere.

4. For a sphere to be represented on a flat plane, there needs to be knowledge of and methods for projection. Chinese cartographers did not have this knowledge.

5. The amount of non-coastal detail (including riverine systems extending thousands of miles from the coast) indicate that these maps could not have been produced by maritime voyagers. The information in the maps was obviously amassed over time by cultures who had travelled widely. It fits perfectly within the history of European cartography, but is a complete anomaly in Chinese cartography.....

B. Annotations

....

3. The eunuch Zheng He is referred to as Ma San-bao. No one would have dared to use his original name given that the emperor had assigned him the surname Zheng.

....

5.. There are various simplified characters ( particularly yu), used in the map, which while in use during the 18th century , would not have been used on a map intended for submission to the Court. This also suggests creation of map by modern person who was unfamiliar with the classical distinctions between these characters.
...

7. The Himalayas are marked as the highest mountains in the world. This fact was only discovered in the 19th century.

....

5. The provincial names Hu-bei and Hu-nan are given. In 1418, these had not been created. The areas were part of Hu-guang.

Earlier this month, Cai Wu, minister in charge of China's State Council Information Office, led a Chinese media delegation to Australia.

During his speech to the National Press Club in Canberra on April 12, Cai noted: "You might all be well aware that last year China commemorated the 600th anniversary of the epic voyages of Zheng He, a great navigator in ancient China.

"According to historical records, the fleets he commanded once arrived at the coast of Australia, which might serve as the start of Sino-Australian cultural exchanges and trade."

Zheng did indeed make some epic voyages in the early 15th century, taking armadas of ships through Southeast Asia, to the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and across the Indian Ocean to the east coast of Africa.

But, despite Cai's claims, there is no evidence that these fleets came anywhere near Australia. The "historical records" referred to by the minister simply do not exist.

Could this have been but a slip of the tongue, or an over-zealous scriptwriter inserting a paragraph to suggest Sino-Australian relations extending well back into the past?

We need only look at the federal parliamentary Hansard record of October 24, 2003 to put that possibility to rest. On that day, Chinese President Hu Jintao, addressing a joint meeting of the Australian parliament, made the claim: "Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China's Ming dynasty reached Australian shores."

Again, no textual evidence was offered in support. Why should senior ministers of the Chinese state conjure up a regional past that involves Chinese engagement with Australia before European settlement?

The motives may be many, and people may speculate at will. However, one thing is clear: historians need to take a public stand against claims that are made without evidence.

To my questions about how his finds had been vetted, Menzies responded vaguely, "The evidence is just so overwhelming that it's impossible to argue against." For her part, executive editor Claire Wachtel defended Menzies by insisting, "He's not a crazy loony."

Hi Ken,
just following up on Menzies' claims about sites in Queensland.
On page 459 of his book, he claims a wreck site off the east side of Fraser
Island was investigated privately in October 2002, and ""huge" wooden ribs,
and cannon were found, poss. 600yr old, but the Government closed the site
with a heritage listing. Menzies claims that this could be the "best proof"
of the Chinese in Queensland.
I talked to the archaeologist who listed the site (he works in my office).
Apparently the excavators' themselves admitted they had probably found the
"Marloo", which was wrecked in 1914 in what is now called "Marloo Bay" (!)
and that the "cannon" were actually metal davits (re: lifeboats). The davits
were found side by side in a neat row: not normal for cannon from a ship
wreck. The (intertidal zone) site was heritage listed to prevent treasure
seekers from ripping the site apart.