1421: The Year a Chinese Muslim Discovered America
The British submarine engineer and historian Gavin Menzies gave an astounding seminar on March 15, 2002 to the Royal Geographical Society in London, with evidence to support his theory that Zheng He, the Chinese Muslim navigator in Ming dynasty, beat Columbus by more than 70 years in discovering America.
Using evidence from maps drawn dated before Columbus' trip that clearly showed America, and astronomical maps traced back to Zheng He's time, Menzies is confident that the Zheng He should be honored as the first discoverer of America.
Menzies's conclusion is based on 14 years of research that includes secret maps, evidence of artifacts, and apparent proof of the voyage provided by the modern astronomy software program Starry Night.
As key evidence for a voyage that will remake history, Menzies says he obtained ancient Chinese navigation charts associated with the travels of Zheng He. The journey ran from 1421 to 1423. Menzies maintains that the ships sailed around the Southern tips of both Africa and South America.
"I set Starry Night up for dates in 1421 for parts of the world where I thought the Chinese had sailed," explained Menzies, a navigation expert and former Royal Navy submarine commander. He found that in two separate locations of the voyage, easily recognizable stars were directly above Zheng He's fleet.
Those stars have since moved, due to changes in Earth's orientation in space. Earth's spin is slightly imperfect, and its axis carves a circle on the sky every 26,000 years. The phenomenon, called precession, means that each pole points to different stars as time progresses. Menzies used the software program to recreate the sky as it would have looked in 1421.
"I had Chinese star charts, and I needed to date the charts," he said. "By an incredible bit of luck, one of the courses they steered, between Sumatra and Dondra Head, Ceylon, was due west."
This part of the journey was very near the equator in the Indian Ocean. Both Polaris, the North Star, and the bright southern star Canopus, which was very nearly above the celestial south pole, were on the charts. "From that I was able to determine the apparent shift of Polaris (due to precession). I could therefore date the chart to 1421, plus or minus 30 years."
Phillip Sadler, a celestial navigation expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says the estimation of a map's age based on star positions is possible. He said an estimate within 30 years, as Menzies claims, is possible.
About Zheng He:
Zheng He (1371-1435), or Cheng Ho, is China's most famous navigator. He built a total of 1622 ships and made at least seven major excursions between 1405 AD and 1430 AD. He traveled more than 50,000km and visited over 30 countries, reaching Somalia and probably Europe (France, Holland and Portugal).
Zheng He constructed many wooden ships, some of which are the largest in the history, in Nanjing. Three of the shipyards still exist today.
In each trip, he led a troop of 27,800 people on more than 300 ships. In each trip, 62 major ships of this fleet were employed, each over 400 ft long and 193 ft wide, holding 1000 people per ship, dwarfing Columbus' Santa Maria (75 ft x 25 ft) more than six-fold.
In the 1930s, a stone pillar was discovered in a town in Fujian province. It held an inscription that described the amazing voyages of Zheng He.
Zheng He described how the emperor of the Ming Dynasty had ordered him to sail to "the countries beyond the horizon," all the way to the end of the earth." His mission was to display the might of Chinese.
The pillar contains the Chinese names for the countries Zheng He visited. He wrote:
We have...beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky-high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course rapid like that of a star, transversing the savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare.
The countries and territories covered and recorded in the official Ming history includes Java, Sumatra, Vietnam, Siam, Cambodia, Philippines, Ceylon, Bangladesh, India, Yemen, Arabia, Somalia, Mogadishu. As a clear demonstration of his travel to Africa, among the souvenirs he brought back to China were the giraffes and lions, indigenous animals of Africa.
The official history also mentioned "Franca" (which was the territory to describe today's France and Portugal) and Holland. The Hollanders were described as tall people with red hair and beard, long nose, and deep eye sockets. If he did meet with the Europeans in their native countries, then the only way would be to navigate around the Cape of Good Hope before the Suez Canal was a throughway.
Unfortunately, Zheng He's magnificent accomplishment was later targeted by other courtiers as wasteful. Most of his records were destroyed and building of ships with more than three masts were considered crimes punishable by death. So, a large part of his excursion (which might include the America part) has no reports.
In Africa near Kenya today, there are tribes that are clearly Asian-looking. They also consider themselves as the descendants of Zheng He's crew.
His achievements show that China had the ships and navigational skills to explore the world. Mysteriously, China did not follow up on these voyages. The Chinese destroyed their ocean going ships and halted further expeditions. Thus, a century later, Europeans would "discover" China, instead of the Chinese "discovering" Europe.
China has a very old seafaring tradition. Chinese ships had sailed to India as early as the Han Dynasty. Chinese sailors had an important invention to help them-the compass. The compass, or "south pointing spoon," started out as a fortune-telling instrument used like an Ouija board. By the Song era, sailors had taken it up. As a foreign ship captain wrote, "In dark, weather they look to the south pointing needle, and use a sounding line to determine the smell and nature of the mud on the sea bottom, and so know where they are.
Chinese shipbuilders also developed fore-and-aft sails, the sternpost rudder, and boats with paddlewheels. Watertight compartments below decks kept the ship from sinking. Some boats were armor plated for protection. All these developments made long distance navigation possible.
After the Mongols were overthrown in 1368, the emperor of the new Ming Dynasty wanted to assert Chinese power. Because China was no longer part of a land empire that stretched from Asia to Europe, the emperor turned to the sea. He decided to build a navy. The Chinese made elaborate plans that would not be fulfilled for many years. A shipyard was built at the new capital of Najing (Nanking). Thousand of varnish and tung trees were planted on nearby Purple Mountain to provide wood for shipbuilding. The emperor established a school of foreign languages to train interpreters. While all this was going on, the man who would lead the navy was still an infant.
China's greatest adventurer, the 15th century Muslim,
Admiral Zheng He
Zheng He was born in 1371 in Kunyang, a town in southwest Yunnan Province. His family, named Ma, were part of a minority group known as the Semur. They originally came from Central Asia and followed the religion of Islam. Both his grandfather and father had made the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Zheng He grew up hearing their accounts of travel through foreign lands.
Yunnan was one of the last strongholds of Mongol support, holding out long after the Ming Dynasty began. After Ming armies conquered Yunnan in 1382, Zheng He was taken captive and brought to Nanjing. The eleven year old boy was made a servant of the prince who would become the Yong Le Emperor. It was Yong Le who renamed the boy Zheng He.
Zheng He is described in Chinese historical records as tall and heavy, with "clear-cut features and long ear lobes; a stride like a tiger's and voice clear and vibrant." He was well liked and admired for his quick wit in argument. Moreover, he was a brave soldier. When his prince seized the Chinese throne from his nephew, Zheng He fought well on his behalf. As a result, Zheng He became a close confidant of the new emperor and was given an important position at court.
The British submarine engineer and historian Gavin Menzies gave an astounding seminar on March 15, 2002 to the Royal Geographical Society in London, with evidence to support his theory that Zheng He, the Chinese Muslim navigator in Ming dynasty, beat Columbus by more than 70 years in discovering America.
Using evidence from maps drawn dated before Columbus' trip that clearly showed America, and astronomical maps traced back to Zheng He's time, Menzies is confident that the Zheng He should be honored as the first discoverer of America.
Menzies's conclusion is based on 14 years of research that includes secret maps, evidence of artifacts, and apparent proof of the voyage provided by the modern astronomy software program Starry Night.
As key evidence for a voyage that will remake history, Menzies says he obtained ancient Chinese navigation charts associated with the travels of Zheng He. The journey ran from 1421 to 1423. Menzies maintains that the ships sailed around the Southern tips of both Africa and South America.
"I set Starry Night up for dates in 1421 for parts of the world where I thought the Chinese had sailed," explained Menzies, a navigation expert and former Royal Navy submarine commander. He found that in two separate locations of the voyage, easily recognizable stars were directly above Zheng He's fleet.
Those stars have since moved, due to changes in Earth's orientation in space. Earth's spin is slightly imperfect, and its axis carves a circle on the sky every 26,000 years. The phenomenon, called precession, means that each pole points to different stars as time progresses. Menzies used the software program to recreate the sky as it would have looked in 1421.
"I had Chinese star charts, and I needed to date the charts," he said. "By an incredible bit of luck, one of the courses they steered, between Sumatra and Dondra Head, Ceylon, was due west."
This part of the journey was very near the equator in the Indian Ocean. Both Polaris, the North Star, and the bright southern star Canopus, which was very nearly above the celestial south pole, were on the charts. "From that I was able to determine the apparent shift of Polaris (due to precession). I could therefore date the chart to 1421, plus or minus 30 years."
Phillip Sadler, a celestial navigation expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says the estimation of a map's age based on star positions is possible. He said an estimate within 30 years, as Menzies claims, is possible.
About Zheng He:
Zheng He (1371-1435), or Cheng Ho, is China's most famous navigator. He built a total of 1622 ships and made at least seven major excursions between 1405 AD and 1430 AD. He traveled more than 50,000km and visited over 30 countries, reaching Somalia and probably Europe (France, Holland and Portugal).
Zheng He constructed many wooden ships, some of which are the largest in the history, in Nanjing. Three of the shipyards still exist today.
In each trip, he led a troop of 27,800 people on more than 300 ships. In each trip, 62 major ships of this fleet were employed, each over 400 ft long and 193 ft wide, holding 1000 people per ship, dwarfing Columbus' Santa Maria (75 ft x 25 ft) more than six-fold.
In the 1930s, a stone pillar was discovered in a town in Fujian province. It held an inscription that described the amazing voyages of Zheng He.
Zheng He described how the emperor of the Ming Dynasty had ordered him to sail to "the countries beyond the horizon," all the way to the end of the earth." His mission was to display the might of Chinese.
The pillar contains the Chinese names for the countries Zheng He visited. He wrote:
We have...beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky-high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course rapid like that of a star, transversing the savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare.
The countries and territories covered and recorded in the official Ming history includes Java, Sumatra, Vietnam, Siam, Cambodia, Philippines, Ceylon, Bangladesh, India, Yemen, Arabia, Somalia, Mogadishu. As a clear demonstration of his travel to Africa, among the souvenirs he brought back to China were the giraffes and lions, indigenous animals of Africa.
The official history also mentioned "Franca" (which was the territory to describe today's France and Portugal) and Holland. The Hollanders were described as tall people with red hair and beard, long nose, and deep eye sockets. If he did meet with the Europeans in their native countries, then the only way would be to navigate around the Cape of Good Hope before the Suez Canal was a throughway.
Unfortunately, Zheng He's magnificent accomplishment was later targeted by other courtiers as wasteful. Most of his records were destroyed and building of ships with more than three masts were considered crimes punishable by death. So, a large part of his excursion (which might include the America part) has no reports.
In Africa near Kenya today, there are tribes that are clearly Asian-looking. They also consider themselves as the descendants of Zheng He's crew.
His achievements show that China had the ships and navigational skills to explore the world. Mysteriously, China did not follow up on these voyages. The Chinese destroyed their ocean going ships and halted further expeditions. Thus, a century later, Europeans would "discover" China, instead of the Chinese "discovering" Europe.
China has a very old seafaring tradition. Chinese ships had sailed to India as early as the Han Dynasty. Chinese sailors had an important invention to help them-the compass. The compass, or "south pointing spoon," started out as a fortune-telling instrument used like an Ouija board. By the Song era, sailors had taken it up. As a foreign ship captain wrote, "In dark, weather they look to the south pointing needle, and use a sounding line to determine the smell and nature of the mud on the sea bottom, and so know where they are.
Chinese shipbuilders also developed fore-and-aft sails, the sternpost rudder, and boats with paddlewheels. Watertight compartments below decks kept the ship from sinking. Some boats were armor plated for protection. All these developments made long distance navigation possible.
After the Mongols were overthrown in 1368, the emperor of the new Ming Dynasty wanted to assert Chinese power. Because China was no longer part of a land empire that stretched from Asia to Europe, the emperor turned to the sea. He decided to build a navy. The Chinese made elaborate plans that would not be fulfilled for many years. A shipyard was built at the new capital of Najing (Nanking). Thousand of varnish and tung trees were planted on nearby Purple Mountain to provide wood for shipbuilding. The emperor established a school of foreign languages to train interpreters. While all this was going on, the man who would lead the navy was still an infant.
China's greatest adventurer, the 15th century Muslim,
Admiral Zheng He
Zheng He was born in 1371 in Kunyang, a town in southwest Yunnan Province. His family, named Ma, were part of a minority group known as the Semur. They originally came from Central Asia and followed the religion of Islam. Both his grandfather and father had made the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Zheng He grew up hearing their accounts of travel through foreign lands.
Yunnan was one of the last strongholds of Mongol support, holding out long after the Ming Dynasty began. After Ming armies conquered Yunnan in 1382, Zheng He was taken captive and brought to Nanjing. The eleven year old boy was made a servant of the prince who would become the Yong Le Emperor. It was Yong Le who renamed the boy Zheng He.
Zheng He is described in Chinese historical records as tall and heavy, with "clear-cut features and long ear lobes; a stride like a tiger's and voice clear and vibrant." He was well liked and admired for his quick wit in argument. Moreover, he was a brave soldier. When his prince seized the Chinese throne from his nephew, Zheng He fought well on his behalf. As a result, Zheng He became a close confidant of the new emperor and was given an important position at court.
:applaud:
