Book claims Chinese discovered America

NEW YORK, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- Scattered evidence that Chinese explorers "discovered" America 71 years before Christopher Columbus and circumnavigated the earth 60 years before Ferdinand Magellan was born has been brought into convincing focus by a book published Tuesday that is expected to rewrite history.

British author Gavin Menzies first aired his theory of pre-Columbian visits by the Chinese to both North and South America in a lecture before the Royal Geographic Society in London last March, resulting in a bidding war for the book he spent 15 years writing to back up his claim. Publishing rights sold for $780,000, a phenomenal sum for a non-fiction book by an unknown author.

The book was published in England in November under the title "1421: The Year China Discovered America" and is now available in an augmented American edition published by William Morrow. A 16-page postscript in the new edition offers evidence that the body of a Chinese official was found buried at Teotihuacan, the pre-Aztec ceremonial site near Mexico City.

The Chinese-style tomb with Chinese inscriptions found by archaeologist William Niven at the base of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in 1911 contained a body identified as a Chinese or Mongolian wearing a necklace of jade, unknown in Mexico.

Menzies, who portions of the body were split between Swiss and Swedish collections, and he hopes to get permission to take DNA samples from the remains.

The author, a 65-year-old retired Royal Navy officer and navigation expert, began formulating his theory when he was shown a map of the world dated 1459 while doing research in Venice. The map clearly showed Southern Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, though Vasco da Gama did not "discover" the cape as a sea route to Asia until 1497. The map noted that a voyage had been made around the cape in 1420.

The map also bore a picture of a Chinese junk. Menzies believes the map was based on Chinese charts taken to Venice by a merchant traveler, Niccolo da Conti, who claimed in a book he wrote in 1434 that he joined a Chinese treasure fleet in India and sailed to China via Australia, 350 years before Captain Cook's expedition reached the Antipodes. There is no evidence of these Chinese charts, but Menzies presumes they existed.

His findings in Venice led Menzies to research existing Chinese documents describing the outfitting of a great treasure fleet by the Yongle Emperor, Zhui Di, under the command of his eunuch admiral Zheng Hi. The fleet of many-masted junks that were five times the size of European caravels and carried 1,000 men each made seven great voyages from 1405 to 1423 when the ships were mothballed as the result of an expensive land campaign against the invading Mongols.

It had long been known that Zheng Hi's ships sailed around Southeast Asia, crossing the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, but Menzies is convinced they also sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to Western Africa and across the Atlantic to the Eastern coast of North America, from Florida to Rhode Island, and parts of the South American coast. Other Chinese ships cleared Cape Horn and explored the Western coast of both South and North America, he claims.

Zheng Hi was also known by the name of Sin Bao, hence the legend that arose in Europe of the fabulous voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.

Menzies writes that after his lecture before the Royal Geographic Society, "new evidence began to pour in from all over the world, all of which had to be evaluated and checked for accuracy by experts." He said he has been notified of new discoveries from Vancouver Island to Chile that lend credence to his claim that Chinese fleets visited the Americas, leaving bloodline traces that only recently have been found in the DNA of Indians living in Northern Brazil, Venezuela, Surinam and Guyana.

In the United States, the accumulation of evidence of a pre-Columbian Chinese presence is strongest in California, around San Francisco, the Mississippi River area west of Kansas City, and Florida, the book says. Other American areas probably visited or even settled by Chinese are said to be Mexico between the Pacific coast and Mexico City, the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, Colombia, and Guyana, and the Amazon Basin.

Menzies reports 50 ancient stone carvings of ships believed to be Chinese and 40 of horses -- extinct in America after 10,000 B.C. -- from the floodplains of he Mississippi. He quotes 16th century Spanish historian Pedro de Castaneda as saying he met people resembling Chinese living along the Arkansas River and his contemporary, Pedro Menendez, as saying he saw the wrecks of gilded Chinese vessels on the banks of the Missouri River.

Menendez's report no longer seems incredible in light of the discovery 20 years ago of a medieval Chinese-style junk buried under a sandbank in the Sacramento River off the northeast corner of San Francisco Bay, Menzies says. Fragments of wood taken from the ship have been carbon-dated to 1410 and identified as cut from Keteleria, a Chinese evergreen tree unknown in America.

The author offers long lists of plants, animals, and birds that were carried to the Americas, probably by foreign visitors, in the pre-Columbian era. The first European explorers found fields of rice -- a crop foreign to the Americas but common in Asia -- in Mexico and Brazil and Chinese root crops in the Amazon basin. The list goes on and on.

This book is likely to be the most fascinating read of 2003.

("1421, The Year China Discovered America," by Gavin Menzies, William Morrow, 576 pages, $27.95.)