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New Book Says Chinese Discovered America

By Sam Chu Lin | Special to AsianWeek

It’s another Lunar New Year, and the Chinese American population can count off one more year of participation in the American experiment. By most counts, it’s been 250 years or so. But what if that count were off by 300 years? And what if the first Chinese had come to America not as immigrants, but as explorers?

That’s the contention of 1421: The Year China Discovered America (William Morrow), a new book by British amateur historian and retired submariner Gavin Menzies which has stirred up enough historical controversy to catapult it onto the New York Times Bestseller List.

Wearing a dark blue pinstriped suit, the 65-year-old Menzies broke out in a warm smile as he sat down in a chair for a television satellite interview and exchanged greetings with this reporter. He was wrapping up a successful book tour that had taken him across the country and to Canada, and he and his wife Marcella were about to leave New York City and wing their way back to London, England.

Critics and traditional historians are challenging Menzies to provide more evidence to prove his assertion that the Chinese beat Christopher Columbus and other European explorers to America, but he says there is already plenty.

Menzies says he has spent 14 years retracing the voyages of Admiral Zheng He, who set sail with a large fleet of Chinese ships between 1421 and 1423.

“This was seventy years before Christopher Columbus,” stated the amateur historian. “They reached the Pacific coast of North and South America, the Atlantic coast of North and South America, India, Africa, Australia (and back) to Asia in the Pacific.”

According to Menzies, these Chinese seafarers did more than just sail to these lands.

“Wherever they went,” he added, “they set up settlements. For example, they had six settlements in North America. Emperor Zhui Di ordered them to bring the entire world into Confucian harmony. That was their task. So wherever they went, they would leave tribute, all sorts of exotic silks and porcelains. And in return they would take produce when they went back to China.”

Menzies says there’s plenty of evidence these early Chinese explorers left their mark in California, long before their European counterparts.

“There’s Chinese porcelain, jade, Chinese animals which the first Europeans who got to California found,” he stated. “They also found Chinese rice, Chinese roses and Chinese hibachis.

“One of the most interesting pieces of evidence is the first Europeans to get to California sent to do an inventory of the Indian people found a Chinese-speaking colony between the Russian and the Sacramento Rivers. They had been there since 1421, for hundreds of years.”

Menzies also notes there are wrecks of Chinese junks and anchors found up and down the coast of California that predate Christopher Columbus. He says he would like to see digging resume on a site close the Sacramento River near Glenn, Calif. where an 85-foot long Chinese junk is believed buried. Local historians respond saying such a large ship could never have navigated the waters there and that such an effort would be a waste of time.

But two Southern California divers are thrilled that Menzies is generating this kind of publicity. In 1975, Bob Merelis and Wayne Baldwin discovered a large collection of strange-looking stones with holes in them in the Pacific Ocean near Palos Verdes, a suburb of Los Angeles. They were scuba diving for lobster when they made their find.

“We sent some samples of the rocks to a scientist in San Diego,” Merelis recounted. “He sent them to China and verified the same stone is found in China also. There are 35 to 40 of them at that one location. My goal is to find out where they came from and what they were used for. I can’t imagine small Chinese boats along the coast here that were fishing for abalone were using 3,000-pound stone anchors. I can imagine them being used as ballast in ships that were 400 feet long, and they were used as anchors.”

His long-time friend Baldwin has the same curiosity. He has been diving in the ocean for more than 50 years.

“After studying them a little bit,” Baldwin said, “they looked like they were man-made. One of the intriguing things about them is there’s a variety of shapes down there. There are some that are shaped like a barrel, some shaped like a donut, some shaped like a pickle with a hole drilled with a long axis.”

Charlie Sie, a retired Xerox vice-president who lives near Merelis, is thrilled to learn about the stone anchors. He would like to see Menzies’ theory proved true.

“Admiral Zheng He is well-known in China,” he noted. “When we were kids, we learned that during the Ming Dynasty, he led a fleet of ships that sailed through Southeast Asia, over the Indian Ocean, and to Africa.”

Menzies believes the Chinese went further, and that they circumnavigated the world. Unfortunately, when the admiral’s fleet returned to China from its last voyage, the country was embroiled in political and economic chaos. The ships were mothballed, dismantled, and most of the records of China’s seagoing period were destroyed. Menzies points out that the Chinese ships were giants of the sea.

“The Chinese navy was absolutely enormous,” he stated. “The admiral had set sail with 800 ships. Some of them were so big that they could have put the whole of Magellan’s fleet in one of their holds and the whole of Christopher Columbus’s fleet (the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria) in another hold. There were more than 40,000 men in the whole fleet. They were technological marvels. They could desalinate water. They grew rice on board. They had tubs of frogs, coops of chickens. They were self-sufficient. They could stay at sea for months on end.”

Menzies also compliments these early Chinese for being religiously tolerant. Zheng He, a eunuch, was Muslim.

“The Chinese were very peaceable,” he noted. “The size of their navy and the power of their weapons — they could have blasted any other navy to pieces, but they didn’t. They never asked for a single square inch of land. They were there to bring goodwill from China and to bring the nations into Confucian harmony.”

Menzies is now producing a television documentary based on the findings of his new book. He’s hoping it will also be a winner. He invites anyone who has any new clues to contribute to this subject to contact him by e-mail at zhenghe@1421.tv.