Tara MacIsaac | Impressions

Did the eunuch admiral Zengh He set foot in America?

According to medieval Chinese sources the eunuch Zheng He, the favorite admiral of the Yongle Emperor, commanded six expeditions between 1405 and 1422. Again, between 1431 and 1433, at the request of the Xuande Emperor, Admiral Zheng He commanded a seventh expedition. The fleet he commanded was the largest maritime fleet in the world.

Zheng He sailed to Indonesia, India, Ceylon, Arabia, Africa and many other countries in the Western Ocean (Indian Ocean). Whether Zheng He or any of his associates set foot in the Americas is now open to debate. Nowhere in these Chinese accounts is even a hint that the 15th century Chinese made landfall in the Americas. Yet, a few modern writers conjecture that the Chinese sailed to lands as far as the Americas.

1421, The Year China Discovered the World

On January 1, 2002, Gavin Menzies, a British author and retired submarine lieutenant-commander, published his controversial book titled: “1421: The Year China Discovered the World.“

In his book, Menzies claims the Chinese reached America 70 years before the Iberian explorer Christopher Columbus. He says the Chinese not only discovered America first, but they also established many lost colonies in the Caribbean. He also asserts that the same fleet circumnavigated the globe.

China lost most of its historical records of the country’s explorative marine voyages during centuries of turmoil in the country. So, Gavin Menzies has cobbled together some plausible evidence supporting his controversial conjectures. He uses some suggestive and a little ridiculous grab bag of evidence. Experts in the field scoff at the theories suggested by Gavin Menzies. There is no real evidence.

Does this map prove that the Chinese discovered America before Columbus (Harper Collins)

According to Menzies, the Ibderian explorers: Ferdinand Magellan, Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Francisco Pizarro, Pedro Álvares Cabral, Thomas Cook et al., had “discovered” lands the Chinese had already visited, and these renowned European explorers sailed with maps charted by the Chinese cartographers.

Almost all critics and historians have rejected and debunked Menzies’ theories, conjectures and assertions as grandiose and speculative re-creation of little-known voyages made by Chinese ships in the early 15th century. They have categorized Gavin Menzies as a “pseudo-historian”.

In the June 2004 issue of Journal of World History, Robert Finlay in his review titled “How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America,” shows that Gavin Menzies’s book has no foundation.

One reviewer of Gavin Menzies’ book, Andrew, says:

“There are books that break new ground with bombshell research and there are books that spellbind us with the skill of their deception. This book is the latter. Menzies takes a tremendous dump on the sensibilities of his readers, bombarding us with outrageous claims backed up with erroneous facts and arrogant speculation.“

Another reviewer, Adam, has commented:

“I have to say that I enjoyed reading this book, if only because it made me so angry at the gross inaccuracies and completely imaginary scenarios that the author made up. He claims to have information from anthropology, archaeology, geology, geography, history, etc, but what he really has exists only in his own mind.“

On page 103, Gavin Menzies claims that on the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic stands a large red sandstone rock, some three meters high, with inscriptions on it. Menzies claims the Chinese carved these inscriptions in the Malayalam language, spoken by the people of Kerala in India. He says he photographed the inscriptions. But he does not provide copies of the photographs, nor line drawings of the inscriptions or translations. In fact, red sandstone is not found on the Cape Verde Islands.

Rock of Our Lady in Ribeira do Penedo, Cape Verde (Source: Pitt Reitmaier/bela-vista.net)

Dr. Pitt Reitmaier, a tropical doctor at the University of Heidelberg posted the above photo of the rock Pedra da Nossa Senhora (Rock of Our Lady) he found in Ribeira do Penedo, Cape Verde. Reitmaier says:

“In 1421, the year when the Great Wall was finished, China sent out a fleet of more than one hundred ships to discover the world. Reports say they crossed the Indian Ocean from Calicut to the African East Coast – what was not new for Arabo-Swahili, Indian and Chinese captains in the Middle Ages.

They rounded the Cape of Good Hope and went North following the African West Coast. Then (as always when discoverers come to Cape Verde) a serious storm took them to the arquipelago, presumably to Santo Antão. And here – as in other places they visited – they left behind “carved stones” (Creole: rocha scribida) in order to give proof for their presence to later generations of discoverors.

So far the fascinating story told by submarine captain Gavin Menzies in his book 1421 The Year China Discovered the World. He diagnoses the writings on this rocha scribida as Malayalam, the language spoken to date in Kerala, southern India – and in its harbour city of Calicut, where the fleet has started from. “

Later Menzies follows the fleet to Greenland, the North Pole (he claims), the Americas, the Strait of Magellan before it crossed the pacific ocean and found back home to China.

…

The name Pedra da Nossa Senhora stems from the Catholic interpretations of the writings as a first document of Portuguese sailors setting foot on Santo Antao Island. The central part with the cross documents the death of a portuguese sailor.“

In the footnote to his post Dr. Pitt Reitmaier says:

“If you go for historical evidence, most likely you will not believe Menzie’s story. Reknown historians argue that none of his findings are new and that his way to combine the facts in a thrilling story is highly speculative and cannot stand scrutiny by scholars. e.g.: The carvings were identified as something like “Malayalam” by an employee of the Bank of India, not by any linguist or historian. Why so? India has excellent historians and linguists by the hundred!

My personal opinion goes to two extremes:

– isn’t it wonderful food for thought, sweet and sour, full of phantasy, even if wrong?

– if this is the way, submarine captains draw conclusions in their leasure time … how dangerous are they at work?”

Linguist Christopher Culver says:

“I would like to offer a perspective from my own individual profession, linguistics. Menzies writes, for example:

‘Linguistics provide further evidence. The people of the Eten and Monsefu villages in the Lambayeque province of Peru can understand Chinese but not each other’s patois, despite living only three miles apart. Stephen Powers, a nineteenth-century inspector employed by the government of California to survey the native population, found linguistic evidence of a Chinese-speaking colony in the state.‘

The first assertion, on the Peruvian village, is not sourced at all and is either the personal fancy of the author or some minor crank idea. The second, however, is cited to an 19th-century bit of scholarship evidentally done without appropriate field methods. He goes on to claim that Chinese sailors shipwrecked on the East Coast of the United States would have been able to communicate with locals, as these would have included Chinese who had walked over the Bering Strait. Chinese walk across to Alaska and across all North America, but end up speaking Middle Chinese, and yet leave no trace of this dialect on neighbouring Native American languages? Risible fantasy. There’s even an assertion that Navajo elders understand Chinese conversation, and an assertion that the Peruvian village name Chanchan must be Chinese because it sounds (at least to him) like “Canton”. Perhaps the silliest Peruvian connection is between Chinese “qipu” and Quechua “quipu“; Menzies seemingly doesn’t understand that “q” represents a completely different sound in each language. So, I hope that the reader with some training in linguistics can see what kind of arguments are used in the book, and beware accordingly.”

On May 7, 2015, I came across an article titled “New Evidence Ancient Chinese Explorers Landed in America Excites Experts” written by Tara MacIsaac in the Epoch Times. She wrote:

“John A. Ruskamp Jr., Ed.D., reports that he has identified an outstanding, history-changing treasure hidden in plain sight. High above a walking path in Albuquerque’s Petroglyph National Monument, Ruskamp spotted petroglyphs that struck him as unusual. After consulting with experts on Native American rock writing and ancient Chinese scripts to corroborate his analysis, he has concluded that the readable message preserved by these petroglyphs was likely inscribed by a group of Chinese explorers thousands of years ago.”

Cartouche 1 (Source - theepochtimes.com - John Ruskamp) — Cartouche 1 (Source: John Ruskamp/theepochtimes.com)

Cartouche 2 (Source: John Ruskamp/theepochtimes.com)

Cartouche 3 (Source: John Ruskamp/theepochtimes.com)

Whether Zheng He’s fleet circumvented the horn of Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, and then sailed across the Atlantic to the Americas is speculative. More concrete evidence is necessary to convince the modern historians to rewrite history as “the Chinese reached the Americas before Christopher Columbus!“.

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