Gavin Menzies

Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service / branch	Royal Navy
Years of service	1953–1970
Rank	Commander
Commands	HMS Rorqual
Other work	Author: 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002) 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (2008)

Gavin Menzies (born 1937) is a retired British submarine commander and author. He is best known for his controversial book published in 2002, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, in which he presents his hypothesis that ships from the fleet of Chinese admiral Zheng He visited the Americas prior to their discovery by European explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492, and that the same fleet circumnavigated the globe a century before Ferdinand Magellan, as part of the era of Chinese exploration. Menzies' second book, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, was published in 2008.

In the community of professional historians Menzies' theories are strongly criticized and have received no support as of this writing. It has also been pointed out that he has no command of the Chinese language, which would prevent him from understanding original source material relevant to his thesis.

Biographical synopsis

Menzies was born in London, England (early versions of 1421 erroneously stated that he was born in China, when in fact his family moved there when he was three weeks old). Menzies joined the Royal Navy in 1953 and served in submarines from 1959 to 1970. Menzies claims he sailed the routes sailed by Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook, while he was commander of the diesel submarine HMS Rorqual between 1968 and 1970, a contention questioned by some of his critics.. He served as operations officer of H.M.S. Resolution, Britain’s first Polaris submarine, in her first commission. Resolution sailed on her first patrol in June 1968 and served as Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent for 28 years. In 1969, Menzies was involved in an incident in the Philippines, when the Rorqual rammed a U.S. Navy minesweeper, the USS Endurance, which was moored at a pier. This collision punched a hole in the Endurance but did not damage the Rorqual. The ensuing enquiry found Menzies and one of his subordinates responsible for a combination of factors that led to the accident, including the absence of the coxswain (who usually takes the helm in port) who had been replaced by a less experienced crew member, and technical issues with the boat's telegraph. Menzies retired the following year, and stood unsuccessfully against far right candidate Enoch Powell as an independent candidate in Wolverhampton South West during the United Kingdom general election 1970. Menzies currently resides in North London with his wife Marcella.

1421: The Year China Discovered the World

This Chinese map, produced in 1763 and claimed by the unidentified author to be based on a 1418 Chinese map, has produced controversy as to how much knowledge Medieval China had of the Americas and Antarctica even though the map uses European place names that had not yet been assigned in 1418.

In 2002, Menzies published 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. The book is informally written and generally structured as a series of personal vignettes of Menzies' travels around the globe examining what he claims is evidence for his "1421 hypothesis", interspersed with speculation and description of the achievements of Admiral Zheng He's fleet. Menzies states in the introduction that the book is an attempt to answer the following question:

On some early European world maps, it appears that someone had charted and surveyed lands supposedly unknown to the Europeans. Who could have charted and surveyed these lands before they were "discovered"?

Menzies concludes that only China had the time, money, manpower and leadership to send such expeditions. The book then sets out to prove that the Chinese visited these unknown lands. Menzies claims that from 1421 to 1423, during the Ming Dynasty of China, ships in the fleet of Emperor Zhu Di (朱棣) and Admiral Zheng He (鄭和) and commanded by the Chinese captains Zhou Wen (周聞), Zhou Man (周滿), Yang Qing (楊慶), and Hong Bao (洪保) traveled to many parts of the world that were unknown to Europeans at that time. Menzies produces what he calls "indisputable evidence" that the Chinese discovered Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, Antarctica, and the Northeast Passage; circumnavigated Greenland, made attempts to reach both the North and South Poles, and circumnavigated the world before Ferdinand Magellan.

Although the book contains numerous footnotes, references and acknowledgments, the references die out when he considers voyages beyond what is normally acknowledged for the range of Zheng He's travels: East Africa. Instead he bases his main theory on original interpretations and extrapolations of academic studies of minority population DNA, archaeological finds and ancient maps.

Menzies claims that knowledge of these discoveries was subsequently lost because the Mandarin bureaucrats of the Imperial court feared that the costs of further voyages would ruin the Chinese economy. According to Menzies, when Zhu Di died in 1424, the new Hongxi Emperor forbade further expeditions, and the Mandarins hid or destroyed the records of previous exploration to discourage further voyages. Menzies discusses the first European attempts to colonize the New World and identifies the maps he used as evidence for his theories.

Tan Ta Sen, president of the International Zheng He Society, has acknowledged the book's popular appeal as well as its scholarly failings:

The book is very interesting, but you still need more evidence. We don't regard it as an historical book, but as a narrative one. I want to see more proof. But at least Menzies has started something, and people could find more evidence.

Within the academic world, the book (and Menzies "1421 hypothesis") is dismissed by sinologists and professional historians. In 2004, historian Robert Finlay severely criticized Menzies in the Journal of World History for his "reckless manner of dealing with evidence" that led him to propose hypotheses "without a shred of proof". Finlay wrote:

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—is simply asserted by Menzies without a shred of proof ... The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous ... Examination of the book's central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance.

Professor Su Ming Yang of the United States, Dr. Jin Guo-Ping of Portugal, Captain Philip Rivers of Malaysia, Captain Malhão Pereira and Dr Geoff Wade of Singapore, in a message to the Library of Congress objecting to that institution's support for a conference featuring Menzies' participation, questioned the extent of Menzies' nautical knowledge as well as his historical methods and state:

As scholars and educators, we feel a strong obligation to speak out publicly about what we feel is an inappropriate decision by the august Library of Congress to make its name and premises available as a platform for the author Mr. Gavin Menzies. His book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, is a work of sheer fiction presented as revisionist history. Not a single document or artifact has been found to support his new claims on the supposed Ming naval expeditions beyond Africa...Menzies' numerous claims and the hundreds of pieces of "evidence" he has assembled have been thoroughly and entirely discredited by historians, maritime experts and oceanographers from China, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

In a later review, Wade also pointed out Menzies had a propensity for making claims of dramatic, forthcoming evidence that never arrived.

1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance

Machines from Taccolas De ingeneis, which Menzies believes to be copies from an earlier Chinese book. In reality, Taccola started work on his treatise as early as 1419 and essentially completed it in 1433, one year before the supposed arrival of the Chinese fleet.

In 2008 Menzies released a follow-up publication titled 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. In it Menzies claims that by 1434 Chinese delegations reached Italy and were in some way responsible for the Renaissance. He claims that a letter written in 1474 by Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli and found amongst the private papers of Columbus indicates that an earlier Chinese ambassador had direct correspondence with Pope Eugene IV in Rome. However, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a professor of history at Tufts University in the United States and at Queen Mary College, University of London, labels this claim as "drivel" and asserts that no reputable scholar supports the view that Toscanelli's letter refers to a Chinese ambassador.

Menzies then claims that materials from the Chinese Book of Agriculture, the Nong Shu (農書), written by the Yuan-dynasty scholar-official Wang Zhen (fl. 1290–1333), were copied by European scholars and provided direct inspiration for the illustrations of mechanical devices pioneered by the Italian Renaissance polymaths Taccola (1382–1453) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). However, Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University questions the rigor of Menzies' application of the historical method and, in regard to the illustrations, asserts that Menzies "says something is a copy just because they look similar. He says two things are almost identical when they are not."

Geoff Wade, a senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, acknowledges that there was a cross exchange of technological ideas between Europe and China, but ultimately classifies Menzies' book as historical fiction and asserts that there is "absolutely no Chinese evidence" for a maritime venture to Italy in 1434.

Map

Zheng He Map, 1763; Collection of Liu Gang

In January 2006, BBC News and The Economist both published news regarding the exhibition of a Chinese sailing map with detailed descriptions of both Native Americans and Native Australians. The map (at right) was dated 1763, and was supposedly a copy of an earlier map made in 1418. Gavin Menzies claims the map demonstrates that Zheng He sailed to the Americas and Australia. Critics point out that the map, if authentic, is more likely a relatively recent creation based on an eighteenth-century European map.

Detail, Zheng He Map, phonetic transcription of "North America"

According to the map's owner, Liu Gang, a Chinese lawyer and collector, he purchased the map in 2001 for $500 USD from a Shanghai dealer. A number of authorities on Chinese history have questioned the authenticity of the map. Some point to the use of the Mercator-style projection, its accurate reckoning of longitude and its North-based orientation. None of these features was used in the maps made in either Asia or Europe during this period (for example see the Kangnido map (1410) and the Fra Mauro map (1459)). Also mentioned is the depiction of the erroneous Island of California, a mistake commonly repeated in European maps from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. On the map the American continent is labeled "Jin Ming Bei Yamolijia" (今名北亞墨利加, "Now named Northern Yamolijia"). This translation was unknown in Ming Dynasty, and is known to be a borrowing from the West.

Geoff Wade of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore has strongly disputed the authenticity of the map and has suggested that it is either an 18th or 21st-century fake. Wade has pointed out a number of anachronisms that appear in the map and its text annotations. For example, in the text next to Eastern Europe, which has been translated as "People here mostly believe in God and their religion is called 'Jing' (景, referring to Nestorianism)", Wade notes that the Chinese word for the Christian God is given as "Shang-di" (上帝), which is a usage that was first borrowed from Chinese medieval text by Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci in the 16th century.

In May 2006 the Dominion Post reported that Fiona Petchey, head of the testing unit at Waikato University, which had carbon dated the map, had asked Gavin Menzies to remove claims from his website that the dating proved the map was genuine. The carbon dating indicated with an 80% probability a date for the paper of the map between either 1640–1690 or 1730–1810. However as the ink was not tested, it was impossible to know when it was drawn. Ms Petchey said, "we asked him to remove those, not because we were not happy with the dates, but because we were not overly happy with being associated with his interpretations of those dates."

External links

• Gavin Menzies' website promoting 1434
• Gavin Menzies' official website about his research on Zheng He

Critics

• 1421 Exposed - Website set up by an international group of academics and researchers
• Finlay, Robert (2004). "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America". Journal of World History 15 (2) - Scholarly review of Menzies
• Gavin's Fantasy Land, 1421
• A critical view of Menzies' story
• Australian Broadcasting Corporation's FOUR CORNERS Program Transcript of "Junk History"
• Mark Newbrook: Zheng He in the Americas and Other Unlikely Tales of Exploration and Discovery - Skeptical Inquirer, Sept 2004 (volume 14-3)