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Gavin Menzies

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Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies
Allegiance United Kingdom
Service/branch Royal Navy
Years of service1953–1970
RankCommander
CommandsHMS Rorqual
Other workAuthor:
1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002)
1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (2008)

Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies (born 1937) is a retired British submarine commander and author. He is best known for his controversial book 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 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 extended his discovery hypothesis to the European continent.

In the community of professional historians Menzies' theories are dismissed as fictitious and have received no support as of this writing.[1][2][3][4][5][6] 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.[7]

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).[8] 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.[9]

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of factors that led to the accident, including the absence of the coxswain (who usually takes the helm in port) who had been replaced by a less experienced crew member, and technical issues with the boat's telegraph.[8][10] Menzies retired the following year, and stood unsuccessfully as an independent candidate in Wolverhampton South West during the United Kingdom general election 1970, where—standing against Enoch Powell—he called for unrestricted immigration to Great Britain, drawing 0.2% of the vote.[11]

In 1996 Menzies was declared a vexatious litigant by HM Courts Service which prohibits him from taking legal action in England and Wales without prior judicial permission.[12][13][14]

1421: The Year China Discovered the World

This Chinese map, bearing the date 1763 and claimed by the anonymous 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.[15][16][17]

In 2002, Menzies published 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. The book is written informally, as a series of vignettes of Menzies' travels around the globe examining what he claims is evidence for his "1421 hypothesis", interspersed with speculation[5] 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 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"?

In the book, Menzies concludes that only China had the time, money, manpower and leadership to send such expeditions and then sets out to prove that the Chinese visited lands unknown in either China or Europe. He claims that from 1421 to 1423, during the Ming Dynasty of China under Emperor Zhu Di (朱棣) the fleets of Admiral Zheng He (鄭和), commanded by the Chinese captains Zhou Wen (周聞), Zhou Man (周滿), Yang Qing (楊慶), and Hong Bao (洪保), discovered Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, Antarctica, and the Northeast Passage; circumnavigated Greenland, tried to reach the North and South Poles, and circumnavigated the world before Ferdinand Magellan.

Although the book contains numerous footnotes, references and acknowledgments, it lacks supporting references for Chinese voyages beyond East Africa, the location acknowledged by professional historians as the limit of the fleet's travels. Menzies 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. He conjectures (without supporting evidence) that when Zhu Di died in 1424 and the new Hongxi Emperor forbade further expeditions, the Mandarins hid or destroyed the records of previous exploration to discourage further voyages.

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.[18]

Within the academic world, the book (and Menzies "1421 hypothesis") is dismissed by sinologists and professional historians.[19][20][21] 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".[5] 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.[22]

A group of scholars and navigators, Su Ming Yang of the United States, Jin Guo-Ping of Portugal, Philip Rivers of Malaysia, Malhão Pereira and Geoff Wade of Singapore questioned Menzies' methods and findings in a joint message:[23]

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.[23]

In a later review, Wade also pointed out Menzies had a propensity for making claims of dramatic, forthcoming evidence that never arrived.[15]

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

Machines from Taccola's 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.[24]

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, 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.[1]

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."[1]

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.[1]

Map

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 (above) 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.[citation needed]

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.[15]

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, that the paper was dated to between either 1640–1690 or 1730–1810. However as the ink was not tested, it was impossible to know when the map itself 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."[25]

References

  1. ^ a b c d Castle, Tim (July 29, 2008). "Columbus debunker sets sights on Leonardo da Vinci". Reuters. London, UK. Reuters. Archived from the original on January 26, 2011. Retrieved January 26, 2011.
  2. ^ The 1421 myth exposed, retrieved 2007-03-22
  3. ^ Zheng He in the Americas and Other Unlikely Tales of Exploration and Discovery, archived from the original on 2007-03-17, retrieved 2007-03-22
  4. ^ 1421: The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies, retrieved 2007-03-22
  5. ^ a b c Finlay, Robert (2004), "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America", Journal of World History, 15 (2) {{citation}}: External link in |title= (help) Cite error: The named reference "finlay2004" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  6. ^ Goodman, David S. G. (2006): "Mao and The Da Vinci Code: Conspiracy, Narrative and History", The Pacific Review, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 359–384 (367–372)
  7. ^ *Ptak, Roderich; Salmon, Claudine (2005), "Zheng He: Geschichte und Fiktion", in Ptak, Roderich; Höllmann, Thomas O. (eds.), Zheng He. Images & Perceptions, South China and Maritime Asia, vol. 15, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 9–35 (12)
  8. ^ a b Interview with Gavin Menzies, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, retrieved 2007-03-22
  9. ^ Challenges to Menzies' nautical experience, retrieved 2007-03-22; see particularly note five of the Appendix.
  10. ^ Enquiry regarding the collision of the USS Endurance and Rorqual, retrieved 2007-03-22
  11. ^ Peter Evans (5 June 1970). "Immigrant girl will vote in despair—Powellism". News. The Times. No. 57888. London. col C, p. 9. template uses deprecated parameter(s) (help)
  12. ^ Goodman, David S. G. (2006): "Mao and The Da Vinci Code: Conspiracy, Narrative and History", The Pacific Review, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 359–384 (371f.)
  13. ^ Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies' status as a vexatious litigant in British Courts
  14. ^ "Judgement of Royal Courts of Justice on Monday, 28th October 1996"
  15. ^ a b c Wade 2007
  16. ^ de Pastino, Blake (January 18, 2006). "Photo in the News: Map Proof Chinese Discovered America?". National Geographic News. Retrieved 2009-10-08.
  17. ^ Lovgren, Stefan (January 23, 2006). ""Chinese Columbus" Map Likely Fake, Experts Say". National Geographic News. Retrieved 2009-10-08.
  18. ^ Kolesnikov-Jessop, Sonia (June 25, 2005), "Did Chinese beat out Columbus?", The New York Times, retrieved June 8, 2010.
  19. ^ "The 1421 myth exposed". 1421exposed.com. Retrieved 2009-10-02.
  20. ^ Newbrook, M (2004), "Zheng He in the Americas and Other Unlikely Tales of Exploration and Discovery", Skeptical Briefs, 14 (3), retrieved 2009-10-10.
  21. ^ Gordon, P (2003-01-30). "1421: The Year China Discovered the World". The Asian Review of Books. Retrieved 2009-10-09.
  22. ^ Finlay 2004, pp. 241f. harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFFinlay2004 (help)
  23. ^ a b Gui-Ping, J (2006). "Joint Statement on the Claims by Gavin Menzies Regarding the Zheng He Voyages". 1421exposed.com. Retrieved 2009-10-10. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  24. ^ Lon R. Shelby, "Mariano Taccola and His Books on Engines and Machines", Technology and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Jul., 1975), pp. 466–475 (467)
  25. ^ "Writer trashes origins of Maori", 1421exposed.com.

Critics

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