1

Schools in the United States have taught us that Christopher Columbus discovered America, but

although Columbus may have landed in the Caribbean on his search for the special route to Asia, none of

his voyages investigated the east coast of land that would become the United States (pg 25-26). His

voyages did, however, result in a wave of exploration by the Europeans in the New World. As far as

discovery, it is believed that the Norsemen had already made trips to northeastern areas of what is now

Canada even before Columbus (pg 26). But recently, there have been discussions about the possibility

that it was the Chinese who truly discovered America and it is this very debate that is discussed in the

book Taking Sides: Clashing Views in United States History, Volume 1, The Colonial Period to

Reconstruction.

In the second issue of the book are excerpts from the two opposing sides to the issue of the

Chinese discovery of America. Gavin Menzies, a “retired British submarine officer” is convinced that the

Chinese armada explored the pacific coast of America sometime between 1421 and 1423. But Menzies’

idea is disputed by Robert Finlay, who believes that Menzies has created an unrealistic explanation with

no evidence to support his claims (pg 25). After a consideration of the two sides on whether or not the

Chinese discovered America, it has been revealed that Menzies appears to rely only on some facts of

Chinese history and European cartography along with his personal experiences from being a submariner

to support his assertion, while Finlay describes in detail how Menzies misrepresents his facts to create his

argument which renders his argument false.

In Menzies’ book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, there is an introduction that tells a

rather poetic story about Chinese New Year’s Day on 2 February 1421. He explains that on this day,

people from all over Asia, Arabia, Africa and the Indian Ocean, kings and rulers, came “to pay tribute to

the emperor…” (pg 27). A point is made in describing the Chinese’s sense of superiority in abundant

trade goods and scientific knowledge in comparison to many of the European kingdoms of the time.

There is provided in the words, a sense of obvious respect for Emperor Zhu Di and his incalculable

wealth and influence. Menzies briefly explains China’s policy to refrain from “direct colonization” and to

send off enormous fleets carrying “all manner of exotic items” every few years (pg 27). A particular

2

armada directed by an Admiral named Zheng He contained four fleets that were to “proceed all the way to

the end of the earth to collect tribute from barbarians beyond the seas…” and Menzies proceeded to laud

the power of the ships’ ability to “remain at sea for over three months and cover at least 4,500 miles”

without the need to stop to replenish anything (pg 28). It is mentioned that many ships were lost on these

voyages because they braved “perilous, uncharted waters” frequently. Some ships contained Chinese

roses and other flora and the intro ends with the idea that many of the seamen would never return and

would instead be shipwrecked or left to establish colonies (pg 29).

After the intro, Menzies begins a personal story explaining his journey in search for evidence that

the Chinese had landed on the Pacific coast of North America. He incorporates his understanding of the

geological patterns in the north Pacific, speculating that the fleet led by Zhou Man may have reached

Canada and sailed along the coast, all the way to Ecuador (pg 29-30). In search for validation, he turns to

a map that was charted by Hernando de Alarcon and the Waldseemuller world map; the latter of which

had charted ship wrecks that Menzies believed to be “circumstantial evidence” of one of Zhou Man’s

junks’ arrival (pg 30). He goes on to say that evidence of their arrival is also supported in the fact that

there were specific plants and animals along the coast of Central and South America that were also found

in China, suggesting a biological exchange had occurred when the Chinese landed (pg 31). Further

researches led Menzies to announce publicly on the issue which led to people bringing his attention to a

wreck on the Sacramento River. He investigated and found it was made of wood found only in China (pg

32) and contained seeds and rice native to China (pg 32-33).

After discussing the potential truth to a shipwreck on the sandbank of the Sacramento River,

Menzies moves on to discuss the colony of Chinese people that may have settled in California, claiming

that some of the Chinese famers who settled in California in the 1870s may be descendants of Zhou Man

in 1423 (pg 33). He refers to the writings of Stephen Powers who in 1874 published an article stating that

there was “linguistic evidence of a Chinese colony on the Russian River in California” and the tribe

seemed to live a similar cultural lifestyle to the Chinese; sedentary and inventive (pg 33-34). To support

the idea, evidence of a settlement made of stone with low walls is presented, backed by an expert from

3

UC Berkeley who asserts that it is “undoubtedly the work of Mongolians … The Chinese would naturally

wall themselves in…” (pg 34).

If they continued down the coast, the ships had to have sailed and landed on the Mexican coast

and encountered the Mayan civilization, which Menzies claims, had “chickens, lacquer boxes, dye-stuffs,

metal work and jewelry”, all which “seem to have the imprint of China all over them” and he believed

that the Mayan name for chicken is identical to the one used by the Chinese: “Ki” (pg 35). In his

researches, Menzies could not find many other plants originating in China that were in Mexico, but he

insists that the Chinese visit was also evident in the fact that “plants indigenous to Central America had

found their way across the world” and ultimately into China.

Historian Robert Finlay, after having read Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered America,

wrote an intense response titled How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese

Discovery of America. He starts off with a deriding tone while summarizing Menzies book, explaining

how Menzies recounts all the different places the Chinese have traveled to based on proof that is

“overwhelming and indisputable” (pg 36). Finlay also tells the audience about how Menzies “is not

disheartened by skepticism” and how he is in fact extremely certain of himself and there is an account of

how the book is organized to incorporate Menzies’ “own search for evidence” in the narrative framework

(pg 37). To disparage Menzies, Finlay includes information about how much money Menzies made off of

his book ($825,000) while he “flouts the basic rules of both historical study and elementary logic” by

misrepresenting Nicolo di Conti (c. 1385-1469) and misinterpreting the technology of Zheng He’s ships

which “impels him to depict voyages […] no mariner could survive” (pg 37). This ultimately renders

Menzies’ evidence baseless.

Finlay focuses his opposition on the term “the missing years” coined by Menzies, which refers to

the years between 1421 and 1423 in which a small fleet left to sail on their own by Zheng He is believed

to have “left the Indian Ocean to seek new lands in the Atlantic and Pacific” (pg 38). This idea is fueled

by the conviction that the documents which recorded this voyage was destroyed, but Finlay finds this

unlikely because there are sources that fill in the gaps, proving the flotilla merely traveled to India and

4

Africa (pg 39). He humors Menzies’ idea and considers the possibility that the ships made it to America

while proving to us that mathematically, the time does not work out with the distance travelled, meaning

the suggestion is unrealistic (pg 39).

Referring back to Nicolo di Conti, Finlay explains that this Venetian cartographer as a key piece

to Menzies’ case since Conti is “the sole vehicle by which Chinese geographical knowledge reached the

west” (pg 40). It is established that Conti was in Calicut around the same time the Chinese chronicler Ma

Huan who traveled with the Chinese vessels was there, but there is no definite proof that they met, shared

any information with each other, or traveled together and Finlay claims that Menzies is suggesting all of

this, once again disregarding the inconsistencies in time and distance (pg 40). In conclusion, it could not

have been possible for Conti to have received any information from the Chinese or created any map while

travelling with them that would prompt the age of European exploration (pg 40-41).

When referring to the first two chapters of Menzies’ book, Finlay observes that the “groundwork

for his claims when describing Zheng He’s fleet before its departure from Nanjing” is used as a

“rhetorical tactic”, and although that makes the book appealing, it is full of assumptions about what was

stored on the ships that would confirm Menzies’ thought that the Chinese reached the New World. Finlay

mentions the types of items and people that Menzies believed were stored on the ships, which included

prostitutes, Asiatic chickens, masons, stone carvers, astronomers, teak, ballast horses, “trained otters”, and

dogs (pg 41-42), but he refutes each and every idea with evidence and a biting attitude. He concludes with

a reiteration of Menzies’ lack of “distinction between premise and proof, conjecture and confirmation,”

continually mocking the man even as he points out the contradictions and information Menzies has

chosen to leave out when referring to the Waldseemuller and Piri Reis maps and Finlay’s only good word

to the book is that it serves as an excellent example of “how not to (re)write history” (pg 43).

Much as I am willing to believe that the Chinese really were the first to discover America, I

unfortunately have to agree with Robert Finlay’s assertions that the conclusions presented in the book

1421 “are uniformly without substance” (pg 38) and I am disappointed that Gavin Menzies could not

support many of his fascinating claims. Although I felt that the story he presented in the beginning about

5

the Emperor Zhu Di’s call to “collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the sea” (pg 28) was interesting

and clearly done only to engage the reader, Finlay was right in that the whole narrative was completely

un-cited, “lacking any documentation” (pg 40). One inconsistency I noticed in the excerpt of Menzies’

book takes place right in the beginning. He mentions that the Chinese “preferred to pursue their aims by

trade, influence and bribery rather than by open conflict and direct colonization” (pg 27) and yet if this

were true, then why does he insist that the Chinese colonized “along the pacific coast” (pg 30) instead of

just traded with the natives?

Now there is also the mentioning of the winds and currents which would take Admiral Zhou

Man’s ships to North America. He doesn’t cite these facts, but I assume readers are supposed to accept

these specifics as truth since he was once a submarine officer who knows about such things. But then

comes the calculations Menzies makes, stating that “[a]t an average of 4.8 knots, the voyage would have

taken some four months” (pg 30). Finlay refers to this detail distinctively, saying that Menzies had no

foundation for this approximation since it “hurries the ships along by granting them an average speed 52

percent higher than what they generally achieved” (pg 39). I find whether Menzies was trying to twist the

facts to suit his theories or just making a mistake, Finlay has a point because there cannot possibly be

such consistency when travelling the sea and speeds could definitely vary depending on the time of year

and the route being crossed (pg 39).

One of the biggest parts of Menzies argument lies in the shipwrecks along the pacific coast. He

brings up a wreck on the beach at Neahkahnie made of teak with sails made of caeophyllum which was

native to south-east Asia and containing paraffin wax, all of which confirms the landing of a Chinese

vessels (pg 30). Finlay rejoins with the fact that “teak was not used in building Zheng He’s fleets” (pg 41)

and there is no substantiation for the Chinese knowing how to desalinate seawater (pg 42). Finlay’s

mentioning of the “trained otters” being used to herd shoals of fish into the nets (pg 42) is not in the

excerpt of 1421 provided in Taking Sides, but if Menzies really talked about it, I find him all the more

incredible. However, Finlay fails to mention the part about the Chinese junk landing along the

Sacramento River, the planting of rice, and the intermarrying of the Chinese with local Indians (pg 33).

6

Menzies, however, uses a lot of speculative language when discussing these possibilities. He conjectures

that the Chinese farmers who worked in the fields of Sacramento may not have actually come from the

wave of nineteenth-century immigration but could potentially be descendants of the settlers left by Zhou

Man, backing his claim from an article written by Stephen Powers in 1874 (pg 33). I personally think that

although Powers was an inspector who was collecting data on the languages of the California tribes (pg

33), how does this make him an expert enough to claim there was linguistic evidence of a Chinese

colony? Did he know how to speak Chinese? There is no mention that he did and the paragraph in

Menzies’ passage continues, “diseases brought by European settlers had decimated this Chinese colony”

which is basically saying that the colony was destroyed. So how does this prove that the colony existed?

Menzies supports himself with Power’s description of the Indian descendants have paler skin, were

“peaceable and inoffensive”, and “developed a Chinese inventiveness” (pg 33-34) which sounds rather

vague. If we recall that the “Indians” were descendants of the first people who migrated from Asia at least

30,000 years earlier and populated the Americas (pg 26), it is not all surprising that the natives may have

looked or lived like the Chinese, not to mention there is such a great cultural diversity among the Native

American in California that to say the Indians Powers found were “unlike other hunter-gatherer tribes of

North America” (pg 34) isn’t saying much.

A consideration of the two sides on whether or not the Chinese discovered America has exposed

to me that Menzies uses Chinese history and European cartography in a selective manner along with his

personal experiences to maintain his allegations. I feel that Finlay is correct in saying Menzies

misrepresents his facts to create his case which leaves his argument false. It could be totally possible that

the Chinese had discovered America, but based on the ideas presented from Menzies, I cannot yet be

completely convinced.