I
had the welcome pleasure of reading this new offering by Gavin
Menzies. What he has done is provide a way station for collecting
scrapes of data from around thev world that targets evidence of
plausible colonizing activity by separate groups in the Americas in
particular. What happens when the public becomes engaged is that
rather than having a suggestive item out of place, we now have an
ample patterrn of supporting data.
This
is night and day compared to the historical situation in which even
excellent archeological foeld work goes into storage and become
forgotten allowing lazy scholars to simply dismiss sporatic evidence
as it wanders in. Men die and knowledge dies this way.
So
this is good news. We have some conjectures to add to our tool kit.
1 We
already have my expanded conjecture for Atlantean culture that
initiated all global civilizations and pyramid building in particular
that encompasses Bimini, Atlantis, the Mississippi Valley and Lake
Superior copper and all of the high cultures throughout Mesoamerica
and Brazil and the Andes. This started seriously well before 2400 BC
and was already fully optimized then. It lasted intact until 1159 BC
and staggered on in pieces thereafter. This is a full 1500 years of
a united global history that introduced metal technology everywhere
and was the global currency. I anticipate a real population in
excess of 100,000,000,000 globally.
2 Chinese
shipping rose after the collapse of Atlantean shipping and emerged
fully in the first millennia of the current era. It developed a
significant deep sea holding technology and they needed it to handle
typhoons. This naturally promoted colonizing fleets to settle in
prospective locales. Gavin has collected ample evidence to confirm
major colonies along the western seaboard that include all the
natural harbors. The colonies themselves would be in the thousands
at the least. Better yet, the chinese junks provided excellent
capacity to retain communication with the homelands involved. It
becomes reasonable that this was sustained as an enterprise almost
completely independent of the central government. It also allowed
them to escape if thought needed.
3 It
only gets better on the East Coast. The evidence has expanded for
the Cape Breton complex in nova Scotia which provides a natural
landfall for a fleet coming from China around the Cape off South
Africa. They mined here from at least 1435 through 1550's and then
smartly packed their bags and left. They may have no longer been
able to justify the mining proposition itself or the incresing treat
of conflict with Europeans warned them off. The population may well
have then joined the Chinese colonies already in the Carolinas and
become largely integrated with the local populations.
My
take home is that the scale of this enterprise far exceeded anything
tat I had imagined.
Does this map from
1418 prove historian's controversial claim that the New World was
discovered by the CHINESE 70 years before Columbus?
- Gavin Menzies, a British historian, claims Chiense Admiral Zheng He set up colonies and sailed round South America before Columbus
- Menzies' new book, 'Who Discovered America?' also claims the Chinese have been sailing to the New World since 40,000 BC across the Pacific Ocean
- His theories are not widely accepted by academia and he has been labeled a 'pseudo-historian'
By MICHAEL ZENNIE
PUBLISHED: 12:42
GMT, 8 October 2013
A copy of a 600-year-old map found in a second-hand book shop is the key to proving that the Chinese, not Christopher Columbus, were the first to discover the New World, a controversial British historian claims.
The document is
purportedly an 18th century copy of a 1418 map charted by Chinese
Admiral Zheng He, which appears to show the New World in some detail.
This purported
evidence that a Chinese sailor mapped the Western Hemisphere more
than seven decades before Columbus is just one of Earth-shattering
claims that author Gavin Menzies makes in his new book ‘Who
Discovered America?’ - out today, just in time for the Columbus Day
holiday.
‘The traditional
story of Columbus discovering the New World is absolute fantasy, it’s
fairy tales,’ Mr Menzies told MailOnline.
Mr Menzies believes
that this portion of the map depicts the Chinese mapping of North and
South America in 1418 - showing major rivers.
Explorer: Chinese
Admiral Zheng He is known to have sailed the to Europe and Africa
with a massive fleet of ships. Historian Gavin Menzies says he also
reached the New World
Among Menzies other
claims are that the first inhabitants of the Western hemisphere
didn’t come over land from the Bering Strait, but instead were
Chinese sailors who first crossed the Pacific Ocean 40,000 years ago.
He also writes that
DNA markers prove American Indians and other natives are the
descendants of several waves of Asian settlers.
Furthermore, he says a
majestic fleet of Chinese ships, commanded by Zheng He, sailed around
the continent of South America - 100 years before Ferdinand Megellan
supposedly became the first the undertake the task.
Columbus features
heavily in the book - insofar as Menzies has devoted the last 20
years to finding and laying out evidence that Columbus not only
didn’t discover America - he was 40 millenia late.
Mr Menzies believes
that Columbus actually had a map of the world that was plotted by the
Chinese Admiral Zheng He, who created the map when he sailed to the
New World in 1421, more than seven decades before Columbus.
Mr Menzies believes
that this portion of the map depicts the Chinese mapping of North and
South America in 1418 - showing major rivers.
His book includes what
Menzies says is a copy of that map. discovered by Beijing attorney
Liu Gang in a second-hand bookshop that he says proves his theory.
The document, he says,
is an 18th century copy of Admiral Zheng He's 1417 map. Mr Menzies
argues that it clearly shows North American rivers and coasts, as
well as the continent of South America.
Mr Menzie's assertion
about Zheng He's voyage to the New World isn't new - he first wrote
about it in 2002 - but the map is.
Mr Liu had the map
authenticated by an appraiser from Christie's Auctions, who said that
the document was 'very old' and was not a newly-made fake.
After Mr Liu brought
the map forward, Menzies also had a team of historians analyze every
word on it. He concluded that it was originally written in the Ming
Dynasty - a Chinese period that lasted from 1368 to 1644.
In the region of the
map that Mr Menzies believes refers to Peru are written the
inscriptions - 'Here the people practiced the religion of Paracas'
and 'Here the people practice human sacrifice' - clear references
peoples known to have inhabited Peru at the time.
The map is further
corroborated, Mr Menzies says, by the Chinese names of numerous towns
and regions in Peru.
He says old Peruvian
maps show places with names like Chawan - Chinese for 'land prepared
for sowing' and Chulin - 'wood or forest.'
Ko-Lan - a remote
Peruvian town at the bottom of a ravine translates to 'difficult
passage.'
Controversial: Gavin
Menzies, 76, has been arguing for more than a decade that the Chinese
and other Asians discovered the Ne World. 'Who Discovered America? -
due out today - is his fourth book on the topic
Mr Menzies calls the
story that Christopher Columbus' discovered America in 1492 a 'fairy
tale' - saying he was not only not the first explorer - he was 40,000
years late
Mr Menzies has no
formal training as a historian and no advanced degree from a major
university - he was a submariner in the British Royal Navy - but he
can no longer be called an ‘amateur.’
‘Who Discovered
America?’ is Menzie’s fourth book in which he tries to re-write
history and orient it East.
He has plowed millions
of dollars of his proceeds from his books into continuing his
world-traveling research into his theories. He has turned his north
London home into a de facto research institute, employing up to six
research assistants at a time.
But his theories are
not accepted by the mainstream academic community. In 2008,
University of London history professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto told
the Daily Telegraph that his books are 'the historical equivalent of
stories about Elvis Presley in (the supermarket) and close encounters
with alien hamsters.'
Even Wikipedia
characterizes Menzies as a 'pseudo-historian.'
That has not stopped
him from gaining millions of readers - and thousands of followers who
contribute to his website and contribute research of their own.
Menzies say this map
of the Ancash province of Peru shows numerous Chinese names of
villages
Each of these dots
represents a Peruvian town that reportedly has a Chinese name. It is
claimed this is evidence of Chinese colonization before Columbus
Mr Menzies debuted his
Asia-centric theories with 2002's '1421: The Year China Discovered
the World.' In it, he said that the famed Chinese sailor Admiral
Zheng He, who is known to have reached Europe and Africa, also
crossed the Pacific Ocean to the Western Hemisphere.
He claims that Zheng
He not only reached the New World, he left colonies there. His fleet
also sailed around the tip of South America - through the Strait of
Megellan around the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi.
There is evidence,
both archaeological and genetic, Menzies says, that Zheng He left his
mark in California, Florida, Virginia and even the Outer Banks of
North Carolina.
In 'Who Discovered
America?' Menzies focuses on theories that Asians also made it to
North and South America by sea long before even Zheng He.
'It appears certain
that man reached the Americas by sea at least forty thousands years
ago,' Menzies writes.
This Venetian map was
made from information brought back from China by Marco Polo and
Nicolo da Conti. Mr Menzies says it shows North and Central America -
upside-down, oriented with north at the bottom
'Doubtless this date
will be continuously pushed back, probably to 100,000 BC, which was
when the first peoples sailed the Mediterranean to Crete and
(separately) in the south from Asia to Australia.'
Most scientists
believe man first widely populated the Western Hemisphere 13,000 to
16,500 years ago.
The almost
universally-held theory among academics is that man came to the New
World by crossing the Bering Strait land-bridge between Asia and
North America.
'The more I thought
about the Bering Straight theory of populating the Americas, the more
ridiculous it became,' Mr Menzies writes about his investigation of
the topic
Mr Menzies says the
idea that man was able to cross the Pacific Ocean around 40,000 BC
isn't nearly as dramatic as it seems.
'If you just go out in
a plastic bath tub, the currents will just carry you there,' he told
MailOnline. 'They just came with the current, it’s as simple as
that.'
He added: 'There’s
nothing terribly remarkable about. Man has been seafaring for vastly
longer than convention credit has given them credit for.'
- 'Who Discovered America? The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas' by Gavin Menzies, published by William Morrow, is due out today.
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