Kirsten Seaver: The Chinese Discovery of America ?
[Kirsten Seaver is the author of Maps, Myths and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map.]
Some four years have passed since knowledgeable critics began to take apart Gavin Menzies’s published assertion that the task of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama and other early European explorers had been considerably simplified by their access to maps incorporating key information collected by medieval Chinese navigators who supposedly preceded them: thus it is hardly news that 1421: The Year China Discovered America[i] is now seen primarily as a completely unsubstantiated hypothesis dressed up as history. Nor is it news that the “Menzies team” continues to make extravagant assertions ranging from an insulting “explanation” for the origin of New Zealand’s Maoris to equally unwarranted claims about a medieval Chinese naval stronghold in Nova Scotia. Such claims now encounter analysis and deconstruction as soon as they appear.
On the assumption that it continues to be in the interest of both academic and general readers to maintain the distinction between entertainment and verifiable information, the present article will address anomalies in 1421 that have so far remained largely untouched by other critics, particularly details connected with the book’s claims that Zheng He’s Chinese explorers left their lasting imprint on New England, Newfoundland, Greenland and Ellesmere Island (to name just a few locations), as well as on several well known maps, including the so-called “Vinland Map,” first announced in 1965 and claimed as authentic medieval evidence of the Norse outreach to Greenland and North America.
Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad’s discovery and investigation of the L’Anse aux Meadows ruin site in northern Newfoundland during the early 1960s established that Norse travelers had reached the Canadian shores in the early eleventh century, their arrival in North America the culmination of two centuries of gradual exploration and colonization of the Atlantic islands that served as their stepping stones. Their last stop before going on to North America was Greenland, where Eirik the Red Thorvaldsson and his settlers succeeded in creating Europe’s most distant outpost and, in time, the most distant northwestern beacon of the Roman Church.
The three North American regions named by Eirik the Red’s son Leif[ii] were, from north to south, Helluland or “Slab Land” (a stretch of Baffin Island), Markland or “Forest Land” (a stretch of Labrador), and V’nland or “Wine Land” (in the area of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, incorporating at least parts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia). The medieval Norse neither used nor drew maps, and the scant surviving literary descriptions fail to define the American areas the Norse visited, but modern archaeologists have found evidence of their physical presence on both sides of the Davis Strait. The verifiable archaeological evidence reaches no farther south than to the southern St. Lawrence estuary, where the Norse would have found wild grapes, and where they would have been able to harvest the white walnuts whose shells turned up at the L’Anse aux Meadows site.[iii]
When 1421 purports to investigate the origins of the “Round Tower” at Newport, Rhode Island and states that the Norsemen “had penetrated nearly as far south as Newport” (328), the book ought surely to have provided some evidence taken from modern scholarship and to have demonstrated more than a glancing acquaintance with cult history. In order to arrive at the desired conclusion that the tower is a fifteenth-century structure erected by the Chinese to serve as both an astronomical observatory and a light house (328-33), the book raises the possibility that the “Round Tower” might have been built by medieval Norse, but dismisses the suggestion out-of-hand on the grounds that the Norse at that time “had little experience of lighthouse design” (330). This is an odd observation from an author who repeatedly assures his readers that he is a world-traveled old salt with excellent knowledge of medieval maritime matters. The Norwegian maritime historian Roald Morcken provides a long list of carefully constructed stone cairns marking the safe entrances to harbors, in many cases a feature of the Norwegian coastal landscape since before A.D. 1000;[iv] the Norwegians even lit warning fires on some of those cairns in times of danger. Innumerable inland structures furthermore testify to highly developed Norwegian stone masonry skills long before the fifteenth century.
The origin and purpose of the Newport Tower are well known, even if not admitted to in 1421. There is ample archaeological and documentary evidence that it was built in the late seventeenth century as a windmill on Governor Benedict Arnold’s estate and that it was copied from an identical structure still standing in England.[v] In one of many examples of the book’s penchant for contorting the published research of others to fit its own arguments, 1421 notes (328-29) that Suzanne O. Carlson of the New England Antiquities Research Association challenged the most recent Newport Tower research on several grounds, but the book fails to allow her central argument, namely that the structure is most likely Norse in origin[vi] (a notion that goes back to 1837 when the Danish scholar C.C. Rafn first stated his conviction that the Newport Tower had served as a Norse church[vii]). Though demonstrably mistaken in her general position on the Norse in North America, Carlson argues her views so meticulously and lucidly that it is hard to misunderstand her central point, and the more surprising that her arguments should have been used to validate the Chinese lighthouse theory. She may take comfort from the fact that 1421 does not scruple to assign Chinese workmanship to the Dighton Rock in Massachusetts -- carved by Algonkian natives but variously claimed over the years to be Welsh, Norse, Phoenician, Hebrew, and Portuguese.[viii]
The archaeological evidence for the northern extent of the Norse Greenlanders’ travels over several centuries goes at least as far as to 72 degrees north latitude,[ix] while Norse artifacts obtained either directly or indirectly by Arctic natives have been found as far north as on Ellesmere Island in conjunction with medieval Thule-culture house ruins.[x] In none of these carefully investigated High Arctic sites, nor farther south along the Canadian and Greenland shores, have archaeologists found a single artifact or other evidence suggesting a fifteenth-century Chinese presence.
Against this void of evidence, the book claims that in 1421-1422, a squadron of Chinese explorers and world colonizers rode the Irminger and West Greenland currents north from the Azores after they had parted company with yet another section of the immense fleet organized by Admiral Zheng He and supposedly charged with exploring and colonizing the whole world (323-39, 345-46). According to these claims, various segments of the fleet had gone their separate ways after reaching the Cape Verde Islands off the African west coast, and -- as luck and 1421 would have it -- junks commanded by Admiral Zhou Wen landed in Massachusetts “around Christmas 1421” (337-39). Leaving behind enough crew members in New England to start yet another supposed Chinese colony with several of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of concubines, the remainder of Zhou Wen’s men, we are told, then sailed on northward with the aim of fixing the exact position of the North Pole.
Sprinkling Chinese settlers or at least Chinese genes on their way, they purportedly took in such locations as Newfoundland, Greenland, and the Bache Peninsula on Ellesmere Island (345-47, 352). 1421 never explains why, after passing to the east of Newfoundland, the Chinese mariners did not follow the long Labrador coast north to South Baffin, past the Hudson Strait, before heading east to Greenland, using a route the medieval Norse had found convenient. Instead, Zhou Wen’s flotilla supposedly made a long loop out into the Atlantic and the lower Davis Strait (where in fact any travelers risked running into English ships by that time) before heading north from the southernmost point of Greenland (345-46 and maps 24-25, 346). The book’s claim that the winds and currents in these waters ensure that a “ship circumnavigating Greenland in this way would never have to sail into an opposing wind or current at any stage” (346) is utter fabrication. At any time of year the winds in both the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay are as unpredictable and treacherous as the frequent fogs, and while experience with the local currents would certainly factor into a navigator’s plans here as elsewhere, one wonders what experience these apocryphal Chinese travelers might possibly have had at their disposal in planning to coast a huge land mass as completely unfamiliar to them as the sea next to it. ...
Read entire article at Kirsten A. Seaver at the website of 1421exposed.com
Some four years have passed since knowledgeable critics began to take apart Gavin Menzies’s published assertion that the task of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama and other early European explorers had been considerably simplified by their access to maps incorporating key information collected by medieval Chinese navigators who supposedly preceded them: thus it is hardly news that 1421: The Year China Discovered America[i] is now seen primarily as a completely unsubstantiated hypothesis dressed up as history. Nor is it news that the “Menzies team” continues to make extravagant assertions ranging from an insulting “explanation” for the origin of New Zealand’s Maoris to equally unwarranted claims about a medieval Chinese naval stronghold in Nova Scotia. Such claims now encounter analysis and deconstruction as soon as they appear.
On the assumption that it continues to be in the interest of both academic and general readers to maintain the distinction between entertainment and verifiable information, the present article will address anomalies in 1421 that have so far remained largely untouched by other critics, particularly details connected with the book’s claims that Zheng He’s Chinese explorers left their lasting imprint on New England, Newfoundland, Greenland and Ellesmere Island (to name just a few locations), as well as on several well known maps, including the so-called “Vinland Map,” first announced in 1965 and claimed as authentic medieval evidence of the Norse outreach to Greenland and North America.
Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad’s discovery and investigation of the L’Anse aux Meadows ruin site in northern Newfoundland during the early 1960s established that Norse travelers had reached the Canadian shores in the early eleventh century, their arrival in North America the culmination of two centuries of gradual exploration and colonization of the Atlantic islands that served as their stepping stones. Their last stop before going on to North America was Greenland, where Eirik the Red Thorvaldsson and his settlers succeeded in creating Europe’s most distant outpost and, in time, the most distant northwestern beacon of the Roman Church.
The three North American regions named by Eirik the Red’s son Leif[ii] were, from north to south, Helluland or “Slab Land” (a stretch of Baffin Island), Markland or “Forest Land” (a stretch of Labrador), and V’nland or “Wine Land” (in the area of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, incorporating at least parts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia). The medieval Norse neither used nor drew maps, and the scant surviving literary descriptions fail to define the American areas the Norse visited, but modern archaeologists have found evidence of their physical presence on both sides of the Davis Strait. The verifiable archaeological evidence reaches no farther south than to the southern St. Lawrence estuary, where the Norse would have found wild grapes, and where they would have been able to harvest the white walnuts whose shells turned up at the L’Anse aux Meadows site.[iii]
When 1421 purports to investigate the origins of the “Round Tower” at Newport, Rhode Island and states that the Norsemen “had penetrated nearly as far south as Newport” (328), the book ought surely to have provided some evidence taken from modern scholarship and to have demonstrated more than a glancing acquaintance with cult history. In order to arrive at the desired conclusion that the tower is a fifteenth-century structure erected by the Chinese to serve as both an astronomical observatory and a light house (328-33), the book raises the possibility that the “Round Tower” might have been built by medieval Norse, but dismisses the suggestion out-of-hand on the grounds that the Norse at that time “had little experience of lighthouse design” (330). This is an odd observation from an author who repeatedly assures his readers that he is a world-traveled old salt with excellent knowledge of medieval maritime matters. The Norwegian maritime historian Roald Morcken provides a long list of carefully constructed stone cairns marking the safe entrances to harbors, in many cases a feature of the Norwegian coastal landscape since before A.D. 1000;[iv] the Norwegians even lit warning fires on some of those cairns in times of danger. Innumerable inland structures furthermore testify to highly developed Norwegian stone masonry skills long before the fifteenth century.
The origin and purpose of the Newport Tower are well known, even if not admitted to in 1421. There is ample archaeological and documentary evidence that it was built in the late seventeenth century as a windmill on Governor Benedict Arnold’s estate and that it was copied from an identical structure still standing in England.[v] In one of many examples of the book’s penchant for contorting the published research of others to fit its own arguments, 1421 notes (328-29) that Suzanne O. Carlson of the New England Antiquities Research Association challenged the most recent Newport Tower research on several grounds, but the book fails to allow her central argument, namely that the structure is most likely Norse in origin[vi] (a notion that goes back to 1837 when the Danish scholar C.C. Rafn first stated his conviction that the Newport Tower had served as a Norse church[vii]). Though demonstrably mistaken in her general position on the Norse in North America, Carlson argues her views so meticulously and lucidly that it is hard to misunderstand her central point, and the more surprising that her arguments should have been used to validate the Chinese lighthouse theory. She may take comfort from the fact that 1421 does not scruple to assign Chinese workmanship to the Dighton Rock in Massachusetts -- carved by Algonkian natives but variously claimed over the years to be Welsh, Norse, Phoenician, Hebrew, and Portuguese.[viii]
The archaeological evidence for the northern extent of the Norse Greenlanders’ travels over several centuries goes at least as far as to 72 degrees north latitude,[ix] while Norse artifacts obtained either directly or indirectly by Arctic natives have been found as far north as on Ellesmere Island in conjunction with medieval Thule-culture house ruins.[x] In none of these carefully investigated High Arctic sites, nor farther south along the Canadian and Greenland shores, have archaeologists found a single artifact or other evidence suggesting a fifteenth-century Chinese presence.
Against this void of evidence, the book claims that in 1421-1422, a squadron of Chinese explorers and world colonizers rode the Irminger and West Greenland currents north from the Azores after they had parted company with yet another section of the immense fleet organized by Admiral Zheng He and supposedly charged with exploring and colonizing the whole world (323-39, 345-46). According to these claims, various segments of the fleet had gone their separate ways after reaching the Cape Verde Islands off the African west coast, and -- as luck and 1421 would have it -- junks commanded by Admiral Zhou Wen landed in Massachusetts “around Christmas 1421” (337-39). Leaving behind enough crew members in New England to start yet another supposed Chinese colony with several of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of concubines, the remainder of Zhou Wen’s men, we are told, then sailed on northward with the aim of fixing the exact position of the North Pole.
Sprinkling Chinese settlers or at least Chinese genes on their way, they purportedly took in such locations as Newfoundland, Greenland, and the Bache Peninsula on Ellesmere Island (345-47, 352). 1421 never explains why, after passing to the east of Newfoundland, the Chinese mariners did not follow the long Labrador coast north to South Baffin, past the Hudson Strait, before heading east to Greenland, using a route the medieval Norse had found convenient. Instead, Zhou Wen’s flotilla supposedly made a long loop out into the Atlantic and the lower Davis Strait (where in fact any travelers risked running into English ships by that time) before heading north from the southernmost point of Greenland (345-46 and maps 24-25, 346). The book’s claim that the winds and currents in these waters ensure that a “ship circumnavigating Greenland in this way would never have to sail into an opposing wind or current at any stage” (346) is utter fabrication. At any time of year the winds in both the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay are as unpredictable and treacherous as the frequent fogs, and while experience with the local currents would certainly factor into a navigator’s plans here as elsewhere, one wonders what experience these apocryphal Chinese travelers might possibly have had at their disposal in planning to coast a huge land mass as completely unfamiliar to them as the sea next to it. ...