Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Explorers 'Discovered America'?
FLY9999 writes: "According to British historian and map expert Gavin Menzies, Chinese explorers discovered America way before Columbus did. He will disclose his information to the prestigious Royal Geographical Society (RGS) at a conference next week."
If anyone is interested, here is what the book "Thunder from the East" by two winners of the Pulitzer prize wrote about Zhang He's fleet: "Between 1405 and 1433 Zheng He commanded seven major expeditions, involving the largest navel fleet that the world would see for the next five centuries. Not until World War I did the West mount anything comparable. Chinese records show that Zheng He's fleet included 28 000 sailors on 300 ships, the longest of which were 400 feet long. By comparison, Columbus in 1492 had 90 sailors on 3 ships, the biggest of which was 85 feet long. Zheng He's ships also had design elements such as balanced rudders and watertight bulwark compartments that would not be introduced in Europe for another 350 years. The ships sailed as far as East Africa and could have gone around the globe. It is difficult to conceive of their magnificence, for each of the grandest ships-the "treasure ships"-had nine masts,huge red silk sails, 24 bronze cannon, carved wooden animal heads, and painted sides with large "eyes" in front to see the ocean ahead. The treasure ships had luxury cabins with balconies for the top officers and for foreign princes who would be brought home, and these ships were backed by specialized vessels including horse-carriers, troop transports, cargo ships, two kinds of warships, and water tankers carrying drinking water. The crews included 10 translatrors, 5 astronomers, 180 doctors and pharmacologists to treat the sick and gather foreign herbs, and even 2 protocol experts to ensure that the Chinese treated foreigners with just the proper degree of respect. The sophistication of the fleet underscores how far the East used to be ahead of the West. In a broader sense, it indicates the stakes for the entire world as Asia struggles to get back to its feet. The present situation-with Asia making up a minor part of world's economy-is unusual in historical terms. For the great majority of the last few thousand years, Asia has been far wealthier and more advanced and cosmopolitan than any place in Europe. Several ancient Chinese cities had populations of more than one million at their peak, and by some accounts the Tang Dynasty capital of Changan had almost two million taxable residents in the later part of the first millenium. In contrast, as late as 1500 the largest city in Europe was probably Naples, with a total population of 150 000. So ancient Asia was the longtime champion of commerce and technology, and one of the central questions is whether it is now ready to recover a part of what it lost. .....
Chinese records show that Zheng He's fleet reached the Kenyan ports of Malindi and Mombasa. Zheng He knew about Europe from Arab traders, and he could have continued around the Cape of Good Hope and established direct trade with Europe. But Europe was a backwards region with nothing to offer, as the Chinese saw it. China wanted ivory, medicine, spices, exotic woods, even samples of African wildlife, but it had little interest in European products like wool, beads or wine. So China turned up their noses at Europe."
And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier.
Actually, the Egyptians discovered New South Wales between 1779 and 2748 BC. Hieroglyphic carvings in Hunter Valley, 100 km north of Sydney, relate how Djes-eb, one of the sons of the Pharaoh Ra Djedef, died from a snake bite.
Australia also appears on the map of Eratosthenes, compiled in 194 BC. This Erasthosthenes was the same person who devised the famous method of calculating prime numbers, still used as a benchmark today.
Hey, it makes nice media propaganda. You know, the poor innocent people of America, living their joyous carefree lives like hobbits in the shire were killed and enslaved by the evil white man. Hell, who needs history. If you looked at history you'd see things like the fact that in Africa, slavery was around long before the white man ever came and it was the Africans who encouraged the traders going there to buy slaves. In other words, slavery was started and maintained by the Africans. But will anyone look to history for that? No, of course not. It's much easier and cleaner to blame all the white guys for everything and then sue everyone. Oh, and don't forget reverse discrimination and special treatment for every single person except straight, white men. For people so smart, our minds are so easily controlled by the media.
Take a look at the homepage of the Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo.
Heyerdahl (who btw. now in his eigthies are still active digging up a historic settlement in Russia I believe, and overseeing excavations of pyramids on Sicily, the Canary islands and South America), sailed from Peru in 1947 to Raroia in Polynesia to prove that settlements in the South Pacific could have originated with explorers from South America.
Btw. The movie about Kon-Tiki won an Oscar for best documentary in 1950 I believe.
What you might be thinking about was Ra I and Ra II from 1969, where he tried to prove that South America may have been populated by boat from Africa, since South America is within reach of Morocco by Papyrus boats built after ancient Egyptian design. Ra I almost reached Barbados, and Ra II succeeded.
He also did a fourth voyage on Tigris, a boat built to show that there could have been cultural exchange historically between the old cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and Egypt via the see. The voyage wasn't completed because of the Iran/Iraq war.
You're right in linking Heyerdahl to the Easter Island, though, as he did lead an expedition there as well, trying among other things to link his theories of expeditions from South America closer to findings on Easter Island.
Central for Heyerdahl is that he believes that there has been much wider cultural exchanges between ancient cultures than what are known today, and that many cultures had much more extensive sea faring experience than many believe.
Here is one quote relevant to your question:
Even 163 metres is only 530 feet, of course, but it shows that 1000 feet isn't that unbelieveable.Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Should you? I'm glad you asked those questions in parantheses, I suggest you find some good books on the subject. Try King Phillip's War by Drake, and Cherokee Removal by Perdue for starters.
You should take class about Native American societies, or at least read an authoritative work on the subject. The Iroquois people did indeed participate in the kind of 'genetic cleansing' that Europeans were also guilty of - granted both cleansings were directly or indirectly the result of viral warfare.
Let me explain, when European explorers started to settle and explore in North America they brought diseases with them that the Native population had been isolated from for centuries, if not millenia. These diseases wreaked tremendous havoc on the Natives - killing up 98% of the population! Often these deaths would occur after explorers (or a ship with an infected crewman sailing up the Ohio river) had past. When subsequent settlers would follow they would find the land almost empty of Natives, this led to the rise of the "virgin land" myth that claimed that the New World was underused, practically devoid of a Native population, and was ripe for the picking. Even the Puritans who settled in what would become New England took the fact that Native villages whose former population was dead in their streets was a sign from God that he was clearing out the country for his believers.
Ok ok, enough digressing. Now, The Iroquois people had a particular empassioned ritual called a Mourning War. When a member of their tribe was killed they would enter into this war against the tribe that had killed their citizen and exact retribution - sometimes capturing a member of the opposing tribe to serve as a substitute for the fallen, sometimes killing the one that had killed their person, or just killing someone in the opposing tribe.
When the Iroquois tribe was slaughtered by smallpox and other nasty diseases, the tribe entered into a Mourning War out of grief and loss and indiscriminately slaughtered their neighboring tribes until King Phillip's War disrupted the region.
Now take a look at a South Carolinian tribe (sorry, I don't recall their name) - they captured and made slaves of tribes to the south and southwest, later making a business out of it by selling slaves to the Europeans.
None of this is to excuse the Europeans, but the relationship between the multitude of Native Tribes and the differing nationalities of the Europeans was MUCH more complicated than an exploiter/exploited dichotomy. esult of viral warfare. Let me explain, when European explorers started to settle and explore in North America they brought diseases with them that the Native population had been isolated from for centuries, if not millenia. These diseases wreaked tremendous havoc on the Natives - killing up 98% of the population! Often these deaths would occur after explorers (or a ship with an infected crewman sailing up the Ohio river) had past. When subsequent settlers would follow they would find the land almost empty of Natives, this led to the rise of the "virgin land" myth that claimed that the New World was underused, practically devoid of a Native population, and was ripe for the picking. Even the Puritans who settled in what would become New England took the fact that Native villages whose former population was dead in their streets was a sign from God that he was clearing out the country for his believers.
Ok ok, enough digressing. Now, The Iroquois people had a particular empassioned ritual called a Mourning War. When a member of their tribe was killed they would enter into this war against the tribe that had killed their citizen and exact retribution - sometimes capturing a member of the opposing tribe to serve as a substitute for the fallen, sometimes killing the one that had killed their person, or just killing someone in the opposing tribe.
When the Iroquois tribe was slaughtered by smallpox and other nasty diseases, the tribe entered into a Mourning War out of grief and loss and indiscriminately slaughtered their neighboring tribes until King Phillip's War disrupted the region.
Now take a look at a South Carolinian tribe (sorry, I don't recall their name) - they captured and made slaves of tribes to the south and southwest, later making a business out of it by selling slaves to the Europeans.
None of this is to excuse the Europeans, but the relationship between the multitude of Native Tribes and the differing nationalities of the Europeans was MUCH more complicated than an exploiter/exploited dichotomy. Though in some cases, like the Cherokee removal of the 1830's, that relationship is practically right on. You just can't speak of the Native population as a cohesive group with one ideology, method of governing, culture, etc. Before the coming of Europeans there were 12,000 languages spoken in North America that we know of, of course the sound, grammer, and vocabulary of practically all of those languages is now, sadly, lost to us. The Tribes of North America were as, or more, varied than the countries of Europe (which, I assume, you already know not to group as one culture even though you seemed to indicate such in your posting).
2000 years ago, Teotihuacan was the largest city in the entire world, with a population exceeding 100,000. The Aztec, several hundred years later, created an economic empire that may well have streched from southern Colorado to Panama. The Inca existed in a huge military empire that spanned a large chunck of the Pacific Coast in South America. Granted, the continents on the whole never had the population density of the world, but there were people farming on the Mississippi, hunting in the Apalachians, and making a decent living in the Great Basin as well.
Rhapsody in Numbers
So what? How is this any different than what a conquering people have done to a conquered people a thousand times in the past? You're saying that scale alone somehow makes the whole thing more 'evil'?
And 80% of the Native American mortality wasn't due to slavery, or genocide, or the use of biological weapons. It was due to the fact that Native Americans had no resistance to common, resistable diseases among Europeans, like the flu. By the time Lewis and Clark reached the Willamette Valley - the first white guys to see alot of America - almost 90% of the valley population had been killed by diseases spread from Native American population to Native American population across the continent. Not smallpox, which never reached the Willamette valley, but primarily the flu.
The Native Americans were no more peaceful than any other people on earth. In fact, a half-dozen or so various confederations were bloodily at war when the Europeans arrived. The Incans and Aztects brutally enslaved and murdered hundreds of thousands of people, allowing the Spaniards to pick up huge armies of allies when they marched upon these empires - because the Native Americans hated each other so much.
They were not peaceful or noble or any different than any other human population you care to look at. The only difference between them and, say, all the native peoples the Assyrians wiped out is that some subset of Americans has decided to engage in self-flagellation over the issue.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I guess you missed the day in history class when you were supposed to learn about how the US Army distributed blankets known to be laced with smallpox to tribes of Indians that were being forceably relocated to reservations in the 1800s. This practice actually appears to have began in the mid 1700s. Small pox was even used as a weapon during the Revolutionary War against opponents who hadn't been innoculated against small pox (ie, the Native Americans). BTW
What? That wasn't in your high school history books? How could that be???
That, my friend, is a textbook example of genocide by European settlers upon the native populations. And a textbook example of how history is written by the victors.
...anactofgod...
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."