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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."
Well, it seems that now scientists think that not only Egyptians and Vikings 'discovered' America, but now Chinese. Well, I wonder how many other sea-faring cultures have landed on these lee shores in search of a land of riches? Sort of brings to mind various historical-fantasy novels.
There is strong evidence that people as diverse as the Phoenicians, the Vikings, the Irish, the Welsh, the Chinese, the Japanese and English fisherman were actually in the New World, in some cases, millennia before 1492.
Search internet for lots of sources: One with a short description here
According to the article:
When explorer Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492, he was 72 years behind a Chinese expeditionary force, which had already made its way to the area.
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.
Sailing in 1,000-foot-long ships with nine massive junk-style sails, the Chinese also circumnavigated the world a century before explorer Ferdinand Magellan's epic journey, and reached South America.
The reason why Columbus, Cook and Magellan get the credit is because they were Europeans. And, in those days, Europe was the center of the world. Western civilization sprung from Europe so to speak. Think about it: most (both north and south) American citizens have ancestors in Europe, so do the citizens in Australia.
For Europeans, America and Australia didn't exist until Columbus and Cook hit their shores (the Vikings did it before Columbus ofcourse but that was forgotten). After that, lots and lots of Europeans emigrated to America and Australia (most of them for economic reasons ofcourse). Contact between them and the homefront was never lost and therefore Columbus, Cook and Magellan deserve some credit. Maybe not for first discovering the continents but for putting them on the map.
...do you discover a country when there are already people living there?
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The history books are always slow to change. We know, for instance, that Basque fishermen fished the Grand Banks (off Newfoundland) for at least a hundred years before Columbus sailed. It was a well-kept secret, but it was often argued that Columbus' wife (who was Basque) let him in on the secret. The Viking settlement on Newfoundland lasted a long time, so there was never much of a hiatus in contact between Europe and North America. Indications of trade with Asia on the West Coast of North America are long-standing - Chinese goods reached as far as Mexico. If this presentation is true (and it would be interesting to see what he is actually presenting, as opposed to what is reported) it would be welcome just as a response to those historians who speculate, what would have happened if zheng he had not stopped at East Africa and gone on to Europe? Would we all be speaking Chinese? The answer would be nothing, and no (or not yet, anyway). The difference between the two voyages of discovery was that for the Chinese, their motive was altruistic: to discover the world and share their civilization with others. For the Europeans, their motive was greed. The difference being, when discovery was starting to bankrupt the government in China it was first on the cutback list. Greed showed to be a more durable basis for exploration than altruism.
And I thought the Native Americans, aka Indians would have discovered it since they lived there, silly me!
The chinese couldn't have discovered it first, per our definition Discovering means "found and claimed by a white person with european descent".
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Henry Sinclair beat the Chinese by another 30 years. When he got there he found people in Nova Scotia speaking a Celtic dialect, He, in turn, was directed there by a couple of Venetians. The Vikings beat him by a few hundred years, and there is plenty of evidence that European fishermen had been sailing across the Atlantic pretty much all through history.
The only thing that makes Columbus different is that by the time he got there the mechanisms and motivation to publicise the discovery and start the process of conquest and colonisation were in place.
On nine sails?
The freakin' Titanic was only 900 feet long and needed 31,000 steam-driven shaft horsepower just to get halfway across.
Thousand foot wooden ships with a single sail every hundred feet or so were either a remarkable engineering accomplishment or a mariner's nightmare.
The boat that was found under the pyramid in Giza was only slightly smaller than the Mayflower. While it wasn't built for ocean voyages, it does seem to be built stronger than the repoduction of the Mayflower I saw.
A common picture in tombs have a picture of the deceased holding a knife to the neck of an Indian or Ethiopian. There are reports that they knew of at least four other races 3000 years ago. There are almost no detailed drawings of ships or maps. There are also reports that the Egypteans didn't go far in their ships but hired crews from other areas. Maybe they had some superstition about going too far from home.
Some of the survey maps from 3000 to 5000 years ago have areas that are very accurate. As in better than the ones done in the 1800's by the French and require round earth calculations. There is an map of the entire coast of Africa in the British Museum so someone was going long distances in boats and getting back. I'm not sure the ones that got to Australia ever got back since a long boat at that time had a high risk of being a one way trip to fish food.
Exploration is one thing. Exploiting a discovery across an ocean is quite another. The Vikings had too many opportunities closer to home to leave very many of them interested in taking up farms in Newfoundland. (One group had already conquered Russia; another conquered a province of France, became Christians, then conquered England, Ireland, Sicily, Jerusalem, ...) So they didn't get a big enough colony to fight off the indian tribes. There wasn't much chance they could get along with them. Lief Ericson's father had been run out of two countries for murdering his neighbors, and in America Lief couldn't even speak the neighbors' language before he started off by stealing their land...
So the Vikings might have ranged along the coast, and their fishermen might have landed there to dry cod for some centuries. There are also indications that English fishermen were taking cod from the Grand Banks well before Columbus sailed, and of course they would have noticed the nearby land. But in 1492, Europeans were finally becoming ready to cross an ocean and _stay_. It was no longer possible to loot the middle east under guise of a crusade. Looting each other led to early death far more often than to wealth. But now they had much improved sailing ships so they could go out and loot new lands...
Of course, those Englishmen who landed at Jamestown in the expectation of digging gold up on the beach, or stealing it from the Indians, were sorely disappointed. They had to turn farmers just to survive -- and then farming turned out to be quite lucrative, especially once explorers along the African coast found a solution to the labor problem...
The most exciting part of Mr. Menzies discovery was not only that discovered America; Zheng He's ships also circumnavigated the globe and got very close to both the North and South poles.
Additionally, Cook, Magellan, de Gama and Columbus all had accurate maps of the world. Mr. Menzies says: "What nobody has explained is why the European explorers had maps. Who drew the maps? There are millions of square miles of ocean. It required huge fleets to chart them. If you say it wasn't the Chinese, with the biggest fleets and ships in the world, then who was it?"
Also, apparently the Chinese ships dwarfed european ships of the 15th and 16th centuries, and only about 5% of the Chinese explorers survived to return to China; But by the time Zheng He returned to China, the government was in chaos and the fleets were mothballed.
A small number of records and charts survived to be passed to Western explorers.
There is a more complete article about this in the London Daily Telegraph.
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and that would be true if in fact we had actually gone to war or declared war at any point (military exercises are what we would consider the activities today). Dismissing the fact that 'americans' however far in our past lied, cheated, stole, murdered, misrepresented, and raped the 'native' population of the americas allows us the comfort of continuing in the same vein of action without remorse or consideration. If we do not look to our past, we cannot learn from it and grow to be a better people.
Everyone DESERVES respect. Our own constitution is based on 'unalienable' rights afforded to man (all man, mankind). In the government and individual actions in the slaughter of societies, tribes and individuals (something we should very closely equate to the Jewish Holocaust) 'we' denied those people of their 'unalienable' rights.
The sad part is that lets say we "move on", we "move past" what happened and the wrong doings of generations past... what are we doing today to make sure that 1) we preserve what little of that culture is left 2) we ensure that the native american as a bloodline doesn't dissappear entirely. And the answer is 'very little'. I don't believe in 'affirmative action' I believe in 'equality'. 'We' put more effort into building 3rd world countries up than we do in building up the nations that exist within this country. We need to look to the past to see what we can avoid repeating and what we may need to correct so that WE (all of us) have a more prosporous and rich future.
Ever wonder why the names of so many New England towns end in the word "field"? Most of what is now New England (and anywhere else on the continent with good dirt and a decent growth season) was cleared fields long before European settlers showed up. Further, most recent estimates (recent, because previous estimates have been uniformly politically self-serving, but based on the same historical observations) show that aboriginal populations in North America rival europe's population at the time of westward expansion.
The density of population from one place to another was much more consistent than in Europe, so there were no streets being used as open sewers , no Bubonic plague, no resistance to the diseases that appear among densely populated cities.
What you learned in High School about native populations is simply wrong. When the plagues started depopulating native villages (mortality rates were about 95%), the settlers thought that all of this wealth sitting and waiting for them to come along was the will of God and in their prayers thanked God for their good fortune.
To get back to the current topic. Just about everyone has been to the Americas before Columbus. The obsession with his successful trips to enslave a few natives and steal a lot of gold shouldn't be interesting to anyone actually interested in history.
Don't get me wrong. The natives made plenty of mistakes. The Mayans were likely wiped out by an ecological disaster of their own making. Other native tribes made their own mistakes. They were human, but several of my ancestors uniformly and repeatedly screwed them over by breaking treaties and contracts time and time again. Pretending it didn't happen or even outright denying it doesn't change the facts.
Here's another one for you. The sale of Manhattan for a few beads? Two problems: First, the deal was made with a tribe that had no claim to Manhattan at the time (though they said they did) . Second, the treaty as signed was for one season's hunting rights (the natives were very savvy with land contracts and land rights). At the end of the contract, we had to vacate, but we pulled out our guns, enslaved the natives, and shipped them back to Europe (the slave trade went both ways across the Atlantic).
Regards, Ross
What you do have to keep in mind, though, is that Monte Verde is in Chile. If the Americas were populated solely via the Bering land bridge, then these people most likely would have taken many generations to not only travel all across two continents, but also to adapt lifeways suited to the new environments which they were encountering. The same goes for Meadowcraft, at least to a lesser extent. Even assuming an incredibly swift migration, you have to go back several centuries from even the latest dates to get to the date of the actual crossing into North America
Unfortunately, if the earliest migrations southward took place along the pacific coast, any habitation sites have likely been submerged with the rise in sealevels following the alst ice age. Robert Ballard and his bunch have recently had a lot of success identifying submerged sites in the Black Sea, so it is conceivable that some of the earliest sites might be found, but as of yet, we still know next to nothing about them.
What a crock. Disease was introduced *accidentally* in the early 1500's and pretty much wiped out most Native Americans by the beginning of the 1600's. Using polio-infected blankets against certain tribes didn't take place until the 1800's. By this time the flu had already done it's work.
There were no concentration camps, no ovens, no Gestapo. The number of people actually killed - as in, murdered - by Europeans can be measured in the tens of thousands. This isn't insignificant but it's by no means unique in history. As I said before the Assyrians did much, much worse and with more brutality than even the Spaniards were capable of. Hell, the Incans and the Aztecs *both* committed atrocities far beyond anything than Cortez and company envisioned, and these boys were complete lunatics.
This pathetic attempt at revisionist history isn't appreciated.
And please note: accepting historical fact by no means exempts people from moral action *today*. Passing laws to protect Native Americans and provide them with equal opportunity are a sign of ethical behavior; indulging in blame-fests is a way of avoiding concrete action which might affect one's pocketbook. Blaming ourselves for what thousands of peoples have done during the entirety of human history is a great way to 'accept responsility' without having to take corrective action to make the lives of Native Americans *alive now, today* more equitable - especially when self-blame is free and money is not.
I do not hold myself responsible for what my ancestors did to Native Americans, intentionally or unintentionally. Life isn't fair, and such is the lot of the conquered. I do, however, blame myself if I don't act to improve the lives of Native Americans in our nation today. So lets stop whining and start doing something constructive, eh?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
But I'm a bit suspicious of the claim that a Cherokee chief said Madoc's people were called "welsh". Welsh is an old English word meaning "strangers" or "enemies". Welsh people (as I guess you know) would have called themselves "cymraeg", or even "British" (Prythaeg ?).