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Chinese Explorers 'Discovered America'?

Posted by michael on from the native-americans-don't-count dept.

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."

2 of 716 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, and ... by SimonK · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Thousand foot long ships? by dinotrac · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Can that really be true?
    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.